Dr. Sara Schapiro
Subject: Leaving the Hasidic World
Bio: Practicing Neuropsychologist and Sex Therapist
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Leaving the Hasidic World.
Our speaker is Dr. Sara Schapiro who is the granddaughter and sister of Hasidic rabbis. After her arranged marriage went awry, Sara went to college and got her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Adelphi University. She is now a practicing neuropsychologist and a sex therapist who communicates with her Hasidic patients in Yiddish.
I first heard about Sara from my good friend Andy Heller. He told me that he was shopping at Barnes and Noble where he selected a book off the shelf just as another woman was going to grab it. She asked him why he was buying that book, and Andy said the subject was divorce and depression and that it summed up his situation. She admitted that it applied to her situation as well. He asked her out, and a few months ago, I attended their wedding.
I want to hear from Sara about her trauma caused by leaving the Hasidic community and her challenges to fit into secular life.
This podcast is the first of two on Hasidism. Our second speaker will be Ayala Fader who is a Professor at Fordham and the author of Mitzvah Girls and Hidden Heretics.
Sara, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Sara Schapiro:
I was thinking about what I want your listeners to know about leaving the Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox community. My leaving was not intentional. It has been an exceptionally long and painful process.
Most of the TV shows or books give this view that it was awful and controlling, and then it is magical liberation and freedom. What completely gets lost is the pain and conflict between leaving a world behind and trying to integrate into a world that you know nothing about.
What do you leave behind? Friends, you are going to lose most of them. Family really depends on the family.
There is a cocoon that you grew up with. If you follow the rules, if you want to get married, somebody is going to find you a match. You might have an intellectual impairment, you might have a physical disability, it does not matter.
If you want a job, you are going to find a job. It might not be a well-paying job, but somebody out there is going to find it for you. If you have kids and you belong to a Hasidic group and you follow the rules, your kids are accepted into the schools.
There are organizations for literally everything. My favorite organization is Chaverim, which if you get locked out of your home, you have a flat tire, you have a bird stuck in your vent, you call Chaverim, under 30 minutes, somebody is showing up wherever you are to help you. There is what they call a gemach, which is if your kid’s getting married and you cannot afford dresses, they’ll lend it to you. You are having a baby, you can’t afford a stroller, they’ll give it to you.
If you walk down 13th Avenue, which is where all the main stores are in Boro Park, someone is going to greet you. All of this comes with a big price of fitting in. If you follow the rules, this is amazing. If you do not, that’s where the pain is because you’re forced out.
It’s not a true choice, because when you start to realize that you can’t make this work, you’re trading all of this comfort for a world that’s scary and lonely for a long time. While you are doing that, you are told by the people who you’ve respected that you are making a terrible mistake and there’s something wrong with you.
You are leaving all of this behind to a world that you are handicapped in. I think of it in three prongs. There is the employment, the academic, and the social. Employment, odds are you have never done a proper interview, you do not have a proper English education. You do not grow up with the internet. You do not have smartphones. Women do not drive. You do not know anyone in the secular world. So, who do you ask and where do you find a job?
Then you have academics, which was my journey out, leaving the Hasidish community and getting a master’s and then a PhD in psychology. I graduated high school; I had an equivalent of a fifth-grade education. I did not know how to fill out an application for college.
A secular kid usually has career counseling. There is none of that. You are told you should not be doing that. When I contacted my school to send my grades to my college, they refused. I did not know anybody with a PhD or with a master’s in mental health counseling.
Then we have friendship, social. Anything related to the secular world is cut off. You do not know movies, literature, music, TV, the news.
If you are a woman, you don’t speak to a boy and vice versa.
There were silly things that I did not know, like shaking hands when you greet somebody. I remember coming home from one of the first secular parties I went to with my husband at the time, and we were like, “When do you shake hands and when do you hug?”
You think you speak English, but you don’t. There is a lot of Yiddishisms, words that are not words.
Everything you are learning is for the first time. You are trading this very comforting community for something that for a long time you doubt if it is worth it. The pain around that conflict often gets lost when people talk about this story.
Larry Bernstein:
Sara, you come from a family of rabbis. Your grandfather and brothers are rabbis, and that shaped both your upbringing and your match. What does it mean to be the progeny of a rabbi in your community?
