Advice to an OTDer who recently got engaged to a non jewish man

Next week my (OTD) brother and his girlfriend are coming to visit for a couple of days, after which my in laws are supposed to visit. Which means...spring cleaning! I finished the semester on Thursday (Yay, I have officially survived my first year as a professor!), so yesterday me and B spent the whole day cleaning, and we have more cleaning plans for today and tomorrow. We also have plans for the farmer's market and a poker game tonight- now that I've been here almost a year I'm starting to have a social life! Thus far it only involves other professors, but some of them aren't sociology professors, so I think that counts. :)

Meanwhile, my brother is coming to visit, and I want to post on facebook about it. I'm facebook friends with his girlfriend (although this will be my first time meeting her in person). So I feel it would be rude to post about him visiting and not mention her. But, I'm now facebook friends with my dad. And even though I find it particularly freeing that my dad can see all my pictures and facebook updates that reflect my *real* personality (or as real as I'm willing to share with colleagues and former students- but quite a few pictures of me up there in tank tops, pants, etc.), my brother is not quite as open.

He still lives at home, and has figured out some kind of weird arrangement with my parents, a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy- in which he somehow drives to work on Saturdays and has convinced my parents to be ok with it (He was always better at manipulating them than I was). So he asked me not to mention his girlfriend on facebook where our dad can see- he tells me that my mother has 'inferred' that he will be traveling with a passenger (I can just imagine my mom trying to confront him without actually confronting him- such things usually involve lots of snarky comments on my mom's end) but he doesn't want them to 'know the details.'

For all the tzures (trouble) I've gone through after 'coming out' to my parents as off the derech, it is SO WORTH not having to sneak around like that anymore. Cause I used to be the same way- having secret boyfriends I wouldn't tell my parents about. Lying about what I was up to. Hiding my true self all the time. And that double life thing is so not for me. But it took a long time to switch from the mindset that I have to hide everything from my family, to the mindset that- I'm going to be myself, if they don't like that, that's their problem and not mine. I don't think I really got to that point until I was married to someone not jewish, and felt like I had nothing left to lose by being myself.

Which is why I admire Tova so much for announcing her recent engagement to her family the way I should have announced mine- as the awesome celebratory thing it is, rather than like some secret to be ashamed of. Not surprisingly, her family did not exactly react in the way that decent human beings should behave. She emailed me to ask my advice:

I wanted to ask you a bit of advice after reading an old post of Heshy's on your relationship and subsequent marriage. This past weekend, I happily accepted my boyfriend's marriage proposal to me. I knew much of my Jewish family wouldn't be glad about the news, but one person's reaction was truly shocking. He had informed my mother (who then informed me) that he was tearing his clothes in mourning. I do not know if he is also sitting shiva for me, but it's not as though I can ask him if he is.

The shocking bit is that I always envisioned my frum family members as reasonable, Modern Orthodox people (my mother herself left the religion her parents raised her with - a liberal branch of Protestant Christianity - to become a Jew) who would never sit shiva or publicly condemn their children for "going off the derech". Sure, they are upset about it, but I was sure they'd never mourn their child's happiness.

The funny thing is that no one tore any clothing "for" my sister when she married her now ex-husband, and he was and is (by everyone's account) an unsavory individual who doesn't hold a candle to my fiance. I was advised by a few others to send a condolence card to - or "sit shiva" with - the person who claimed to be tearing clothing, but I was worried that this would be seen as a challenge instead of revealing the absurdity of mourning a relative's engagement.

Have you any advice for me, considering your similar personal history? You are free to publish this letter in its entirety on your blog, as I would like to know what your readers have to say.

So what's my advice, as I'm a week away from my 2 year wedding anniversary? I guess...don't take it personally, expect the worst of people and you will hardly ever be shocked, remember who is good to you and keep in closer touch with those people, get financially independent and out of your parent's house as soon as humanly possible, and be prepared to find out a lot of views of your family members that you didn't want to know they have.

