Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls
Stephanie Wellen Levine, New University Press, 2003
Reviewed by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
Nice reading about nice people trying to make this world a little nicer.
When I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University, I decided to do my honors thesis on The Role of Women in Old World Religious Orders. That brought me to live one week with the Mennonites of "Pennsylvania Dutch" country, and one week with Lubavitcher Hasidim in Crown Heights. The young girls of the Mennonites were blunt: "In our religion, it's clear. Men and women are not equal. Men are the head and women are the helpers. Men run the church, the business, and the society, and women run the home. Nobody tries to be equal. " Then I went to Crown Heights. Everywhere I went, people tried to match me up with "former" Reform Jews, who told me how much happier they were now as women. The young girls equivocated: "We are separate but equal. We are definitely equal in God's sight, but we have different roles to play, different rules. It might seem unequal to you as an outsider, but it isn't." The last interview I had became the title of my thesis. This young ba'alat teshuva (newly religious) girl said to me, "Now I am free- of the need to be free."
Are the young girls whom Stephanie Wellen Levine met in her year in Crown Heights "free of the need to be free"? Unfortunately, she does not go deep enough into analyzing their lives to answer that question. Her book Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls sets out to see if Hasidic girls are able to "cultivate their inner voices" by interviewing seven girls in the Lubavitch community. She got the best and brightest ones, to be sure. And she has prejudices, like most modern feminists, assuming these girls would be squashed, one-dimensional, oppressed creatures. To her surprise, she finds them feisty, spirited, independent, clear, and insightful. They have strong, wonderful friendships. They are bold, but not brazen. She meets the rebels among them and presets them with a colourful stroke. We are taken into this somewhat closed world (though among the Hasidim, the Lubavitchers are certainly the most worldly and open) and given insights into its richness. She exposes the reader to the underlying strength of the girls' convictions that their lives matter, and that each person is valued. It is that spiritual strength that gives the girls their clear "inner voices." The interviews are entertaining and full. She relates the fights as well as the beauty, and shares the pain of the "outsiders" of the community. She is impressed by the sweet teasing and easy comraderie between the girls. In the end, she even makes a convincing argument for gender-segregated activities among adolescents and calls for a move away from the sex-soaked atmosphere that most teens inhabit. She takes the best of Crown Heights sex-segregation- the fact that it allows girls freedom from the demands of always being attractive and accessible to boys- and tries to imagine some form of it in our non-Hasidic, egalitarian world. She isn't altogether successful in that, though, because she doesn't analyze the difference between chosen separation and enforced separation; between taking leadership in a small group of girls and the inability to take leadership for one's entire community; and between individual girls benefiting from periods of separation from boys and an entire system based on the deep-seated belief that male and female are so inherently different that that one difference must inform what they can and cannot do every day of their lives.
The book may not satisfy an intellectual reader with more than a voyeuristic curiosity about how this "exotic" Jewish community lives. Let's admit that many Jews have a marked fascination for how "they" live and what "they" think and why "they" do certain things, thus the popularity of books like Holy Days and Boys 'N The Hood. The author admits: "I will escort you through the girls' lives and minds more for the pure delight of knowing them than for any lessons you might glean." But with a foreword by Carol Gilligan, a foremost researcher whose work In A Different Voice inspired an entire generation to understand masculinity and femininity in a profoundly analytical way, I had hoped for a deeper quest. How does being raised in a spiritual community with such clear and marked gender differentiation impact upon the life of a young girl? This lack of analysis mars the book for readers who want to understand how, in the twenty-first century, a life of traditional values, clear patriarchy and gender obsession is balanced with an independence of spirit. She admits: "..."there is little place for the person who falls beyond basic assumptions about belief, desire, or personality." But she never seems to ask whether those basic assumptions are the problem, or whether the person's own quirks and personality are the problem.
Levine does a splendid job of presenting how the girls cope, and she paints vivid pictures of Shabbat around their family tables. But after a while, it gets repetitive. For example, she explains how all the Bais Rivka girls get invited to each other's weddings at least three times; every time she describes an engagement party she tells us this fact again. She explains Lubavitch philosophy over and over again. She spends too much time describing the foods, the houses, the neighbourhood, and the small talk and not enough time probing the questions and assumptions of her subjects.
She is unapologetic about her lack of desire to become a ba'alat teshuva even after a year with the strongest Jewish outreach group in the world. I was grateful to see her acknowledge that "...I may have received a somewhat packaged vision of the truth, a movie version as opposed to messy, haphazard lives." Let's face it, that's what outreach is. She calls herself "an extremely sympathetic skeptic" and indeed she portrays the girls, even the so-called "troubled" ones (who wear short skirts or go to secular colleges) very sympathetically, because they are, truly, nice girls. It's great to meet so many nice teenagers, though there are many nice teenagers in the non-Hasidic world, too, contrary to the misty-eyed view that only cloistered kids come out with strong values. Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers is a little misty-eyed too, but it's nice reading about nice people trying to make this world a little nicer.