Sara Schapiro:
I want to first make a distinction around the type of rabbis. People make this assumption that all Hasidish rabbis are passed down, father to son. My grandfather was a rabbi because his father was a rabbi. My father did not follow in the rabbinical footsteps. He was a diamond dealer. My brothers became rabbis by education, meaning they studied, they got smicha, like a degree. They are academic rabbis rather than a rabbi just because their father was.
In my family, education was important. That is how there was an opening for me to want an education. Even though I took the path of a secular education, it was not a complete no, but it was dependent on if my husband is going to give me permission.
When my parents were considering a match, they had to find somebody who came from a rabbinical family because it’s a caste system. But it needed to be somebody who is an outlier enough who was going to be okay with me going to college. That is where things started to go wrong. My husband gets picked based on that he is from a rabbinical family. Word on the street is that he is more what they call “with it.” That’s the term for somebody who has more lenient ideas around Hasidish life.
Your parents decide if this boy is suitable for you. Then you meet in your parents’ dining room over an hour, and you have a conversation. I had two orders of business. I would like to go to college. I’d like to drive. Women do not drive. Those were the two things I needed to hear that he will allow me to do. Then, I will marry you. He said yes to both.
We met two more times, an hour each. The third time his grandmother came with him, which is a message of you are getting engaged. I got engaged, got married four months later. I was nineteen and two days. Right away he tells me, I am not religious.
Larry Bernstein:
Did the two of you discuss what kind of life that you both wanted, how many kids you would have, how religious you would be?
Sara Schapiro:
I would say it’s so unnecessary. Children, you are expected to have as many as you possibly can. If you decide not to, you usually must ask a rabbi for permission to take birth control. They give it easily. Nobody discusses the number of children and level of religion, because you are expected to follow whatever group your husband belongs to.
Larry Bernstein:
What Hasidic sect did you and your first husband belong?
Sara Schapiro:
I belonged to Belz, and he belonged to Bobov. The reason why we were matched, usually they stay within their communities, was because we were both from rabbinical families.
Larry Bernstein:
I assume that’s within both the Belz and Bobov sects there are not a sufficient number of rabbis’ kids in any given year to find a match, and as a result, you have to seek a marriage partner outside of your sect.
Sara Schapiro:
It is also about what they consider royal blood, keeping it within the families there’s a lot of genetic issues that run into that.
Larry Bernstein:
The other benefit of marrying within Belz is that everyone knows each other. Once you go to a different sect, you do not know those people. Is that where this match went awry, that your parents could not do the proper due diligence that would normally be available with ease?
Sara Schapiro:
It was a combination of lack of information and my parents’ anxiety. They were so worried that word was going to get out that I want to go to college and that would have limited my potential matches. So, for them it was we need to get her married as soon as we can.
So, then he tells me he is not religious.
Larry Bernstein:
Does this come out immediately after the wedding? You go home and have your first heart-to-heart?
Sara Schapiro:
I would not even say I have my first heart-to-heart. I woke up in the morning and he was not going to pray. I’m like, “What’s happening here? Why aren’t you following the rules?” That is when he is like, “well, I’m not religious. I haven’t been for years.”
I did not tell my parents. I was horrified. I was shocked. I did not have a good relationship with my parents at the time. I had one mission, which was I wanted to go to college, and I was not going to risk that. If I told my parents they were going to tell me to get divorced.
At some point he said to me, you can leave. You have a right to leave. But I did not want to. I thought I loved him at the time. There was a part of me that was excited to see what this other life looks like.
I saw it as wow, I am not being criticized and reprimanded for the color of my tights, for the length of my skirt, for the length of my sleeves. I had my freedoms, but I stayed religious for a long time. Things started to break down when he interfered with my ability of staying religious. During my PhD is when I stopped being religious.
Larry Bernstein:
I am surprised. I assumed that when you discovered your husband was not religious, that you felt betrayed, and that he had been dishonest during the engagement process. Instead, you were excited to be with the secular world. It is almost as if both sides assumed during the match that the other was capable of being a heretic.
Sara Schapiro:
I felt betrayed and shocked. But my response was not seeking a divorce because I had my own stuff that I wanted and could not imagine that I would have been able to get it any other way.
I was ashamed that other people were going to know. There is one thing about you doing it in private and there is another about neighbors knowing. I was fine as long as things were in private because that allowed us to exist. When he got a motorcycle, I was horrified. I begged him not to do it, like the neighbors are going to see.
