When I started out wanting to be a writer, my plan was to show all the beauty of religious life as I had experienced and understood it. If, at that time, anyone would have described to me the books that I was destined to write, books in which religious men beat their religious wives; books in which rabbis’ wives are raped and hide their shame; books in which communities encourage individuals to sacrifice their own well-being to maintain the fiction that all is right and perfect in our religious world, I would have been shocked.
There was even a time when I thought that, as an Orthodox Jew, I should avoid depicting fictional situations in which telling the truth would make the Jewish community look bad. For example, at the end of my first book “Jephte’s Daughter,” a triumverate of rabbinical judges grants Batsheva Halevi her divorce. If I had been as committed to the truth as I now believe I should have been, I would have written that ending very differently. Mrs Halevi Harshen would never have been given that get. She would have been blackmailed, extorted and abused as she struggled through the system, and she probably would have been too old to have children by the time she married David. However, I felt that the disgraceful state of the Jewish get in the Orthodox community is a hillul hashem (a desecration of God’s name) and by depicting it, I would cause halakha to appear cruel in the eyes of the world, both Jewish and non-Jewish. For that reason, I had Batsheva receive her divorce, in what can only be described as fantasy fiction.
“…exposure is the only way to break the wall of silence…”
I compromised the truth in “Jephte’s Daughter,” because I mistakenly believed it to be my religious obligation. I was influenced by the view that it is a desecration of God’s name to expose any evil committed by religious Jews. It took me a while to fully understand how destructive this belief is, and how it destroys our ability to change anything for the better. I now believe that the act itself is the hillul hashem, not its exposure, however embarrassing, and that exposure is the only way to break the wall of silence and bring about a more decent and just Orthodox society.
I did not come to this conclusion without a struggle. I began my career as a writer of fiction with a story that was very close to my heart. My neighbor in Ma’alot Daphna, a young, beautiful haredi woman, took her little girl to the top of a hotel in Tel Aviv and jumped, killing them both. Hers had been a shidduch, an arranged marriage. Her husband was known to be an illui (an extraordinary Torah scholar). Only her closest friends and her psychologist knew that he was also an abusive spouse and father Pregnant with her second child, my neighbor felt she only had one way out to protect her children from her husband: to kill them along with herself. Because of the shame, her family had refused to help, as did the community. When I heard people say that she was crazy, everything inside me suddenly crystallized. I knew that I had to write a book about how a perfectly sane, lovely, intelligent, deeply religious woman was driven to the edge by the society around her. I wanted to defend her, to rewrite the unhappy ending of her life. I wanted, most of all, to tell the truth about what happened to her.
When “Jephte’s Daughter” was published, people told me that it was like a bomb had hit the Jewish world. I was so naïve. I had thought that all my religious friends would hoist me up and put a laurel on my head. I was soon disabused of that notion. I gave a copy of the book to a very close friend, a fellow rebel and talented student of literature who had been brought up in an extremely Orthodox family in Jerusalem. I gave it to her in the hope of hearing gushing praise, which is basically the job of writers’ friends. Instead what I received was a rather cold, almost angry rebuff.
“You weren’t fair,” she complained. I took her seriously. I was shocked at her criticism, and I searched my conscience. I began to think that perhaps my friend was right. Perhaps, despite all my attempts to “clean it up”, “Jephte’s Daughter” was not the right story to tell. It was too shocking, too tragic, too atypical.
In the decade since I engaged in all that soul-searching, I have become the lodestone for an outpouring of letters and phone calls from abused religious women. I have come to understand that my friend was wrong and that I was right. Batsheva Halevi’s case was not a rare one. It was a story that had to be told. My only crime was being the first religious woman naive enough to publish such a story and not worry about breaking the taboo that condemns religious women to suffer in silence to maintain their social positions.
“Jephte’s Daughter” was the little snowball that turned into an avalanche. In my opinion, only good has come from it. We can now all admit that that there are Talmud scholars who beat their wives. We can admit we need shelters for abused religious women, and guidelines for rabbis about how to handle this abuse. We can stop pretending that it does not happen in the Orthodox world.
