Rejuvenation: The Skeptic and The Rabbi

[Music] hi everybody this is Eve Harrow on rejuvenation for the Land of Israel Network and I am sitting in Los Angeles on a beautiful sunny day with Judy Grune journalist and author whose book I managed have time to read on the airplane during my trip over here the skeptic and the rabbi falling in love with faith so since Judy lives in LA I know even though he's just here for a couple days I said oh maybe she'll have some time for an interview and sure enough she made some time so thank you Judy so much for sitting with me today thank you Eva it's a delight to meet you and to meet you here on our our old stomping grounds that's right since I'm a former LA girl so the skeptic and the rabbi falling in love with faith is really about your journey not your recent journey but your journey into more traditional Judaism which at reading the book which also happens to be very funny it's not a dry book at all I'm just telling this to my listeners you know that it's funny is I think a journey that you've had that resonates with a lot of people and that's why I asked if if you would be willing to talk about on the show so a little bit about the book about your personal journey right so the book is about a little bit about my background as having grown up in Los Angeles fairly secular but with a very strong sense of being Jewish particularly from my mother's parents who are European immigrants came over in the 1920s and growing up and considering myself very proudly to be a feminist and I graduated from UC Berkeley so I had all the the bona fides for that and the last thing I ever thought that I would end up doing was becoming Orthodox that the word itself was just fraught with a lot of negative connotations one of the reasons I wrote the book is because so many people who have become my friends over the years who had similar journeys also struggled a lot with you know what it meant to explore and engage with our Jewish faith in a in a more traditional and and I would say a more authentic way and that's really what this book is about it's also a against the backdrop of the 60s and 70s culture where the culture was really arguing and mitigating against tradition more and more which made it psychologically and emotionally so much harder to leap that barrier and say okay I'm going to explore this so many of my listeners are Christians and I know from conversations that I have with them when I go to them or they come to Israel that Judaism is is is interesting for them because we have so much stuff to do so in Christianity finding faith means finding faith and you're a good person and you believe and you give charity etc and you're a good person and you bring the Bible into your home and you learn but you but Orthodox Judaism has so much stuff that we have to do the way we dress the way we eat what we don't eat the kosher laws for Orthodox women do you or do you not cover your hair after you're married there is just so much that goes along with it and in your book you very eloquently write about how those are really the steps that are difficult for you not so much believing in God but it's finding faith but then all the trappings that go along with what it looks like in Judaism right that's that's true I'd like to step back for a second and mention the non-jewish interest in Judaism for many many years I've had I'm very happy to say a lot of religious Christian fans who've written to me and sometimes and then this has really happened a few times they would write to me and say Judy I don't understand it why are so many of your co religion co-religionists not observant you know don't they know what it says in the Bible you know you know they can quote we can't and Christians a Catholic in my case and a religious Christian in the case of my husband Jeff who's a very important player my story play important roles in in the book cameo roles but important roles for example when my husband Jeff was in junior year abroad in England it was a Christian friend of his who said you know during spring break you're already here in Europe you must go to Israel and just said well why would I do that you know and and in my case when I was really struggling about moving toward faith I was already involved with Jeff and he had made the decision to move toward faith and I really wasn't sure I could go there it was a Catholic co-worker who said to me you know if I weren't Catholic I would really want to be Jewish and often it is our Christian and Catholic friends who are the ones to give us the push and the empowerment to explore our own faith when our secular friends and relatives feel uncomfortable as we had felt uncomfortable and we're not going to get the the push or the encouragement from them in most cases so yeah I think there's God people and there's not God people in all religions you know and and I think that we see that I think religious people attract other religious people at some point even if it's not necessarily the same religion we have a common language we see God in the world we see God in our lives but a little bit of bad your background because I mean the book starts off really with you meeting Jeff who becomes your husband spoiler alert everybody I'm really sorry and that he's on this journey and you kind of go along with it that's kind of a package if you want Jeff then he comes it's a Jewish Jeff but you very you're very honest about some of the back and the forth and the questions that you had and while your maternal grandparents were very the Jewish Jewish Lea oriented your paternal ones weren't exactly