Larry Bernstein:
You did not want to follow the strict protocols of your ultra-orthodox sect, but you wanted to be perceived as complying by your peers.
Sara Schapiro:
Yes, that’s a good summary.
Larry Bernstein:
In Ayala’s Fader’s book Hidden Heretics, there are stories of young women who leave home in Hasidic garb, get on the train to Manhattan, change their clothes, and are free to be secular.
Sara Schapiro:
That was me for a long time. I was lucky because I drove, so I had an entire wardrobe in my trunk. I would leave my house in a skirt, in a wig, get into the car, drive to New York City, and I would have leggings or pants underneath and I would take my skirt off; I would take my wig off. Right before coming back into Boro Park, I would redress in my car.
When I go to Boro Park, I still put on a wig, and I still dress modestly. It’s out of respect to my family. It’s easier for me to do it now than it was ten years ago when I had a battle and something to prove. Now I am fine putting this costume on for a little bit. Anyway, those wigs look amazing.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell me about your wigs.
Sara Schapiro:
When you are married, you are required to wear a wig. My family, because they are a rabbinical family, they will wear a wig plus a hat on top of it. You can tell that it is a wig. Then the more progressive women, they will wear wigs that really look like their hair. They can range between $3000 to $7000.
Most Hasidish women shave their hair underneath. I decided not to shave my hair when I was newly married. That was horrifying. That comes back to why my ex-husband, and I fit because he did not bother me. He’s like, “Do whatever you want, I don’t care.” For any other Hasidish guy, it would have been a terrible thing that his wife is not shaving her hair.
Larry Bernstein:
I attended your second wedding, and your family clearly loves you.
Sara Schapiro:
They do. I want to stress that it is very unique. I have been incredibly privileged. I don’t think any of my peers have had the experience with family the way that I did. My father is not alive anymore. He died very tragically at sixty-one years old. He was the leader in demanding that my family accept me and be okay with who I am. You saw my wedding, there was definitely things that I did to make them feel comfortable.
Larry Bernstein:
How did your family respond when they found out that your ex-husband had left the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
At first my father pretty much stopped talking to us. He could not look at us, he was devastated. My mother tried a little bit more, telling me, just do not wear this when you come to the house. You are making your brothers uncomfortable. For a while we were pretty much estranged.
Then my parents joined this group, and it is written about in Hidden Heretics, the emphasis was accepting the children. Many of the families’ children were in rehab, could not hold down a job. Here I was in college. They looked at each other and they are like, “What are we doing? We are going to lose our relationship with our daughter for no reason because she doesn’t fit in.”
My parents separately wrote an apology letter to me. They got me a denim jacket, which I still have. Denim is a big deal; you are not allowed to wear denim. That was their way of saying, we will accept you. Wear this denim jacket.
My sister and my brothers were always fine with me coming to the house. Many of my peers have been completely cut off by their parents.
My father, all he wanted was for me to get divorced. He was seeing my life evolve into something he was enormously proud of. When I was sitting at his shiva I just kept saying I’m so grateful that I am grieving the father I had a relationship with and not somebody I was estranged from.
Larry Bernstein:
You said that you loved your first husband for a period. The idea that you can meet someone for three hours and fall in love is surprising and incredibly positive to me. Tell us about match making and love.
Sara Schapiro:
The match is based on families. They are assuming if the family matches, then the boy and girl are going to match. The expectation is less about love and more about mutual goals and respect. The women that I did stay in touch with, they all loved their husbands. They thought they were great fathers.
Love evolves differently. Some of my peers were madly in love the day they were married; they were all rainbows and sunshine. Others took it slower, saw it as, this is the man I need to respect. I am going to learn to love him.
I am also a therapist and I work with a lot of Orthodox men and women. I see the side of where things did not go the way that people hoped. They have families, they have children, they want to stay together, but how do they navigate when they feel no love and no connection? The hardest part is when men and women just cannot connect.
Larry Bernstein:
Is that lack of connection uncommon?
Sara Schapiro:
It is very painful, and that is the case for many.
Larry Bernstein:
Your second marriage was a love marriage. In the general population, I hear that half of marriages end in divorce, and that marrying young raises the risk. You married younger than any of my friends, yet hardly anyone gets divorced in the Hasidic community. How should we think about matching as a strategy for marriage?
