otd

The air in the lobby outside the sanctuary always smells dusty, like playground sand and over-stewed potatoes, but inside is admittedly, beautiful. Warm wood, giant windows, and an eternal pendant light, its tiny flame protecting the torahs behind the embroidered navy velvet curtain. If I could spend more time in there, with the modern-ancient books and their unglued pages, losing myself in faith and community and tradition, maybe this place would be an anchor to me the way it has been to my father for thirty years. But my father and my brother are my anchors in my family, and if I go inside the sanctuary then I have to sit in the women’s section, amongst the married girls from my middle school and their perfectly coiffed wigs and knee-length skirts and then I have to remember what it feels like to never, ever been one of them. The second I had to be a woman, had to be one of those women, I didn’t want to be there anymore. I stand outside for a while, then go home.

In middle school, I was an insufferable, precocious, know it all who used intelligence as a shield to avoid feeling unmoored in sea of people who seemed to fit in. The girls told me in fourth grade that ‘all the boys in our class ranked all the girls how pretty they are and you were last.’ I read seventeen thousand pages in a fifth grade read-a-thon that meant I got to skip lunchroom politics for a month. I carried around a dictionary and sneered at people who didn’t know what ‘imbecile’ meant. I wasn’t cool but I also wasn’t kind; truly the worst of both worlds.

If I am generous to myself and uncharitable to my environment, maybe it was just that my hair was too curly, too frizzy, too pulled back in a ponytail. My parents didn’t have money to spend on Juicy Couture hoodies and Hardtail skirts and multiple pairs of Uggs. My mom worked late and didn’t understand lip gloss well enough to teach me to understand lip gloss and we didn’t have cable and I listened to the mix CDs of Bruce Springsteen my dad burned for me instead of P!nk and Gwen Stefani on an iPod. I played baseball at recess with boys who saw me as a weak arm in the outfield, maybe a friend, but definitely not a crush. My heroes were Nellie Bly and Anne Boleyn. No one knew what to make of me and I certainly didn’t know what to make of myself.

The Orthodox Judaism I grew up with is a matrilineal religion that managed to feel oppressive. Women can’t be congregation leaders, can’t sing in public, can’t wear skirts above the knee or shirts above the elbow. Their voices are too sexual, their bodies too tempting. In my middle school prayer space, the women’s section was quite literally on the outskirts of the space, a ring around the centered men who read from the torah. This is not to undermine the power of the women’s prayer circle where I, in a stubborn baby feminist streak that surprised no one, decided to read torah for my bat mitzvah. Or the fact that our temple, since I last attended regularly, has controversially begun ordaining women as ‘rabbas.’ There are expectations for how men are supposed to dress, too. Though I hear my brother and father’s voices in my mind chirping all of this, none of it moves me into the inner sanctum.

There is resentment oozing, from my side, surely. A petulant ‘you don’t want me so I don’t want to be a part of you.’ Or maybe it is simply that I can’t feel like I am a part of a rising tide when my anchors are on the other side of a wall. I built a community for myself where I can show up in heels and glittery makeup and a crop top and be outspoken and totally myself and I like it there. I confront the ways in which gender is a snarling, snaky myth that runs rivulets around me each day and I’m not going back. I’ve strayed too far from the path. There is nothing left for me there now.