and that struck and that struggle because of course you were close with all of them so so how does this you know how does this work out for you right so my grandparents I I know I mentioned my mother's parents earlier in our conversation they were religious my grandfather became ordained in the conservative movement but they were born into Orthodox families in Europe of course given when they were born but my paternal grandfather and his second wife who I considered my grandmother every inch of the way they were atheist and while my grandmother considered herself a agnostic but my grandfather was a bacon frying cigar-smoking he was always poking fun at religion but there was something very sad about it underneath and he had lost his father when he was a little boy and the story goes he said that the rabbi came to their house and told him that it was God's will and so as a little boy my grandfather said well if that's his will so long I'm out of here and he never looked back but my my non-religious grandparents were also my fun grandparents my grandmother was a doctor not just was she not only was she an MD at a time when women were generally not MDS in fact it was very rare she was even more radical she was a homeopath she was an acupuncturist they were cool nobody had grandparents like those grandparents and they were fun and I was close to them and I I loved all my grandparents and I saw that each set had something that the other was missing and I really was growing up thinking is there any way that I could be broadly intellectual and cosmopolitan like CC and Papa Rosenfeld without losing the grounding to the tradition that Nana and Papa Cohen had so that they form you know part of the backdrop to this story and in in the story yeah it's it's not a secret because I open open the book with our our wedding but then I go back in time and revisiting parts of my childhood including a few very very painful parts and then later struggle intellectually and emotionally with whether I can make this leap into orthodox ville and then when I do make the decision I have several chapters showing myself navigating the new waters and including the difficulties for example I I did not cover my hair at for a good few years and that was just really hard it's never been my favorite Mitzvah it still isn't and that's okay you know so part of it is learning to be okay with you you don't have to love everything you have to believe in in the package and then the greater good I think that's part of the story so when I was just in Phoenix I met a couple a lovely couple who became more observant later on and like in their 50s or so and lost all their friends they were traveling they were good friends with a lot of other secular couples they would go on cruises they would do whatever they did and by taking on you know stricter level if you will of Judaism they lost their friends and I could see how even years on how painful that was for them like they weren't loved for who they were they were and and really they felt very alone so did you have that as well I had it yes to an extent I think it would have been a natural separation due to geographical distance but becoming religiously observant also it just changes your value system it changes your worldview my politics also changed I think that had something to do with it but I still miss those friends even though we haven't had real connection in so many years and you know one of them saw something that I posted on Facebook and and she made a very snarky comment and this is just very common it's just common and I think part of it is there's a fear of judgment that goes both ways we who become religious fear the judgment of our I don't like to say religious and not religious that's it I really don't so please I'm just using that for as a convenience word okay less whatever there's a fear of judgement that goes both ways I think that that's part of it but I think part of it is also just we start to see the world differently through the lens of the Torah and that's actually something I'm incredibly grateful for more and more as time goes by because more and more the pace of change around us in society it's it's about a breakneck speed it's were were whipsawed with ever every week there's a new thing we're supposed to be ok with and it's it's not ok and what I love about Torah among many things is that it is a grounding so how do you know you know do we just go where the wind blows or do we stop and assess and what is the baseline for assessment you know the Torah gives us that and our sages give us give us that and it's it's a framework for living even in the most crazy and unsettling of times the more often I come to the States the more worried I actually am about the United States in particular in Western civilization in general that there is been a loss of some mainstay things like the importance of family the importance of community and it makes me afraid for the civilization because really without that a lot of things goes when everybody decides what's moral in their own eyes and there isn't as you said this baseline then it can be one day one thing and one day something else so it's clear in your book that you date your husband for a while before you get married and then it's clear that there's there's in there's a need on your part to not adopt Orthodox Judaism for him that it's going to be yours which is very smart because in later years it also wouldn't have been great if you'd said I only did this for you and that's not a great basis for a marriage so is that what you were going through yes absolutely