Sara Schapiro:
I don’t know if it’s about matching. It’s about what are the values and the expectation of this match. For Hasidish people it’s mostly raising a family. For men it’s providing and doing the religious responsibilities, and for women it’s nurturing and taking care of the children. A lot of women work.
There is not an expectation of love. There is an expectation of doing your duties. Love is a bonus. I’m now in a love marriage. Love is step one and that is not the case for Hasidish couples.
Larry Bernstein:
Explain the matching process.
Sara Schapiro:
There’s matchmakers and they get paid for what they do. In 12th grade, a list gets sent to the matchmaker of all the graduating students and their parents and anything that is important. Are they wealthy? Are they a rabbinical family? Is there a problem that we know of? Then he also gets a list of all the graduating boys.
Larry Bernstein:
Is the matchmaker always a woman?
Sara Schapiro:
It’s men or women. My matchmaker was a man. When you are from a rabbinical family like me, it’s pretty limited. They would call my father. They almost always call the husband. They would say, what do you think of this family?
If both sides say yes, they start the information process, which is, in my case, my parents started calling friends, family, and neighbors. Tell us what you know. Everyone lies. That is the biggest problem. In 12th grade, we get a 3-hour lecture on how to give information, and what are the halachic rulings around lying.
Larry Bernstein:
Why do people lie?
Sara Schapiro:
Because of Lashon Hara, you are not allowed to say bad things about someone else.
Larry Bernstein:
Sometimes I’ll try to set two people up, and it never crosses my mind to lie. She’s attractive, she’s funny, she’s got a good job, I think you’d like her. Why lie?
Sara Schapiro:
All the boys are going to be described as he is a great learner, he sits and studies all day, and he’s a great conversationalist. The girls, she is sweet, she’s modest, she’ll be a great mother, she’s a great cook. You get pictures, so you cannot lie about people’s looks, but you can lie about everything else. Mental illness is a big thing that people keep a secret. If somebody knows that someone is on medication or is seeing a therapist, odds are they’re not going to tell.
Larry Bernstein:
If someone is seeing a therapist, what is that a sign of?
Sara Schapiro:
Mental illness. There is a difference between anxiety and schizophrenia. When I was growing up, anyone who saw a therapist was seen as meshuga, which is crazy. The concept of you might just be seeing a therapist for self-growth or for mild depression did not exist. Still, medication is a big deal.
You gather the information. If you like the information you hear, you let the parents know. My mother-in-law at the time met me and she decided I was suitable for her son.
Then they do what is called the bashow, which is the meeting. The boy and the girl sit in the parents’ dining room, and they are having a conversation. Often, the parents are meeting to discuss finances. What is the split around paying for the wedding? If the husband is going to continue studying for a year or two, there is an expectation of support. If the couple wants to move to Israel, there’s an expectation about how long to support them in Israel? The boy and girl come out and tell their parents, do I think this is suitable? Almost always they say yes.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned your father was involved in the match, but knowing my parents, my mother would have run the show and my dad would have been a figurehead. Is the role of the Jewish mother the same in the secular world as in the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
Yes and no. There’s a clear division of labor. My father made all the religious decisions of which schools do we go to. My mother, especially when it came to the matchmaking, ran the show. She did all the phone calls and got all the information and insisted that this was the right match.
One of the ways that things went wrong was my father was hesitant about it. My mother was very much like, “This is the right thing,” and pushed it through.
Larry Bernstein:
Did your father suspect something was not right? Was he onto something?
Sara Schapiro:
Probably. My father has a good intuition but didn’t necessarily know how to articulate it.
Mothers are just as overbearing and meddling as any Jewish mom. They train their daughters. What did you cook for supper today? Are you feeding your husband?
If the husband is not acting the way the mother-in-law likes, she will come at him. Mothers are very, very powerful in that community. If you have a son, they will buy gifts for the son to give to the new wife. Here, I bought a bracelet, give it to her.
Larry Bernstein:
You said everyone matches. That is different from the secular community, where a lot of people are desperate to find a spouse and become despondent. In your community everybody finds someone, which is a blessing.
Sara Schapiro:
There are many people who stay single for a long time and it’s because they’re being realistic. There definitely are single people out there and they call it the shidduch crisis, which is a crisis of matching. But if you want to, someone is going to marry you off.
Larry Bernstein:
How do the attributes of the individual come into play in the matchmaking process?
