Some shomrim recite Psalms, others smoke dope (Shalom Auslander), others masturbate. You get what you pay for. Shomrim, kosher supervision, are usually down market occupations staffed by a high number of retards.
LAT: An Ancient Vigil : In Orthodox Judaism, a Shomer Keeps Watch Over Souls of the Dead
Nevertheless, the job’s drawbacks seem to outweigh its rewards.
“People don’t treat me the same after I tell them what I do,” says a veteran watcher who is known to area morticians as “the unofficial shomer of Los Angeles.”
“They think it’s disgusting to hang around with dead bodies.” He asked that his name not be used for fear of being further ostracized.
The problem, he says, is the public’s fear of death: “I was spooked myself at first. . . . I didn’t want to do it again because of the negative perceptions I had.” But he kept at it, in part, to conquer his own demons. “I knew I had to face it–and I had the guts to do it.”
NYT: On Maple Avenue he came to the Yeshiva of Spring Valley, where he went to school for a time. “Do you see that Hebrew lettering?” he said. “It says: ‘Please join us for a reading by Shalom Auslander. Bring your bags of rocks.’”
Mr. Auslander grew up on the other end of town, which used to be less religious, and looping around his own street, a cul-de-sac called Arrowhead Lane, he was astonished to find, next to his old house, a holdout: a ranch house with a “John 3:16” sign on the lawn. Nearby was a landmark he calls the Stone of Pornography in “Foreskin’s Lament”: a boulder behind which he used to find a seemingly inexhaustible store of skin magazines, ditched presumably by a guilty commuter heading home. No porn this time, but there was a discarded box of nonkosher cookies.
Pornography, which Mr. Auslander eventually imported by the sackful, was part of his secret life in Monsey, both an escape and a source of anxiety. So were marijuana, orgies of nonkosher fast food and shoplifting expeditions. To a certain extent, he always felt like an outsider in the Orthodox world, he says now, but his escape proceeded by fits and starts, in spurts of rebellion and then periods of appeasement.
“The big discovery for me was that there’s a whole world out there,” he said. “That there’s no reason to be terrified of the Nanuet Mall and, even worse, no reason to be scornful of it.” But it took him years, including a stint as a bearded, fedora-wearing student in Israel and a subsequent gig as a weed-puffing shomer, or ritual corpse watcher, in New York, to arrive at his current, uneasy state of truce.
He tried ignoring God, and also compromising with him. As a teenager, he writes in “Foreskin’s Lament,” which goes on sale this week, he once rode his bike to Caldors on Saturday but then found himself unable to further violate the Sabbath by activating the electric-eye door opener. In the early-1990s he was married and living in Teaneck, N.J., working in an ad agency and just getting started as a writer. One Saturday he walked all the way to Madison Square Garden to see a game during the Stanley Cup playoffs. God punished him by making the Rangers lose.
“It’s ridiculous that I feel the way I do,” he said at the end of his drive in Monsey. “That I have this cartoonish view of God as someone who rewards and punishes. I feel like a fool when I read someone like Richard Dawkins,” he said, referring to the British atheist and evolutionary biologist. “But let’s trade childhoods.” Intellectually, he said, he understood Mr. Dawkins, but “emotionally I’m not there at all.”
