Summer feels like swapping my skirts for shorts and my long-sleeve shirts for crop tops. Summer feels like the sun on your legs and stomach, the wind in your hair, and the beach on your toes.

Summer has always been a hard time for me. Walking around in the Middle Eastern heat, dripping in sweat, thinking- is this really what God wants? For me to dress like this in the summer. I have gotten better about it. Buying tznius clothes that aren’t so hot, loose breathable shirts, flowy skirts, but nothing can compare to a tank top and the feeling of the golden sun on your shoulders. This year is even harder. It’s my first summer married, and I’ve already been tempted to stop covering my hair dozens of times.

It was hard since the beginning, don’t get me wrong. I love my hair. It was something I always got complimented on. Long and thick, and always looked like it was styled even though the most I ever did was run a comb through it.

I have an amazing relationship with Hashem (most of the time), but I still have moments when it’s hard for me to accept the Jewish Version of Hashem. Mostly during the summer and the chagim.

It isn’t hard for me to trace where my struggles with emunnah started. I had always been more doubtful, more questioning, but my question about the historical accuracy of the Tanach never pushed me over the edge- it was morals. Especially seeing how women were treated.

But what I know is that after making aliyah as a teen and going into a Bais Yaakov that was not at all like what I was used to, I felt like my eyes had been opened. I was being shown Judaism, and there was one thing that was becoming more and more clear. Judaism and I did not view women in the same way.

I remember sitting on my friend’s bed in tenth grade. I was tracing my finger across her patterned sheets- they were covered in a print of Raggedy Ann- while she was explaining to me the way of the world. She had made aliya from Flatbush, so she was much more worldly than me.

My friend had an older brother in one of those OTD yeshivas, and she was pointing out something I had never thought about before to me.

“Boys in the frum world can do like, whatever they want, and then they hug their Rebbis and cry and flip out and find the best shidduch out there. They would never chas vashalom go out with a girl that struggled.”

I know now that this isn’t true. My husband, who happens to be the most amazing guy out there, never “struggled,” and he married me. I’ve spoken to guys who have had their journey and would appreciate or at least understand a girl who had the same.

But at the time, I felt like I was being reborn, seeing the world in a new light.

“Girls stop dressing tznius, so they instantly get kicked out of society. Boys continue doing whatever they want with their kippas on their heads, and their Rebbis dance and sing with them when they occasionally roll into shachris.”

This was something that still bothered me when I was in seminary, and I remember what my rabbi told me. Just because society treats it that way doesn’t mean it’s okay. It doesn’t say so in the torah.

But some things still bother me today. It’s not that I longingly look at my husband putting on his tefillin and get jealous. Or that I wish I had read my bar mitzvah parsha out loud- no, that actually sounded like a nightmare. I love that this past shabbos, when my whole extended family went on a shabbaton, I could sleep in a bit longer while my husband went to daven.

I didn’t want to dance with the Torah on Simchas Torah either. It was more about what all these separations led to. It led to going to a shul on the chagim where the azrat nashim was stuffed and far away that you couldn’t listen to the tefila. The feeling that you being there was an afterthought. Sure, I could find a shul where the azras nashim was on top, but it would still bother me that stuffing women in the basement or at the end of the shul behind thick curtains was acceptable.

It’s the common fact that if you ask most young girls or women how they feel on Purim or simchas Torah, they will feel something in their chest. It’s a boys’ chag- but don’t worry, you women have your own chag every month on Rosh Chodesh! (cue eye roll)

For the longest time, something was missing for me. I was a religious woman- so what did that consist of? Dressing a certain way? Popping out babies? Was my religious life only to begin when I got married?

That was one of my biggest searches once I believed in God again. The God I knew in love wouldn’t create a system just to alienate women. So what was the lesson in all this? Why didn’t women need to go to minyan or read from the Torah or be in religious public life? The answer that women are not obligated to time-bound mitzvas didn’t sit well with me.

I really dislike religious generalizations of men and women. They hurt me a lot too. Hearing in class that girls naturally have emunah, that girls don’t ask the same questions boys do, that only boys struggle with lust made me feel grotesque. But in the rest of this post, I will be speaking in generalizations just to get my point across. I hope you’ll bear with me. And that’s not saying that I don’t believe there are differences; there are. There are definitely big differences and certain tendencies we lean into. But Hashem made us all a beautiful mix of both.

Maybe Hashem created this world with two modes of connection. The connection of doing: building, pushing, and the connection of being- relating to God through lived reality, relationships, intentions, and feelings.