When I got engaged, I didn't go about it the same way. I called my parents as soon as we had posted it on facebook, and then slowly told other family members over time, as I encountered them. My parents told a few people too (although they were too ashamed to tell any of their friends and most of our family). So I didn't have the initial shocked reaction of people tearing their clothes or whatever after we got engaged.

What I did have was a long engagement (almost a year). During that year, I got a number of long letters from my dad trying to reason me out of getting married (using very misinterpreted statistics in some cases- by the way if you are trying to convince a sociologist who specializes in marriage and divorce not to get married, don't misquote statistics on marriage and divorce), my dad also tried to convince me to convince B to convert, there was the infamous phone call from my little brother telling me a rabbi said if me and B got married either he would convert, we would break up, or "B would die within a year" (as I said- it's our two year anniversary a week from Tuesday, take THAT stupid rabbi who is full of shit!), my mom wrote to say that if I went through with the wedding we couldn't have a relationship anymore (and she mostly kept to that), and a cousin "just happened to be in the neighborhood" (2 hours from where he lived) and stopped by to try to convince me not to get married. After I was married, my charedi grandfather told me I wasn't married according to him and tried to get me to find a nice jewish boy at a wedding we were at.

I too was very shocked at some of these reactions. My parents are 'modern' orthodox too (although they are right wing MO). My parents also both changed religious backgrounds around my age- my mom from charedi to modern orthodox, and my dad to modern orthodox after growing up more traditional/conservative kinda (My grandparents went to a conservative shul, kept a loose version of kosher and shabbas, and celebrated holidays- but they sent my dad to an orthodox yeshiva for high school which is when he became a BT). My parents are supposedly reasonable people who talked about black hatter/charedi people as "people who have gone off the deep end." My parents even had religious drama at their own wedding, cause my paternal grandparents wanted mixed dancing and my maternal grandparents said they wouldn't go to the wedding if they had that. I always thought of my family as religious, but also reasonable people. My dad has a PhD for pete's sake.

But when it came to me getting married to someone not jewish, all that reason went out the window. The same people who were supportive when my cousin, at the age of 20, married a 40something year old Breslover guy with no job (my parents flew to Israel for that wedding! They bought my cousin an expensive mattress set! And my cousin got divorced 6 months later after the guy went through all my cousin's savings and sold all their wedding gifts-including the mattress set- for money which we think went to support a drug habit) would not even attend their own daughter's wedding for fear someone might actually think they supported me and my decision to get married in any way. To a guy who actually is my age (well a year and a half younger than me) who is perfectly awesome in every way, just not jewish. They were cool with all my cousins' arranged marriages to virtual strangers, and they are cool with the fact that some of my cousins were told by their rabbis that it's against halacha to use birth control (so my 24 year old cousin is now pregnant with her 4th child!). But marrying a non jewish guy is worse than all of that. Clearly our morals are not the same.

Not to say things were all bad. But you shouldn't be surprised by horrible things your family might do or say to convince you not to get married. I actually found that the worst reactions came from family members closest to me (my parents, my brother, my grandfather). But I was also really pleasantly surprised by the support I got from some of my extended family members, like my grandmother, who once stopped talking to me for 2 years for dating someone who was a convert when I was around 18, but after I got married called me to tell me to call her more often. An uncle of mine who lives in Israel called the morning of our wedding to say "even if we don't always agree on every decision, you are always part of our family, and we love you and we wish you the best today." One of my cousins (actually, the same one who got married/divorced to the dude 20 years her senior) even got us a wedding present.

Ok, reading that, that's kinda a pathetic excuse for "support." The only family member on my side that truly supported us was my brother (the one visiting next week- not the crazy rabbi death one) who was a witness at our wedding. So I guess another piece of advice is to lower your expectations of your family, and maybe even what your wedding will be like. Growing up MO, I'm sure you went to tons of fancy weddings where lots of family members came and had a huge celebration. By marrying someone not jewish,you won't have that. Which doesn't mean you can't have something even better- I used the fact that my family was non supportive to have the small non-traditional wedding I wanted (~20 guests) and since it was so small, we could do exactly what we wanted,and only invited people we really loved- didn't have to invite people out of obligation. We also got to have great non kosher italian food.

