What It's Really Like to become an Orthodox Jew

When you first become frum (Orthodox/Torah-observant), the prohibitions can hit pretty hard.

For example, you enjoy Shabbat and love hearing all the inspiring gems that go along with it.

At the same time, you also get tangled up in all the minutiae of everything that's forbidden on Shabbat.

And this is true with every other aspect of frum life.

But at some point, you start to fall into the rhythm of things and eventually, you start to experience the liberation that the prohibitions actually provided you all along.

Having said that, this doesn't mean that you never again ram into a prohibition. Because no one is perfect except God, you can knock into or chafe against certain prohibitions again and again.

You've got your Divinely imbued flaws and weak spots and there's no free ride out of their grasp except to just get down to work, spiritually speaking.

And that work is the journey of a lifetime.

The Paradox of Liberating Limitations

But how can prohibitions be liberating?

Well, it's as if you've lived your life on the monotonous rocky Moon. The ever-black sky is full of stars and the blue-marbled Earth looks so cool up above.

And you've got your super-cool perfectly pressurized spacesuit, and your moon-rover that bounces all over the bland surface.

And you can jump thrillingly high!

Inside your theoretical moonbase, you float around, catch airborn food with your tongue, and have a great time while doing all your other stuff.

Then you get back to Earth and your body feels heavy and you can't bounce around like you used to.

At first, everything feels "off," and you can barely eat a hamburger. You're overwhelmed by all the color and light after the Moon's black-and-grayish environment.

But...you have oxygen.

You can BREATHE. You've got a beautiful azure sky around you (which is also sometimes gray or purple or dark blue or black or -- when the sun is setting -- a canvas of azure, lavender, peach, crimson, and pink!) and you've got day (DAY!!!) and night, and trees, and flowers, and countless other goodies.

But in the beginning, you mourn your lack of bounciness. You miss floating. You get irritable over feeling too cold or too hot after that nice temperature-controlled environment you used to enjoy. You fret over the lack of colorful interesting objects in your new nighttime sky.

Okay, to be honest...when you were on the moon, it's not like there were TONS of colorful spheres -- just the one marbled-blue Earth.

But still! Now all heavenly bodies are just plain white (except for Mars, which sometimes looks the color of pale rust).

And driving just isn't the same on Earth.

But eventually, your body adjusts to Earth and you realize how great it is to walk around without being confined within in a bulky pressurized suit, and you start to experience all the advantages available on Earth.

And sure, maybe you sometimes miss being able to jump thrillingly high or being able to bounce-drive however you want without being hemmed in by nuisances like street lanes, speed limits, traffic lights, and oncoming traffic.

And maybe all the color and light still overwhelms you from time to time and you miss your old place with its stark simple contrast of grayish rock (sometimes BRILLIANTLY grayish, when the Sun hits it just right) and its star-and-Earth-studded black sky.

Nonetheless, you're still profoundly grateful and appreciative for the very limitations of gravity and atmosphere, which are precisely what enable you to do all that which you enjoy on Earth, but remain impossible on the Moon.