Sadomasochism

But not the good kind

I wrote this joint a few weeks ago and then I let it sit, moldering, unpublished. It sort of builds to a crescendo promising further writing on OTD, and the truth is, I have a lot to say about the topic. Just not structural commentary or essay-style ethnography or data-driven regressions about who leaves and why. I could shoehorn my thinking into those containers, to be sure, but my relationship to the topic is more personal and discursive, developed over many years of first-person observations: short, unsparing, angry, ironic. An ensemble of self-reflection and coping mechanisms that nonetheless (I hope!) keep the shape of an empirical cast of mind and avoid too much self-indulgent or flaccid thinking. But I may never write a fucking thing on this topic again. It took me 30 years to write this, after all. And if I do push out some sequel-style things, I’m guessing they will be short snippets rather than full-length essays. In any case, I’m hitting publish now.

“The essence of sadomasochism”—Christopher Hitchens once kink-shamed religion. I occasionally replay that quippy indictment in my mind, where it rattles about in his stentorian timbre. It generally makes me smile, funny in the fashion of many Hitchens’s withering religious takes, suspended in a superposition of a Jonathan Edwards sermon and a Monty Python skit. Was he 100% serious, one wonders?

The point he was making was about the relationship religion requires one have with God. One is enjoined to love a god—itself an odd injunction (and certainly improbable to originate from an omni-[insert favorite suffix here] God)—that one must also fear. For Hitch, it was a conceptual point¹, a rhetorical jousting lance. For me, as I’ll explain, it feels like a psychological one, one that has sharpened up in the wake of writing in public.

Public writing has a hall-of-mirrors quality, where the mirrors are the readers’ eyes and the writer’s soul. One can spend many years building a life, an identity, ensconcing oneself in it, and then have elements of that identity dissipate like mist in the wind in the self-conscious reflection of other people’s feedback.

Most of the feedback I’ve received has been generous and warm. To be sure, when one touches topics that implicate right-wing Orthodox Judaism and does so in a register of sardonic dismissal, there will inevitably be those who careen into action to defend the faith (yay for defense of faith!). Every fundamentalism has this sort of foot soldier, braying about this or that, “offended” about something, genuinely impressive in how exquisitely they match unlettered sentences to unlettered arguments. An ignorance equilibrium.

The comments that most arrested my attention were those that referred to OTD. I was OTD. My arguments were OTD. I was down with OTD. Fuck that, I thought, reflexively. That’s like referring to Vasyl Lomachenko as an off-the-Ukrainian-folk-dancing-derech. True, as far as it goes, and rather integral to who he is and what he’s accomplished, but such a misordering of emphasis as to be functionally wrong.

My decades-long attitude to “OTD” as such has been, borrowing a coinage: “OTD is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.” I would not detain myself with this silly acronym, one that arrogates to itself the high ground (derech, lol) and expects the person attainted with the charge to engage on that basis. “No thanks, pass,” I thought, as I allowed myself the clemency and peace of mind of total recusal.

In time, and on reflection, however, I came to realize that there was more than a modicum of truth in the brief. I could have written about any number of things. The throughline of the topics I wrote about was having grown up frum and then having left. I am interested in a range of things. Markets and sports and politics and technology and many more than those. But lots of people are. What distinguishes me is that I am interested in those topics and also come from a strange, niche subculture. I know, from the inside, in my very kishkes, what it means to be a yeshiva guy and, more pointedly, what it feels like to be one.

When I am still more honest with myself, I recognize that while I am passionate about empirical thinking, and fitness, and history, I have nothing like the complicated and unrequited feelings about those topics that I do with being OTD (gag). None of those are the crucible in which I was forged. None of them was the Foster Wallacian water I swam in. None of them bestowed an exacting and all-encompassing culture, and beliefs, and language, and calendar—a civilization, a life (!)—and then crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions and fatuousness. A system that was, across nearly every dimension, across nearly every claim it made for itself, not merely wrong but, too often, the opposite of right.

So, as I complete my 50th orbit of the sun, it’s time. The only way, as they say, is through. Time to write about being OTD. To write for those who can’t. Who lack the facility with words. Who are too entrapped or reliant on the community to draw arrows from their quiver. Who aren’t studied enough to recognize the self-evident truth that there is no esoteric knowledge or faith skeleton key possessed by some rabbi somewhere. Who wilt before the inevitable, ‘you think you know enough (better?!) than Harav Whoever Shlita,’ to ask obvious, insuperable questions?! (NB: ‘Yes’). To write for all of them. To write for myself.

To write an elegy, a cri de coeur, animated by equal parts nostalgia and fury, love and rage. By the crushing disappointment of having been born unbidden into a system that shapes and molds and instructs an entire life (and afterlife, ffs) that inscribes itself into one’s very being, encoded like epigenetics, only to abruptly disappear like a rug pulled. Unmoored. To realize none of it was true, and a lot of it was quite absurd (and that absurdity often bleeds into shit ethics and shittier morality). To spend a life in the dislocating realization that this system is who one once was, essentially, indelibly, and who one simply cannot be. Like a noetic autoimmune disease. Like sadomasochism.

To write without apology in any direction. I didn’t choose this story, but it is mine. It is both my patrimony and something I earned through years of study and practice and sacrifice. Nobody can take it from me. It is mine to love, and to reject. I have done both. And I will do both again. On my terms. These are my terms.

1. I am sure there is some Kabbalist somewhere who has a God-as-dominatrix idea; talk about shviras ha’kaylim.