Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood by Vincent Leah

Author:Vincent, Leah [Vincent, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385538107
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY WAS IN James Hall. But I couldn’t match up the large brick buildings with the squares on my map. I could feel the sweat on my back as I strode up and down the walk, trying to find the names on the buildings. I also needed to pee. Desperately.

Why’d you think you could do this? I asked myself. Can’t even decipher a fucking map. College student? Who are you kidding?

When I’d been released from the hospital, I’d felt infused with a rush of energy. It was apparent that I would not sail directly into the life of an ordinary Yeshivish girl. That was an unavoidable fact. If I couldn’t have children, no normal Yeshivish boy would ever want me. It was time, I realized, to pursue the dream sparked by that conversation with Jacob and Naftali so long ago. A Yeshivish girl who could fall for a Rastafarian drug dealer should be bold enough to go to college.

I had passed Brooklyn College many times on my walks through the borough, peering through the black spiked fence at the men and women who sauntered along the paths. They seemed to radiate privilege, so comfortable in their roles as students, taking their freedoms entirely for granted. I had never been bold enough to enter the campus, but the plastic hospital band that still encircled my wrist was like a magic bracelet that finally allowed me to pass through the iron gates. It reminded me that my life had shifted, that I was no longer myself.

I had wandered the labyrinth of basement corridors, shrinking from the people I passed, sure that, at any moment, I would be identified as an impostor and escorted off the premises. Rabbi Kaplan’s daughter, the security guard would snarl. What the hell do you think you’re doing here?

Eventually, I found the small admissions office, filled out a form, tried to find my voice to cough up questions about this mysterious process. At home, I wrote essays and filled out scholarship applications, startled by how simple and doable it all was.

For Yeshivish Jews, higher education was forbidden. This was in contrast to Modern Orthodox Jews and non-Orthodox Jews, who were known for academic achievement. But that brand of Judaism—the Judaism of bagels and lox, “my son the doctor,” and Woody Allen—was foreign to me. Scholarship in the Yeshivish community was restricted to Talmudic scholarship and practiced only by men. I’d never dreamed that my education might continue beyond a year or two in seminary, studying Jewish philosophy. Now, applying to college, I was as tense and frightened as if I were trying to hurl my body through a glass wall. Would I lose my love of God if I went to college? Would college pull me further into a spiral of self-destruction? Would I end up lying in the gutter, looking back at this decision with bitter regret?

But when the letter came in the mail, notifying me that I had been accepted and awarded a

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