somebody said you have to be you wish to be Jewish now I didn't hear that cute little line until much more recently but I always felt it was true I didn't want to lose myself you know in the relationship or in a religious community and my husband Jeff is a wonderful man and and tends to be soft-spoken and was never one to to push me in fact he would never have continued to date somebody as belligerent as me unless you know he really had so much respect for me and in every way and including for my intellect and but but he he was patient she's a very patient man and I think that he saw that deep down I had certain bedrock values that were we would today we call them conservative but they're really not they were just traditional and the kind of values that everybody until pretty recently agreed on were normative you know the family you know family and that sort of thing and as I saw by starting to learn what the Torah really said at least a little of it and learning the inside learning was so exciting for me it was like a journalistic hunt and being a journalist I loved getting the story behind the story when you're in a fantastic class Asheer and the teacher the rabbi or whoever it is who's teaching is peeling back the layers of what does this word mean where else have we seen this word what are the implications of it to me as somebody who loves language it was fabulous and I was mind-blowing it was intellectually incredibly stimulating it showed the depth of Torah it showed that this wasn't just some kind of blindly following system it meant that there was engagement on every level a spiritual intellectual and emotional I couldn't resist all that Wow it's you make it sound so exciting because I'm now I'm seeing it from your perspective as a journalist like investigative journalists what really happened over there with Joshua right stay tuned that's great so when you get married and have kids how do you decide how do you educate your kids because some of the very traditional Jewish education can be a little more closed minded but both of you coming from backgrounds that were very much open to the world I mean you went to UC Berkeley I would imagine you had some choices to make here what you expose your kids to how much Torah to give them so that's not in the book but how were you able were you able to reconcile that given the choices that we have today it's a great question and it was hard then and I think it's much harder even just one generation later because of the the media when arc when we were raising our kids videogames were they weren't new but they were something that had become kind of ubiquitous and trying to create limits around that and trying to find a balance between involvement and engagement and with some parts of the secular world versus not it was a balance and it it's hard it's hard to do I mean my husband took took the kids to a lot of Dodger games and it was great you want to think what's what's more wholesome than that it's not oh no we so host them anymore because everybody's swearing a blue streak now do you want your young kids to be you know hearing that no you don't but then do you do you seal them off there's no such thing as sealing them off so it all I can say is it's hard you have to you have to give your kids a little you've got to give them some space you have to give them a little bit of rope but not enough to hang themselves you have to use your judgment and you have to be open but it's it's something that's a very very individual some kids just naturally one of our kids would naturally much more I don't know spiritually centered and didn't want to exposed and that was just who he is you know other kids want more others gravitate more parenting is hard we see it in the Torah how hard it is and with from the same home the same parents how siblings can be so different so all I can say is it's hard and you have to really look at each each child and do the best for him or her with what what's gonna work we felt it was very important not to cut off everything I could never have lived like that some of our kids have chosen to live in a more sequestered way but I well that's not for me I have much more sympathy for it now when I look around and see what's out there and really truly how coarse and vulgar and depressing a lot of what goes on out goes on out there is and look how unhappy people are - and how did it work with your extended family I mean both of you coming from families that are not necessarily traditional and let's say that keeping kosher and you go to this grandparent or that aunt and uncle were you able to negotiate these minefields how did that work let's just say I've done a lot of cooking over the decades and you know to make Thanksgiving for the whole family it meant I was making Thanksgiving you know and certainly we invited family for a number of Chavez's and of course you know the big holidays I couldn't always do it for every holiday and invite everybody but I did it a lot we tried a few times to go elsewhere but we saw it was just getting too complicated there were too many compromises that we had to make and we felt that we were too uncomfortable it's really hard it's a hard thing for ballet chuhwa not to make their families feel like they are rejecting them choosing one thing I just read this last night and Rabbi sacks was talking about this parsha with the the blessings that even though Jacob was chosen it didn't mean that a sub was rejected although it felt like a rejection so those of us who are choosing Torah and Torah observance it doesn't mean we're rejecting the family