We know that women didn’t sin with spies, and maybe it’s because of this very idea. Women are naturally more connected by being. So when the spies were sent to go into Israel because it meant no more “coddling” from God- in the desert, they were protected and provided for in every way- they thought that was the only way to live a truly spiritual life. They thought it freed them up to be able to be involved only in “holy” things and not “mundane” ones like running a household. Now in Israel they would have to work, farm the land, and wash clothes. But maybe the women understood that living real life, not always wrapped in ritual, wasn’t a stira to holiness. It was, in fact, holiness. Kedusha emerges from everyday living, not an escape from it. And maybe this is what my teachers were trying to convey when they said women are different. That we aren’t chayav in certain mitzvahs.

Maybe this is evidence of the different modes. On a whole, women lean more towards the connection of being, and men to the connection of doing. What we call masculine and feminine. Hashem pushes us in one direction, gives one more emphasis than the other. But I think any woman can attest that she’s had to be more “masculine” at times and a man has had to be more “feminine”. We need both, but our role is to find beauty in the one we were born into.

So maybe this is just some work I have to do within myself. I know how I relate to God. Rituals are very difficult for me, so maybe I should just accept this feminine connection. The feeling I have of God.

A short time after we got married, my husband told me that I experienced God more strongly than him. I didn’t understand what he meant by that. In fact, I felt the opposite. My husband was in yeshiva half the day; he wears black and white, never misses a tefilla or a day of putting on tefillin. I can’t remember the last time I davened with a siddur (I didn’t even do so on my wedding day). I struggle with kashrus and respecting rabbis. If you hang out with me long enough, you’ll have some cynical remark about frum society or the Tanach or chazal. I contemplate uncovering my hair and wearing shorter clothes every day of my life, so what did my husband mean?

“It’s like you really feel Hashem. You get mad at him when things go wrong, frustrated when you can’t understand him, thankful when things are good. Like you’re really with Him. I have to push myself to feel this. Maybe that’s why you get angry at him more because you really believe he’s controlling everything.”

I always had it in my head that religion is the male model. But I don’t need to know what time shkia is to feel the sunset. My husband was right- though there was a time that i didn’t feel hashem at all (I didn’t tear up when I heard tatty my king- which made me feel like there was something deeply wrong with me) but the bigger problem in my life was that I just obsessed with trying to understand him, because the way I saw relation to Hashem happening confused me and didn’t make sense and I cared too much.

I’m okay with the fact that now, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I reach for is not a siddur, and that I feel Hashem more when I wake up, make my morning coffee, and do some stretches. I’m okay with realizing that maybe the generalizations I make in my head are my fault and I can change the narrative. Tefilla isn’t only valuable when it’s in a minyan. It’s also valuable when it’s part of my slow morning routine, my meditation.

I’m ok. That shabbos for me is spending time with family and curling up on the couch with a good non-Jewish book, sprinkled in with some chapters of a rare Jewish book I find that does light me up. That I can relate to life and meaning through secular movies and music and books. That my neshama feels elevated with music, even if it’s not always Jewish. That I don’t view modesty as an anti-lust mechanism but a form of self-respect. And maybe the point is to work on meshing them together.

I don’t have to frame my relationship with God through rituals and customs, dont have to go to shul or put on tefillin for what I feel to be real. It’s okay to not be wired that way, and that doesn’t make me worse- or better.

And it’s not that I have to do the “worldly” things like cooking and cleaning (which my husband does plenty) and bearing children in order to help my husband do the real important things like davening and shteiging. No- we’re two sides of the same coin. Intertwined. I do my part, and he does his, and our missions get flipped and intertwined and tangled.

A relationship needs both sides to flourish. If a relationship is left only to the whims of feelings and experience, it is destined to fail. Even if we don’t feel it at times, a relationship has rules. You can’t cheat because you feel like it. There are some things that you can’t say to your spouse, can’t say to others. There are rules. Strict rules. A relationship cannot survive without them.

I know I can’t just do whatever I want. Wear whatever I want, watch whatever I want, eat whatever I want. There are some things that are hard work, and some rituals that we need.

Maybe women can learn to be a bit more manly and men to be a bit more girly.

I’m only twenty-one, and one thing I learned is that life changes and teaches me so many new things. If you talked to me when I was nineteen, I would tell you I want to be a full on trad-wife, never work a day in my life. I started my degree with having to actually use it being my worst case scenario. But surprisingly, I have found real joy in my studies. I still want to be a stay-at-home mom eventually, or have more time to spend with my future kids, but it’s okay if I like my work and don’t want to only be a mom. It’s ok that I will be the engineer and my husband will be a therapist. That sometimes my husband is a better balabusta than me. That he’s supporting me financially through college and then it will be my turn to do the same. That I make dinner when I have the time and he makes dinner when he has more time.

