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My First Pair Of Tefillin
I pick her up, put her on the washing machine, flip the switch to Spin cycle, and move the tefillin out of my eyes. It’s 1993 and I am new to Judaism.
I got my first pair of tefillin a few months earlier after passing the Beit Din (Jewish law court) for my Reform conversion. They’re an ancient ragged pair, but I’m thrilled.
I first put them on one Sunday in the fall of 1993 at Congregation Ohev Shalom in Orlando, a Conservative synagogue. The way the rabbi taught me then, I still use.
A few weeks earlier, my father had caught me in the shower with Pam*, a woman eleven years my senior who’d flown in from Orlando to stay with me at my parents’ home in Newcastle, 95658. I was 27.
In my conservative Christian home, sexual sins were the biggest sins. As my parents put things together, helped by a letter they got from Diana, my ex who detailed all the nasty things we’d been doing around the house, they realized I had been using their Jesus-filled sanctuary for “immoral purposes.”
They write me out of the will and I flee to Orlando with Pam. It’s August 1993 and I’ve been bedridden by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for almost six years.
Our relationship spirals downhill for a couple of months until Pam can’t take it anymore. She drives off one evening and spends the night with her ex. My stuff is already packed due to our fights, and so a few days later, I move out from Pam and in with a family I met at shul.
I’m all prepared to bounce from Pam. I’ve been placing singles ads and on my first night away, I spend it with a black alcoholic who prints out for me at work a copy of my 200-page triumphant tale of my conversion to Judaism.
One of the dating sites I’m using is operated by a Messianic rabbi. I’m not Messianic but I am interested in meetings girls of all kinds.
I answer an ad placed by Paula’s mom. Paula is not Jewish. She’s nine years older than me. She’s been married twice to the same guy, eight years each time. She has three kids.
On our first date, I take her to Olive Garden (well, she picks me up in her mom’s station wagon but I pay for dinner). For our second date, I pay for us to have Shabbat dinner at my Conservative shul but an awkward conversation with the family I’m staying with freaks her out and she ditches me. I call her late Friday night and talk her into coming to shul with me the next day.
Motzi Shabbos, Paula drives me to her mom’s place and we spend our first night together. The next morning, I walk into the living room and her mom says, “She’s a tiger, isn’t she?” We barely make it to shul for shacharit.
So a couple of weeks later, after Sunday morning minyan, while I’m still wearing my tefillin, Pam helps me take my washing out to the machines in the back. We put my filthy clothes in my washer and become strangely stirred.
In the chaos of my early life as a Jew, a tightly wound pair of tefillin provides much needed security. Now I have an eager girlfriend, my second major source of strength. She’s game for anything.
As my soiled garments spin clean beneath us, I stand on my tip toes, wrap my arms around Paula, and straining against my tefillin, I choose life.
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Prayer As A Way To Meet Girls
Dear Jewish Journal: You wouldn’t believe what happened to me! I was toiling away on my Facebook when I got a message from a young Jewish yoga instructor who liked my video below. One thing led to another and we started chatting intensely about God, ultimate meaning, recovery, right and wrong, when suddenly she posted these photos of doing various tantric poses and our FB chats went in an entirely unexpected direction. She said she loved my mouthguard, my foot guards for my plantar fascitis, my CPAP for my sleep apnea, my 12 step for my emotional addictions, my poverty, my work as a secretary, my esteemed status in 90035′s Orthodox community and before I knew it, my defenses were removed and I was sitting in front of my computer in nothing but my brutal honesty and naked need.
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My Favorite FB Posters
My fave FB posts tend to come from the following persons:
* Monica Showalter
* Monica Osborne
* Lewis Fein
* Kate Coe
* Amy Alkon
* Heshy Fried
* John Leo
* Drew Friedman
* Kipp Friedman
* Clare Spark
* Jim Romenesko
* Eliyahu Fink
* Rabbi Josh Yuter
* Shmarya Rosenberg
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Lag B’Omer Parade
Dear mom: Today is the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer and there was a big parade and concert, closing off a main street by where I live and a thousand Orthodox Jews in attendance. I hung out for 2.5 hours, clasping a book, had a few mini conversations. I got a sun burn, first time I’ve had that in memory. Then I got home for my banana protein shake smoothie lunch and my normal solitary life on the computer writing and emailing and Facebooking.