but the family some members of it can feel rejected it's a it's a delicate dance and I think that both ballet chuva have to work as hard as they can but also the family members also need to try and be accommodating so tell us about your other books and and after that because I believe this is your fifth book why you chose to write this book now because you're ready have grandchildren you're writing about what happened 2530 years ago so if there was a like this was this book cooking in you for a while already were you not gonna write it it's something happened now but first I want this tell them the listeners because you said you have a fan club so clearly you're out there so what have you been doing until this book came out my whole career has been writing and editing and a lot of humor work I've always loved writing humor I have three humor books the first one is called carpal tunnel syndrome motherhood as shuttle diplomacy even though I wrote it 16 years ago it's still the one that people said oh you're the one who wrote carpal tunnel syndrome and I smile I kind of grit my teeth and I think yeah I had a few more since then that's the gun over the writers response and till we eat again a second helping and the women's daily irony supplement they're all nice little books they're all available online and then a timeless humor yeah they actually held up very very well and why the and then I co-wrote a book on MBA admissions called MBA admissions for Smarties with Linda Abraham why this book over the past 10 years or so I started to think that maybe I should write my story because enough time had gone by where I really had perspective I wasn't still new in it I really saw how it had worked out not only for me but I've observed you know so many other people and how it had worked out for them I felt that I could say something of substance about this experience it's also part of the the Jewish experience of my time the the ball chuva phenomenon which is not now what it was 20 years ago 25 years ago but still tens of thousands of people did what I did and there are their stories have not been told what really put the fire under my feet was over the past several years there have been a spate of memoirs that were written by people who grew up mostly in Hasidic communities or joined Hasidic communities only to leave them in much pain and anger and while I am not disputing anything anybody said I don't question anybody's right to tell their story those were the only stories about Orthodox Jews in America that were getting out there and reaching a secular audience at a non-jewish audience because the media loves stories like that religion as abuse stories they love those stories so it was very hard for me primarily as a Jew but also as a writer have made me crazy to see these people who have no you know writing credentials just to speak of they haven't spent years building up their platform but boy they they didn't have any trouble getting on NPR they didn't have any trouble getting agents and and publishers it made me very upset and I know what sounds like sour grapes but I really more than that part of it was know there while there are many people who say goodbye there are people like me who say hello and are glad they did and stayed and I wanted to try to start to level the playing field a little until the good side of the story again without the sugarcoating warts-and-all but it's mostly been wonderful and and blessed and often funny and poignant and now our kids are all grown we have three grandchildren and I couldn't ask for a better return on investment okay you also have a column or you write for different newspapers in addition to being an author I don't have a column regularly I show it yes I'm on H comm very very frequently recently I've done a lot of topical stories I wrote about the unfortunate Harvey Weinstein case and and about hookup culture on campus I tackle a lot of very serious societal issues through a Jewish lens I do a lot of that so right now I'm very busy also coaching a couple of clients with their books and promoting the book so I'm pretty busy but writing is next to my family the love of my life so what is your feeling about the tremendous level of assimilation here I mean here I read your book and there's such love that comes through for Judaism for the Jewish people that you embraced on your own yet at the same time what we have here what I see every time I come to the States more and more is Jews leaving leaving not necessarily out of anger like you mentioned some of the books that were written we're you know high profile I'm out of here Orthodox Jews who go secular but just kind of adrift not jumping off a cliff but just like adrift it's just not that important to be Jewish it's not that important to find a Jewish spouse it's not that important to raise your children with any kind of Jewish identity beyond you know a like ask almost a symbolic one so you went the other way you swam against the tide even though at the time a lot of people did in the post Woodstock Six Day War era which i think is not coincidental that a lot of things happen during that time period but now we're seeing it's going the other way what is your feeling about that I think that as Jews were obligated to be optimistic and it's true that if you looking around everything you say is true it is almost impossible to find somebody who's in my age bracket even if they marry Jews whose kids who are now grown up in their 20s say are married or interested in being married or interested in marrying Jewish it's not just that that their Jewish involvement