Judaism definitely has gender roles, but I’m trying to see them as less of a cage and more of a guide, a way of connection. And last time I checked, Hashem never said that the man is assur in doing the dishes.

So back to what bothered me, and still does, I don’t know when i’ll be able to stop cringing when i’m squished in the back of a shul on yom kippur, not fasting because of my eating disorder and nto really paying attention to the tefila and pretending it’s because i cant hear- but I cling to my relationship with God, and how my daily life and connection is just as important as the structured religious world we live inside, even though they don’t always fit neatly together. I’m learning to integrate them together, even if they aren’t equally as natural for me, because in essence, it is all one relationship.

I don’t go to a gross mikvah or have horror stories with the baalanit, but I find myself crying every time before going in and after. Wiping my tears away so I can go home and greet my husband normally, but I usually end up crying into his arms.

It got me thinking about things a lot. Particularly how much I HATE the mikvah and bedikos, and it led me down the hole of everything I don’t like about Jewish femininity.

Dressing “tznius,” sheitels, mikvah, the fact that I’m the only one allowed to be stuffed with birth control.

But I know all this stuff isn’t exactly true. The thought of these things used to make me want to throw away Judaism completely, but I’m not there anymore. I’m working on a piece talking about all the things that pulled me back, all the things I love about Judaism. But lately, I’ve been hurting.

I think some of my sense of gender in religion might be warped. Sometimes I feel like I’m an oxymoron. I love to paint, write, and play music. I want nothing more than to be a stay-at-home mom making crunchy recipes for my kids and doing arts and crafts with them—yet I’m pursuing an engineering degree (though it is the most girly one). I grew up confused. Seeing the sharp contrast between men and women, listening to conservative politics that led me to see red pill content. Hearing that girls are good at cooking (I hate it), that they love little kids (I’ve never wanted to hold every random baby i see like some of my other friends), are agreeable (I was always very argumentative), calm (I was a wild child who climbed trees), and not good at math (which I love). My school did push us to get a top math and computer education (one win for them—but they lost that point when I realized it was in order to make me be the primary breadwinner and the primary caretaker).

I hate covering my hair, and often find myself feeling ridiculous putting my sheitel on. Covering my hair with hair that costs a fortune. The more natural it looks, the less it looks like a wig, the better. So is the answer only wearing tichels? I find it hard to believe the imahos made sure that none of their hair was visible. It was just common throughout history to have something on your hair (like a sari) for men and women, and now it’s become this crazy race of buying the most expensive sheitel to cover your hair and make it special for your husband (while your real hair gets damaged).

So I find myself bouncing between different thoughts. Hashem moved history this way on purpose. Hair is spiritual and blah blah, and Hashem guided history this way.

And the other side of me thinks we completely lost the plot. When you see ponytail sheitels and baseball cap sheitels, we’ve lost the plot. When a kallah who doesn’t spend 30,000 on a sheitel is seen as a neb—we’ve lost the plot. Is this better than covering our hair with a small headband? Going out with the natural hair Hashem gave us, but showing that we are married?

I feel similarly about tznius. Have we lost the point of it all? Where’s the spirit? Is wearing loose pants and short-sleeved shirts not modest? I know what the arguments are: you need guardrails. If everything is left up to interpretation, then there’s no telling where it would go. And maybe they are right- i mean, just look at the way mainstream western society dresses now. But where is our seichel? Our heart?

Maybe if we believed in the spirit of modesty, it would be unfathomable to go to a pool shirtless or in a bikini, but we would understand that a woman wearing loose shorts and a baggy T-shirt and a baseball cap would look normal. We wouldn’t be hyper-fixated on collarbones and knees.

Maybe I’m just bitter or biased or missing something, but when I see a little girl running around in the Israeli heat in thick black stockings, it hurts me. Because I know we can’t understand everything God wants, but He doesn’t want us to suffer, and I feel like we’ve twisted His words and gone too far and, frankly, that we’ve lost the plot.

So why do I stay? Because I see something in all of these values. I want my kids to grow up with as little technology as possible (technolgy has done so much harm), and not talking to the opposite gender so much (much healthier). I want my daughters to have a childhood before they start makeup routines and skincare routines, and I want the way they dress to be out of genuine self-respect. Because I love Hashem and have a relationship with him.

I don’t like the simple narrative that dressing “immodestly” was just for male attention. Of course, that’s part of it. Of course it is. When a girl goes to a club dressed sluttily, there’s one reason behind it. One.

