Foreign Lands
He reminded me of myself, back when I’d never been inside a bar, hardly even to a restaurant. It was a spontaneous meetup. He’d been a fan for years, and we corresponded on and off. My identity was no longer a secret to him, and we’d gotten to passing regards to one another through mutual friends. But we’d never met. Until one day he dropped me an email out of the blue saying he’s in my neighborhood, would I like to have lunch.
He was ok with non-kosher, he said, which took me by surprise. I have many friends who play the game well, living the lifestyle without believing in it. But his wool talis katan fluttering beneath his open vest, clean and well-pressed though it was, would’ve fooled even me.
He didn’t know how to order from a menu, how to ask for a check, that a gratuity was pretty much required. But he was far from a Forrest Gump-like dunce. His comments on my blog posts were thoughtful and well-written. He could hold his own on many an intellectual topic. His awareness of the contemporary world was fairly advanced. But it was all theoretical, achieved from within the confining space of the shtetl-like community he came from.
It reminded me of when I first introduced the idea to my then-wife that we go to a restaurant on occasion. Alone time, away from the kids, nice ambience, good food. “What’s the point?” She was genuinely baffled. To her, restaurants were meant for exhausting shopping days or when taking the kids to after-school doctors’ appointments, when there’d be no time to prepare decent dinners. Restaurants with high-chairs for the babies, and tiny ice-cream cups gratis for the kids, personally delivered by the restaurant’s charming proprietor, a Chasidic gentleman with a flowing talis katan with bubbly, knotted fringes along the hemline.
“It’s just a waste of money,” she’d argue. “My cooking is just as good.” She’d look to me for reassurance, or look away lest I’d argue otherwise. But she came to appreciate restaurants eventually, the elegance of sparkling wine glasses and crisp white tablecloths, different dishes to try, exotic ones, different from the Jewish-Hungarian fare her mother taught her to prepare, expertly though she came to do them.
And I suppose all these things are matters to be cultivated, staples of our contemporary society done not necessarily for utilitarian reasons but as ends in themselves. But in truth, I too was a stranger to much of non-Chasidic society’s cultural habits, and remain so to this day.
“You have to check out this bar!” my friend Alex texted me excitedly one recent Friday night. “Two-dollar beers until midnight!” She was there with friends, and they discovered this hole in the wall in the Lower East Side. And I couldn’t help thinking, I “have to” check it out? What’s wrong with the two-dollar beers I can get from my corner deli and have it at home with a few friends? Alex laughed when I said it later that night, she already tipsy, tottering on her heels. “You have so much to learn about us goyim and our ways,” she said. The bar lends itself to socializing, meeting new people, being “out on the town.” But I never quite got the point.
A long time ago – during what now seems like an entirely different lifetime – I found myself wandering alone aimlessly around Greenwich Village on a cool evening, curious about the experience of having a drink in a bar, watching the NYU students with a mixture of envy and resentment for the ease with which they came and went, “bar-hopping,” a term I would only later learn but never came to really appreciate. But I let the matter go without even trying, too intimidated by the idea of something so foreign. A bar was for drinking, that seemed fairly obvious. But was there some protocol to be followed? I’d had plenty a glass of Johnny Walker or Whiskey and Amaretto at a kiddush or vach nacht, and the occasional beer at a shulem zucher. But did goyish bars serve those? Would I sound funny, amateurish, if I asked for the wrong thing? And what afterwards? Drink it and leave? Make conversation? Were there local customs to adhere to? I had no respite from my overly analytical, anxiety-inducing mind, so I gave up. What do I want from bars anyway? I asked myself. Nothing but a nagging curiosity that could just as well be left unsatisfied. I decided I’m not the bar type, and left it at that. And I never really did become one.
I watched him order a salad, chit-chat with the waitress, the folks at the table near us. He was more at ease than I’d been when I first began to socialize with non-Chasidim. But there was no mistaking the incongruity. A chasid with a long talis katan, he too with bubbly fringes along the hemline tied in elegant knots, hardly knowing how to order something off a menu, seated in a non-kosher establishment in the company of tattooed and heavily pierced hipsters. He wasn’t much of a restaurant type, he said. I understood. Even I never quite cared for a “nice” restaurant – save for those special evenings when they contribute to an amorous encounter – always pooh-pooh-ing when a friend would mention a place with elegant décor and wonderful ambience. Chasidim don’t take much to being waited on, signaling for an extra glass of water, condiments, asking for the check. A tip? He glanced at the check. It’s not included? He looked skeptical.
