Greg: “You won’t eat that candy? There’s nothing unkosher in it.”

Me: “How do you know? They aren’t required to list things that go in trace amounts.”

Greg: “You really care about little things like that?”

Me: [jokingly] “Well I’m very Jewish.”

Greg: “What does that mean? You pick up pennies in the subway?”

Okay, note to self: use “religious” instead of “Jewish” in the future.

Then there was the time I was reading the book, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, during off time in the lounge. Naturally, it raised a few eyebrows. Jews + Pirates? Gotta be kidding. But Joey just looked at the cover and sniggered. “There must be good stuff in there about them fighting over coins,” he said.

“That’s mean,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” he replied.

Seriously. Why do I hang out with these people? Oh right – they’re helpful when I can’t figure out my homework.

Then there was the time Greg swore that Oreo cream is made of lard, and they fool the rabbis because they’re not there all the time. His point? I might as well eat non-kosher because I was eating it already. At first I argued. Then I remembered that there’s no point in arguing with conspiracy theorists. They tend to be off their nut.

So now I take those things in stride. But I was thrown off by the following little exchange:

Me: So what do you do for fun, besides watch the Simpsons and South Park?

Greg: Race cars.

Joey: Race cars? Like really race them?

Greg: Yep. Do you have a license? Well, not you Frumgirl, you don’t drive, but Joey?

Me: Hey, hey, wait a sec. I don’t drive?

Greg: You do?

Me: I’m not Amish. I drive. I even own a car.

A split second later my brain caught up with my mouth and I realized that you don’t have to be Amish to not drive; you could be Satmar. And the average irreligious Russian Jew (Greg) has had more of a run-in with chassidim than litvaks, leaving them with the impression that Jews are 500 years out of style, don’t speak English fluently, and abide by many more rules than we actually do. Indeed, I have been often told that I’m obviously a “liberal kind of Jew” because I’m not married, don’t obsess over Israel, and don’t shout “antisemitism” every time something goes wrong. It’s interesting to see what an outsider’s criteria of a “strict Jew” is.

Calling myself a “religious Jew” puts my practice standards on the same level of perception as the barely practicing: the folk who may wear pants, pat coworkers on the back, and don’t make a big fuss about things like being asked to go for a coffee run at a non-kosher restaurant.

“Orthodox Jew,” is often misunderstood, though. Unless someone has had considerable contact with frum Jews in the past, calling myself an Orthodox Jew not ring any bells in terms of practice and possible accommodation I may need. It’s also unwieldy, being two words and not complying with easy grammatical conversion (Orthodox Jews or Jewish People do not do “x” sounds either lumpy or truncated, and unnecessarily accusatory or overly PC).

I’ve noticed a tendency to shorten one’s description to simply “Orthodox.” This is not a good idea. Why? I fell into this habit for a little while as well, until I was permanently cured of it in the course of a single conversation. I described myself as Orthodox to a non-Jewish underclassman, to be told “Me too, I’m also Orthodox! Coptic Orthodox!”

It was an abysmal, rainy Thursday with few patients. The end of the week was close enough that everyone had begun to slack off, but still far enough off to engender an aura of expectant listlessness. Perfect for story time.

“At first I lived with some cousins in the Bronx, but I couldn’t stay there. I was looking for an apartment in the yeshiva area…”

“Yeshiva area?” I interrupted. You never know which yeshiva people are talking about sometimes.

“You know, yeshiva university.”

I hadn’t. “Oh, okay.”

“Apartments are really scarce there,” she continued, “So the way to do it is make friends with the doormen, who tell you when someone moves out so you can grab the apartment. So one day I went thrifting here in the city, and I bought some nice decorating pieces. One of which is a multi-candle holder. I just thought it looked nice. And I’m carrying my thrifting finds in my bag, and I decide to walk down my favorite block and ask the doormen if any new apartments were available. Sure enough, I’m super-lucky and somebody had just moved out the day before. The doorman let me look at the apartment, and I put my deposit down right then and there. As I’m finalizing everything, the doorman says, ‘The neighbors will be so happy to hear that a Latina Jewish woman moved in here. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Columbian Jewish woman.’

