Anorexia And The Orthodox Seminary Girl

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes:

Last week my eldest daughter called me from Israel, where she is studying for a year in seminary, crying and terribly distraught. A girl she was friendly with from another seminary had died of anorexia. She was seventeen years old.

Hearing my daughter wail on the phone, and not being there to comfort her, was indescribably painful, but incomparable to the pain of the poor parents who had sent their daughter to Israel from the United States to study in a chassidic seminary, never to see her again. I asked my daughter how this could happen. Did no one notice that the girl was super-thin, that her life was in danger? My daughter told me that the girl appeared to her to be very small. She could not discern that the girl’s life was at risk.

When I discussed the terrible tragedy with my two other daughters who attend a very religious Jewish high school in New Jersey, they told me that there are several girls in their school who, no doubt, suffer from anorexia, and that the disease is all too common even in religious circles.

I just spent a week filming one of the most difficult episodes of my TV program “Shalom in the Home.” A fifteen-year-old girl hospitalized for anorexia was our subject. I came face to face with just how catastrophic, devastating, and intractable the illness can be. Indeed, anorexia kills one out of every ten girls who suffer from it.

In this case, the young girl we worked with explained that she had a voice inside her which she referred to as ED, for Eating Disorder, which constantly whispered to her that if only she would lose a few more pounds, she would be beautiful. People would love her. Other girls would want to be like her. Getting more attention all depended on losing just a few more pounds. But losing just ten more pounds for this girl would, God forbid, bring her to death’s door. And still the voice whispered.