A colleague recently heard someone pronounce a religious term differently from the way that she had always pronounced it. This made her concerned that perhaps she had always said it wrong. When such a thing happens, the ramification is that a person becomes retroactively self-conscious. \u201cHave I been saying it wrong? For how long? Who have I pronounced it wrong in front of? What did they think of me?\u201d (I assured her that both pronunciations are correct.) It was around then that another associate shared with me a term that she had picked up on the interwebs: Jewbarrassment.<\/p>\n
My co-worker defined this word as the feeling one gets in the presence of someone more religious or more knowledgeable. This is common, for example, when people with less religious education attend the synagogue. They don\u2019t know what to expect: \u201cWhat page are we on? When do we stand? When do we sit? Why did everybody just bow?\u201d It\u2019s also common when a less observant person goes to a more observant person\u2019s home for Shabbos: \u201cI know I can\u2019t turn the lights off and on but can I flush the toilet? Wait \u2013 I wasn\u2019t supposed to start eating yet?\u201d<\/p>\n
But don\u2019t kid yourself \u2013 religious embarrassment isn\u2019t limited to people with less background. Even people with strong religious educations can feel it in the presence of others. A friend of mine experienced a memorable form of this when he was interviewing for a post-college yeshiva. The piece of gemara<\/em> they asked him to read included the Hebrew abbreviation chaf-gimmel<\/em>. This stands for \u201cKohein Gadol<\/em>\u201d (High Priest) and the context was that the High Priest does this and the High Priest does that. But chaf-gimmel<\/em> is also the number 23 in Hebrew, and a regional court in Biblical and Talmudic times consisted of 23 judges. My friend therefore read the section \u201cthe 23 do this and the 23 do that.\u201d When he was informed of his error, he was religiously embarrassed.<\/p>\n (I shared a friend\u2019s religious embarrassment story not just because it\u2019s an interesting and illustrative anecdote. I have a few of my own that I could have used just as easily but I chose not to because, you know, I\u2019m religiously embarrassed to do so.)<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take things one step further: one can experience this sense of religious embarrassment in the other direction. Imagine the only boy in his school to wear a yarmulke<\/em>, or the only girl to wear skirts. Imagine the student who can\u2019t participate in a track meet because it\u2019s on a Friday night, or who skips prom for religious reasons. These kids are adhering to their religious ideals but not without consequence. They are often religiously embarrassed.<\/p>\n Finally, religious embarrassment can even occur when you\u2019re the most observant in a group of religious people. What if you\u2019re the only one in a group of friends who won\u2019t eat at a certain restaurant because it\u2019s not up to the kosher standards you observe, or who won\u2019t go to certain movies that you deem inappropriate? What if you\u2019re the one who\u2019s always making everyone wait so you can daven<\/em> or bentch<\/em>? Your friends might accommodate you, and they may never say a word, but you still might feel self-conscious, assuming that they\u2019re thinking, \u201cThere (s)he goes again!\u201d<\/p>\n So, whether it\u2019s non-religious to religious, religious to non-religious, or even religious to religious, the potential to be religiously embarrassed exists. (And it’s not limited to Jews! Do you think it’s easy for a Muslim girl to suddenly start wearing hijab? Or for a teen of any faith to be the only one in his peer group not to watch R-rated movies? I imagine this phenomenon is pretty universal.)<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the good news: the vast majority of the time, nobody cares if you make a faux pas<\/em>. If you\u2019ve rarely been to shul, nobody expects you to know all the details. If you don\u2019t keep Shabbos, nobody expects you to know all the rules. (If anything, we want<\/em> you to ask!) My friend who mistook the Hebrew abbreviation for a number got into the yeshiva; embarrassed though he might have been, it wasn\u2019t actually that big a deal! (And if he already knew everything, what would the school have to teach him?)<\/p>\n But still, even if there\u2019s no consequence, we might still be embarrassed to be ignorant (if we\u2019re the least religious person in the room) or to feel like we\u2019re flaunting our religiosity (if we\u2019re the most religious). So how can we overcome that feeling? The suggestion I\u2019m about to share came to me from the most unlikely of places.