When I first started my journey into secular culture as it is actually lived – after having been immersed in secular readings and exposed to the culture – again, only theoretically – for years, I took it all in with a child-like fascination. My first movie as an adult (as a child I’d seen Dumbo and some other Disney fare on a neighbor’s old-fashioned movie projector) was Big Daddy, followed by Spartacus, the experience of being drawn into a complete world of make-believe positively intoxicating. My first movie theater attendance was Ocean’s Eleven; the large screen and surround-sound audio made me uncomfortably dizzy, while my brother, a veteran of movie theaters and hardly the bookish type that I was, grinned with amusement. My first club was with a group of Chasidic friends at Café Wha in the Village. My first Jazz bar: a smokey hole in the wall in same said Village with a $5 cover with my friend Pearl. My first tastings of bona-fide non-kosher food were Starbucks’s Turkey and Swiss sandwiches. The first bar I did eventually venture into was The Library on Avenue A, near Houston Street, a friend recommending it as a cool, unpretentious place, and he knew the bartenders. They were friendly, he said. Like it mattered. My first non-Kosher restaurant was a Mexican joint in the Upper West Side, which I was told served the very best frozen margaritas. Frozen margaritas? I wouldn’t know the best from the worst. My first rock concert was to see The Who at Nassau Colliseum, and my first sporting event was a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden (they lost narrowly to the Spurs).
These encounters – some more fulfilling than others – were taken tentatively, unsure of my interest in the specific event, but curious, oh so curious, as to what it was that secular people found meaningful and entertaining. But it wasn’t these cultural attractions that made me eventually discard my Chasidic garb and make a drastic lifestyle switch. I was, and remain, a more bookish type. “Geek,” a friend teases me still, and it’s a badge I wear, proudly or not, but it’s who I am.
And he too seemed the more bookish type, which was where we shared our common interest. “Would you ever leave?” I asked him. “What for?” he shrugged. The secular world contained matters to satisfy his intellectual and academic curiosities, but he only had to visit his local library for those. He was comfortably ensconced with family, friends, community, and career. His lack of belief was only an inconvenient matter of trivia, dealt with fair ease by keeping his mouth shut when appropriate. In many ways, I wished my former life had been as simple, gratifying – which in many ways it was, save some notable ways in which it wasn’t, private matters that pertained to me and me only.
Indeed, he had no reason, I agreed, and wistfully thought of all that I’d left behind, having to choose between having my cake and eating it. But while to an outsider – say the Israeli photographer hired by the restaurant for promotional work, who was intrigued by the Chasid and the secular guy having lunch – I might’ve seemed more in place in this world, we were both in many ways foreigners. And I suspect in many ways I’ll always be one, now fairly comfortable navigating the pathways of secular culture, even doing the occasional “bar-hopping,” however unenthusiastically, but always looking back to a world that would always be my only true comfort zone, exiled as I might be for choices made tossing and turning in the dark of night.
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Love this post. Writting is incredible.
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Thanks, HT.
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Wow. It’s a rare thing for an adult to have first experiences like the ones you describe here. Almost like traveling to a really foreign country for the first time: Your senses are heightened and overwhelmed at the same time — everything is totally new, you’re not sure what things mean, whether any of your cultural knowledge applies, what to do or what to say. I think we only get a few of these moments in our lives, and not everyone appreciates them when they happen. So bravo!
(By the way, how you describe going into a bar…is kind of how I felt the first time I went to an orthodox shul!)
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Cool bucket list you got checked off there.
This is a great piece!
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I still feel that way, like the person who has this intellectual knowledge about things accross the planet but hardly knows how to turn on a TV.
but I don’t know that it’s about religion anymore, but about being so conditioned for so many years to withdraw into my own thoughts. I’m kinda getting used to myself as a loner.
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Wow! in a chilling way. I could have written parts of this myself.
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Try going to a sauna in Sweden on your own when you have no idea what is going on
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Awful, painful, shudder inducing and brilliant.
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Nice to see that you are realizing that the outside world is not as great as you imagined it to be. All that glitters ain’t gold…
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Lit — Not sure I ever imagined it to be something different from what it is. I didn’t join the secular world for what it has to offer. I left the Chasidic world for what it does or doesn’t offer.
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Nice rhetorical response, but you can’t possibly believe your own words.
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Lit-
I think your response is painfully ignorant. First of all, is the message of the piece that of disappointment? Like another response suggested, these sensations are human in nature, and I think you would be able to find similar patterns in cross cultural exchanges elsewhere. Also, even if HR hadn’t found the “outside” world to be all it was cracked up to be, how is that nice? If someone were leaving for reasons other than those HR described I would hope that they were able to fulfill whatever dream they had left the Hasidic world to pursue.
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R&C — Why do you say that? My own reasons for leaving were very personal, something I never really went into in depth publicly (and don’t know if I ever will). But you shouldn’t presume.
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I can understand the logic of leaving an undesired situation and not taking up a new lifestyle. Inherent in the act of leaving is switching one social environment, and adopting and assimilating into a new social environment. Whatever your reasons for leaving were, you must have carefully weighed your options before you left. You must have come to the conclusion that where you are going must be a better place than where you were.
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Better doesn’t imply easy. There’re no roses with a thorn. If there were, you would’ve seen a mass exodus from the shtetel. Status quo is always the more convenient choice. HR said he wasn’t imagining it any different from what it actually is. I guess he got he wanted and is paying the price.
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R&C: OK, I should’ve phrased it better. I didn’t leave because I thought the secular world was “glittery.” I left because (at least for me) the Chasidic world was decidedly “un-glittery.”
