Tel-Chai Nation

As galling as I find the leftist New Yorker magazine these days, they did publish an article worth pondering about parents and kids growing up in Hasidic communities in the US, though there are some galling biases prevalent in it, and moments you have to take with a grain of salt. At least one story appears to be another discussion of a report I may have spoken of before in past years. Let's take this as an example:

Chavie was the fifth of ten children. She saw herself as a good girl, a rule-follower, but she never really believed that the rules were important. When nobody was looking, she would put on the lights on Shabbos, or turn on the air-conditioning. She never really prayed; she just mumbled the words. She knew that she ought to be ashamed of this, and she was, but she wasn’t afraid of God; she was afraid of getting caught.

Her community believed the secular world was sinful, but she was curious about it. She sneaked glances at the TV in the doctor’s waiting room; she stared at people in the mall. In high school, she discovered that she was attracted to girls, and she slept with a few of them, especially at summer camp. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, because it was immodest to show your body to another person, but she didn’t think of it as gay sex—she didn’t know that it was sex at all. She certainly never connected the experience with the fact that in a few years she would be married to a boy.

A matchmaker paired her with Naftali Weisberger, a boy from her neighborhood, and they married in 2002, when she was nineteen. The wedding night was horrific. It felt to Chavie as though they were violating each other. It wasn’t that he was rough—he was meek and shy. But they had been told that they had to consummate the marriage that night, and if they were having trouble they should call the rabbi, so they did. For her, there was no way to come back from that night. She couldn’t imagine loving the person who had put her through it. And although she had not previously connected her relationships with girls with marriage to a boy, now she thought, This isn’t love. I know what love is, because I have felt it.

After a year, Chavie told her parents that she was unhappy in the marriage, and they sent her to a Hasidic therapist. The therapist told her that people became gay because they were abused in their childhood. When she told him that she hadn’t been abused, he hypnotized her to try to get her to remember, and taught her to self-hypnotize when she was having sex with her husband. Six years into the marriage, Chavie and Naftali had three children, the youngest a few months old. That summer, Chavie, Naftali, and the kids went away to a camp in the Catskills. Being back in that place, Chavie remembered vividly what it had been like to be there as a girl—how fun and innocent summer camp had been—and she felt more than ever that her husband was dragging her down.

It's not great they're normalizing the lesbianism she developed (though something tells me that someday, they may actually turn against lesbians much like a lot of male supremacist homosexuals of the SJW breed are these days, more so than in the past), although the reason the woman may have become lesbian is likely because she was not given any proper view of the opposite sex, nor was she allowed to communicate with them properly, let alone given a basic education youngsters could need to understand themselves and their gender at a young age. This is something the article doesn't seem to mention here, and maybe because it'd conflict with their idea of political correctness, which their statement she "wasn't afraid of God" seems to have something to do with. To be sure, some people become homosexual because of abuse in childhood, but there are other ways for it to happen that Haredi communities like the above woman came from pretty much led to. Anyway, there's more:

A few months later, early one morning, Naftali was changing the baby’s diaper when she fell off the bed and broke her leg. Chavie bolted upright in bed when the baby screamed and said they had to take her to the hospital right away, but it was Saturday—Shabbos—and they were staying with her husband’s family for the weekend. Her father-in-law asked a neighbor, who was an emergency medical technician in the religious ambulance corps, to examine the baby, and the technician concluded that the baby’s injuries were not serious enough to warrant driving on Shabbos. (A lawyer for Naftali Weisberger declined an interview requested on his behalf.) All through the day, as Chavie held the screaming baby, she grew angrier and angrier. As soon as Shabbos was over, the family went to the hospital, but the doctor was so disturbed by the broken femur, and by the fact that they had waited nearly ten hours to bring the baby in, that the hospital called child-protective services. That night, while Chavie slept in the hospital with the baby, she was watched by a child-protection worker, for fear of abuse.