But we can’t act like that’s everything. When a girl wants to wear a tank top and shorts in the scorching Middle Eastern sun, she might not even be thinking about the penis havers.

My husband was telling me that one night he and a few friends went camping near the Kinneret. They knew they would probably have to leave in the morning because many non-tznius girls would come there. When they left, one of his friends said, “Oh we had to leave because there was ervah there.”

I don’t understand how that’s not just as objectifying as what the goyim do. They use women as objects, adding them to every ad and making young women think their only worth is their looks. Aren’t we supposed to break away from that? Instead, we make girls think boys are disgusting, that their bodies are bad (which contributes to the high rate of eating disorders), and teach boys that women are obstacles to be overcome. That’s how a girl goes from being a human to being an ervah.

Because what did this girl do wrong? She wanted to go to the lake with her friends, just like my husband and his friends. Right now, wearing a bikini is the norm, and so is boys going shirtless. She did just what this boy did with his friends, but he perceived her as an obstacle in his path.

Bikinis shouldn’t be the norm. It makes people insecure and I could (and will) write about what i think the real value and meaning behind modest is, but that’s a different subject.

Of course there is beauty to a modest society, but the word “tznius” has become so tainted. I like that my husband guards his eyes, that porn isn’t seen as a thing that should be tolerated. That I don’t mingle with men and he doesn’t mingle with women. That we have standards. That’s the definition of kedoshim tihiyu—not wearing a “designer sheitel” or stuffing my hair under a scarf that makes me feel ugly.

And mikvah and bedikos. I just want some help, some answers. I want to see the beauty in it. I really do. But right now I only feel pain. That during the time of the month when I most need physical affection, I can’t get it, even after being shomer negiah my whole life.

It feels like a joke that during the time that I’m in pain, that I have hormones causing me to be sad and irritable and depressed, and all I want is a kiss or a hug—I can’t have that—and if I do, I feel guilty. That I can’t fall asleep during that time because I’m not on my husband’s chest.

And then you figure out that it used to be niddah was four or five days (only the days of bleeding), and zavah was the extra week. So what am I doing this all for?

Again, is this a spiritual thing that Hashem guided the world to be at the point that we are at, or have we made a critical, critical mistake, and it’s time to go back to the truth?

My friend was telling me the other day that Hashem made birth control available in our times because we are so weak and can’t be niddah for so long. And I wanted to cry because birth control is horrendous for our bodies, but now it’s what we all use.

I thought I was alone, having horrible, horrible reactions to birth control, but I wasn’t. I hear my friends telling me they have to decide between having migraines and nausea or being sad and angry and not feeling like themselves and pushing themselves to take these pills because they want to have more time to be with their husbands physically, or they can’t handle a baby right now and condoms (easy, painless, non-invasive) aren’t allowed.

I see the beauty in so much, but I also need help to make sense of this. The pain, the contradiction, and how I can move forward. How do I know when I’m struggling with Torah itself, or wrestling with the things that Hashem never intended? לא בשמיים היא but sometimes the truth feels so far away, covered in layers upon layers and so convoluted.

This piece is a place for my thoughts to live. I have tried to make it as coherent as possible, but these are thoughts I am actively working through and trying to understand. No grand conclusions, but maybe some will resonate.

The other day my husband and I were driving through the mountains in Yerushalayim when I turned to him and said, “I don’t really keep halacha.”

He paused, knowing me well enough to know I would explain myself if he stayed silent. “I keep halacha when it is convenient for me,” I continued. He asked me for examples. The first thing that popped into my mind was waiting between meat and milk. As far as I can remember, we waited three hours in my house between meat and milk.

In seventh grade, when we learned hilchos kashrus, I piped up and said that we waited three hours. And the only girl from our class from Lakewood had to quickly say, “There’s no real minhag to wait three hours.” Since we were in an out-of-town, lovely-dovey, accepting school, my teacher shut her down. But that stayed with me, and I went home that day and asked my mother. She shrugged me off. So I asked my father, and he always told me the plain truth. My grandfather had grown up chassidish. At age eighteen, he cut off his payos, left home, and enlisted. He never left Judaism, but he kept a very pareve version of Judaism and had decided to cut down from waiting six to three. Six was unlivable, but three—that was somewhat of a sacrifice, but still manageable.

Now, as a twelve-year-old, I was very concerned and asked the rabbi who taught us halacha what I should do, and he gave me two answers I loved. One, since my grandparents and parents waited three, it was a minhag for me. And second of all, I was a girl, and it would be much too hard for me to change now. The first sounded like an actual halachic answer, and the second sounded like he was just trying to trigger us (he always did that), but I had gotten my answer.

