Matisyahu, the Hassidic rap reggae artist whose music videos can be seen on MTV, shared the following thoughts in an interview I heard recently:
“Most people that are hearing about me…see that I am religious, I’m Hassidic. But I think as more and more people are getting into it, and getting the album, the less it becomes like ‘oh the Hassidic rapper’ and the more it becomes like ‘oh yeah, there is Matisyahu and his story and his music’, and its something that personally a lot of people can relate to”
I felt a similar feeling to Matisyahu’s gripe the year that I attended a large public school in which I was one of only four students who wore a kippah. Taylor Alderdice High School in Pittsburgh is perhaps 30% Jewish, but few orthodox students attended the year I went there, and among these, few were willing to display their Judaism openly.
One orthodox girl who wore a skirt to school (in accordance with her view of Jewish law) was in my math class. Though I had never talked about it with her, it made me feel comfortable that there was someone else who felt that she could show her religion in public.
The societal norms of high school present a difficulty to someone who differs from what is considered “normal”. While in college it is acceptable and encouraged to try new and different things, in high school I felt that the social pressures to fit with the crowd were insurmountable.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. One day I overheard someone asking the girl in my math class why she always wore long skirts. She hesitated, and then replied by simply saying that she liked wearing them.
I felt like someone punched me in the stomach. Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe she just didn’t feel like getting into a whole discussion, but I doubted it. She was scared. Of what? I didn’t totally understand the fear at the time, but it was a fear that I certainly commiserated with.
There were days that I wished I were invisible. I walked quickly from class to class, in fear that someone might laugh at the strange black leather disk on my head, or would beat me up.
My fears were not unfounded. I was called names; I was never beat up, but people threatened. Once at a crowded assembly in the auditorium a number of kids sitting behind me kept tapping me on the head, and one of them scratched across the back of my neck with the fingernail of his index finger. One boy in my gym class asked me why I was wearing a “nut-cup” on my head.
Sure, it didn’t help that I was puny, inept at sports, and in a year-long state of culture shock. I had arrived to this city high school from a small, strict Lubavitch Yeshiva. I was suddenly thrown into a massive machine of a high school, replete with security guards in every hall, pot-smoking thuggish kids who hung out in the bathrooms, and a fair share of violence. Kids would beat each other up in the cafeteria. There was a school related gang murder that year as well.
But there was a fear beyond fear of physical or even verbal mistreatment. It was the fear of being hidden underneath the kippah. It was the fear that people would see me as something so one sided and flat that the rest of me might as well have become invisible.
As a Kippah wearing teenager, this little hat became my sole identifying feature. I felt that I needed twice the personality of the average person just to prove to that I was a human being. Perhaps ten times. And quite frankly, I just didn’t have that amount of personality.
One day I pulled a sandwich out of my lunch bag, sitting with a few people that I usually ate lunch with. A boy asked me why I always had the same thing for lunch, “is it because you’re Orthodox?” he asked.
No matter what I did, it was because I was orthodox. I felt that people took one look at the kippah, and I was not allowed to have feelings, tastes, wants, or the ability to make logical choices. People automatically assumed that whatever I did had something to do with my kippah.
So unless you are a part of the kippah wearing society, or in Matisyahu’s case Hassidic society, you have to buy the album to understand.
Like Matisyahu, the fear that I had in high school was the fear of being defined by a gimmick. Nobody wants to be bought as a novelty album, thrown on the shelf to be forgotten.
It is difficult to live in a society that defines you externally when you have a societal anomaly on your head. Quite literally.
With this understanding of American society in consideration, I suppose that when someone wears his or her religion outside, he or she is asking people to ignore the person inside.
Or perhaps it just points out the problem with a society in which labels are printed on the outside of clothes; in which people are classed by wealth and college rank; that cares less for anything beyond skin-deep.
Or perhaps this is a mechanism to force the individual to display one’s inner-self more outwardly to compensate.
Hopefully enough people will buy the album for the quality of the music rather than the beard faced black-hatted cover.
“You could see beauty shining externally but that's the story of Greece
Inside America bleeds, Israel won't you get up from your knees” –Lyrics from Water by Matisyahu.