Not long after, Chavie decided she was done. She knew that husbands were often reluctant to give their wives a get—a religious divorce—so when Naftali agreed to give her one and they went to the beis din, the rabbinical court, she readily signed whatever papers she was given. She didn’t pay much attention to a clause requiring her to raise the children Hasidic. In March, 2009, they were officially divorced. Later that month, Naftali married again. After he remarried, he told Chavie that he needed to focus on his new wife, and he stopped seeing their children regularly. Sometimes he took them out for pizza, but he didn’t have them over to his new house. He didn’t pay child support. Soon he and his wife began having babies of their own.

Well this is certainly angering. What kind of crappy men are those who refuse to recognize the vitality of "pikuach nefesh", to the point where an infant's endangered by offensively overreaching religious stringencies, and somebody who likely wasn't qualified to be a medic if he didn't consider the injury serious enough? This compounds all wrong with insular communities.

It was at this point that Chavie allowed herself to think, If I am raising these children alone, how do I want to do it? And what do I actually want in my life? She consulted a Modern Orthodox rabbi, hoping he would tell her that she could be both gay and religious, but he said that if she was really a lesbian she had to be celibate. And so her choice slowly became clear to her: she could be celibate; she could live a secret life and lie to everyone; or she could leave the community. This last possibility was so extreme that it took several years to form in her mind.

And from this, it sounds like the "modern" Orthodox rabbi didn't have the courage to urge her to try and overcome her lesbianism, or encourage her not to reject the opposite sex, or do her best to be attracted to the opposite sex. This problem could be even more troubling when homosexual men are the topic. Don't worry though, I'm aware of what kind of offensive laws a few states may have enacted for the sake of LGBT activists, and wouldn't be surprised if the aforementioned jerk capitulated in some way or other. A terrible shame either way that we seem to have people lacking an understanding of psychology, and science. Here's more about a woman whose mother was from a German Haredi family, and who actually decided to take up what her mother left behind:

While she was in college, Marie met a rabbi from Monsey. He told her that in Monsey there were men who were a little older than she but still unmarried because for some reason they weren’t considered a catch. If she wanted to marry a Haredi man, he said, she should look for a man like that, because with her dubious religious background she wasn’t a catch, either. It took her a while to get used to the idea of marrying a man she didn’t know, but she believed that she should trust God without questioning, so she did. She met a twenty-seven-year-old man in a religious chat room, and left college to marry him in the fall of 2001.

[...] When she and her husband had their first child, a daughter, she became absorbed in being a mother and felt happier. A couple of years later, they had a son. But the marriage grew worse. Her husband controlled the household money, and told her that in order for him to give her some, even to buy basic items such as sanitary napkins, she had to deserve it. He called her names, and when their daughter was around six or seven he started calling her names, too—ugly, fat, stupid. Finally, in 2012, they went to the beis din to get a divorce. She got custody of the children; he was to see them for dinner a couple of times a week and every other Shabbos.

She later had custody sadly revoked, due to a dreadful mistake, which is a shame, because the way her hubby treated her was reprehensible. More on that comes later in the article. What's flawed here is the assertion she thought she should trust God unquestioned, rather than whether she should trust in humans unquestioned, because that's what she did wrong. And back to the hubby, he was wrong to control the finances in a way symbolizing an unequal marriage partnership. In Japan, from what I know, whether it's the husband or wife working in a job, the wife always takes charge of the financial issues. Now here's something about a man in the flawed faith of Haredism, under the Bobov sect:

When Issac turned eighteen, in 2006, it came time for him to marry, and matchmakers started getting in touch. Normally, a person had only one shidduch—one match. Eight of Issac’s nine siblings married the first person they met, but Issac met five girls, and five times he was rejected. Part of the problem might have been that he wasn’t a yeshiva boy anymore—he worked in an office-supply store—and having a job was less prestigious. One matchmaker told him that she’d fibbed on his behalf, saying that he learned with a study partner every night, but it made no difference. He was told that one girl rejected him because he talked too much. By the time a matchmaker suggested a sixth girl, he no longer gave a shit. He agreed to go through with the meeting only to pacify his father. The matchmaker didn’t know him or the girl personally—presumably, she had picked a girl for her failings, to go with his.

