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