Oneiron

by Laura Lindstedt

  In order to avoid accusations of defamation, let me also mention that research results also exist that suggest that eating disorders are more common among secular Jews than the religious. Jewish Law emphasizes modesty and humility, which in some cases can be a protective factor when it comes to eating disorders.6

  According to Jewish thought, humanity is the image of God. The concept of shmirat ha-guf means the protection of the body (proper nutrition, staying in shape, and avoiding risks). Anorexia, on the contrary, always represents rebellion, hubris, and excess. Anorexia is a startling manifesto against the prevailing environment. So we must assume that when an Orthodox Jew falls into the snare of anorexia, it happens innocently, as a result of the greatest and most powerful sort of self-deception.

  Viewed from this perspective, it’s no wonder that the use of laxatives and diuretics, along with vomiting, all of which are active and aggressive weight control techniques that break the principles of shmirat ha-guf, are most common among secular Jews.7 On the other hand, Jews have also been more ready and willing to seek help for their problems than other cultural groups. This has been seen as a consequence not only of their low self-confidence but also because they have a more positive view of the psychiatric profession (with the exception of the most traditional Orthodox Jews).8 You may also know the saying that the Jewish imagination is paranoia, confirmed by history. Self-investigation and self-criticism, not to mention black humor, are a part of our culture, and all these things are excellent qualities in terms of successful therapy.

  Jewish communities have also awoken to the need to help their own. One American Reform Jewish women’s group has compiled a handbook and course material packet named “Letapeah tikva—Let’s Feed Hope! Eating Disorders in Modern Jewish Life: Observations and Perspectives.” The women’s Zionist organization, the Hadassah Foundation, whose purpose is to improve the status, health, and welfare of Jewish women and girls in the United States and Israel, has awarded a large grant for the study of eating disorder prevention. In 1999 Rabbi Dovid Goldwasser and the clinical psychologist Ira Sacker founded the organization Helping to End Eating Disorders (HEED) for Orthodox Jewish teens. The Renfrew Center has started a program on Long Island for people who follow a kosher diet and suffer from eating disorders.

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  Some causes for pathological eating behavior can be found on the surface, in pressure surrounding outward appearances. Jewish women often consider their Semitic features ugly if they compare themselves (and they often do) to the average white American woman.

  Because of their racial characteristics, Jewish women think they’re short and plump. This plumpness applies to buttocks, thighs, hips, stomachs, and breasts. They often consider themselves overweight, their muscles flabby, or other parts of their body structure too robust to be feminine. They see big noses, body hair, and abnormally dark eyes and hair. Their hair is usually curly, like mine, and that curl-iness is also seen as an unattractive element.

  So in many ways Jewish women are the opposite of their Anglo-Saxon Protestant sisters with their ethnic tendencies toward being tall, athletic, slender, blue-eyed, and blonde.9 Although athleticism and slim figures are quickly disappearing in the face of fast food culture.

  No one can do anything about being short, but the other Semitic characteristics I’ve mentioned are amenable to alteration. Nose jobs and hair straightening are very common in the Jewish community.10 The size of breasts, thighs, buttocks, and stomachs can be reshaped with muscle training and diet. Pelvis size can’t be changed since it’s bone.

  Back when I wasn’t a skeleton, just terribly skinny, more than once I heard my Jewish friends say, as a compliment, “You have such a lovely gentile body!” I learned when I was a teenager that there was a word that meant non-Jewish. The most shocking thing is that this didn’t particularly shock me. You may have heard the phrase “self-hating Jew”. Many believe this phenomenon arose when the Jews were freed from the ghettos and allowed to assimilate with the general population.11 From living within one culture, the Jews moved to a border between two cultures, to a place where they could see in both directions: backward and forward, toward dreams, toward change.

  My other features (big nose, curly hair, five foot four height) are typically Semitic. I’ve gotten along quite well with them, unlike my body, which has always had its own will separate from mine. African-American women have done better in this regard. Everyone knows the slogan “BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL”. One background factor for this racial self-esteem may be that, unlike Jews, black people have a significantly harder time changing their ethnic features.12 You can also change your name. I was born as Sheila because my parents didn’t want me to stand out too much from the crowd.

  Nowadays Sheila is a very common Jewish name despite the fact that it comes from Irish. The name arrived in Ireland from the Latin Cecelia, which comes from the Latin word caecus, which means blind.

  Shlomith without the final H is a rather rare name with roots in the Bible. Its base form is found in First Chronicles, chapter three, verse nineteen: And the sons of Pedaiah were, Zerubbabel, and Shimei: and the sons of Zerubbabel; Meshullam, and Hananiah, and Shelomith their sister.

  I Hebraicized Sheila to Shlomith after I got married. I wanted to add the H at the end because it made the name more complete. It made it feel more rounded and soft in my mouth. The name remained even though we divorced and I left the kibbutz.

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  Strict religious communities have always tried to protect themselves from outside influences. For example, Haredi Jews forbid their members from watching television. Isolation also feeds a culture of silence. Mental health problems, which anorexia is generally considered to be, are one of the greatest sources of shame among traditional Orthodox Jews. Knowledge of psychiatric treatment can even become an impediment to marriage.

