Last week I promised an exploration of Jewish/queer identity in this week’s blog post. Unfortunately, that I can’t provide…because I showed up mad late to last week’s ‘Queer Shabbat’ at my Hillel. I did get there in time to catch an interesting documentary called “Trembling Before G-d”, about the struggles of queer Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews. The message of the film, if I am to take a wild guess, is that it is wrong of Orthodox Jews to persecute gay Jews within (or without) their ranks, and that some of the theological positions of Orthodoxy have ruined the lives of gay Orthodox Jews, by estranging them from their families and communities. Makes a lot of sense to a secular Jew like me. And I was definitely struck by images of Neturei Karta members dressed in sack-cloth protesting um…people being gay? Sorry, the film clip of NK members was introduced without much context. Images of Charedi/Chasidic yiddin, which this film was all about, are always a an eye-catcher for me, attuned as I am to ‘Jewish issues’ but firmly planted in the liberal Jewish tradition.
So even thought I take issue with a lot of the social and theological positions of Orthodoxy, I am a closet-Hasid/Charedi lover, and consider myself pretty well-informed about ultra-Orthodox theology and practice, for a secular guy. Just as I obsessively read about and watched sports in high school, I suppose in attempt to live out a fantasy of sports-stardom I’ll probably never live out in real life, I now scour the net for weird Orthodox websites, trying to get a peek at a world I’m far away from but somehow attracted to. Can’t tell you how many Chabad.org articles and videos I’ve read and watched. I just think they’re really cool; I also regularly read frumsatire.org and aish.com and a few others, and have now googled enough yiddish/Ashkenazai-pronunciation Hebrew terms to understand what’s going on most of the time. Those Chabadniks are really good at outreach, that much I can say. And I suppose from Chabad’s theological perspective, even the mere act of reading and watching content on their website is a mitzvah, because it’s studying Torah in some very superficial manner. I consider myself to be dawgs with my campus Chabad shliach and I’ve also taken two of those weekly “Jewish wisdom and leadership” classes offered on college campus around the country by various Orthodox-outreach organizations, and thoroughly enjoyed both. But I’m not about to become a bt…probably.
‘Bt’ is an abbreviation for ‘ba’al teshuva’, a Hebrew term which means, ‘master of returning/repenting’ and the moniker denotes people who have did not come from religious Jewish backgrounds and ‘returned’ to the tradition later in life. Guys like Matisyahu, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Jack Abramoff, and whole lotta prominent rabbis consider themselves ‘bts’. I took a weekly night class my freshman year with a Charedi rabbi who had ‘gone frum’ after graduating from Swarthmore, and then spent a dozen or more years studying in yeshivas in Israel, and then came back to the States to spread Torah wisdom to secular kids like myself. With my Jewish education at the time consisting primarily of 1 semester of Biblical Hebrew, bar mitzvah tutoring, and years of liberal Jewish camp, the class really blew me away. I loved hearing this rabbi lecture on the mysteries of Kabbalah, and how all of recorded Talmud was actually oral Torah revealed to the children of Israel at Mt. Sinai. And I didn’t (and still don’t) believe a word of it. In fact, in spite of my weird fascination with Orthodoxy, and a couple of years of classes which have (I hope) made me slightly-better educated Jewishly, I’m not much more observant than before. Does that mean I haven’t really learn the lessons of ‘Torah wisdom’ that I’ve supposedly been learning? Plato (famous for his idealism and a ‘to know the good is to do the good’ approach) would probably say that I haven’t and so would the Orthodox religious scholars I’ve met and learned from.
Does anyone else feel fascinated by Orthodoxy without actually committing to it or even changing Jewish practice or theology substantially?