Orthodox Judaism is good for me in the sense that there are so many ways to connect with people, but everyone is married with kids, and so I stand out as a freak in that category and many others.
Talked in shul yesterday with a guy who works with troubled teens. We hit it off. I’m a 47 year old troubled teen with typical teeny problems.
My wallet never showed up. I go to get a replacement driver’s license tomorrow and my CCs should show up in the mail over the next two weeks.
I’m paying all my bills and saving up to take another writing class when I can. It’s great having that once a week to look forward to and to show off in.
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My Dream Girl
One Sabbath afternoon in seventh grade at Pacific Union College in Angwin, CA, 94508, I’m hanging out with two male classmates Cary and Kevin. They call this girl in our class who I like, Denise, the most beautiful girl in the class, and they ask her who she likes. When she doesn’t answer, they start throwing names at her. One name is mine. I hear them pause on the line and they follow-up. “So you like Luke?” I’m thrilled. When Kevin and Cary get off the phone, I make them tell me everything.
Apparently, Denise likes three guys and I am one. I’m thrilled. I’m excited. I can’t believe I have a chance with this beauty. So I start calling her up every afternoon after school and asking her if she’s made up her mind who she likes. I’ve never called a girl before so this is awesome. I feel like I big shot, a sophisticate with the ladies.
After a couple of weeks, Denise complains to her friends about my calls and word gets back to me and I feel humiliated. I had a chance with this girl but once I started calling her, she lost all interest in me.
A friend tells me to play on her guilt, so I call her that day and say I’m sorry for bothering her and I hang up. She calls me back and say it’s ok. I didn’t bother her.
Pfft. Whatever. I killed any attraction she had for me.
One day on the playground, Cary gets mad at Denise, and yells at me, “You can have her.” As though I have a chance anymore.
A few months later, Denise and I race to the drinking fountain and I beat her and so she punches me in the eye and gets her drink first and I go around for the next day with one eye closed to dramatize how badly I’ve been hurt but once she apologizes to me, I let it go back to normal.
In eighth grade, my class goes on this 20 mile class bike ride. I’m biking along beside Denise having a great time talking to her. I notice how hard she pushes up the hill but with effort, I keep up with her. I’m not reading her signals. At a rest stop, she complains to friends and word gets back to me and I leave her alone for the rest of the trip.
In the summer before 11th grade, I start asking Denise out. It seems she always has something going, usually a horse show that she must attend, but when the baseball season resumes after the 1982 strike, I have tickets to the first game and she agrees to come along with a group of us. It’s my first date. A group of us are riding along in the back of the Toyota pick-up and playing card games and my best friend Andy’s little sister Jenny Muth-vonBlankenburg says, “Luke, you’re wearing mismatched socks.”
True.
At the San Francisco Giants stadium, I race ahead of my date to try to find our seats and then during the game, I spend much of the time making bets with Andy. Denise is not impressed and she complains about my oafish behavior. There’s no second date.
I haven’t seen Denise since June of 1984, when we graduated high school. My last strong memory is her leaping with joy into the air and out of the PUC pool that summer and she smiles and flings her hands about in pure abandon and I see in an instant that she is not perfection any more, that she does not have the greatest body, that my dream girl is chunky, that everything isn’t distributed right, there aren’t enough curves and there’s too much in the middle, and I see that life will be hard on her too.
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LAT: Jewish dead lie forgotten in East L.A. graves
From the Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2013: “A search at Mount Zion for the tomb of a prominent Yiddish author reveals a dystopian landscape of toppled tombstones that no one seems to own.”
In 1974, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles started paying a monthly fee for the upkeep of the cemetery but the place has remained a mess for decades.
Rabbi Moshe Greenwald of the downtown Chabad wants to restore the grounds. In reply to my inquiry, he said: “We must do everything in our power to fix and restore the vandalized and smashed graves of Mt. Zion cemetery. This is not a “nice thing to do” rather it must be a top priority. How we treat our dead shows a lot of what kind of society we are. That this is happening in the second largest Jewish city in the country is appalling. We already have a contractor ready to do the work at cost price. We are ready to begin the work and we will need people to donate generously to make this happen. If this was your mother, would you not do the same?”
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I Put My Needs First
So I just got asked if I had a problem with putting other people’s needs before my own.