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Misyavni. I wasn’t responding to HR’s statement that he knew what he was getting into. I believe him and I’m willing to accept that at face value. I was responding to the statement he made that he left for the sake of leaving, not for the sake of what the secular world had to offer. All I said is, that there is no logical weight to that statement. You can use that logic when you abandon something and you’re not forced to select a different thing. For instance, upon biting into a rotten apple, you can choose to forsake the apple just on the basis that the apple is undesirable. Selecting to forsake the apple doesn’t force you to assume a new stimulant; you can remain neutral. But when abandoning ones social environment it is inherently tied in to selecting a new environment, therefore the logic is inappropriate to the situation.
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That changes everything. Were at peace!
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Can you write about your first sexual encounter?
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Very well written. I only wonder if the women who left the “fold” had the same experiences. Or perhaps it depends on which circles somebody comes from, and how gradual their transformation was.
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HR, great post. Perhaps you could conduct a tour for some of us, you know, like the walking tours in downtown manhatten, but one for skeptics.
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HR, great post. Perhaps you could conduct a tour for some of us, you know, like the walking tours in downtown manhatten, but one for skeptics.
(reposting this comment, because my previous one ended up in the wrong spot.)
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Yes, HR, maybe you should. There’s a “Rebel Rebel” store somewhere.
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Threads get messy here. Somethin’ is off. I wonder how many nested replies there might be. I see they shrink thinner and thinner with every step inward, surrounded with borders of varying shades like the rings inside a tree trunk.
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Also, the comments are not stacked up chronologically, and there is no confirmation that a comment posted successfully.
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Nice piece. Made me think about many of my ‘firsts’.
Like you, I never found many of the activities which the general public engages in that appealing to me, and simply decided that, now that I can do what I want with my life, there was no need for me to participate in something which I had no interest for. I’m usually game to try something new once or twice, but if it doesn’t tickle my fancy, it’s typically scratched off my list.
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It’s not that I want to leave, it’s that I want to be in two worlds.
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turkey and cheese, ugh… did you ever try that one again???
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Great piece as usual, Hasidic Rebel. I’m wondering if now that you left and in effect conceded to Yoshev al Hageder (Re: http://hasidicrebel.blogspot.com/2003/07/journeys-of-faith.html)that you were then indeed at the beginning of your journey, if you have any comments on that post in retrospect.
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“A chasid with a long talis katan, he too with bubbly fringes along the hemline tied in elegant knots, hardly knowing how to order something off a menu, seated in a non-kosher establishment in the company of tattooed and heavily pierced hipsters.”
i used to be one of those “heavily pierced hipsters”…until i got sucked into odoxy! lol.
excellent.
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Wow, Hirsch. It’s amazing that someone still remembers an obscure post from six years ago. I guess… I’m flattered.
But I guess I do have to admit that even as I was writing that, I feared that I might shift back into the secular/rational mindset that I had originally discarded. But note, I did concede that I was at the “beginning of my journey.”
More importantly, my final point was one that I still think is (at least partially) true. I said then: “I am still indeed at the beginning of my journey. This journey will last a lifetime. But I don’t think that at any point will I come to see Judaism through the prism of his lens.”
And to a very large degree, I think I’ve maintained a strong degree of affection, even admiration, for some aspects of religiosity, even if no longer embrace it personally. And in that respect, I think Yoshev’s and my perspectives are still very much at odds. He wrote with a degree of hostility, if I recall correctly, from which I have consistently tried to stay away.
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None of those posts are obscure. They all had a huge influence on me and especially that one. I really was struggling to understand why you were not agreeing with Yoshev. On the other hand, I was really happy with that post. For one thing, I was using my parents computer, and just in case I would be caught reading your site I could show by that post that it was a kosher site. But you see, I didn’t remember the whole post after all, as you point out. (I should have reread it before commenting). But I really appreciate your clarification. This brings a sort of closure to an issue for me after all these years
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Hirsch — the real shame is that all the hundreds of comments generated by those early posts are lost to posterity. There was some seriously good back and forth going on there, whose historical value, unfortunately, our failed comment hosters (enetation.co.uk) neglected to realize.
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Absolutely. Are these comments better insured?
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JUst wnnted to know if your reasons for leaving the fold were related to the hasidic world in particular or the orthodox world in general.there are many communities that many of the activities you mentioned in the peice are not taboo at all and some commendable(sports games,reading secular materiels etc.)and we are still strong believers and proud orthodox jews.
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hr …. wowwo what a post. very very well written
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I’m glad I found this website.
I’m a goy–no lying there!–but I find Chasidim to be so interesting. It is really amazing how culturally isolated they are as a group. Really? You guys don’t go out to restaurants? A good bit of my life has been spent in restaurants and cafes.
I can say that you’re not alone in not being a “bar type”–there are even goyim that feel like that.
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There is a certain amount of social correctness that can sometimes never really be ‘earned’ even years after leaving the fold. Even after discarding the garb it is often very easy to pick out the ex-chasid in the group.
I wonder about the chasidic accent – how is it that ome manage to lose it and some don’t?
HT, is that you upthread? from the olden days?
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