Sara Schapiro:
For women, physical attraction matters more than anything. Men not so much. For women, being thin and small. Tall is not a plus, which was another challenge that my sister and I faced. My sister’s six feet and I am five nine. Being pretty, blonde is a big plus, even though they all end up going to brown wigs.
After physical attraction, it is wealth. Then there’s rabbinical status, what is your lineage. Then there is status in the community. There is some who are not necessarily wealthy or part of rabbinical families, but they are what is called askan, which is somebody who’s involved, helps people, runs a charity. Then there is obviously the low level of families who do not have money, who don’t have any prestige, and those are what they would call a simple family.
Smart does come up. It is more about how long this man is going to study. It depends on what you are looking for.
I did not want a man who is going to sit and study. I wanted somebody who is going to go out and earn. Is he a hustler?
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned your 5’9, and that’s not desirable. Being attractive in the secular world can mean being curvaceous, and you said that is considered unattractive. Why is that?
Sara Schapiro:
The mothers when they talk about the girls, it will be she is skinny like a broomstick, that was the biggest compliment you can give. I do not know if it is because they all end up being pregnant and gaining weight after. It is more about cute than pretty. Mothers look for cute girls for their boys. Being a redhead is a disaster.
Larry Bernstein:
I come from a long line of redheads, and my daughter Hannah is one. I think redheads are fabulous.
Sara Schapiro:
Well, I’m not a real redhead and when I dyed my hair red, my mother’s friend who has redhead kids approached me and she’s like, “What are you doing? Do you know how devastated I am to have redhead children? There is nothing pretty about this.”
Larry Bernstein:
You come from a very academic family, yet you said that you were not educated. How is that possible?
Sara Schapiro:
I came from an academic family in terms of Hebrew studies. Women are not educated in that way. When I say I did not feel I was educated, it’s secular education. There has been a huge push to educating women. My niece who graduated from the same high school that I went to, took the Regents and her education was close to a public-school education. They skip certain biology, earth science, things that they think are not along Jewish values.
When I was in school, the emphasis was on cooking and sewing. I took five years of sewing instead of taking math. In high school you were able to take math for six months and that was it. We had Holocaust as a subject. In 12th grade I took Laws of Family Purity, which is all the laws around family and what is called Hilchos Yichud, which is being alone with a man, when it is or isn’t okay. We learned all the rules about kosher. My math was probably the level of third grade, up to fractions.
Larry Bernstein:
Did you study English?
Sara Schapiro:
You start to learn English as a language. First grade, second grade, third grade, you are learning the ABCs, but you are not speaking it. You start to speak between your peers probably twelve, thirteen years old.
Larry Bernstein:
What language did you speak with your parents?
Sara Schapiro:
Yiddish.
Larry Bernstein:
And with your siblings?
Sara Schapiro:
Yiddish.
Larry Bernstein:
Are you fabulously proficient in Yiddish?
Sara Schapiro:
I would not say I can write beautiful essays in Yiddish. At least I cannot anymore. I am losing it, even though I do neuropsychological testing and I do it in Yiddish for the Hasidic community. I translate all the tests in Yiddish for them. I guess back then I was able to write a good Yiddish essay.
Larry Bernstein:
You only started speaking English at about twelve, yet when I first met you, it never crossed my mind that English was not your first language. How did you become so proficient?
Sara Schapiro:
I worked hard to get rid of my heavy Yiddish accent. All through my academic career I always worked with tutors.
Larry Bernstein:
I moved to Japan with my wife in 1998 for a year, and it was much more foreign than the New York you describe. I did not speak Japanese, I could not read the signs, and people behaved in ways that were completely foreign. When you put on your leggings and went into Manhattan, you were not going to Tokyo.
Sara Schapiro:
People often use that comparison, like immigrants, and it is not. Yes, things feel foreign, but it’s deeper than that. You are going from a life where everything you do is scripted from the minute you open your eyes. You open your eyes, you say Modeh Ani, which is you thank God for returning your soul. You are constantly battling and undoing what you have been so trained to believe.
The emotional baggage is what is different. When you are an immigrant, things are foreign and confusing, but you’re not coming with guilt. You are not eating and thinking, what I’m doing right now is awful, I’m desecrating my family, my family will disown me over this.
My mom’s Israeli. Her whole family lives in Israel. There was a huge amount of loss. But this is a loss that sometimes does not feel like you chose it, because you get pushed out of the community. It is not a 100% true choice.