So the potential wives went by a socialist belief system, did they? Oh, good grief. This is just plain sad. And when he did eventually find a lady whom he could work well with:

Everything changed when his daughter, the summer before preschool, was rejected by the Bobov yeshiva because, he and Faigy were told, Faigy, who had been brought up in a community with slightly different rules, drove a car. He and Faigy had been pleading with the school for months, and finally they asked for a meeting with the grand rabbi in Borough Park. The rabbi didn’t understand why Faigy insisted on driving. Couldn’t she give it up for the sake of her children? Issac said that maybe the Bobov school was the best school, maybe it wasn’t, but he wasn’t willing to chain up his wife to find out. Afterward, as he and Faigy walked away, down Fiftieth Street, he didn’t feel angry; he felt peaceful. He said to Faigy, “It’s over—the book is closed on Bobov.”

The next day, he realized that he was done with more than the school. He said to Faigy, “If I don’t have to follow the rules for the yeshiva, then why do I need to follow them at all?” He told her, “I think I can keep Shabbos, I think I can keep kosher, but beyond that I’m not sure.” This was intensely painful for Faigy, who was deeply pious. Issac had been untethered from religion inside his head for a long time, but to her it felt as though everything she knew about her family had suddenly exploded into pieces.

So the good news is that the man here wised up regarding the Bobov. The bad news is that his wife seems to have been far too nailed on an interpretaton of the Judaist faith that does the whole religion a disservice. The article turns back to the lesbian named Chavie:

Chavie had been afraid to talk to such a wild-sounding person as Chani Getter, but on the phone Chani was very friendly. She invited Chavie to attend a retreat for L.G.B.T.Q. Orthodox Jews. At the retreat, Chavie was asked to speak about herself, and she saw that people were moved by what she said, and she thought, This is real, this is actually who I am. At the retreat, she met many queer parents who were there openly with their children, not hiding or lying to them. She thought about how she had been behaving with her own children, putting them to bed and then locking herself in her bedroom and watching a movie. Her children were four, six, and eight, so it wasn’t too hard to keep them in the dark, but she thought that as they grew older it would be impossible to keep lying and be a good parent. At another retreat, one of her new friends said to her, “I dare you to take your wig off.” Chavie was shocked—this felt even more exposing than being naked, especially since, unbeknownst to anyone, she had let her hair grow out into a Mohawk and dyed it in rainbow stripes—but she did it. After that, things started moving very fast. A month later, she went to the friend’s house for the weekend and rode in a car on Shabbos and ate bacon, and it didn’t feel frightening or sacrilegious—it felt normal and right. And she realized, I guess I never believed in any of this.

She began introducing her children to her new friends—a lesbian couple, a trans woman. She felt that she and her kids were pushing open the door of their ghetto together, and it was both scary and thrilling. She thought that, since she was abandoning the values of the community, she should come up with alternatives, so she started a “values wall” in her house, and when she read a book with the kids they would extract a value from it and paste it up: kindness, inclusivity, social justice. She believed that a family should have rituals, so for every ritual she abandoned she invented a new one to take its place. She was worried that when the community saw what she was up to it would try to turn her children against her—she had seen that happen. But the key was she had time. Outwardly, they were still a good Hasidic family, so no one was paying attention.