Now in high school, when I was having my doubts, I stopped counting. Admittedly, I never had meat and milk together—but I did have them within a difference of thirty seconds.

But a few years later, when I started believing again, it was time to start waiting. But there was a problem. In high school, I had developed an eating disorder. Along with that eating disorder came a crippling caffeine addiction.

Now I was in recovery. But my body was still broken, and any time I would eat a proper meal, the exhaustion would knock me out for a few hours. So I started having a coffee after my meal, even if it was fleishig. And then in recovery I was told to listen to my body, and lo and behold, my body’s needs didn’t coincide with a strict three-hour window after meat, so I essentially chose my well-being over halacha. Now I know many of you will tell me that if I asked a rabbi, he would tell me pikuach nefesh and lalala, but I didn’t want to ask anyone. I made the decision for myself.

When my husband and I were dating, I told him everything about my eating disorder and about my complicated relationship with religion, and especially halacha. But maybe I couldn’t believe it until I saw it in action.

This Yom Kippur was my first married one, and I was planning on fasting, but my husband told me I wouldn’t. No call, no rabbi, no psak. Just my safety.

But right now, I am struggling and have slipped into some old eating disorder habits and have started to ignore waiting between meat and milk.

But back in the car, my husband waved it off. Simple pikuach nefesh. He asked for another example.

“Do you remember the maayan?” I asked my husband, and he nodded.

A week after our wedding, we had gone on a hike to a maayan. I wore leggings, a short black skirt, and a typical black Lululemon running jacket. Under that I wore one of my husband’s old T-shirts. I didn’t have any long-sleeve sports clothes besides that jacket since I had never been the outdoorsy type, and all my exercise was done in a separate gym in the crisp AC.

It was a hot day, but we had a glorious time. But as we cooled off in the cold spring, the sun started beating hotter, and by the time we were going back toward our car, it was unbearable.

“Take your jacket off,” my husband had said.

I told him that I couldn’t. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt.

“If you feel comfortable, I don’t mind if you take it off.”

And I did.

“Booyah,” I said triumphantly.

I had just shown him a clear case where I only followed halacha when it was convenient for me—and not because I was “struggling” or because of pikuach nefesh, and not thinking I was doing something wrong and would work on it in the future.

My husband was puzzled, but we had gotten to where he was dropping me off, so the conversation was cut short.

*

My husband doesn’t let things go, especially when it comes to him understanding me. So that Shabbos we continued that conversation. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he said something about “halachic perspective” when I cut him off.

I hated when people said that—like halacha was some mathematical equation, some incomprehensible strict laws that were templates from God with no meaning or reason. Like there were two sides to Judaism, halacha and hashkafa, each one deeply disconnected from the other. Like we could study halacha like the laws of physics, understanding how but never why. Like they were the laws of America that sometimes seemed to make no sense but we have to follow because… well, it’s a law.

I told him that halacha was never black and white, that it couldn’t be. Is the halacha to fast on Yom Kippur? Yes.

What about for me? Well, no.

Not black and white at all.

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate computers. I switched major from computer science one month into the semester to escape the horror of it. But in my engineering degree I do have to still learn a good bit of code and it has changed my thinking in some ways.

Code can be written out in thousands of different ways and still be right. That’s why we stick to certain conventions. You could name an array this_is_not_an_array, but that would be counterintuitive, especially to other people who would try to understand the code, so we stick to a convention and call it arr. It will still work if it’s not called that, though.

Let’s say I go onto a website and the background is flashing. If I want to know if that’s intentional or not, let’s say I go look at the code. Let’s say I see that the only thing that is making the background flash is a missing ;

It’s very likely that is a mistake. A skilled programmer would have probably made a clearly defined function labeled as how it was going to cause the background to flash.

But maybe not. Maybe they left the ; out on purpose. The only person who could know is the writer. We could use experts to decipher it, but they can’t ever really know without the writer.

So is the flashing screen a bug or a feature?

When people get frustrated with halacha and all its loopholes, what they don’t realize is that that’s the feature of halacha, not a bug. That’s how God programmed it.

There are thousands of programming languages, some very similar to others. If you take the same code and run it through a Python interpreter or a C# interpreter, in one it will work smoothly and in the other it will crash.

So is the code “right”? Is it “true”?

The answer is yes, and no, and it depends. It depends on what it’s for and who is reading it.

Kind of reminds me of the pasuk: “אלו ואלו דברי אלוקים חיים” huh?

*

My eating disorder and my religious identity are closely tied. The first time I really broke Shabbos was when I had to write down exactly what I ate after the Shabbos meal and just couldn’t wait until Motzaei Shabbos.