But you won't have that big family wedding that you grew up seeing- at least not with your side of the family. You won't have the big traditional jewish wedding that we all saw over and over again growing up. Your parents will likely not give you any money for your wedding, so you will have to rely on what your fiance's family can give + your own savings.

Your relationship with most of your family members will probably change. Some will be supportive and some will not, and you will remember which is which, and that can't help but change your relationship with those people. Remember that even though you will probably 'lose' some family members, you still are gaining a whole new family- your fiance's family. :) And my in-laws are pretty awesome, which has helped me a lot. And even the family you 'lose' will probably not be lost- I still talk to my mom at least 2 or 3 times a year even though we supposedly don't have a relationship anymore.

What helps in keeping your sanity through all this? Apart from blogging about the crazyness (which helps, because whenever something crazy happens you can be like "this will make for a great blog post!" instead of "woe is me I'm surrounded by asshole zealots!"), As a sociologist,I try to approach everything like an ethnographer. An ethnographer does 'participant observation'- they go into a strange culture and try to figure out the social arrangements, the rituals, the internal logic of that culture, etc. But while the ethnographer is participating in the culture, they are also apart from the culture, an objective outside observer.

So from my ethnographer/sociologist stance, a relative tearing their clothes is a form of community pressure to promote endogamy (marrying within a group). Your relative was socialized (or brainwashed) to tear his clothes and/or sit shiva in reaction to news of a family member marrying someone not Jewish. There will also likely be an enormous amount of community pressure on your parents(if their MO community is anything like my parents') to not give approval of your wedding. These responses are methods of preservation of their culture by promoting within-group marriages. It's sort of like a survival instinct, but for a culture rather than a person. Jewish culture has survived for thousands of years despite people trying to kill us all the time. In order for that to have happened, the community must have developed very strong norms and social sanctions against assimilation/exogamy (Marrying outside a group). These are those strong norms in action.

This isn't about you, it's about the symbolic nature of what you are doing- leaving a religious community, signaling that you will probably not raise your (theoretical) children in that religious tradition and continue to socialize your descendants into their culture. The community therefore reacts to try to prevent that in order to preserve itself, in whatever insane way possible. And family members are one of the strongest 'policers' of community social norms (in this case the norm that you should marry within your group)in part because they are closer to you and therefore have a stronger influence (one of the functions of the family is to socialize members into community norms of behavior), and also have the most to lose (because they can lose community standing) if you violate community norms.

As for how you should react to this person, that's up to you and your relationship with them. With my little brother, I laughed at him when he told me that thing about our rabbi,and on our own year anniversary I made sure to send him a message mocking him for passing on that idiotic advice. But that's based on my relationship with him, where we frequently make fun of each other. Other people might not react as well to that.

The way I see it you have 4 options:
1. Make fun of him
2. Confront him in a serious way, saying he hurt your feelings
3. Confront him in an angry way, telling him he's being a ginourmous asshole who needs to get over himself
4. Ignore the whole thing, pretend like you never heard about it, and let things blow over.

I will say that now that I've been married a couple of years,and people have had time to get used to the idea (and the idea that no, we're not getting divorced so I can marry a jew) things have settled down some with my family. The absolute worst time was when I was engaged,and people were trying to convince me not to get married, and I was constantly defending my decision to get married. But after we got married (apart from that one thing with my grandfather) it's been mostly quiet, and I even talked to that insane brother for like an hour on the phone right before pesach.

Was it all worth it? Definitely. I get to live with my husband every day, we have our own family that we hope to build in the future when we are ready to start having kids, I've found out which of my family members will be there for me no matter what, and which are insane. I can finally be open with my family about my actual level of religiosity because I have nothing left to lose. For me just getting to be with B is worth it all. But looking back I do feel like my engagement was a battle with my family(and engagements can be stressful even if your family is completely supportive), so I wish you the best of luck!

Anyways this post has gotten insanely long and I have to go to the farmer's market, but congrats again to Tova, I hope this helps, and readers- please feel free to offer your own advice as well!

America, fuck yeah!

