The Kosher Complex or How a Muffin Changed my Life

[Music]

on a fateful winner’s day

in 2019 standing in front of the baked

goods display of the brandeis university

c

store i found myself at a moral

crossroads

i was staring at this scrumptious

looking chocolate chip muffin and

it was making me feel things and

no it’s not because i was worried about

the calories i pride myself on being

somebody who reliably goes for cake over

cucumbers at any opportunity

no something else about the muffin was

leaving a pit in my stomach

it wasn’t kosher well

what is kosher and what about the muffin

falling outside of that category left me

feeling so

contemplative on that fateful winter’s

day

come join me on a journey through time

back to my humble upbringings in the

world of modern orthodox jewry

where together we’ll put my childhood

under a microscope and find out why

a verboten chocolate chip muffin

provoked an epiphany in me

that would change my life forever

now i know what you’re thinking hot damn

he looks so much cuter when he’s dressed

up as a rabbi

thank you between the years of 1998 and

2008

i was raised by my parents bonnie and ed

weintraub in the small but strong

orthodox jewish community of harrisburg

pennsylvania

they cared deeply about raising me with

a lifestyle that was rooted in jewish

ritual traditions

and customs along with my parents and

two sisters

i observed the strict jewish laws of

kosher and sabbath

we would cease all work from sundown on

friday until there were three stars

out in the sky on saturday night we did

not mix meat or dairy

but beyond that only ate foods that were

specially marked as

kosher on their label now you might ask

was that limiting not at all

i loved growing up in harrisburg keeping

the sabbath or keeping shabbat as i

would call it

was then and remains today a highlight

of my week

and believe it or not keeping kosher

wasn’t that hard

in fact most of the food at your local

supermarket aside from

pork lots of seafood and the mcdonald’s

next door to it is kosher

and especially marked with symbols like

these

you know how you don’t eat expired food

because it can make you sick well

if i had to put keeping kosher in

layman’s terms i’d say that eating

non-kosher according to my upbringing

is comparable to eating expired food but

for your soul

so while most foods you see are kosher

things like mainstream marshmallows for

instance are not because they have pig

gelatin in them

if i had a bonfire with you roasted one

of those bad boys and popped it into my

mouth

i could burst into flames

at least that’s how i felt growing up

and even into my emerging adulthood

so while the muffin in the sea store was

not

wilbur from charlotte’s webinar wax

paper baking cup per se

it was a close second because it was not

a wrapper

which meant that there was no guarantee

it was made under kosher supervision

which meant that it wasn’t kosher which

meant that if i took it out of the

cabinet and had a bite of its forbidden

fruit i’d become instantly aware of my

own nakedness and banished from the

garden of eden

flanked by a storm of hellfire along

with the inevitable scrutiny of god

almighty and my peers

scary i know we all have adam and eve

moments though

right but when evil inclinations give us

a call i think we all know better to

just

let the phone ring and ask satan to

please leave a message at the beep

and it was with such an attitude that i

led my life

after i left harrisburg in 2008.