Being on the path to recovery has changed a lot about my perspective. Some might call me crunchy. The health issues I’ve had to face and the help (or lack thereof) I’ve gotten from doctors have made me explore other less conventional paths. Eastern medicine and the works. I talk excessively about healing and energies. My friend and I sat in a coffee shop and manifested, and my husband and I chant affirmations to the bathroom mirror in the morning, and I’m afraid that these things spill over into my religious views.

I don’t believe halacha is a legal framework in the way we often present it . In our world, laws are a set of agreed-upon rules to ensure the functioning of society. We have to stop by a stop sign so society can function. But if you are at a junction that is deserted, is it immoral to ignore it? Illegal, yes. Immoral, no. I don’t believe halacha is like that. I believe halachos are more powerful, more spiritual, something to make us grow and connect to God. If halacha tells you to stop at a sign even when other people aren’t there, it’s not just for society to function, but because it does something to you.

And maybe all this comes from a place of ignorance. As much as I criticize the Bais Yaakov system, I don’t think the yeshiva world was any better. Maybe I have the privilege of looking at halacha like this because my limudei kodesh were Navi and Chumash and not Gemara and Mishna. I haven’t studied those words like a student preparing for the LSATs.

I’m also done chasing a rabbi to validate my thoughts and feelings. To find all of this in writing to confirm I can feel this way. I was made in the image of Hashem with thoughts and feelings, and I don’t have to be and think like anybody else.

I think the flexibility and fluidity is built into the system, but are we to be trusted to interpret that? I don’t know. Maybe it really only is the rabbis, and I must treat every word of theirs like it came from God, but that doesn’t feel right.

I know my thoughts might change, and they might not sound so solid or coherent to anyone else, but viewing halacha like this has changed my perspective, lowered the war in my heart and my brain, and I feel at peace. And so much closer to God—to Hashem—than I’ve ever been.

I’m not coming out with a big statement.Now I’m just letting myself explore using my heart and head.

There was another side to my wanting to go to seminary. Now I was an adult. I was in charge of where I would go. Maybe I could find somewhere real and true and good. If I was so open to so many other worldviews, why wouldn’t I give the one I was born into a chance?

And I won’t lie, there was another part of me that wanted some fun. Although my friends and I had been labeled “bad girls,” I had longed for what I saw in movies. Real, actual fun. Alcohol at parties with music, cigarettes, and weed, and maybe some boys who didn’t exist only on Snapchat.

My principal called me in for a meeting, golden and glowing because I was actually considering going to seminary. I was going to get saved. I had a list of seminaries I wanted to go to. She helped me sort them out from best for me to worst. Of course, I ended up going to the last on her list.

If you know anything about the seminary world, you can probably guess which one I went to, one for at-risk OTD girls. I never thought I would end up in that one. I thought maybe a more intellectual one, but I still remember the feeling when I went to check it out.

I had already gone to check the first two seminaries on my list. The first one was out of the question. I hated the girls, the staff, and cried after. The girls from my school who had gone there were bitches who couldn’t even smile at me. The second one was amazing. I had sat in on one class, and it had gripped me. The girls from my school who were there were nice and raved about the sem. I had excellent grades, both in limudei chol and kodesh, and I was told on the spot that I was accepted.

So the last seminary on my list was more of a cross-off. I had to give it a chance, but there was no way I was going to a seminary with long pleated skirts and kosher phonesand a seminary where everyone was obsessed with the rabbi, like a cult.

I was sitting on the couch, not particularly nervous, thinking about how I had to get back to school to do my math final.

“You waiting for an interview with the rabbi?” a girl on the couch asked me, and I nodded. “He’s going to change your life.”

I wanted to laugh. I wasn’t like the rest of the girls there. I didn’t come from a super frum family, wasn’t abused, didn’t have deep emotional issues (at least not that I admitted at the time), and had no daddy issues that this rabbi was going to fix.

This interview was different from the others. The rabbi didn’t ask me to read from the Chumash, lucky for me, because my Rashi reading was rusty. He asked me why I thought a seminary like this was good for me.

“Are you mad at God?”

I scoffed, and his expression shifted.

“Do you believe in God?”

He was asking me seriously, not accusing. And it was like he broke down a dam. I told him everything< everything I thought. And he didn’t look scared, horrified, or disgusted.

“Well, if you come here, I can guarantee that you and I will have interesting conversations.”

That summer was an interesting one for me. The rules I had held so tightly fell like chains off my body. It was the first summer I got to feel the sun on new parts of my body—above the knees of my legs, my shoulders, my chest, and even my stomach. I pierced my ears, let my nails grow very long, and painted them loud.