In Fall 2001 I took the path train every day to get from NJ to college in NYC. There were two Path trains- the one I took to midtown, and the one to the World Trade Center. For months after 9/11 the Path train station had hundreds of missing persons signs, which no one would take down. I would read their descriptions while waiting for the train every morning. I can't help but think back to that time today.

It was the start of a dark decade. Being in NYC at the time was scary. People were scared. People were jackasses, and kept throwing bags of flour down the escalators at the subway stations. Other people panicked and said the flour was anthrax, and subway stations were shut down. I showed up late to my social statistics class at least 5 times that semester, since I had to walk across town to get another subway, or try to get a cab if I was really going to be late (but that cost upwards of $20, which I couldn't really afford).

I'm not normally happy to see anyone die. I hear young people were rioting on some college campuses when the news came out last night. These students were 8, 9, 10, 11 years old when 9/11 happened. They've lived half their lives under this shadow. I was 19 and it is a clear turning point to me. Before 9/11 I didn't read the news, things happened,but the 90s were a golden decade for the most part, the economy was booming, we weren't at constant war, and I was too young to remember the 80s. But since 9/11 things have not been good. People are too cynical. Conspiracy theories abound. No one trusts anyone, least of all the government.

I hope this marks another turning point in the mood of our country. When I was a kid I was proud of our country. Ronald Reagan told the Russian dude to tear down that wall, and he did. We went to war (the gulf war) and everyone hung up yellow ribbons on their trees to support the soldiers. My 3rd grade teacher took us on a walk around the neighborhood to see the ribbons. The war was over in a few months. Later that year the Soviet Union collapsed, and we all looked on in amazement as the map of the world changed.

Now people have a magnet, a picture of what support used to look like. The facade but not the ribbon itself. How symbolic. There's so much cynicism about the government, they are corrupt, they are constantly having sex scandals, they can't get anything good done, we're in two endless expensive wars, and up until now we had gone almost a decade not even able to find Osama Bin Laden. People don't have trust in the government anymore, and part of that has manifested in not wanting to give the government more money. Republicans are using this as an opportunity to cut government services to the poor and trying to cut services like family planning for women. This is incredibly shortsighted, but this generation has apparently not learned from the mistakes of the past (maybe because the quality of public education has become so dismal as the education system has also been starved of money and resources).

Anyways, I'm tired of living in this depressing country of cynics. I'm hoping this revives some of the sense of unity and sense of shared responsibility to each other that used to make this country so great. I feel better already.

Gardening update and a passover miracle

It's been so long since I've updated and so much has grown since then!
Here are the peas and onions at 5 weeks and again at 7 weeks. The second picture was taken today, and there are also dill and cilantro seedlings sticking out of the ground (although they are hard to see). In about a week I'm going to plant some zucchini seedlings out there and the week after that 3 pepper seedlings will go back there too.

I recently repotted all the seedlings into larger containers with real (potting) soil. The seedlings grew pretty well the first few weeks (especially the zucchini seedlings, which I didn't even plant until about 4 weeks ago).



The cotyledons (The first set of leaves) had come up fine, but the first set of true leaves had started to peep out and then the plants kinda...stalled and didn't grow anymore. So last week I replanted the zucchini and a the red bell peppers into plastic cups with some potting soil in them (and holes cut in the bottom for drainage.) The true leaves on those peppers started growing like crazy (as you can see in the picture- the true leaves are the heart shaped leaves) so today I replanted the colored bell peppers in real dirt too (they had been growing in seed starting mix, which doesn't have a lot of nutrients- hence probably why they stalled after a while).
This time I put a bunch of seedlings into the same pots which will make it easier in a couple of weeks when I start to take them outside and inside for a week while I harden them off before planting them outside.


Meanwhile, on south side of the house I cleared out a big weed patch and planted dill, cilantro, 3 mammoth sunflowers (1 to block the view of our neighbor's front porch for each of our 3 windows), and a rosemary and oregano plant. Some peppers and basil will go out there in a few weeks too.

In this picture you can see the rosemary with a sunflower seedling on the top left. There's also dill seedlings growing there above the rosemary but they are pretty hard to see.