You moved with your wife, you had each other. My peers who have left I met later at Footsteps, which is an organization that helps people who are leaving the community. The hardest part, who do you turn to, who do you talk to?
Larry Bernstein:
Are there organizations that support Hasidic people who leave the community?
Sara Schapiro:
There’s Footsteps, which has been around for a long time. They helped me significantly with my education, with mentorship, with helping me get scholarships to pay for my master’s.
The community themselves is shifting. My brother who is a rabbi, he has a shul. They are working on building more of a community center rather than just a shul, where teenagers will have a game room; they will get a library. There is always going to be rules. If you decide to walk in here without a kippah, or bring Peter Luger’s steak, there are always going to be unacceptable. They are trying to create an environment that you can be somewhat different and still stay within our community. It is not fun to leave. It is a horrible choice to have to make.
Larry Bernstein:
Has the high school curriculum changed for girls?
Sara Schapiro:
Completely changed. My generation was so fed up with how we wasted our years that we pushed for better education. They fired a lot of the school principals. Now they evolved into having a board. They realize that if you want women to work, they need to have an education. It’s been about fifteen years.
Larry Bernstein:
Fifteen years is not a lot of time. Nothing happens in 15 years at NYC private schools. What is happening with high school boy’s education?
Sara Schapiro:
The focus is on studying. They are in school at 7 am, they come home at 8 pm and it’s all Hebrew studies. There are no sports. They now have maybe an hour or two of English education.
My brothers always had tutors. You heard my brother speak at my wedding; he still has a heavy accent.
Larry Bernstein:
Do the boys go to college?
Sara Schapiro:
No. They have Jewish programs now. My younger brother got a master’s in social work, but he went to a Jewish program connected to Long Island University, but they take the classes in Brooklyn. It is accredited.
Larry Bernstein:
Is it any good?
Sara Schapiro:
It is watered down. I do not think it is great. That is not where I wanted to go.
Larry Bernstein:
You are a professional sex therapist in the Hasidic community. Tell us about that.
Sara Schapiro:
I got my master’s in mental health counseling. I worked for a clinic that was all sexuality, gender nonconformity. On my website, I wrote that I speak Yiddish. I ended up getting a lot of Hasidish clients who had issues related to sex.
The reason why I did my masters first was because when I came to study for the GREs, the gap was just way too big for me to make up in a couple of months.
I also decided I might as well get a certification in sex therapy, this is very specific, the sexual issues that they were encountering.
My clients were a mix of Hasidish, ultra-Orthodox, and secular patients. I later got my PhD and pivoted a bit to neuropsychology. I do both now.
Larry Bernstein:
Is there anything peculiar to the Hasidic community that is different from your secular clients?
Sara Schapiro:
The relationships evolve differently. When I see a secular client for sex therapy, I can help them go back to a time where they were in love, or they were having enjoyable sex. With the Hasidish clients, I do not have that to fall back on. We are starting ten years into their marriage.
Often one spouse is very resistant. So, I am only seeing one partner and trying to teach them to bring it home. In the secular world I will also have couples where the wife or husband is like, “Leave me out of this.” That is different than my Hasidish clients, their wives are constantly saying, “You shouldn’t be going, therapy’s going to ruin you.”
Larry Bernstein:
Were you able to maintain any of your friend relationships after you left the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
We stayed connected over text from time to time, “Hey, how are you?” Our lives just are so different. Some were an intentional cutoff and some, there is just nothing left.
Larry Bernstein:
You are part of my secular world now. Are you saying you cannot be in my world and their world at the same time?
Sara Schapiro:
I could. I am like that with my family. We are in such different life stages. They all have five plus kids. Do I miss them? They are busy. I am busy. I am not that motivated. It does not fulfill me anymore. We have nothing in common to talk about.
There’s that world that I miss, and it is a longing for a world that does not want you. It is a complicated type of grief. But I cannot necessarily say I miss them. I am incredibly happy with my current friends.
Larry Bernstein:
How is the internet used in the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
Internet in the homes is pretty much not allowed. If you have internet in your home, you must prove to your school that it is related to business, and you also need to have a filter. All other households must go to an internet kiosk. All over Boro Park, all over Williamsburg, you can go to a store that has a computer, very filtered internet, and the screens are facing to the center, so the monitor can always see what everyone is doing on their computer.