is is almost nil it's that they're not even getting married that's that's a huge thing so it's scary but I think we just have to keep doing what we do and I am still hopeful that more people will have it a certain awakening one thing that I wrote about in my book is that concept of the pentalogy the the small spark of Jewishness that we believe is in every Jew and I give the example in my book of a friend of mine who was secular married to a non Jew and she called me in tears when her first son was born and she discovered that her husband didn't want their son to have a circumcision now she married out she did nothing religiously Jewishly but she was so shocked and upset by this and she said I don't know why I feel this way and I said you know I think this is just primal this is part of being a Jew so you never know where wake ups are going to come from and I just I think we just have to do what everything that we can do to share share what we can share about our Jewish lives and and the benefits of it and the rest is going to be up to Hashem so this was kind of off the topic of your book with something you said a couple of minutes ago I interviewed years ago woman actually a psychiatrist who was appalled at the level of suicides of young women on campus that's risen steadily over the years and one of her conclusions was as you just kind of mentioned it's one of the topics that you've dealt with in your columns said a lot of it has to do with that hookup scene on campuses that women are not built to just you know go on with it like that we're emotional we've become attached and that a lot of this pressure to just you know be who we like everybody else was actually causing a lot of these girls to to even commit suicide or to go into massive depression so I see your feminist side here still alive and well now were you writing this column from a religious perspective let's say a moral perspective you shouldn't sleep around or from a perspective of girls like what's going on here because for me the torah's ideas are very much not not anti-feminist at all Torah feminism I don't think is phenomenal and I don't think people appreciate it enough but more like an understanding that women to some are different than men and the same things that men can do or maybe shouldn't do but do do don't apply to women where was the impetus for that particular column it just struck struck right so I done two stories like this they're both on acecomm and I encourage anybody who's interested in this topic to look it up one was done several years ago it was about the book called unprotected by dr. Miriam Grossman who who first had to publish her book under the name Anonymous and she was a campus psychiatrist at UCLA so I wrote that story for H but from the the standpoint of what she found which was this very frightening and very clear connection between anxiety and depression and all kinds of things but not just between with women after you know too many affairs or abortions she found it also in men yes in young sensitive men who who could not identify you could not understand why they were feeling depressed or down and often it was also related their sensitivity had been you know hurt the much more recent story I did very much on the same topic was based on dr. Lisa Wade's book called what does it hook up the campus of sexual campus culture or something like that much more recently dr. Waite is is not Jewish he's not socially conservative but in her own research also she's seeing the the devastating effect of college students who are judged like that in you know in a look do I want you tonight or do I not want you tonight imagine the devastation you know were the feminists feminists so this also when I write these stories for Asia of course at the at some point in the story I'm I'm putting in a plug for for Jewish values which are so antithetical to this sort of cheap and degradation kind of you know interactions which leave people feeling depleted and depressed and it's so unfair our young people today are have been given such a raw deal now I hear this from both Jews and Christians who were worried that without those Bible values a lot I'm not talking about in a theocratic aligned of way or theological kind of way there's a lot of wisdom in this book that was written so long ago about people and how people behave and what people are sensitive to and a lot of that's getting thrown out in the name of progress or whatever it is and and as a parent and as a grandmother also it's really frightening the kind of world that is seen is what you have to do to be accepted and there are a lot of beautiful things in the toe even if you're not Jewish or even if you're not so-called observant I agree with you a hundred percent I hate the term religious and secular because everybody's got their own relationship with God in their own level of things and and and we can't judge or shouldn't judge or be judged on that level so uh so I'm glad to see and it is Miriam Grossman whose name's gave me because names escape me now um that that I interviewed a few years ago and how shocked she was by what she was finding and I think it's only gotten worse since then yeah angry also as someone who's been in journalism for so long that journalists who know better who have the information about the connection between say for example a lot of STDs sexually transmitted diseases and later infertility and all kinds of things they don't they keep that quiet they keep that quiet but meanwhile you know if there's a new food dye for apples or something like that that wasn't tested for