Losing Her Religion

[Voltaire2]

THE BOOK OF SEPARATION
A Memoir
By Tova Mirvis
302 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

Modern Orthodox Judaism — a loosely defined sect that adheres to the strictures of Jewish Scripture, while engaging with the broader world, intellectually and economically — has always been something of a paradox: It embraces modernity and, at the same time, lives by the dictums of an ancient system. Tova Mirvis’s memoir, “The Book of Separation,” chronicles this paradox, and many others, in an intimate tale of leaving a community that served as the literary inspiration for her first two novels, and the bulwark of her life.

Mirvis’s story is less stark than recent memoirs of leaving ultra-Orthodox sects; Modern Orthodoxy, by definition, allows more mingling with the outside world. Nonetheless, her narrative is one of deep heartache, both in the predeparture attempt to quiet her own objections to the faith, and in the self-willed abandonment of certainty that departure requires. Early in the book, Mirvis writes about a childhood objection to the biblical verse that commanded Adam to rule over Eve; her mother quieted her objections with alternative explanations. Mirvis muses about the contradictions she felt: “The text couldn’t be wrong; the rabbis couldn’t be wrong. If sexism was wrong, the text couldn’t be sexist. … The laws couldn’t change, the words couldn’t change — nothing, in fact, could change — yet you could turn the words, reframe them, and reshape them, do anything so that you could still fit inside.”

The struggle to fit inside takes up much of the book, which skips from the aftermath of Mirvis’s divorce from her husband and her faith back to the genesis of that faith, and of her marriage. Mirvis’s tale is one of privilege — a prosperous Memphis upbringing, college at Columbia, graduate school in creative writing — run through with a red thread of anguish. In many ways, to those of Modern Orthodox background, it is a deeply familiar story: She attended an Orthodox school, studied Jewish texts for a year in Israel, got engaged at 22 to an Orthodox man after 12 weeks of dating and lived under the watchful eye of a tight-knit, conformist community. (A Jewish marriage manual she read during her engagement had a chapter entitled “Thoughts to Banish.” “I wanted to scream,” Mirvis writes.) The choking tangle of laws that dictate how to handle everything, from dishware to vaginal discharge, was stifling. Orthodox Judaism, unlike other forms of American fundamentalism, largely avoids the question of belief; steadfast, granular obedience to the 613 commandments of the Torah, and the embrace of the community, preclude the question. The journey toward leaving is a slow awakening to her own suffering, and then a sudden leap to cut its bonds.

NYT - you may encounter a paywall.

[ffr]

1. I think most of us can identify with some of this. It was how we were brought up to think.

Then as we began to question, things just didn't add up. Then there was all the greed and spirituality towards money. What does money have to do with any of this. Oh. Plenty.

Piece by piece, it's all mind control.

[Cartoonist]

2. 613 Commandments?

Not for me.

[guillaumeb]

4. How many secular laws are there?

A bit more than 613, agreed?

[Cartoonist]

5. Big difference

And you know it.

Laws are written after much deliberation and can be subject to change. Most laws fall under the golden rule.

Commandments were written by "anonymous" and never get changed. Many fall under the heading of busybody regulations, like what hat to wear.

[guillaumeb]

8. Like the GOP tax law?

Many laws, perhaps most laws, reflect what a particular society sees as desirable.

[Igel]

6. Many of them are of no effect.

In the absence of the circumstances necessary for them to be breakable, it's hard to break them. I'm in my late 50s and have yet to run into circumstances under which I could have broken them.

A number of them are deductions, not explicit commandments. Things like the requirement to actively hear the sounding of the shofar on the feast of trumpets.

Some of them are far outposts of the fence around the Torah, like not mixing milk and beef. It's highly unlikely in this day and age any animal killed and cooked in milk is being cooked in milk that its own mother produced.

Many are very difficult to implement. Many of those are the ones I think most important to implement.

[Cartoonist]

7. Not the point

Commandments represent unquestioning obedience. Secular laws are malleable.

Your examples don't change that distinction. There are secular laws still on the books that don't get enforced, many dealing with horses.

Out of curiosity, is there a list of these orthodox commandments?

[guillaumeb]

3. And this provides balance to this:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1218263026

[Lordquinton]

9. It really doesn't

But you'd have to work through deeply ingrained privilege to see why.

[guillaumeb]

10. A non-answer.

But I understand the reasoning behind it.

[Lordquinton]

11. You prove my point

It wasn't an answer because there was no question.

I do hope you are taking in the pervasiveness of religious privliges, and how you benefit from them. It's a long process, and took me a long time to recognize it, and I exist on the non-benifical end of it. But it has helped my life in this and other areas. It can for you too.