In passover news, on erev passover (day before passover) my dad called me while I was teaching a statistics class. So after class I called him back, and my mom picked up the phone. A passover miracle occurred! I talked to her for a whole 3 minutes before she made up an excuse to pass the phone to my dad. But I talked to my dad for a while, and then I talked to my youngest brother E for a while. The 3 of them were at a hotel for the first days of passover.

My brother E wants to be a professor and is going to be applying to Philosophy PhD programs in the Fall. It's funny, when I moved home for an uncomfortable summer between college and moving away to grad school (and out of my parents house for good) my mom said some mean thing about how I shouldn't talk to my youngest brother too much so I wouldn't be a bad influence on him "the way I was on my other brother" (who actually started eating non kosher meat before I did, so I think it was more the other way around- although we did go OTD at the same time and were very close at the time).

Anyways it seems like I did influence my youngest brother- to try to become a professor like me! And I got a text message from him yesterday saying he got an invitation from phi beta kappa and was that a good thing and should be join? (I answered "That's the most prestigious honors society in academia you should definitely join and congrats!"). I'm totally a GOOD influence! (I'm also in PBK).

It did sting a bit when my mom made up an excuse to hand off the phone to my dad after like 3 minutes on the phone. But at least I should be glad she answered my call at all? (she answered my dad's cell phone cause he was talking to someone on her cellphone) That was the first time I talked to her since I called my dad when my grandfather died in October, and she answered his phone then.

Oh and I almost forgot the actual passover miracle! So after I invited my brother to come visit whenever he put my dad back on the phone, and I figured, what the heck, I might as well invite him too. So I was like "hey if you ever are driving to Florida or something [my parents now have a condo in Florida that they inherited from my dead grandparents who lived there for about 20 years after they retired]. you should come visit us on the way. And my dad said that maybe he would drive down to Florida in December and visit us and my cousin's mom who lives in Atlanta on the way down.

So yeah! Possible actual visit to our house by my parents! (or at least my dad? Not clear). And classes are over for the semester, and finals are about to be taken starting tomorrow! And in a week and a half my brother and his new-ish girlfriend (they've been dating like 8 months, and I've never met her) are coming down to visit on his motorcycle. I don't know much about her but we are facebook friends, and she is on a roller derby tea, so from that I infer that she is awesome. Then after after that my inlaws are coming for a few days and I think we will do some of the touristy things around town with them. :)

Baggage

Tova was posting about cleaning out her mother's basement and finding all sorts of old stuff and trying to figure out what to keep and what to get rid of.

After living in dorms for the last two years of college, I spend a couple of tense and uncomfortable months living with my parents over a summer before moving to my new apartment for grad school. When I made that move to my new grad school city, 2 hours away, my mother told me that I should bring whatever I wanted with me cause she was throwing everything else out (which she did- I left behind some artwork I had done in college and a pair of steel toe boots, and she threw them + the artwork away. I really felt the love in that family).

I threw away/donated/gave away 22 years worth of stuff when I moved out of my parents house that last time. I gave away clothes, books, and threw away years worth of letters, including some I had gotten from people over the summer as a child during the two summers I spent in Sternberg sleepaway camp (before I was kicked out, ha), old dolls (including some I had sewn and embroidered myself when I was very young- a skill I have absolutely no use for as an adult- which I wish I had kept), lots of clothes from my goth days, and pretty much all the decorations and posters and trappings of being an adolescent.

I decided I would keep all pictures, all yearbooks, the two glasses filled with stuff from my bat mitzvah and melted over with wax (assembled by some classmates) that was all the rage when I was getting bat mitzvad in 1994, some tickets and playbills, some stuff from ex boyfriends, and my diary from when I was on birthrite. I put these all in a box I labeled "big box o' nostalgic crap." When I was in grad school I left this box in my closet, except a few times when it came out and I looked over the stuff in there- sometimes when old friends were visiting, sometimes to show to new(ish) boyfriends about what my life was like back in the day.

