The Jewish Turn-Off

Florida Jewish News, March 10, 2006, pp. 12, 17.

I can always tell when someone has been abused by a yeshiva, shul, or other religious institution. Right away, they start saying things about religion being “old fashioned” or “ridiculous,” or “not my thing.” They go beyond being “unfamiliar” with it—they hate it.

I learned years ago not to argue with them or to try to convince them about how beautiful our religion is. They know otherwise.

I know it’s hard for you to understand this. You love Shabbos. You love your shul. You’re into learning and you enjoy davening. You enjoy the social times and the down times of Shabbos and holidays. Kashrut is not an obstacle for you. And you wonder: “What is this lady talking about?” Maybe you’re even offended at the thought that there is such a thing as institutional abuse.

Well, let me ask you a question: Why doesn’t Outreach work so easily all the time? Why is there so much resistance to it?

If our Torah is so beautiful and our ways so pleasant, you would think that hordes of the unaffiliated would be swarming to us. Indeed, we are succeeding in ever greater numbers in sharing what is beautiful with our fellow Jews. But for many people, simply sharing isn’t enough. For these people, you must first acknowledge the suffering they have experienced at the hands of our institutions.

And we must find a preventive solution for all the people about to be hurt before they become the next victims.

Most often, victimization starts in childhood.

Here’s the story of how one child’s attachment to Torah got off on the wrong start: Miriam adored her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Sokoloff. She did well in school and would have done even more to earn her teacher’s praise. She davened well; she studied hard; she was quiet in class; she did all her homework. She even wanted to fast on fast days although she was too young. When her grandma died, she went numb. She absolutely couldn’t understand how God could have suddenly taken away her beloved grandma. She started to find it hard to concentrate in class. Because she had been such a “good girl,” no one noticed when she remained quiet and kept her pain to herself.

For some reason, her teacher did not give her a word of sympathy over her tragic loss. As her work slipped, and the low grades started coming in, Miriam stopped caring what Mrs. Sokoloff thought. Her mother, however, became alarmed and went to school. “She’s not trying,” said Mrs. Sokoloff. “She seems to have an attitude lately.”

Miriam kept her problems to herself, knowing how much her mother already was hurting over the loss of her own mother. She would come home, lay on her bed, and stare at the ceiling. When her mother tried to talk to her, she shrugged her shoulders. After all, could a ten-year-old find the words to say, “I’m in pain and no one cares?” or “I thought the Torah was about love. Why do I feel so unloved at school?”

Her mother didn’t know further what to do. It was a hard year for all of them, after all. Maybe little Miriam would grow out of it. She left her daughter alone and tried to move forward herself. But, of course, neglecting a problem does not make it go away, and all through that year and the next, the problem got worse. By the time she reached Middle School, Miriam was what they like to call “a rebellious teenager.” Eventually, she was thrown out of the yeshiva all together and she made her way in Public School with a rough crowd. To this day, her parents think it’s “her.” She’s the “bad one.” But you and I have taken a peek behind the scenes and we know different.

Here’s Menachem’s story: At seven, Menachem still has a great deal of trouble with reading English, let alone Hebrew. Let’s not mention math. School comes hard to him. He so wants to be a good boy, but somehow, his yetzer hara just doesn’t let him. It’s so much easier to throw spit balls or make ridiculous noises than to try to concentrate. He gets scolded a lot.

In fact, Menachem gets scolded a lot at school and at home for his antics. When his overwrought mother comes to school, the teacher makes her feel blamed for not having learned how to control him. Not only does it hurt her, but it accomplishes nothing. It certainly doesn’t teach her what she could do differently. Menachem manages to get through his Bar Mitzvah and then he informs his family, regarding yeshiva, “That’s enough of that.”

As adults looking back on their childhoods, Miriam and Menachem do not have fond memories of school—or the Torah that was part of the package.