About a year after my first book was published and still smarting from the criticism, I came across an article in the Israeli newspaper “Maariv” in which a young haredi mother of six described her adulterous affair with a neighbor, an equally ultra-Orthodox married man. The facts of this particular story did not interest me as much as the ideas and the unanswered questions evoked. How was it that a girl brought up in a strict haredi family in the heart of Jerusalem found herself in such a situation? How was it that a deeply religious woman gave into her human desires and frailties in such a way and found so much joy? While I personally have never had much sympathy for women or men who cheat on their spouses, I could not help but feel compassion for this woman because of the horror of her public humiliation, and the injustice of how she was treated in comparison to the married man involved. It brought to mind the Biblical description of the sotah, the married woman suspected of adultery, who must undergo a biblically mandated public ordeal, whether or not she is guilty.
There was a much louder outcry against “Sotah” than against my first book. The “Jewish Observer,” the official organ of Agudat Israel, became involved, impugning all kinds of evil motives to my work. It was at this point that I began to understand the reality of the situation. It was not the truth or falsity of what I was writing that was at issue, but rather that I had the chutzpah to address these subjects at all. Novels about religious life were meant to promote the fantasy that everyone in the religious world was a tzadik or a tzadik’s wife. So, in my third book, I finally stopped caring about what people would say. I finally decided just to tell the truth and let people deal with it.
In “The Sacrifice of Tamar,” I describe a society built on the premise of denial. I believe that this idea of “what’s not nice we don’t show” began, as many social rules begin, with the good of the community at heart. You do not need to look very far back to see in the lives of our grandparents in the European shtetl, or in those huge slum dwellings where families shared apartments on the Lower East Side, why people wished to present a good face to the world. My mother-in-law told me that in Europe we were so poor, all we had was our self respect. And so we patched worn clothes and bleached them until they glistened white. We tried to hide our poverty in order to keep our dignity. And I can understand, too, the stance of some Holocaust survivors who choose to bury their past. There is nobility in the desire to spare loved ones; to preserve their self-respect by refusing to dwell on crimes committed against them, crimes born in the filthy imagination of beastly men; to hide the past in order to prevent it from tainting the present.
However, today, it is really necessary for us to expose and face unpleasant truths about ourselves as a society. I do not believe that God put us here on earth to pretend that all is perfect. If you believe in the Torah, which I do with all my heart, you must believe that it was written by God. And the Torah, among other things, is also a book of history – the collective history of our people- with all the sadness, the sins, the triumphs, and the failures. Even Moshe Rabbenu, who was probably the most godly man who ever lived, was not spared in that history. Despite all his good deeds, God does not leave out Moshe’s failings. From this I learn, that the only way we can move toward godliness is to see the truth with all its complexities and even sordidness, and to try to make a change for the better.
“I do not believe God put us on earth to pretend that all is perfect.”
I write as an Orthodox Jewish woman, who loves God and his gift to humankind, the Torah of Israel. I write because I am committed to the principles of Jewish law as outlined in the written Torah and its oral counterpart, the Mishnah and Talmud. I write in tribute to my teachers who gave me a deep knowledge and understanding of our Torah and Prophets, but most of all, who taught me that morality and social justice are at the heart of our religious beliefs. Without them, our service to God is meaningless.
“Be thou just because he is just: be thou compassionate because he is compassionate.”
Fairness, compassion, justice, care for the weak, protection for the oppressed, these were the lessons which nurtured me. Jewish law demands social awareness to bring social equality. It is a law that demands that we all raise our voice to cry out for the voiceless, and for those who cry out against their oppressors and find no listening ear.
There are many people in the religious community who would dearly love to short circuit my word processor. I keep going, despite the constant criticism, the accusations of making money by exploiting the religious community and the accusations of airing dirty laundry in public, because I believe that we are not only the sum total of bitter realities, but also the yearning dreams of our hearts and minds to forge new lives, new hope, and new endings. In dreams begin the blueprint for our society and our individual lives, and possibilities limited only by our imagination and our courage. I keep going because as a religious Jew, it is my obligation.