Sometime during my year in seminary I met a guy online who was in yeshiva. He was a self-proclaimed atheist. He came from a Modern Orthodox home, had shtarked out, then lost his faith, and now was going to yeshiva to see if they had any answers.

I told him that I was confused. That the morality of the Torah deeply disturbed me, and the lack of historical evidence for so many Torah stories made me believe the Tanach was a book of fairytales. That I was starting to see the complete and utter absurdity of this religion.

He told me we’re just meat sacks. Puppets in space. We had no free will, we did as we were programmed, the world was random, and everything I was searching for didn’t exist.

I told him that I didn’t believe that we were just meat sacks. That I believed in my feelings, and I thought my emotions meant something. That love was real. That we weren’t robots with no free will. That I believed in the spiritual, and maybe even the divine.

He answered me with words that I pretended to understand at the time—ontological, axiomatic, reductionist. He buried me deep under those words I didn’t know how to fight. He was smarter than me, more knowledgeable. I had just tasted the edges of other beliefs, but he was a pro. He knew all the philosophers and epistemological facts. He knew how to extinguish every spark I threw at him.

“You’re just a basic OTD girl. You think you’re smarter, different from the rest, and that you really care about the truth. But you’re just a little different from the rest—maybe a little more questioning and a little more rebellious. Wanting some fuel to let yourself party, or a little confused because of emotional issues. Some rabbi will give you basic, mushy emotional brainwashing, and once your brain is all clean, you’ll go back to that world, get married to a regular guy, and be just like them. You’re not smart enough to nto believe.” He paused, took a long breath like it was taking all his energy to interact with someone as unintelligent as me. "

"You’re basic.”

And maybe he was right. Because I did—I went right back to that world and married a guy who never had these doubts. I dress tznius and wear my sheitel next to his black hat. Dress just like they do, talk just like they do.

But I knew in my heart that I wanted the truth. Just because I didn’t know the words he did or the art of debate didn’t mean I didn’t care.

I wanted the truth—just as much as he claimed he did. Not just something palatable enough for me to go back to my old life. In that dark dorm room, I was more confused than ever about where I stood in my beliefs.

There was something so cold about the way he viewed the world. So narrow. It looked pretty similar to the box he and I claimed to hate, a rigid set of rules that didn’t let you think beyond them. He claimed that all he cared about was logic. He had no room for pesky feelings. To even dream about things that we might not understand or see.

But what if feelings are there to show you something? What if they are part of the truth, just as much as logic?

Was I so stupid and naive for believing that these things—the depths of love, the fuel of passion, the pain of betrayal—were real and different? That connection you have to your best friend, that otherworldly tie you have to your spouse? The things you feel so viscerally in your gut but aren’t physical at all, that they were also a piece of the puzzle that would point to the truth?

Maybe it was the most feminine thought of my life:

But maybe some feelings… are facts.

My school rented a few beautiful homes somewhere up north, in the middle of nowhere.
It was chilly outside—not too cold, just perfect. I was sitting with a few girls on the fuzzy carpet, cozied under the blankets.

We were chatting about our mechanches, trying to decide if we liked her or not. She was different than all the other teachers we had. They were older, buttoned up to the chin. Frum and frigid. Not from our world at all.

Our mechanches was young, trying to be hip and relatable. The type that said, “You can tell me anything and it won’t get back to the principal.”

But my mind had wandered away from thinking about her, and I was reminded by something we had just learned in class. So I leaned forward and asked, “Doesn’t it bother you that women can’t be witnesses in the Torah?”

My friends got quiet and cringed at the question—because deep down, it bothered every one of them. But no one would say it out loud. Instead, they said stuff like, “Yeah, but we all know women are more emotional than that.”

I pushed back—and maybe it was a bit too hard—because eventually one of the girls called me the worst thing she could think of:

“Well, what are you? Some kind of feminist?”

And quicker than my mind could think, I said, “I guess I am.”

The rest of the shabbaton was fun. My friends and I weren’t the type to go on school trips, so our mechanches, who wanted to save our souls, bribed us to come by putting us all in a room together. But the small interaction the night before had planted a seed in my brain. A seed that would grow.

Girls in my class were smart, talented, and funny. Did they really not care that Judaism saw them as… other? More emotional, less reliable, less… just less? Did they really buy the crap that school shoveled straight into our mouths?

That even though it really might not look like it,
Women are holier than men.
They couldn’t go to court because it’s degrading—just like you wouldn’t require a king to come and be a witness.
Women couldn’t give a get—but it was for their own good.
That washing dishes and wiping babies’ butts was our Avodas Hashem, just as amazing as the Kohen Gadol.
That women were the gedolim of Am Yisrael—they just had to stay quiet and indoors and be censored from the magazines.
That we had rights—one day we would get married and have a ketubah—but of course we should ignore the part about providing and gladly send our husbands to kollel.

