We never got used to Egypt.

I am newly glad again that my parents kept me away from such unjoyful rigid places growing up. And I am glad to have found welcoming and celebratory communities everywhere I have lived as an adult.

You should think about switching congregations OP. Most of us go, including parents and their children, because we want to be there and want our children there with us, not because of strict obligation and fear of shaming or ostricization if we don't go or don't take our kids.

The shul I bat mitzvah'd at (UK Reform) had a rule that you should take the kid to services at least once a month in the year before the b'nei mitzvah, and kids were welcome in services (including the "regular" adult one).

I grew up in a Reform community where I was THE only person under about 50 who regularly attended Shabbos services when there wasn’t a bnei mitzvah or a special child-themed week. My public school was 20% Jewish (a mix of Reform and Conservative) and I knew almost no one else who went to shul regularly outside of the High Holidays. Anon is not making this type of community up just because you didn’t experience it.

And likewise, I have been to more Orthodox shuls than I can recall in the past 15 years and never once have I NOT seen them full of kids on Shabbos.

I look up banks that do this program.

I choose one and make an appointment to speak to someone by phone.

After waiting 2 days for this appointment, I am immediately told by the person on the phone that their bank is reorganizing and no longer doing this program, but she would advise that I go to this other bank, which definitely participates.

So I got to the other bank's website and yes it has this program on their website (although so did the first bank). It says to click to apply so I fill out all the stuff and submit all the documents. I miss the call from the loan officer after.

I send him an email asking a specific question about this program.

Some act like tznius is an obligation only for women, but it's supposed to apply equally to men too, and we should treat it like that

I think we'd have a lot less young women struggling with this if it wasn't possible to see it as a form of sexism, fostering resentment towards the mitzvah

as someone in a community that would take issue with a woman (of our community ofc) in a sleeveless shirt, i (and the people around me) would be shocked if a man in the community was going around shirtless! and most of the men around me wouldnt wear a sleeveless shirt either.

and i do think this is a fairly common sentiment that people have, so i’m not quite sure which people anon is talking about, who are okay with shirtless guys but not sleeveless women. but i suppose that there’s always a wide range of jews

I do think that what OP has described unfortunately exists in certain circles.

But the bigger problem is that tznius of dress is sometimes (incorrectly) outright taught as being a way that women need to protect men from themselves, rather than the inherent, gender-neutral Jewish value that many sources demonstrate it is. Even in communities where shirtless men at the beach would not fly. The FFBs friends of mine who struggle most with tznius consistently cite that attitude in their explanation for why they don’t take it seriously. And I really can’t blame them given that’s how tznius was sold to them. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously either if that had been my intro to it.

@jewishgay4il

Well lots of things, let's be real, but in this specific case this is Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim.

The concept of the book is that it's an alternate universe where when a person crosses a border (it seems like this mostly means country borders although there are certain references to other types of borders), if they are not planning on coming back (consciously or not), they "instance," which is to say, they physically duplicate into 2 identical people, one of whom remains in the original country and the other of whom continues on to the destination. Both instances start with the same set of experiences/memories but from that point their experiences are entirely separate - they can't read each other's minds or anything. In this universe it is also possible for instances to "reintegrate" by coming into physical contact (the reintegrated person has all memories/experiences of both instances simultaneously).

It's about the immigrant experience really, specifically the Korean-American immigrant experience but immigration in general. And because that's its focus, I feel like in a lot of ways it doesn't delve completely into the full horror that this universe promises. The main characters are a woman who instanced at age 9 when her mother moved her from Korea to New Jersey (both instances of her) and a man who instanced in college when he was studying abroad in NYC and made a subconscious decision that he wasn't coming back when he headed from Korea to NYC after winter break (both instances of him). So, like, immigrant experience, alienation, who you left behind in your home country and your relationship with them, etc. etc. but both of these individuals are really pretty privileged people. There are background references to scary things like people instancing while being trafficked. But they aren't particularly front and center to the story being told because it's meant to be about the general immigrant experience, not a horror novel.

Anyway, the only Jew to appear thus far (228 out of 358 pages into a novel set partly in NYC) is in 1 very brief scene that one of the characters remembers. Here is what we know about her from that brief blip of an appearance: she is a startup founder for a tech company working on an advanced wearable that can prevent reintegration of instances in the event of physical contact for those who don't want to reintegrate, and she is "independently wealthy," and she is Jewish.

This character decided to get into this industry and create this product due to her genuinely horrifying family history related to instancing. Her grandparents just barely made it out of Europe before the Holocaust...but they instanced at the border. The instances who came out were fine. The instances who got left behind survived, barely. After the war they came to find the instances who escaped and wanted to reintegrate. This woman's grandfather (the one who escaped Europe) murdered his instance (the one who survived the camps) rather than reintegrate and have to live with the survivor instance's memories.

Again, this is deeply horrifying! These are the kind of implications of the universe I'm talking about when I say that the author doesn't fully delve into them. This is a really logical and meaningful reason for a person to want to create a product that could prevent reintegration - what if her non-survivor grandfather could've felt he was safely able to prevent an unwanted reintegration without literally murdering another version of himself that had already gone through hell?

...or so I think. The implication of the way it's written is very clearly that this startup founder is just in it for the money and using her sob story background for marketing or clout or something. This scene is a meeting between her and a character working for a company that wants to acquire her company, about which she is highly skeptical (and doesn't end up agreeing to it):