  I know of cases in which the parents of dangerously malnourished girls who were admitted to hospitals told the most stupefying lies to acquaintances and schools about their daughters’ conditions. One favorite explanation is the standard teenage illness, mononucleosis. What makes this comical is that mononucleosis, known in the vernacular as kissing disease, is acquired through touch or the exchange of bodily fluids like saliva or blood. Touching of any kind, but especially sexual contact, is subject to the most extreme regulation in ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture.

  “But what does this have to do with you, Shlomith-Shkhina? You’ve never belonged to the religious Jewish community!” Yes, I hear very clearly the questions running through your minds. I can hear the murmurs in the auditorium. Your hushed voices grate in my ears because the thin layer of fat surrounding the lining of the nerve cells in my inner ear has almost completely disappeared.

  It is true that my family looked askance at the Hasidim of Borough Park. We thought they were weird, freaks who represented the dark side of Judaism. Despite this, the Holy Book and the rabbinical Mishnah and Gemara that developed around it over the centuries always remain part of the shared foundation of Jewish culture and, ultimately, all of western civilization. The Holy Book is used in different ways in different Jewish communities, either freely and adaptively or dogmatically and inflexibly, but either way, the Book is there. It is in us. Jewish Law, Halakha, is an intertextual DNA strand we can no more escape than our own genes hidden in our chromosomes.

  So for a moment longer let my body remain a laboratory in which deadly metaphors become concrete, in which contagious allegories and ravaging myths are tested!

  *

  The first conference on Judaism and anorexia was organized in Philadelphia in 1998.13 I was there. That conference provided the final spark for the project you see before you, although almost ten years passed before I reached this point. In any case, the conference was incredibly exhilarating. While there I formed many significant collegial relationships.

  Several theories for the causes of eating disorders emerged. One of the most significant relates to the dating culture (shidduchim) of ultra-Orthodox J
ews, which deviates greatly from the courtship rituals of the general populace. Orthodox Jewish young people are not allowed to meet together without the assistance of matchmakers. Even touching (negiah) the opposite sex, a potential spouse, is strictly forbidden.

  Those who interpret the Law most stringently avoid situations in which they could touch a member of the opposite sex even by accident. This dictates their choice of seats on buses, airplanes, etc. Shaking hands with someone of the opposite sex is also extremely problematic from their perspective.

  Because the outside world (such as the business community) frowns upon refusing a handshake and may exact serious penalties on a person who does so (such as rejecting business deals), highly educated rabbis have given instructions for how to handle such situations honorably. The negiah observer’s hand must remain “helpless” and avoid squeezing. If the other party takes a vigorous, firm grip, the Jew’s helpless hand remains an “innocent bystander” and thereby ritually pure.

  Some marriage brokers are professionals who charge a fee. These practitioners are called shadkhan. They maintain a database in which the first question pertains to the woman’s dress size and weight. Men tend to look for very slender women to marry.

  Slimness is a prized trait emphasized by matchmakers and the mothers of girls of marriageable age. I’m not exaggerating much when I say that you can’t get a date until you hit a size 0 and the magic numbers 32-24-34.

  Slimness symbolizes pubescent innocence, incorruption, which in turn ensures that the wife candidate will be one hundred percent under the control of her husband. You’re supposed to marry very young, and the use of birth control is not customary. The primary purpose of sex is the creation of children. A large number of children is a way to spread Jewish values (Jews don’t engage in missionary work).

  This is one obvious reason for anorexia among young Orthodox women. If they don’t feel ready for the demands of parenthood, sex, and raising a flock of children, they start to focus on what they do control: their own bodies.

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  Girls become potential future spouses at the age of twelve years and six months, which is considered the official beginning of menstruation. For Haredi Jews, even touching a three-year-old member of the opposite sex is a problem. Because menstruation is treated with the same horror in strictly religious Jewish culture as in most ancient tribal societies and because this attitude of shunning exposes those growing into women in the modern world to serious body image issues, I’m going to give you some more specifics about menstruation in the Jewish context.

  A menstruating girl or women is niddah; the word means “moved” or “separated”. According to some rabbinical interpretations, niddah comes from the word menaddekem, which means “those who cast you out”.

  According to Jewish thought there is normal (niddah) and abnormal (zavah) blood flow. Because it is very difficult to know whether the flow is normal, it is always treated as abnormal. This means that after her period ends, a Jewish woman must wait seven days before ritually immersing herself on the eighth day, after nightfall, in cleansing water (mikvah) and thus metamorphosing back to a state of purity.

  Just to be sure, Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews add five more days on top of the seven, so a woman has to wait twelve days before purification.

  Ritual immersion belongs to the larger concept of “family purity” (taharat hamishpacha). Immersion is preceded by a complete cleansing of all body orifices. Nails are also trimmed and hair brushed. So as a woman immerses herself, she is not only washing physically, she is becoming spiritually clean.