Is that really what Hashem said? Did I really agree with that?

These ideas exploded in my mind after what happened in Meron. The next week at school, we were going to have an assembly to talk about it—to process. But before that, our mechanches was going to talk about it with us in a smaller, more intimate setting.

We all pulled up our chairs into a circle, and she asked everyone to share what they were feeling. I said nothing. But like I said before, this teacher thought she could save lives—and she was already looking out for my neshama. Because while I had started the school year with questions on the Torah, scientific and ethical, I had stopped asking and started rolling my eyes, which was worse.

She urged me to share, so I did. Sometimes my father would fall asleep to a shiur. He had been snoring last night in his room, but I had heard the rabbi’s voice echoing into mine. This tragedy had befallen Klal Yisrael because of women’s immodesty. Long sheitels especially.

My teacher scoffed at me and said I must have not understood correctly. A rabbi would never say that—or at least not in those words. After being dismissed, I tuned out the rest of the conversation until it was time to file into the school’s auditorium for the rabbi’s chizuk.

He walked in and took his glasses off—so he wouldn’t see us, of course. A hall full of underage girls was too tempting after all.

He started off by telling us his son came to him in a dream. His son had passed away a few years ago, and he had one request of his father: please tell Bnos Yisrael how much suffering they are causing in the world. This latest tragedy—it was all our fault.

Did we know how much bachurim had come to the rabbi and told him Bnos Yisrael were making them stumble? It was all because of our hair. We wore it out of a ponytail—or better yet—a braid. We wore it nice and long.

I was too young to understand that this rabbi was basically telling us that his students had confided in him to jerking off to the sight of our long hair.

It was then that my mechanches caught my eyes and her face fell. I was right.

The lecture went downhill from there. He then went on to tell us that our unborn babies in heaven were crying—crying at the pain and suffering we were causing them.

I can’t explain why, but something about the way he talked was so captivating. A few girls were crying. Maybe it had to do with the fact that we were all young teenage girls—some of whom had known people who had died in this tragedy.

When the lecture was over, I ran out of the room. I felt sick to my stomach. But okay—there were crazy rabbis out there, right? But that small seed was now a roaring lion in my head. You’re ignoring all the signs. This is the religion you believe in.

But it couldn’t be, could it?

My mechanches found me and asked me how I was feeling.
“Do you agree with him?” I asked.

She tried to brush it off.
“Do you?”

Now here’s something you should know about this specific teacher. I secretly liked her. SI had even confided in her before (that backfired—but that’s a story for a different day), and she grew up out of town. Just like me.

But now we lived In Town. Where Judaism lived. And I had just seen its ugly face.

“Do you agree?”

She looked confused by my question.

“He’s a rabbi. Of course I do.”

All this is just a glimpse into my mind. How I started researching the religion I was raised in—and how I started researching others. How I ended up reading the Quran and New Testament while going to a Bais Yaakov. Listened to lectures on karma and Sikhism. Paid for courses on meditation and Buddhism. Learned more science and math just so I could disprove the Torah—but it all started from there.

And that’s when I decided I would never be part of a religion that saw me as less.

And if that made me a feminist—maybe that wasn’t so bad.

The slit in the side had ridden up high, creeping up my thigh. My black T-shirt was more modest — one of those “oversized” shirts where it’s not really long-sleeved, but because it’s oversized, it is.

While the wind was still blowing, an understanding snapped into place in my brain.

Not too long before, I had confided in my therapist that whenever I saw what I deemed an oxymoron walking down the street, I wanted to stop and shake them — how are you covering your hair but not your elbows? Don’t you know the halacha?

Who gave you permission?
Who?
How?

Yet here I was, being that very oxymoron, and my head and my heart had never been this on fire.

Nobody knew how badly I wanted to be wearing a simple pair of pants. How much work it had taken to put on that skirt with the high, high slit and the not–Bais Yaakov-approved T-shirt and be okay with it — from both sides of the spectrum.

So yes, I had all eight of my piercings in, with no plans to take them out.
My elbows showed when I moved.
I thought maybe I would consider sewing up the slit a few inches.

My long, colorful nails flashed in the light.
My Haesh Sheli necklace rested on my exposed collarbone.

And I wasn’t saying this was right.
I wasn’t saying this was wrong.

I was just existing in the world God had put me in.

Yes, I was an oxymoron — but maybe that’s what it means to be alive.

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