‘I’m not Jewish,’ I told him,

‘Then why are you carrying a Menorah in your bag?’ And he points to my candle-holder that I picked up thrifting that day! I had no idea! The candle holder (what do you call it again- a Yora?) got me my dream apartment!”

My LDS (Mormon) classmate is one of the best ones. She and I both had good news on the same day (her sister got engaged and I have a new niece,) she immediately wished me mazal tov and I automatically responded with congratulations. Today, upon hearing that a first-year grad student was engaged, my classmate gushed with the standard frummie vocabulary, inquiries, and request to see her bracelet.

One of my Muslim classmates was asked by a Frumguy what an Islamic head-cloth was officially called.  “You mean a shmatta?” he replied with a wink.

Even a relatively clueless classmate, when asked why he didn’t attend an Orthodox wedding when invited responded with,  “Me? Go to a party where all the women are a hundred feet away and on the other side of a wall? No thanks!”

Are there still misconceptions floating around? Sure, and plenty. Will there be enough humorous and sticky situational fodder for me to write about on in this blog? Undoubtably. Is there still a long way to go? You betcha. But it has become most apparent that in meeting the world with as open a mind as I could muster, the world that I’ve met has reciprocated.

When I was first told it, I thought it was on par with knocking on wood, (fairly common, even if I don’t know the origin,) and not walking under ladders (common sense,) but then I mentioned it to a classmate who asked me if it was an Orthodox thing. Yup, all my weird foibles and indecipherable comments must be Orthodox things, obviously. Clearly, financial repercussions for putting one’s purse on the floor was not a run of the mill superstition.

Personally, I find the random little superstitions embedded into standard American culture or fragments thereof to be infinitely amusing. They make me feel better about not stepping over people and only ever placing cups right side up for most of my life. Every time I come across a new little irrationality, I like to find out who will look at me like I’m an alien if I reference it around them and who will know exactly what I’m talking about. Chalk it up to learning the role.

So far, the people I have met who heard the purse-on-the-floor superstition from a parent or elderly relative are: Southern Baptist, Syrian (Sephardic) Jewish, and Colombian Catholic.

My first step to puzzling this one out was to contact my Portland friend, who will heretofore be known as Miss Priss (yes, she approved this nickname,) and who is my go-to for questions on Southern Baptism due to a plethora of Southern relatives and a flair for explaining things well. All credit for putting this puzzle together goes to her. After some thought, it seems that all three locations have heavy West African cultural influences. I will assume that if you put your handbag on floor in most West African locales, there is a good chance that your money will “go away.” mystery solved. Since I’m not about to conduct an in-depth study as to where else in the world there are heavy West African influences, I will simply shelve this knowledge until someone gasps when I put my bag down.

I’m pretty sure that other people have come across random and humorous superstitions, too. I find it gratifying that most are just as silly as the ones I grew up with, just different. If you’ve encountered any interesting ones, or grew up with any uncommon ones, please share!

Usually it’s not that hard to differentiate the valid questions or genuinely curious (if overly so,)  from the simply annoying. This question didn’t hit a single validity marker, so I told him to get lost. Little did I know.

“But,” he interjected, “my friend’s father designs closets for Orthodox Jews’ houses and he says they’re all like, room-sized. Like the size of this classroom,” (roughly 30 by 15).

And suddenly, the idiocy of such stereotypes struck me. I said, “Dude, you know I live in a tiny apartment. Do you think I have a room-sized closet?”

He is surprisingly silent for a few second. “Uh, no…”

“And do you think that all Orthodox Jews have room-sized closets? The ones living in poverty? The ones living with a whole big family in a city that fits two children and a dog on a good day?”

“Uh, no, but…”

I didn’t let him finish. “Do you want me to tell you that there are wealthy Orthodox Jews out there? Sure, I’ll tell you. There are wealthy Orthodox Jews out there. Are all of us wealthy? Think, Dude, think.”

And I walked away in disgust. Oops?