I also kept a box of sefarim (religious books). I actually gave away a whole lot of sefarim when I made that move (most just went to my family's library), but I kept my tanach (old testament), the artscroll chumash (the torah) which I used in high school chumash class, that 5 volume blue version of the chumash, two machzorim which I had gotten as a bat mitzvah present and which had my name engraved on them, a couple of siddurs that I had used frequently as a child/teenager, a couple of books of tehillim and some benchers from my brother's bar mitzvah and from some weddings of friends.

In grad school those sefarim took up the bottom shelf of one of my (4) bookshelves, under a shelf that had lots of books on Buddhism, ancient Greek religion, Quakerism, lots of yoga stuff, and some philosophy of religion books from my "reading lots of stuff about religions" phase in college. When I moved to the South last summer I brought the sefarim with me. When I got here and I was unpacking the books, I decided these books didn't need to be out, they could stay in a box. I had put the big box o' nostalgic crap in one of the closets in one of the spare bedrooms (which we don't really use), so I decided to put the sefarim in there too- on the highest shelf (out of sight, out of mind)

Of course I strained my back, lifting a heavy box like that over my head. It hurt for weeks.

So as I moved into my new house here in the South, my old baggage was still causing me pain, even as I was trying to put it on the shelf.

How symbolic.

Weekend

The past week has been crazy. In addition to my normal work load (teaching 3 classes this semester) we had to have our annual review documents in by Friday so I had to write a narrative about what I've been doing this year and update this ancient official computer program with all my yearly activities, I'm giving a guest lecture this week so I prepped an extra lesson last week, I'm getting peer reviewed in 2 of my classes this week so I worked extra hard on those lesson plans and had a meeting about that with the people reviewing me, and I had to edit the page proofs for one of my upcoming articles (and journal editors always give you like a week to finish them at this stage).

But the weekend was great. Yesterday we went to home depot and got lots of gardening supplies, some plants, and paint for the bathroom. A few months ago Max ate the plastic support holding up the wall mirror in our bathroom, and the mirror fell down. The mirror was fine but the wall was damaged. So we spackled the wall and fixed a spot next to that as well. The previous owners had left tons of cans of paint, and we figured we must have that color too. Well, it turns out we had every shade of beige except this one (which we figured out after testing several colors on the area behind the mirror), so for several months our bathroom was in limbo and we just propped the mirror up against the wall.



Yesterday using a box cutter I cut off a little piece of the wall behind the mirror- about 1.5 inches square. I stuck it in an envelope and wrote down the info on all the other paint the previous owners left behind (since they were all the same kind, we figured this had been that kind too). And we headed off to Home Depot, where this old painter guy who seemed kind of scatterbrained mixed us up a can of paint that matched it nearly-exactly.

So we came home, I painted, and then we used a studfinder to find some wooden beams and screwed in new metal mirror supports into those beams (the previous plastic supports were screwed into drywall which wasn't helping) and rehung the mirror. The paint is the tinyest shade darker, but it's so close you can't tell unless you know where to look. Bathroom accomplished!



Also today I put out a bunch of black mulch around some bushes out back where I pulled out a ton of ivy last summer (The mulch looks much nicer than bare dirt). In plant news, I picked up a strawberry plant that is already growing mini strawberries, a second rosemary plant (one is going to be potted and one is going in the ground when it gets warmer) and a baby oregano plant. Yesterday I started some zucchini and eggplant seeds.

Now there is nothing to do but make sure my plants get enough water (but not too much water) and make sure the pea vines climb up the trellis for about the next 3 weeks, until all chance of frost is gone. At that point I'll be hardening off and then planting bell pepper and basil seedlings and cilantro and dill seeds and one of the rosemary plants directly into the ground, and replanting other pepper and basil seedlings into containers for the north facing deck. I'll also be moving the oregano and lemon tree outside. About a month after that the zucchini and eggplant will go outside.

The lemon tree is growing lots of new baby leaves. It's been pretty cold this past week so the Crape myrtle outside hasn't put out any new growth since it's been planted, but it seems to be doing ok as far as I can tell. The peas are slowly growing and the onions seem to be loving this cold weather.

I think this place is going to pretty much be my gardening blog for the next few months.