“Never had that problem,” I said. “I did have a girlfriend who gave me the book, The Givers and the Takers. It wasn’t because she thought I gave too much.”
“So did you read the book?” my friend asked.
“No,” I said. “I traded her in for a hotter girlfriend.”
“So you operated in integrity with yourself,” he said.
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More Questions About Rabbi Michael J. Broyde
I’ve long had suspicions about Rabbi Broyde because his legal rulings seemed much more liberal than the sources would dictate. They seemed dictated by a left-wing agenda rather than honesty to Jewish text. There seemed to be some funny business going on. Why would he write an article saying it was not necessary for married Jewish women to cover their hair? That’s clearly the Jewish ideal. Why would Rabbi Broyde write so many articles with a partner? When that happens, it usually means one person is doing the work and the other one is going along for the credit.
Blog post: I have another example of Rabbi Broyde’s apparent fabrication of halachic proof. A couple of years ago, Rabbi Broyde was in London, UK, and gave a shiur to a coneference of Jewish doctors. In the course of his lecture, he referred to a letter from the Lubavitcher rebbe which permitted prospective medical students to take entrance exams on Shabbat. My husband thought that this was an unusual position for the Lubavitcher Rebbe to take, and contacted his own Rav, the Lubavitcher Chassid and talmid chacham Rabbi Chaim Rapoport, shlita. Rabbi Rapoport was also puzzled by this; he said that he had never heard of such a psak from the Rebbe, and that he does not think that the Lubavitcher Rebbe would have said such a thing, for a number reasons. My husband then emailed Rabbi Broyde, asking where he could find the source the Rabbi Broyde had refered to. Rabbi Broyde’s response was “I do not think it has been published.”. My husband felt that this was an unsatisfactory answer, and emailed him again to ask “If not, where can I find reference to it to look into it further?”. He received no further reply.
At the time, my husband thought that this seemed strange. If a letter has not been published, then how can Rabbi Broyde know of it to refer to it? And the psak in this letter contradicts the huge amount that is documented already about the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s stance in this regard. In light of the discovery that Rabbi Broyde has fabricated other material, which was not halachically sensitive, his reliability in presenting ‘new’ halachic proofs is also affected.
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The Glories Of Judaism
I grew up a Christian and nobody I knew mocked converts to Christianity. Rather, they were extolled. I converted to Orthodox Judaism and I feel most at home with a crowd that mocks me constantly for my conversion, says I’m a dumb ass, and talks constantly about how much they hate their religion and their gartels and their rituals and their restrictions.
I ran into a yid today who told me how stupid Lag B’Omer is and how he’s taking his kids to the zoo instead because they’ll be free from Jews there. I have an inexhaustible appetite for dark Jewish humor.
What other religion aside from Judaism mocks converts (I have no objections to this, I enjoy the ribbing) and by my estimate, at least half of the Orthodox I know say they hate their religion and only do it because they feel stuck? I get a kick out of this distinctly Jewish brand of bitterness, it feels straight from the Torah.
I was shocked at shul today. The rabbi was teaching Talmud and called out the name of someone in the shul who would appreciate this particular passage, and so we went outside to get him. The bloke comes in. The rabbi says, Joe*, you’ll appreciate this and starts explaining a particular passage and the chosen one laughs, shakes his head, waves his hand dismissively, and walks back outside to continue his conversation. In what other religion do its clergy get so routinely dissed? If the rabbi ever said my name and said I’d appreciate a particular passage, I’d crawl over glass on my bare knees to sit at his feet.
Here’s a conversation I would never have with someone born Jewish:
How do you do?
4:43pm
Luke Ford
good, u?
4:45pm
I’m doing pretty good. If I may ask, are you what people call Orthodox?
4:46pm
Luke Ford
yes
4:48pm
That’s very good. I was not raised Jewish nor were my parents so I assume I am a Noahide.
May I ask a request?
4:52pm
Luke Ford
ok
stop being so tentative, just state what you want, no need to be polite
5:10pm
Tov Luke, my request is:
5:11pm
You might being doing this already, I don’t know, but, can you pray to HaShem every day that He bring the entire Messianic age as soon as possible without anything bad happening whatsoever and every day you do your best or at least try to do your best to follow as much mitzvot as you can and also encourage others to do the same?