For three years after the divorce, Chavie didn’t tell her children that she was queer. But then, in 2012, she thought that her older daughter suspected it, and Chavie told her that she was. That fall, a transgender friend of hers had a fire in their apartment, and she invited them to stay with her, at her home in Borough Park. They brought their cats; pets were not exactly prohibited in the community, but they were a tell. Chavie grew bolder. She allowed the kids to eat non-kosher food a few times. She let the girls wear pants inside the house. She let the kids watch a movie called “How the Toys Saved Christmas.” She told them that certain Hasidic beliefs were sexist and homophobic, and that she was an atheist. Finally, she thought, I am done trying to please people. One day, she impulsively went outside in her neighborhood wearing secular clothes, with her hair—now short and blond—uncovered for everyone to see. She walked past a group of mothers waiting at a bus stop. At first, they didn’t recognize her, and then they did, and grew very quiet, but she kept walking.

She decided to come out publicly as a lesbian, and was promptly fired from her job at the magazine. The community was horrified that Rabbi Wolfson’s granddaughter had turned out to be such a shocking person. People wrote her letters telling her that she was disturbing the soul of her father, who had recently died. But she never imagined that she would run into custody problems. Her ex was busy with his new children. She figured that, even if he did take her to a secular family court, the judge would side with her, because she was progressive and wanted her kids to get a good education.

It turned out that she was wrong about this. In November, 2012, she received an emergency order to show up in Kings County Supreme Court. The judge told her that she was confusing and harming her children by making such drastic changes in their upbringing, and ordered them removed from her and sent to stay with their father that very day. A few days later, the judge issued a temporary order decreeing that Chavie’s children could live with her for three nights a week, on the condition that while they were with her, and whenever she was in Borough Park, she dressed and acted like a proper Hasidic woman. In a subsequent hearing, Naftali told the judge he had assumed that Chavie would have relationships with women after the divorce, but he had expected her to keep them secret from the children. Chavie said that a parent who hid her authentic self from her kids, and raised them according to values that she didn’t believe in, was not a parent but a nanny, and to deprive children of a parent was a terrible thing.

The judge summoned several experts to give testimony on the family. A therapist testified that, ever since Chavie had begun openly flouting Hasidic rules, her older daughter said that she could not have normal friendships with her classmates in school, and that she and her siblings were afraid of being seen in the streets with their mother wearing secular clothing. A psychologist testified that her son’s behavior in yeshiva had grown disruptive and defiant. Both said that Chavie’s criticisms of Hasidism had left the children deeply confused. A forensic psychologist testified that although Chavie was a loving mother who had a strong bond with her children, by disparaging the Hasidic way of life in front of them she had put her own needs ahead of theirs; she should have shielded them from anything that could turn them against their father and his community. The judge, appalled by what he felt was Chavie’s “remorseless” violation of her agreement to raise the kids religious, made his temporary ruling permanent.

Chavie appealed, and, two years later, the ruling was overturned, on the ground that a religious-upbringing agreement could be enforced only so long as it was in the best interests of the children. The appeals court was more impressed by Chavie’s care of the kids, and by Naftali’s spotty visitation and child-support record, than by Chavie’s rogue behavior. The appeals judges accepted Chavie’s argument that it was not in the children’s interests for her to conceal her beliefs from them. They pointed out that the plain language of the agreement required a Hasidic upbringing for the children, but did not specify any requirements as to the behavior of the parents; nor was it acceptable for a court to compel an adult to practice a religion. The solution was to split the difference: Chavie was to make sure that the children dressed and acted like Hasidic kids when visiting their father or attending school, but she could dress or act as she liked.

Chavie had been lucky, but she had also had help. Around the time of her appeal, in 2017, Footsteps hired Julie F. Kay, a human-rights lawyer, who began recruiting attorneys from top Manhattan firms to represent Footsteps members in custody cases pro bono. [...]