Larry Bernstein:
As a teenager you were a Hasidic rebel. What does that mean?
Sara Schapiro:
My dress probably the most. I was not doing anything crazy. If the school said you are only allowed to wear navy shoes, I came with gold shoes. If the school said no ribbons in the hair, I came with ribbons. You weren’t allowed to wear gel in your hair. I came with slick back, gel. I remember being called into the principal’s office and she was like, “Just make your hair normal,” and I’m like, “What’s normal?”
I would be sent home to go change. Eventually I was told to find a different school.
Larry Bernstein:
What did your mother say about all this? She knew when you were walking out of the house with gel in your hair.
Sara Schapiro:
She would yell, sometimes I would sneak out. I came with a skirt that had leather on it once, which leather is not allowed, so my mom got a call. I got hold of an iPod with secular music on it that my parents found. They confiscated it. I look different that is probably the biggest thing.
Larry Bernstein:
What upset your parents, was it the principal’s anger, or the risk to your marriage match?
Sara Schapiro:
It was both. I remember my father saying to me, I am not finding you another school. I was on school number four. They were worried about that, and then they were worried about the matchmaking. I said in school that I want to go to college. So of course, the principal called my parents.
My parents, to their credit, said, “You can go to college if your husband lets you, but you have to keep your mouth shut.” I tested the system a lot, but I would not have left if not for my ex-husband.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think that you have been happy if you had stayed in the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
No, because it does not align with my values. I believe that women should do whatever it is their heart desires if they are not hurting anyone. I believe that kids should be able to do that. If a boy wants to play basketball, let him play basketball. Women are not allowed to sing in the Hasidish community. What happens to all the women who are musically talented?
There is an incredible singer, Ricky Rose is her name on Instagram. She left the community, I think, because she wanted to be able to sing and now, she does incredible performances in Yiddish.
Larry Bernstein:
What would you advise a young Sara who wanted to leave the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
I don’t wish this on my nieces and nephews. I wish for them that they fit in and that the system works. My advice to others, is do not be afraid to ask for help. What I would say to secular people, if you come across somebody who is leaving the community, offer your help and follow up. Check in with them.
Larry Bernstein:
I know several secular Jews who are angry with the Hasidic community. They feel that not educating boys and girls is a mistake because they are less employable. What would you tell secular Jews about how to think about the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
Overall people are happy in that system.
They all find employment if they want to. Yes, it’s within the Hasidic community. If you’re trying to leave, you don’t want to stay stuck working for that community, which has happened to many of my peers. They have large families and maybe it’s not well-paying jobs, but they have an incredible amount of support from each other.
I’m very happy that there’s a push to improving education and making sure that everyone has some level of command of the English language. But everything else, if it works for them, what do you care if they don’t watch movies? These kids are so pure. They play outside, they play dress up and they are on bikes all the time. Good for my nieces and nephews that they are not stuck playing video games.
I think most of what secular Jews hear is the dark side of things. For the people who it is working, they have no reason to talk about it.
A lot of it is just they see the world very differently.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about in the Hasidic community?
Sara Schapiro:
That they are evolving. During the time that I was leaving, many people were leaving. There was also, unfortunately, a lot of suicide and drug overdoses at the time. It was a wake-up call.
Some of the groups are evolving, especially Belz. The Belz rabbi is keyed into making sure that even if people leave, they can stay connected. For a long time, you were allowed to kick students out of schools. You must do something truly outrageous, like set the school on fire to get kicked out.
He’s also done a buddy system, any Hasidic man who leaves a community gets assigned somebody else in the community that stays in touch with them. Their job is not to keep them in the fold. It is just to check in on them every couple of months. They have a long way to go, but they are trying.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Sara for joining us.
Tune in next week for our second podcast on Hasidism with Ayala Fader who is a Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Fordham and the author of two books Mitzvah Girls and Hidden Heretics.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was the Fall of Weil Gotschal.
Our speaker was Jeff Hammes the former Managing Partner of Kirkland and Ellis. Jeff explained why Weil Gotschal failed. It was fundamentally caused by Jeff’s strategy to disrupt the top 10 law firms that ultimately made Kirkland and Ellis the most profitable law firm in the world. Hear how Jeff targeted the partnership lockstep compensation scheme by paying for performance and not seniority.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, The Fall of Weil Gotschal, here.