Which may sound incredibly simple and you’d think it’s the sort of question people are asked all the time. But this was the first I’d ever heard it, and it was about to become the preamble to a doozy of an encounter. I’ve fielded “Do you believe in hell,” danced around the definition of Judaism, and been subject to a broken record of common phrases and preconceptions that wind up within the first ten questions the average non-Orthodox individual feels comfortable asking me. Never had I been asked so directly and so practically such a basic tenet of Jewish thought. Certainly not while contending with a patient chart containing no discernible evidence of having ever approached the English language despite being written by, of all things, an actual Englishwoman.

Which is why I stared stupidly at my Colombian temporary ten-week-boss for a full thirty seconds of silence while trying to sift two illegible anti-hypertensives and a mood stabilizer out of the cogent response I knew was lurking somewhere in the back of my head.

“I mean, do you go to hell?” she clarified helpfully.

“That depends,” I started, since almost all things religious depend in some way and it gave me a few more safe milliseconds in which to think, “on what my intentions were and what else I did in my life.”

“So if you eat pork once without knowing it, you don’t go to hell?”

“Uh, no.”

My boss took a deep breath, as if she was greatly relieved. “I’m so glad to know! I’ve been feeling horribly guilty ever since my wedding.”

Of course I was not about to let that rest unquestioned, despite the infinitely alluring call of a stubbornly indiscernible patient chart. Besides, this was the boss herself I was wasting time with and I had no patients waiting for me. Gradually, I teased out the full story:

“I have this friend Ron. Who’s Jewish and sort of religious, but not religious like you.” She waved a hand at my wardrobe choice for the day, continuing with “he doesn’t keep kosher, but he won’t eat pork. When I made the menu for my wedding, I chose a pork dish. And I knew that he wouldn’t eat anything at my wedding if he knew there was pork in it, and I felt so bad about that so I put him on the vegan table and told the chef to give him the vegan menu. Well, the chef tells me the day before my wedding that the vegan menu also has a little bit of pork in it, but you can’t taste it. And I knew that if I told Ron, he would go hungry at my wedding so I told the waiter to tell the whole table that the food had no pork in it if they were asked. Ever since then I’ve been feeling terribly guilty that Ron might go to hell because of me for something that’s my fault.”

The first thing I couldn’t help thinking about were those urban legends about trusted domestic help putting butter in peoples’ chicken and similarly trusted daycare assistance feeding people’s toddlers ham sandwiches at the corner deli and then lying about it for years. Then there was also the “darn, I had just worked myself into something that did not quite involve so much wariness and now this.” Then I think I became even more disgusted that she’d feed a table full of vegans pork, lie about it, and then feeling more guilty about endangering her “sort of” religious Jewish friends’ afterlife.

So I flubbed a platitude as a response and went back to my chart decoding, but I was shaken and the boss could tell. Needless to say, dietary trust is one area in which no absolute point of view is ever always right.

Anyway, I was in the elevator, and suddenly, breaking into my thoughts, comes the question, “Are you Hasidic?”

I look up. A tall black fellow is smiling across the elevator at me. I straighten. “No, just Orthodox.”

“Ah, Orthodox.” He pauses and then explains, “I live in Crown Heights. It’s not often that I see one of my people here in this university.”

I smile at the mention of “my people.” We strike up a conversation. We were going in the same direction anyway. We split when he went to teach a class and I went to do some work in the lounge, but met up again when he left his students to hold a top-secret conference and wandered into the lounge to wait it out.

He was soon chatting with a few students, helping another with a speech, and listening to another complain.

When ten minutes were up and he had to get back, he went around shaking hands and high fiving. “How about an almost high five?” he asked me. I agreed. I won’t do shomer hugs, which I find obscene, but I don’t see any harm in failing to complete a high five. A Caribbean fellow watched all this in bemusement. “What’s that? An almost high five? You can do that?” He was amazed. “You know, I tried shaking hands with her the first day and she flattened my nose.”

“I was wondering how your nose got that way,” the professor grinned. Then he did a double take. “Wait… you mean she almost punched you in the nose.”

“Yeah, stopped just short, but the wind did the rest.”