That in itself is fine. It's just a shame these Haredi communities won't come to terms with how customs like gender segregation and censorious approaches to education are exactly what lead to homosexuality, and this woman fell in with tasteless crowds as a result. In any case, the reason why she initially lost her custody case was, I'd estimate, because the judge was the kind of leftist who otherwise saw the religious background she came from being acceptable to his world viewpoint, not unlike Islam. Speaking of which, here's some more on the woman named Marie:

While Marie was in India, she spent time with a cousin of her friend’s, who had a Jewish mother but a Muslim father. She had met this cousin before, when he visited her college, in Texas, but he was several years younger than her and she hadn’t taken much notice of him. Now they bonded over family troubles, and over the difficulty of being Jewish while having a non-Jewish father. After she returned home, they stayed in touch. Back in Monsey, Marie felt hemmed in by scrutiny and gossip. She believed that her ex-husband was trying to find dirt on her, in order to get the kids back, and that people were watching her on his behalf, looking to see if she had stopped being observant, or if she was entertaining men in her house, getting drunk, shooting up drugs. He told people in the community that she didn’t keep kosher, that she didn’t keep Shabbos. People rammed their shopping carts into hers at Rockland Kosher.

[...] Meanwhile, as Marie’s educational petitions were pending in the court, a year after her first trip she went to India again. She spent more time with the cousin, and they became engaged, and, a year later, they married, although, for visa reasons, her husband did not move to America for many months. Her children were upset that she had married a man they had never met, and Marie’s ex-husband began telling people that Marie had married a Muslim and was no longer Jewish.

In court, Marie was pressed to prove that she hadn’t married a Muslim. Her ex-husband’s lawyer displayed photographs of her at her wedding wearing traditional Indian clothes, with wedding henna on her skin. The judge, saying that she needed to assess Marie’s credibility, told her that she should produce a valid ketubah to prove that her wedding was Orthodox. Although the judge had ordered both parents not to disparage each other in public, an associate of her ex-husband’s posted a video online, soliciting money to pay legal fees. “He woke up and found himself alone,” a male voice narrated, in English, over dramatic music. “No wife; no kids. Thousands of miles away, his wife converted to Islam and married a Muslim man. He almost lost his children forever. After a lengthy battle in the courts, he now has his kids back. But that may change soon if he doesn’t come up with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his lawyers.” Then Marie’s ex-husband appeared and pleaded, in Yiddish, “Dear brothers, it is not easy to turn to you, but what doesn’t a father do for his children. I’m begging you, help me.”

If the husband himself wasn't an Islamic adherent, that's why the defamation committed by her community is only so truly shameful. They practically provided the New Yorker's leftists with a weapon to use against "Islamophobia". Indeed, that's what's really irritating about this article. Though I'm wondering if this is actually a distortion, and the allegedly Muslim father of her hubby was actually an Indian Buddhist? I just don't know. All I know is that, given the chance, the New Yorker's staff can be very deceptive, all in their attempts to paint anyone they allegedly disagree with as an Islamophobe, and for all the wrong reasons. But, I will say that, if the woman above had a lenient view of Islam, much like another one had an accepting view of homosexuality, it becomes a case where I don't know whom to root for.

It's too bad there's insular Haredi clans out there who just don't comprehend that their deleterious and oppressive approach to education and reality is exactly why anybody could end up under poor influence if exposed to the "outside" world, could end up finding their customs sexist, yet couldn't understand why all this LGBT idiocy is no better. Also notice how the article alludes to "social justice and inclusivity", all without a proper understanding of differences between race and ideologies/cultures, apparently. That's the problem with it here, that even if there is what to think about, it's still written from a far-left position that doesn't consider the Islamic religion offensive, and isn't even concerned about it being far more homophobic than most other western religions could be. It's grating how the Haredi clans take up positions biased against women, who, when exposed to even more leftist propaganda, end up believing they should support LGBT ideology, even though the practitioners of such beliefs can be just as condescending towards women themselves. And it's disturbing when these positions by the ultra-Orthodox tribalists lead to situations where an uninformed woman could develop an accepting view of the Religion of Peace. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Haredi clans like Satmar and Bobov are so stuffy, there's just no telling if they'll ever change and reevaluate their positions for the better.

Labels: Asia, dhimmitude, haredi corruption, India, islam, Judaism, misogyny, Moonbattery, msm foulness, New York, United States