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a family-friendly comedy troupe I follow that recently started their own digital media channel called JK! Studios. One member of this troupe, James Perry, wrote a book called I Still Want to Be an Astronaut: Living Your Dream When You Dream Too Much<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. The book is hard to pigeonhole, containing aspects of humor and autobiography, but if I had to define it, it would be self-help. (The teen who didn’t watch R-rated movies wasn’t a hypothetical example; it’s an incident from Perry’s book.)<\/p>\n In his book, Mr. Perry describes what he calls \u201cthe Confidence Triangle.\u201d In a perfect world, Perry says, confidence would entail being genuine, brave and humble. The problem with that is that trying to be genuine, brave and humble can already be pretty intimidating. This is where the Confidence Triangle really gets clever.<\/p>\n I have written elsewhere<\/strong><\/a> that character traits are neither inherently good nor inherently bad; any trait can be viewed in a positive or negative way. I\u2019m thrifty; you\u2019re cheap. My kids are energetic; yours are out of control. If I like cartoons, I\u2019m childlike<\/em>; if you like video games, you\u2019re childish<\/em>. The traits we can recontextualize as either assets or flaws are endless. This is what Perry does with the confidence triangle, replacing \u201cgenuine, brave and humble\u201d with words that are \u201cso usable that you can be confident even on your worst days.\u201d Specifically, Perry reframes \u201cgenuine, brave and humble\u201d as \u201cweird, stupid and wrong.\u201d\u00a0To quote Perry:<\/p>\n Anyone would be proud to call themselves genuine, brave, and humble. But the reality of those qualities is they require you to be weird, stupid, and wrong, respectively. You can\u2019t be genuine without being different, which the haters call weird. You can\u2019t be brave unless you do something that your brain tells you is dangerous, which is stupid. You can\u2019t be humble unless you embrace being wrong. Imagine how empowered you would be if you loved being weird, stupid, and wrong. <\/em><\/p>\n This may be useful in combatting our religious embarrassment. Did you mispronounce a word? Stand when you were supposed to sit? Eat before you were supposed to? That\u2019s okay. Maybe you don\u2019t feel it in yourself to be humble about it but it\u2019s easy to be wrong. (I do it all the time!) Do you think you stick out like a sore thumb because you dress, eat or behave differently? That\u2019s okay, too! Maybe you don\u2019t feel like you can be genuine but being weird comes naturally.<\/p>\n As I said earlier, others really don\u2019t think about our differences so much. If we make a mistake, it\u2019s unlikely that anyone else even cares. If we need to do our own thing, our friends probably support us. The only one affected by me being different is me, and that\u2019s all in my head. Perhaps we can overcome this religious embarrassment \u2013 Jewbarrassment or otherwise \u2013 by embracing the reality that each of us is occasionally weird, stupid and wrong. Right now, it just happens to be my turn.<\/p>\n Finally, remember I said that I could have shared a story of my own instead of one from a friend? Here goes. In my youth, I was calling the honors at a friend\u2019s chuppah<\/em> and I mixed up the forms m\u2019chubad<\/em> (so-and-so is honored) and mechabed<\/em> (we honor so-and-so). That probably doesn’t seem like such a big deal to you but I was extremely Jewbarrassed at the time. Now? As Perry writes, \u201cYay! \u2026 What a lesson to learn! Happy to be called wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n I embraced my wrongness and shared that incident. Guess what? Nothing bad happened! You can do it, too.<\/p>\n Rabbi Jack Abramowitz is Torah Content Editor at the Orthodox Union. He is the author of six books, including\u00a0The Tzniyus Book<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Taryag Companion<\/a>. His latest work,\u00a0The God Book<\/a>, is available from\u00a0OU Press<\/a>\u00a0as well as on\u00a0Amazon<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A colleague recently heard someone pronounce a religious term differently from the way that she had always pronounced it. This made her concerned that perhaps she had always said it wrong. When such a thing happens, the ramification is that a person becomes retroactively self-conscious. \u201cHave I been saying it wrong? For how long? Who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":61893,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\n
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