fifteen years you know everybody's screaming so when it comes to things in the physical world you can't be careful enough out there but when it comes to things in that affect us at our very core emotionally spiritually you know I I'm truly I'm at a loss for words as to how people can think that it's just okay don't we want to do a little testing here first before we tell the whole world sure go ahead do this try this and I imagine I don't think Hashem has any one of us on a journey that he didn't want us to be on and I think that you have a voice because of your background you didn't grow up in a sheltered orthodox home where you're just kind of speaking out of your hats as it were because you you went to Berkeley and you grew up in that world and you went to university so I think that gives you really a lot of credibility to talk about those you know the two different joy the joy so that people can make and the pressures of the outside world can you give us a little bit of a clue as to maybe your next column or the next idea that you're thinking about right about it sounds like you don't keep too many things in the closet like you everything's everything you should it should be discussed and not hidden well a funny one is I just saw that I think it's allure magazine has now banned the term anti-aging in their magazine which is pretty much a riot because they all have used Photoshop and whatever has replaced Photoshop to make everybody look 14 right so there's they're using other phrases but I'm very interested in the topic of women's vanity because I feel it also and yet I look in the mirror and I'm getting older and there's only so much I can afford and so I want to make fun of of that you know anta my anti-aging and my pro aging you know what am i and then I just I don't know my my editor from Ash will sometimes say here this is hot write about it and so I never know what's going to come and I love that because that's just the journalism part of me that I just love to start you know oh I did something on what's-his-name who did those awful jokes on Saturday Night Live and but I I'm always learning Larry David yeah and I found that there was a documentary from last year about humor based in the Holocaust so they they interviewed Carl Reiner from the producers I learned a lot from that and it helped ground my story so I love what I do because I'm always learning new things but I don't have a list right now I'm just kind of being tossed a little bit here and they are depending on what what each new day brings what the new cycle brings and what I need to do to promote my nice little memoir the skeptic and the rabbi falling in love with so would you go to I know you have at the end of the book you have like a list of questions and things that can come up as topics oh you do do you run or would you run let's say a workshop on that if there was a book club that was reading your book and wanted to invite you in is that something that you would do and if so how would people get in touch with you oh they'll be fantastic sure people can reach me through my website which is Judy Gruen comm Ju dy gr u en there's contact form I I have done Skype based book group meetings with people if somebody wants to bring me out and it's not too far afield I would love to I love to meet people I love to talk to people and I would appreciate any of those opportunities to have meaningful discussions about these really important topics because they're important for everybody because they're about how you're living your life whether you are moving toward Jewish engagement or Christian engagement are you moving or are you static and I think that's a lot of what the book really is underscoring is where are we going you know how do we make those decisions so that's that's really what it's about one of my editors kept using the phrase your TrueNorth she said Judy you know this is all about how you found your true north and I hadn't heard that expression but I really I started using it and and I I loved it it's you know where are you going what what's your what's the direction you're meant to be going and yes I absolutely agree with you you know Hashem puts us all where we're supposed to be and we have to figure out how to make the most of it I think I was definitely meant to be put on this wonderful road even though it was an unexpected one so just in terms of direction in Hebrew the word for your conscience and North are pretty much the same word in Hebrew you're much spoon is your conscience and Sephora is north so when you're editors saying to you where's your north it's more than just the direction it's also you know where is that that leading you in terms of how you think it's just another example of the brilliance of Hebrew and the psychological meanings that we get see that's so exciting okay Judy grew thank you so much for joining me today everybody I highly recommend the skeptic and the rabbi falling in love with faith almost like in her Mabon Beck becomes religious kind of bulk that's what funny humorous self-deprecating at times like when you almost scalded yourself on your wedding day but ultimately a very very honest memoir of a very big part of your journey which I know that you're still on and many of us are so thank you so much for joining me today and everyone I hope you enjoyed the interview I want to thank and in Tabitha and Jeremy and Arie and everybody at the Land of Israel Network who make it possible for me to broadcast every week and you can always be in touch with me everyone Eve at the Land of Israel com take care everybody goodbye for now