what a wonderful way to start the year
Jan. 1st, 2006 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theyellowhobbitI feel sick. I'm all stuffed up and tired and icky. My mom is also sick, and she might have caught it from me, even though she got sick yesterday while I was in New York. It's only 10:14 and it feels like 12am.
That being said,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
levana_b's house was awesome. Her dog Shatzi is really cute, and acts like a giant cat. And it was a nice relaxing shabbat where I got to be anti-social, but yet still hang out with levana_b. No cooking involved. Which I guess could be said of my Shabbats in Providence as well, but there's no one my age there.
It's weird, I'm like maybe 2-4 years older than some of the kids, yet I feel closer to the parents, like Dr. Gottesman, and Mrs. Yavner and Mrs. Felder. And they're all in their 40s, so almost my parents age. Maybe because they're also BTs*, while the kids are b'nei BTs*** and thus FFBs**. And there are some things that someone born into that Ultra-Orthodox community wouldn't get. They're nto as worldly people, which is not a bad thing, but it makes them different from me.
Or maybe it's just that I'm in college, and the kids are still in high school. Maybe college really does make you mature. Though I don't feel mature. But at Penn I don't feel there's a huge difference between the people who grew up frum and the people who became frum at Penn. Maybe it's because Modern Orthodox Jews are more assimilated.
I tried a little experiment.levana_b's parents were asking me such things like where I was from, whether or not I went to seminary, etc. And although neither of them grew up frum, I still wanted to see if I could pass off as being an FFB. Though then I asked levana_b, and she said that her mom knew beforehand that I was a BT. Yet it didn't seem like she did. Maybe she didn't remember.
In any case by Saturday I decided I was being silly, after all Mrs. S is a convert and Mr. S. is a BT. And unless I want to lie or be evasive, there's no way for me to pass as an FFB. I don't think that makes me any less frum.
*BT= Baal[at] teshuva. Someone who was not born Orthodox, but became so later in life, or someone who started off religious, became unreligious, and then became religious again.
**FFB= frum from birth. Someone who was born into the orthodox world.
***B'nei BTs= children of BTs.
There is no apostraphe in BTs, or in FFBs. Technically it shouldn't even be written like that, because the plural of ba'al teshuva is ba'alei teshuva, bu I guess they need a way to abbreviate it. But an apostraphe is either possesive or contractive, and BTs is just plural. Kind of like the 1920s or something. People keep on doing that on Beyond BT and it annoys the heck out of me.[/rant]
That being said,
levana_b's house was awesome. Her dog Shatzi is really cute, and acts like a giant cat. And it was a nice relaxing shabbat where I got to be anti-social, but yet still hang out with levana_b. No cooking involved. Which I guess could be said of my Shabbats in Providence as well, but there's no one my age there.It's weird, I'm like maybe 2-4 years older than some of the kids, yet I feel closer to the parents, like Dr. Gottesman, and Mrs. Yavner and Mrs. Felder. And they're all in their 40s, so almost my parents age. Maybe because they're also BTs*, while the kids are b'nei BTs*** and thus FFBs**. And there are some things that someone born into that Ultra-Orthodox community wouldn't get. They're nto as worldly people, which is not a bad thing, but it makes them different from me.
Or maybe it's just that I'm in college, and the kids are still in high school. Maybe college really does make you mature. Though I don't feel mature. But at Penn I don't feel there's a huge difference between the people who grew up frum and the people who became frum at Penn. Maybe it's because Modern Orthodox Jews are more assimilated.
I tried a little experiment.
levana_b's parents were asking me such things like where I was from, whether or not I went to seminary, etc. And although neither of them grew up frum, I still wanted to see if I could pass off as being an FFB. Though then I asked levana_b, and she said that her mom knew beforehand that I was a BT. Yet it didn't seem like she did. Maybe she didn't remember.In any case by Saturday I decided I was being silly, after all Mrs. S is a convert and Mr. S. is a BT. And unless I want to lie or be evasive, there's no way for me to pass as an FFB. I don't think that makes me any less frum.
*BT= Baal[at] teshuva. Someone who was not born Orthodox, but became so later in life, or someone who started off religious, became unreligious, and then became religious again.
**FFB= frum from birth. Someone who was born into the orthodox world.
***B'nei BTs= children of BTs.
There is no apostraphe in BTs, or in FFBs. Technically it shouldn't even be written like that, because the plural of ba'al teshuva is ba'alei teshuva, bu I guess they need a way to abbreviate it. But an apostraphe is either possesive or contractive, and BTs is just plural. Kind of like the 1920s or something. People keep on doing that on Beyond BT and it annoys the heck out of me.[/rant]