  According to Jewish doctrine, mikvah is an even more important element of the religion than the synagogue and Torah scrolls. Of the 613 commandments and prohibitions that make up the mitsvot, the requirements of the mikvah belong to the third category (chukim), which consists of rules that surpass human understanding and challenge reason, and which are, therefore, beyond all criticism. According to the Jewish view, these commandments are paramount because they have no pragmatic function. They are simply instructions handed down by God and must be accepted as such.

  The actual mikvah font must be built in contact with the ground; it cannot, for example, be a discrete bathtub. The font must be divided into two parts, one of which contains at least two hundred gallons of rainwater that has been collected and funneled to the font according to precise requirements. In an emergency, melted snow or ice may be used if rainwater is unavailable.

  For practical reasons, the other section of the font is filled with tap water. Between the sections is a dividing wall with a hole of at least two inches in diameter. Because of the flow between the sections, the waters “kiss” each other, which gives the font official mikvah status.

  The font symbolizes both the womb and the grave. It is an intermediate space where one moves between life and death. It represents relinquishing oneself and rebirth. In Jewish thought, the source of purity (tahorah) is life itself, while death represents impurity (tumah). According to this logic, a woman’s period is the death of potential life, and so a menstruating woman moves into a state of symbolic impurity from which she must escape month after month through the aid of the mikvah.

  This is also one possible additional explanation for why ulta-Orthodox Jews have so many children. Who would want to live constantly unclean?

  Purification requires a precise determination of the end of one’s period. Otherwise it would be impossible to count the seven (or twelve) days a woman has to wait. So women check the end of their periods through a ritual called hefsek taharah. First the woman bathes or showers at sundown, then wraps a clean white cloth (bedikah) around her finger and wipes it in her vagina. If the cloth remains clean or if it only comes back with something white or yellow on it, menstruation is considered to have ended.

  If the cloth is stained red or pink, menstruation is considered to be ongoing. If some other color comes back on the cloth, for example brown, the matter requires closer inspection. In this case the woman has to consult with her rabbi.

  To be on the safe side, an Orthodox woman who has completed her period will also place a piece of cloth called a mokh dahuk (nowadays a tampon is often used) in her vagina for eighteen minutes to an hour each morning and evening for seven days. The fabric must be placed carefully in order to avoid irritating the dry vagina in an undesirable way and causing bleeding that will interfere with the result of the examination. Women looking for convenience or who suffer from spotting may at this point use colorful toilet paper and colorful underwear so any possible stains won’t stand out and no further action will be required.

  Of course the married couple are not allowed to interact amorously (harchakot) during menstruation. Anything that could arouse sexual desire must be avoided. In some communities, sisterly touch is allowed.

  Those who celebrate the good tidings of Judaism claim that menstrual periods actually invigorate married life. It is as if the couple enjoys repeated honeymoons fed by longing and separation since one of them is temporarily unattainable and forbidden. In addition they claim that women benefit at a personal level from their time in niddah. They can devote themselves to study and completely control their own bodies, unlike during the rest of the month.

  A woman also becomes niddah after losing her virginity, after her hymen is torn (regardless of whether she bleeds or not). The wedding night is followed by the same morning and evening examination of bleeding as at the end of menstruation, with the difference that there are four days instead of seven (or twelve). Weddings are planned according to brides’ periods, because a woman must cleanse herself in a mikvah font just before the great celebration.

  I believe that routines and rituals can bring order and joy to a woman’s life. However, I am also certain that the repellent, even demonizing attitude of ultra-Orthodox Jews to menstruation, to what is one of the most natural events in the world, is one of the elements that leads to anorexia in this culture. This situation is not changed at all by the fact that some modern Kabbalisti
c trends attempt to glorify this madness by using the euphemistic name “Spa for the Soul”.

  Sufficiently advanced anorexia is an effective method for producing secondary amenorrhea, an endocrine disorder caused by hormonal disturbances of the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and gonads, which results in an interruption of the menstrual cycle. And, I hardly have to spell this out, a woman who is free of her period is also free of the above-mentioned menstrual circus.

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  Jewish celebrations are well known for centering around large meals. In the Jewish home, the weekly Shabbat is just as lavish as the yearly Thanksgiving dinner is for other Americans. The late supper on the Friday preceding Shabbat also contains numerous carefully prepared dishes. It’s no surprise that a focus on food has been proven to increase eating disorders among Jews.14

  The days preceding a weekend are largely consumed by food preparations for the tradition-conscious Jewish woman. It’s also good to remember that cook isn’t a Jewish woman’s only role by any means. In the Haredi community, the woman is also responsible for supporting the family because the man has to focus his attention on spending all day cramming the tenets of the faith into his brain.

  The festival of Yom Kippur each autumn centers on fasting, and other twenty-five-hour periods of fasting from food and water are also found in the Jewish calendar. The fast either ends with a large meal or is preceded by one. A food culture like this that alternates between abstinence and gluttony is also tailor-made for triggering eating disorders.

  Jews who closely follow halakha eat according to so much regulation that an anorexic attitude toward food is almost a foregone conclusion. It isn’t just the orthodoxy of food defined by the kosher rules, but also the numerous rituals related to the actual act of eating, that ensure that one’s thoughts will constantly revolve around food. Blessings are uttered before and after meals, and a ritual handwashing must precede partaking of bread.