Now I’m in hot water, Leah thought. I shouldn’t have said anything to the girl; I should have told her to ask her local Orthodox rabbi, or her bubbee or her father!

“I’m not smart enough to answer those kinds of questions yet, Shaindele. I don’t understand the connection either.” And I don’t know if I ever will. “I’m also learning, day by day. But I really do believe that this community, in its own way, has created these rules to keep people close to God and to encourage them to keep the Torah.”

Even as she said it, Leah wondered if that was as true as it once was. Or if she even believed it at all anymore. Or were the social rules piled on top of God’s rules just a misguided attempt by very limited and small-minded people to keep control of the little society they’d created and wanted to rule with an iron fist? And did it expand hearts and minds, or simply harden and close them? She felt her face flush.

“Sometimes,” Shaindele began wistfully, oblivious to the struggle going on inside the woman across from her, “I wonder what it would have been like to have been born into another family, from another religion, maybe even another country. Is that terrible?”

“No, of course not. All of us wonder that.”

What are they teaching her in Bais Yaakov? All those religious lessons, over all those years, and still they had not instilled in her even the most fundamental loyalty and appreciation for the basic tenets of her faith! And were the rigorous and never-ending attempts to seal off members of the community from the outside world simply the recognition of the abject failure of the educational and spiritual training given to their children, leaving them so weak that they’d crumble with the first whiff of a challenge from outside the community’s high walls? But no, she thought. It’s more than that.

“Shaindele, you have lived such a sheltered life. You go out into the world and listen to some music, and it all seems so much fun, and so innocent and enjoyable. The world outside of Boro Park does have many good and interesting things, but it is also full of real horrors.”

“What do you mean?” Her eyes were wide.

“Well, some of these places are dangerous. The secular world isn’t a place that respects women. There is so much pornography everywhere.”

“What’s that?”

Oh boy. Just shut your mouth, Leah. “Ugly movies about young women who are attacked and molested. It encourages normal men not to respect women, to behave badly toward those who are vulnerable or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your father, your teachers, they want to protect you from those risks. They don’t want you to learn about such terrible things or to be in any danger.”

“Were you ever attacked, Leah?”