Part II: Perspectives of a Modern Orthodox Observer

This is the perspective of a modern orthodox friend of mine on the issue.

“The Frummy Who Finagled.”

I have firmly held the belief throughout my life that Judaism allows men and women to be able to be in contact with each other. The Torah, though it is male-dominated due to its writing in a time when the world was male-dominated, still has encounters in which unmarried, single man has spoken to and been attracted to unmarried woman, and, though at times it has had negative connotations, (like Dina- she may have flirted a little much with a prince. Bad idea Dina. You never flirt with an entitled teenager) the fact is that male and female conversation is quite common in the Bible, and in no instances does the Bible ban such encounter.

This disclaimer brings me to a CalmKallahs topic in which a Beis Yaakov girl, a girl who has never been friends with a guy outside of a date, meets a guy she says she can’t marry “for a lot of reasons”(guy she met in class? Non-observant? Not Jewish? Modern Orthodox?!), and hooks up with him. She’s been hooking up with him for so long that she recently had sex with him.

That, in using textual analysis of how women talk, brings me to several conclusions: a) she is not the angel that she is making herself out to be, and is trying to make herself into the victim. b) she says shes still a Beis-Yaakov girl “at heart”. She may be at heart, but maybe the T-shirt and jeans were hiding in her closet, c) she likes the guy, a lot. Heck she admitted it and d) she’s in denial, because she contradicted herself in saying that she can’t tell her parents… but no one would believe it.

Now, as a modern orthodox person, who has the benefit of understanding both the Jewish and the secular mind, as well as paying attention to the actions of the people and the society around me, the reality is that these kinds of things happen way more often than people think, and, if this letter shows any evidence, even more in regard to the people who don’t discuss their sexual encounters. That in the first place is wrong, because it gives an air of deception and silence. It is also wrong because I’m sure it eats away at those BY girls who fucked some random guy back in the day, but kept it silent because they don’t want their husbands to hate them. I don’t know about you, but I like my girlfriends to tell me about their pasts, because it gives me an idea of who they are and what their perspectives are. Heck, honesty is attractive in a lot of ways. I feel that these BY girls and guys should be much more open about who they are. Maybe that will cure the “shidduch crisis” in America.

But, what I feel the most disturbing thing about this topic that this girl (she was clearly around 19 at the time… maybe I know her?!) brought up is the responses given to her. The lack of support about a girl who had sex is astonishing. The holier-than-thou attitude of some people, saying that she should keep it silent speaks volumes of that community as a whole. Heck, of COURSE she won’t tell her parents (what teenager, or PERSON, tells their parents about the full extent of their sex lives), but to ask a Rav for help?! The idea of that is ridiculous. For one, I’m sure many rebbeim have no CONCEPT of what she did. If anything, if she is going to go to a rabbi, she should go to an open-minded one; one that absorbs all that he sees, and isn’t in denial about the amount of pre-marital sex that goes on in his community. But, if anything, she should talk to her friends about it, because maybe her friends have also taken some kind of oath of silence in regard to their sex lives.

Then, there’s the entire idea of “healing her neshoma” which is absolutely preposterous. If anything, she should go out into the open, and be friends with more men so she isn’t such an animal out of a cage the second a guy flirts with her.

Overall, the entire ordeal says a lot about the issues in the Beis Yaakov community, and the closemindedness and denial that go along with it. Hopefully, one day it’ll open up, but, if there’s any indication, it is more likely that the community will fall further and further away from reality, and have a harder time helping a girl who went with her human instincts and had sex just because she felt something.