i was almost 10 years old then and in

february of that year

my mother passed away after a long

battle with breast cancer

and my dad had already passed away in

2003 from a brain tumor so it would have

been super irresponsible for the adults

in mind my sister’s lives to let us

live on our own needless to say we had

to move

i’m sorry i forgot to tell you my dad

died before my mom

i’ve been told more recently that it’s

traditional to present death in a

chronological order so

my bad oh also i’m gay

yeah i forget that sometimes too three

years on from coming out and i finally

find that fact about myself a little

boring

i mean it always pales in comparison to

when i come out to people as an orphan

so and do not worry not to worry

all of this information is relevant to

my encounter with the muffin in the c

store it all comes full circle in a

super satisfying way tied up in a neat

little bow so stick around

i don’t just come out as gay and an

orphan as a party trick

i do it to inform plot and

character now where are we

ah yes so at this point i am nine years

old gay

though not out of the closet yet an

orphan

and a modern orthodox jew with the

latter of those four things being the

most serious of my conditions

because after leaving harrisburg

at which point i moved in to my aunt and

uncle’s house in queens new york

being an orthodox jew turned out to be a

lot more than just

rituals and traditions for me keeping

shabbat

keeping kosher wearing a kippah

these were now what little i could do to

keep the memory of my parents

and by extension the love for judaism

that they’d instilled in me

alive it was the most powerful memory i

had left of them

to let go of any of it felt to me like

i’d be retroactively letting go of my

parents

this keeper that i just pointed to well

first things first is called the kippah

it is traditional garb for jews all

across the gender spectrum and

is traditionally worn during the

performance of jewish rituals such as

prayer services

however in the orthodox community

only men wear them with rare exceptions

and we wear them

all the time and believe it or not these

little suckers can even be fashion

statements

indeed keep us like braziers come in all

shape sizes and colors that can be

tailored fit to their wearer’s

individual taste

but more than that primarily

the kipa’s function is to serve as a

constant reminder of god’s

all-encompassing presence god

is always watching god is with you when

you walk god is listening when you pray

he knows when you are sleeping he knows

when you’re awake

he knows when you’re lusting over now

and coaching from heaven so you better

watch your back if you want your slights

to find the world to come for heaven’s

sake

don’t worry for me i think that

wearing a keep is marginally more of a

fashion statement than it is a means by

which i religiously fear-monger myself

though i think it goes without saying

that

mendel has a bit of a kosher complex

i never have enjoyed the luxurious

anonymity of

average muffin eaters or as they are

more commonly known

people because when you spend

every day in public wearing a statement

of your faith on your head you become

very conscious of how you behave in

religious contexts and outside of them

for instance when i eat a muffin i’m not

just some shmo eating a muffin

i am a jew eating a muffin and when i

was looking at that chocolate chip

muffin in the sea store that winter in

2019 on a day that saw the space

filled with my fellow orthodox jews who

felt like a jury of my peers

i was a jew about to take a non-kosher

muffin

where i come from jews who take

non-kosher muffins are designated as

off the dara or off the path

and you are either on the dara or you

are off of it it’s very black and white

and for my adolescence i felt

very strange about myself because there

are all these things going on in me that

were not supposed to go

on in a good jewish boy walking straight

on the path

i loved movies which by many in my

community

were considered inappropriate and a

waste of time

i had questions about my faith that were

largely met with rebuke or

altogether ignored and finally

i found myself attracted to men all

while practicing judaism in a discipline

that interprets its founding text as

unequivocally

rejecting same-sex relationships

and knowing that all these things that

felt so inherent to my being

were unacceptable made me feel terribly

uncomfortable in my own skin

i felt like a walking desecration of my

community

going off the darach even worse so i

felt like i was desecrating my parents

memory

in the process and i didn’t think i had

anybody i could talk to about it

i wasn’t myself every so often

i would let out a cry for help

consciously or not

like in my high school yearbook when my

senior quote from the late great

fred rogers pay no attention to the

dolls in the picture was

the greatest gift you ever give is your

honest

self so

now that you have all that information

i’m sure you can

start to piece together the thoughts and

feelings that were going on in my mind

when i came to the understanding inside

that

i really wanted to take that muffin like

i wanted it so bad

and at that point i was almost three

years out of the closet and figured i

definitely done

worse as far as the jewish hierarchy of

sin is concerned

but even as i considered that and the

muffin

i felt god’s presence hovering over me

i began to worry that if my jewish

friends saw me

take the muffin they wouldn’t just judge

me but they’d probably write home about

it with a nice little

letter along the lines of you wouldn’t

believe it but i saw mendel weintraub

take a non-kosher muffin and

i think he’s off the darach now

i gave many a chocolate chip about what

my fellow jews thought of me

why well enter a sociologist by the name

of

charles horton cooley now i’m not saying

all my insecurities back then are

cooley’s fault i’m just saying that

cooley came up with a theory that serves

