Guard your heart

Instincts are crucial tools for living. Sometime a voice comes into your head telling you exactly what you should do. You don't have so many facts. You aren't so well informed about your options. Instincts say "Do it." Or they say "Don't do it." Many times it turns out that the instincts were right.

It is a still, small voice however. You must be quiet and listen. You mustn't overwhelm this gentle voice with force of habit, the force of convention, or bullying of oneself via the channeling of voices of others.

When you become frum, there's lots to do that you are not used to. It doesn't always feel good as you train yourself in this new way of life. Part of you objects. You force yourself. There's lots of this on the road to teshuvah. But one must be careful not to overdo it.

You want to eat a cheeseburger. You tell yourself no. You have no choice. You want to drive on Shabbos. No. 

But there are many areas in the life of the BT where you have choice and pushing yourself can be unhealthy. 

For me, trying to fit into the different groups did me harm. First there was the yeshivish people. The Talmud itself says to study what you want to study, but yeshiva people steer you away from all kinds of material. They tell you to live in their neighborhoods. They tell you to drop out of college. They make fun of your tweed jacket. 

There are no halachic requirements in all of that. So, too, hating goyim. I tried that for decades. It never worked. Disparaging secular studies. Never worked. It only shut down my feelings, shut down down my instincts. 

I felt the same way about traveling to shiduchim. To me, it's outrageously unfair to force the man to do all the work, particularly for older women who have been saying no for decades. It's not just unfair, it's impractical, because it seemed to me that when the man schleps to the woman he looks pathetic in her eyes and that causes her to reject him. But I made long trips anyway because I was told to, over and over again.

Living where I didn't want to live, doing work that I didn't enjoy-- yeshivish rabbis pushed me into all of that. The result was a comprehensive shutting down of my instincts that tried repeatedly to be heard by me, but I had become deaf.

The modern orthodox people have an agenda of their own. Chief among them is an obsession with the state of Israel. It is hard to function in that world if you aren't in love with the state of Israel and everything it does. I have had as much trouble with that as I have had trying to hate goyim. 

And then there's all the feminism. I once said to a modern orthodox rabbi that I could appreciate the attempts to make religious life more palatable to women but felt that we should do the same for men. He blurted out, "I don't know what you're talking about," and walked away. 

To fit in with such people meant to shut myself down. And I did that thousands of times. I did it all day long.

I reached a point where even my religious observance wasn't my own. I was just pleasing my masters and trying to stay out of hell. I was dead inside. I operated from a kind of depression. That must be what Avodas Hashem means, I thought. 

It was not just the rabbis. It seemed at times that it was everybody I met in the frum world. It's not a society where people accept one another. The women in shiduchim were particularly outrageous. They had their requirements and that was that. The modern wanted you modern. The yeshivish wanted you yeshivish. It didn't matter what they were or were not. They made demands all the same. Making lots of money was one of those demands.

The Rambam recommends the middle path. Yes, there is halacha, i.e. basic halacha, but you don't have to pursue chumrah. Yes, there are social conventions and pressures, but you can't say no to yourself all the time. Living in a part of the world that suits you, working in a profession that's tolerable to you, studying the parts of Torah you enjoy, pursuing the kosher secular activities that enliven you, and approaching shiduchim in a way that doesn't sicken you -- these are reasonable accommodations that will protect your individuality and your instincts. 

Be brave. Have faith. Pursue the middle path and ignore the ideologues who push you to their extremes. Be careful who you go to for advice because most of the time what you get isn't advice but rather a dagger in the heart. That's not good for preservation of instincts. And you need them. People will come and go, but your own mind is your best friend in the end. Shlomo the King said, "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." (Proverbs 4:23)