Chaptzem Blog!      

This wasn’t the first time he had tried. At first, he filled the bathtub with water and tried to drown himself. Later, he thought of entering the sea and never coming out, filling his lungs with water and sinking into eternal rest. But every single time, he thought of his children, who would be left fatherless. “I am suffering,” he told me when we first met months ago. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about how I’m living a double life: A secular living under the guise of a haredi. It feels like Purim, only in my life, I am always in costume.”

Some two months after our first meeting in Tel Aviv, and after countless phone calls, his friend Racheli called me in the dead of night. “He did it,” she said. “Matan has committed suicide. He choked himself to death. I don’t know too many details, and I also have no one to ask, because his family doesn’t even know what he’s been through these past months. He has been suffering.”

Matan (a pseudonym like all names in this article) was an ultra-Orthodox Jew who stopped believing several years ago. “I don’t believe there is a God, but I also don’t really rule it out,” he said. “It can’t have an unequivocal answer. Our understanding as humans ends somewhere…Religion tells you exactly how to understand things, how to interpret them. This is exactly the problem.”

“We, like the Marranos in Spain (Jews forced to abandon their religion during the 14th and 15th centuries), are forced to lead a different lifestyle than what we believe in,” explains Moishi, a Hasidic Jew from central Israel. “I sobered up about religion five years ago, but I can’t change my life, because I am closed off tightly within haredi society, with family and children. Inside, I am completely secular, but because of the fear of hurting my family, I have to remain haredi on the outside.”

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=87205