as a very good explanation for them

two very different things now

in 29 now

in 1902 when he was teaching at the

university of michigan

cooley published human nature and the

social order

in it he introduces his most famous

sociological theory

the theory of the self or the looking

glass self

according to this theory our self

perception is not so much a product of

our self-consciousness

so much as our self-consciousness is a

reflection

of our internalized fantasies about how

other people

judge us as cooley puts it

we are afraid to seem evasive in the

presence of a straightforward man

cowardly in the presence of a brave one

grossed in the eyes of a refined one

and so on and the psychological

manifestation

of the looking glass self is a

three-step process that begins with

one the imagination of our appearance

to the other person or self-perception

followed by two the imagination of his

judgment

of that appearance or self reflection

followed finally by

three some sort of self-feeling such as

pride

or mortification sound familiar

of course it does because cooley’s three

steps are precisely what were running

through my mind as i grappled with the

prospect of taking a non-kosher muffin

in the presence of my non-jewish friends

let’s break it down i was wearing a

kippah

therefore appearing as an orthodox jew

so it must have been that i was judged

by virtue of that fact alone

self-perception and with that in mind

my jewish friends must have been

thinking oh my god is he about to take a

non-kosher muffin

self-reflection and finally my concept

of their judgment sank in and pulled me

down with it into an ocean of hellfire

self-consciousness

but in the immortal words of my mother

bonnie weintraub

feelings are not facts and my paranoid

intuition that my friends were going to

rat me out to the shtetl was completely

baseless

my friends at brandeis were then and

still are some of the most fiercely

supportive people in my life and i know

for a fact and i say this with love

that they’ve all taken muffins of their

own in their day

and as i realized that i came to

understand

that the voice telling me i can’t was

not coming from outside

it was a self-sustaining force of

negative energy that i had been feeding

every day with conspiracies against

myself

and with that part of me finally

awakened i could look

at my reflection superimposed in the

window

between me and the contents of the

pastry cabinet and realize

oh my god my whole life has been a

series of muffins

i told myself that i cannot love movies

because i’m jewish i told myself that i

cannot be gay because i am jewish

i told myself that i did not deserve

love because i am jewish

i told myself that i was desecrating my

parents memory by being

the wrong kind of jewish

i believed that i deserved nothing

because of everything i

am i wasn’t kosher

feelings are not facts inside every one

of us

is a muffin taker trying to claw its way

out for a chance to grab

at the baked goods of opportunity that

life presents in front of us

every day we believe that we are

protecting ourselves from the pain that

comes with the judgment of others when

we don’t go after the things we care

about but

in doing so we only cause ourselves more

agony

people say this is some evolutionary

trait a means of instinctual survival

fight or flight right

when we don’t go after the things we

care about that is not fight or flight

that is fight and flight we are

simultaneously fighting

our inner voices and fleeing our

greatest potential

before we ever fight ourselves and flee

ourselves

before we tell ourselves we aren’t

kosher

a muffin of the mind appears begging us

to take a bite that is the first

instinct

not to run away our default setting is

not supposed to be i

can’t we can make it i can

now i’m going to ask you for a moment of

vulnerability

close your eyes and ask yourself

what is the muffin in your life now it

could be any flavor

coffee corn whole wheat or god forbid

bran

it could be that job you don’t know if

you should apply for it could be that

date you’re not sure you should

ask somebody out on what does it taste

like

i’ll join you

for me right now in this moment

my muffin is this ted talk

i don’t know who is going to see it once

it’s out in public and it could be

anybody

it could be people who reject the

message i am trying to spread

it could be my grandparents who still

don’t know that i came out

but i’m standing here today because i

believe

in what i have to offer and i know i’m

going to be okay

what do you have to offer to yourself

and to the world focus on that

you can open your eyes now and through

this short exercise i hope you are able

to realize one of two things

one that you can take the muffin and two

which i hope none of

you noticed is that your wallet is gone

i genuinely believe that the greatest

gift we can ever give

is our honest selves and when

you don’t go after the things that you

are passionate about you are not just

depriving yourself

you’re depriving the world as

i have grown more in touch with my true

self i’ve become a better friend

a kinder brother a stronger leader

and a few pounds heavier because some

muffins just have more calories

than others i wear my kippah every day

not only because i am proud to be jewish

but because in doing so i get to show

the world

you the rabbi from my high school who

taught ap

psych that said homosexuality is

comparable to cancer

i get to show the students in the closet

who take his class

to this day who believe that they are

less than because of it

i get to show my younger self that there

are jews in the world

who look like me

i stared at that muffin in the winter of

2019

and believe it or not my whole life

flashed before my eyes

but i was no longer merely telling

myself that i wanted it

i told myself mendel nesim weintraub

you owe it to yourself and the world to

take that muffin

and you gotta swallow the whole damn

thing

and i did thank you

you