Depending on how you would like to write this story, we could add details such as dysfunctional or painful homes, or homes with less than honest observance or devotion. Writing in a half dozen variations on the theme produces thousands and tens of thousands of stories of children coming from supposedly observant homes leaving it all in the dust—and bearing a terrible pain in their hearts due to the coldness and blindness of the institutions that were supposed to nurture their delicate little neshamas.

Sometimes the institutional abuse starts in adulthood when loving and warm individuals have to face an insensitive scholarship committee. The pain those people feel at not being able to hold their own economically is already bad enough. Now they must grovel before people who themselves have forgotten that all their own money is a gift from Hashem.

I represent myself as a “frum therapist” and I am very cognizant of this problem. I was challenged by a scheduling conflict in which a needy person occupied a time slot that someone who could pay me in full wanted. What was I to do? I called the Rabbi who said that I certainly could do what I needed to in order to insure my own parnasa (living), but when I requested that this individual vacate that time slot, he told me that this was absolutely the only time he could come. When I explained that I needed him to work with me to make room for people who could afford to pay, he looked as though I had punched him in the gut.

We spent a good bit of time talking about Hashem’s ways and how it was not something for him to be ashamed of that he was not earning a good living and that Hashem decides at the beginning of each year just how much each of us will earn that year. We talked about the way he could do mitzvahs for others that do not involve spending what he doesn’t have and the way I was attempting to use the income from those full-paying clients to cover people like him and that if I didn’t respect those people’s needs, I wouldn’t be able to help him at all. Finally, we agreed on some telephone visits until that time slot opened up. Most important is that he left my office in better spirits than when the subject first came up.

Sometimes that institutional insensitivity is a matter of business-as-usual for shuls and schools while it is a slap in the face that lasts a lifetime on the receiving end. I will never forget, when I was four or five, one snowy walk to shul that ended very badly.

I grew up Conservative, but my father, olov b’shalom, had a religious soul. I had a love of Torah since I could remember. One winter break, he decided we would go up to the mountains in the Catskills for a week. On Shabbos, he set out early for the trek to the little shul in the area. My mother and I followed about an hour later. We trudged through the pretty but alien landscape for what seemed an interminable length of time. Finally, we got to shul. The door would not open. My mother knocked and a man poked his head out the door a notch. The moment he spotted her pocketbook, it was all over. Shaking his head from side to side, he said, rather gruffly, I thought, “You can’t come in.” My mother was near tears herself. She begged, she pleaded, but it was all to no avail. He turned us away. It was a long, sad walk back, not a nice Shabbos walk. We felt as if we were somehow “wrong,” but could think of nothing we did that was wrong. The ground would have been ripe for me to develop an animosity towards orthodoxy except that I realized that the man at the door was “grumpy” and placed the blame where it belonged.

Herein are the seeds to the solution.

Huge pain can be avoided by talking. Talking with kindness, sensitivity, and patience.

Had Miriam’s teacher called her aside to speak privately, she might have learned that her grandmother had just died. She might have learned that Miriam had been close to her grandmother and that this was a terrible loss. With that knowledge, she should have handled things much differently, with patience, gentleness, encouragement, and kindness.

Menachem needed special tutoring and help for his learning disabilities, not chastisement. His mother needed some parenting help, not chastisement. He needed time, attention, patience and skill. He received none of these.

Scholarship committees need tact—and love. So did that man at the shul door.

Outreach is wonderful, but at the same time, let’s do everything we can not to wound our fellow Jews and turn them off to Torah. It’s totally avoidable with a good dose of tact and love. That’s on the prevention end.

On the reparation end, here’s my suggestion: apologize.

Apology is part of t’shuva, and t’shuva means understanding that you inflicted a hurt on someone, you are deeply sorry, and you are totally committed to handling things differently in the future. If you meet an angry adult, understand where the pain came from and make yourself a shaliach for the institution or individual that inflicted it. It doesn’t matter who or what institution it was. Tell him or her with love in your heart, “They shouldn’t have done that. That must have hurt. I am so sorry.” Then be patient with the healing process. Understand their anger for what it is—and address the pain underneath it. You might just turn someone back on.