This was not quite true. I’m a mostly non-violent person, and definitely never punched anyone for trying to shake my hand. Truth is, if the room is noisy, the subject is business, and if I’m never going to see the person again, I’ll shake, based on the “embarrassing is worse” principle. But I do think it’s important to establish with students and people I’ll be around long-term that there’s this no-contact thing. There was one fellow I missed the boat with on that, and he turned out to be the sort who goes around poking people when he says hi. Since then I’ve warded off huggers, back-slappers, fist-punchers, and high-fivers. In return, I accept the reality of air high fives and “I wish I could hug that’s how pleased I am right now but I can’t so I’m gonna hug myself and you understand that it’s for you ok” type of scenarios.

Why’d I go AWOL this time? You can imagine my expression when I walked into my parents’ place one rushed Friday afternoon to spot a certain familiar blog header open on my youngest brother’s laptop. My family has a variety of opinions on the contents, (they recognized my voice instantly,) ranging from “you sound so subversive” to “it’s fairly well written.”

If you can’t imagine my expression then, how about when a non-Orthodox classmate asks me who I was referring to by one of my little ruthless classmate-descriptors here? No? Well, I’m sure both times it was a mix of shock, disbelief, and a tiny little traitorous slice of pride. A slice which has convinced me to keep writing, even though parents and classmates are reading now and anonymity has revealed itself to be transparent false security blanket in a very small world. I have never been the sort to pull punches or allow the opinions of people I do not respect affect the way I do or say things, and I’m not about to start now.

A lot has changed in the months since last post, including myself. I can pass for non-frummie far more effectively than ever before. I’m not quite sure how and why this occurred, but it doesn’t bother me as long as I can turn it on and off at will. It has lowered my patience for those willfully close-minded frum-bubble-dwellers who form opinions based on third hand and highly suspect visions of reality, but my patience for such has never been ideal to begin with. That was always at least a portion of the point of this blog: to gently, circuitously, and humorously cause at least a few people to think about whether bubble-dwelling is truly beneficial in the long run. For both ourselves microcosmically and as a group member of a larger global community that has the power to afford and deny us needs. Ignorance on both sides of the frum-bubble has not helped me or anyone I know one bit. There has got to be a better way to preserve who we are and what we believe in without isolating ourselves with a blanket war on media.

So I will keep on writing, regardless of who is reading (or not reading,) and if necessary I will be equally forthright in person to all confronters. Expect more.

Suddenly Emma, in a reserved, Emma-like voice, pipes up. “Hey F5, you know…maybe you’ll think I’m crazy or something…but…ever since the first day of school, I was totally thinking that you and Joey would be perfect for one another!”

Having just taken a swig of orange juice from the carton I was holding, I struggle not to give my classmates a shower. A shadchan? Here?! And in the form of a Seventh Day Adventist from the West Indies, no less. Hashem bless my lucky stars…

Joey is a nice, rather funny guy of Syrian descent who is the only yarmulke-wearing dude in the whole program. He’s definitely a sweet fellow, but not exactly what I’m looking for in the slightest. Needless to say very much surprised at the randomness of the suggestion (in a way, I suppose, similar to the “she wears a skirt, he wears pants” shidduch arrangement), I try valiantly to swallow my mouthful.

Sadaf, however, beats me to it. “Nah, that won’t work,” she says casually.

My eyebrows go up. Oh?

Diana joins in now. “Why not?”

Sadaf keeps going. “Well, because Joey is Sephardic, and F5 is not.”

The other two say “ohhh” and nod sagely. I am fighting the urge to laugh. Diana then turns to me and asks, “So, F5, what kind of guy are you looking for, then?”

About to answer, Sadaf beats me to it again. “She’s looking for a Yeshiva student. You know, those guys with the black pants and white shirts.”

I’m looking at Sadaf incredulously now. Where in the world does she get her information from?

On a roll now, she continues. “Oh my gosh! Hello, F5, I totally have the perfect guy for you!! He was in one of my undergrad classes, white shirt, black pants, the whole deal! Hmm…and good looking too…”

Two lessons:

1. The multiculturalism in graduate school is mind-boggling.

2. The shadchan will always find you.