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Sex, drugs and faith: the Rabbi's Daughter- Reva Mann
19 Marzo 2008
Reva Mann has caused scandal in the Orthodox community with her account of a life that veered between pious and promiscuous. She talks to Cassandra Jardine
Reva Mann lost her virginity in style. At the age of 15, she smuggled a boy into the Marble Arch synagogue, where her father was rabbi, and shouted out "Hallelujah" from the bima (pulpit) after the deed was done.
It was the start of a rebellion that took her first into excess and then, aged 22, into extreme religious observance, before she ended up somewhere in the middle.
Her comic and often poignant autobiography The Rabbi's Daughter shows her desperately searching - but for what? Love? Acceptance?
It certainly wasn't the rumpus that her book has caused in Anglo-Jewry. Several synagogues immediately banned it when it was published.
An old friend of her father called it "a book of shame", which saddens Mann, now a demurely dressed 50-year-old.
"I wish he had read it, or spoken to me," she says. "My father would have wanted him to give me the benefit of the doubt. The rabbis are making a huge mistake. If they read the book they would see that it is a spiritual journey with some sexy scenes."
But, of course, it was "Randy Reva the Rabbi's daughter" that grabbed the headlines, not her long quest for God.
She was pretty wild during her time in London in her late teens and early twenties, when she took cocaine and heroin, contracted hepatitis B, and was arrested while on holiday in Israel, after being found with more than 20lb of hashish.
Finally, she was given 24 hours to leave home by her father after she committed the most heinous sin of all for an Orthodox Jewish girl - she found a non-Jewish boyfriend.
But no sooner had she started living with him than Sunday lunch with his family made her yearn for the Sabbath roast chicken and the other scaffolding of the world she grew up in, as the grand-daughter of Israel's chief rabbi.
Instead of reverting to her father's relatively moderate ways, she joined a yeshiva (seminary) in Jerusalem to study the Torah.
But it was far too repressive for her own voracious sexuality. Unable to find a specific doctrine forbidding female homosexuality, she seduced her best friend.
She has, she readily admits, "an addictive personality".
Yet, deep down, she wanted to be a good Jewish mother, so she stopped the affair and begged a matchmaker to find her a pious husband.
The result was someone more interested in God than in her, so soon she was finding the man who came to fix her kitchen so irresistible that she would sneak out of the house, swapping her baggy skirt and headscarf for tight jeans and make-up, and indulging in wild sex.
Hostility to the raciness of her book has boosted sales, but upset her.
She is trying now to woo the world of Orthodox British Jewry by giving talks in synagogues, showing herself to be a true believer.
But still she has her critics because she has crossed a line by describing the closed world of Orthodox Judaism. In the book, it comes across as, at best, hedged in by archaic rules - such as a prohibition on tearing lavatory paper on the Sabbath - and at worst, it sounds deeply misogynistic.
Married women hiding their hair under wigs and girls wearing two pairs of tights to hide their legs are among Orthodox Judaism's most visible aspects.
During her period and for a week afterwards, Mann describes being deemed nidda (unclean), so she and her husband were not allowed to touch.
Even passing the salt was forbidden. Nor could she hand her newborn babies over to him, because she was bleeding. But now she denies that such rules are based on fear of female sexuality.
"It's not like Islam. We don't have female circumcision or the veil. Jewish women are modest for themselves."
Maybe, but as a goy reading her book, I found it hard not to cheer when she cries out "Nooooo" in the synagogue when her three-year-old son's head is shaved, bar a ringlet on each side, to initiate him into this rule-bound world.
Nor did I find it hard to agree with Mann that religious fervour was "bordering on the insane" when a call to a doctor was not allowed after she had a panic attack on the Sabbath.
Mann, however, is horrified to think she might give the impression that Orthodox ways are risible.
"I don't say the rules and rituals are archaic or daft, I give their esoteric meaning. A lot were difficult for me, but they work for other people.
"The loo paper, for example, is a big issue. It sounds stupid, but tearing is related to one of the 39 jobs involved in building of the Temple in Jerusalem, so it isn't allowed on the Sabbath. I thought I had shown the beauty of the purity laws. But it depends, of course, on what the reader brings to the book."
At one synagogue in the North of England last week, a woman came up to her, saying she had hated her after reading the book. "How could you?" the woman asked. It turned out, Mann says with a laugh, that her unforgivable offence had been to disclose that her mother had had plastic surgery.
That was the least of it. Both her parents were dead when she wrote the book, which is just as well because she makes them sound so grim that it is not surprising she went off the rails.
Mann claims that her mother presented an immaculate front to the world, but at home was a self-pitying, Valium-popping attention seeker.
When Mann's waters broke before the birth of her first child, there was a hilarious moment when her mother's need for Rescue Remedy took precedence over her daughter's contractions.
The rabbi, meanwhile, was more interested in polishing his sermons than ensuring his daughter's happiness, she says.
The reason for Mann's anger and hurt - and her need to escape with sex, drugs, alcohol and religion - emerges as she describes the trauma behind it all.
When she was eight, her disabled elder sister, Michelle, was sent to a home. From then on, she seemed to fear - and therefore to court - a similar rejection, but her parents never talked to her about it.
Instead they were self-absorbed and fanned her feelings of... I search for the word. "Guilt," she supplies with some passion. "All Jews have it. We are all Holocaust survivors, even those brought up in London."
Israel is her home now. Twelve years ago, she divorced her husband and began living alone with their three children - aged 20, 19 and 14 - in West Jerusalem. They are under strict instructions not to read her book until they have children of their own.
Putting her confusion into words has undoubtedly helped her. "I didn't have much sympathy for myself for a long time, until I started writing."
She believes she has now found a middle path, loving the Torah and observing some rules, such as the kosher preparation of food, while ignoring others. "I've found a balance," she says, "but still tend to go to extremes."
She has channelled her former obsession with religion into health. Five years ago, breast cancer was her cue to change. No more drink, dope or sex.
Lots of hot water with lemon and so much swimming that her muscles sometimes hurt. Physically, emotionally and spiritually she feels better and is writing a novel about three women - a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim - waiting for the Messiah.
She won't talk politics, but she believes women are the key to peace. "And women are on the rise in Israel."
What about herself: is it now time to look for another relationship? "I now know that I don't need a man, so I feel ready for a proper relationship," she replies.
"I'd like a non-smoker, non-doper, who is interested in healthy things like hiking. Jewish would be good, but he wouldn't have to be."
Source > Telegraph.uk
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