A Community Divided

I'd like to tell you a little story. Close your eyes and picture yourself back in high-school. You go to the modern orthodox day school, Akiva, and you have several girl-friends (girls that are your friends. Get your minds out of the gutter!) in your posse that go to the "rival" school, Bais Yaakov (You see, it can't be Beit Yaakov. They speak Ivris, not Ivrit.). By rival, you remember that you live in a relatively small Jewish community. There are very few choices of where to go to school. There are the off fringe school, like Darchei Torah and Hillel, but the major two choices are Akiva or Bais Yaakov for Girls/Yeshiva Beth Yehuda/Gedolah for the boys. Now, you remember that most people in your town go to BY or YBY/YG. You're one of the select few that go Akiva. Now, the people of the former have a very low image of the people that go to Akiva. They think that we're really not that Jewish and that the girls are whores for hanging out with guys or that some of them wear pants or that the school must be very bad b/c they don't have this system where they can keep tabs on what you do outside of school. You see their girls and boys can't do certain things, go to certain places, can't be seen with members of the opposite sex, and if a whiff of violation is smelled, you're out. So, imagine both schools' surprise when girls from Akiva actually have friends with girls from the Bais Yaakov. How did any of the schools find out, you ask?

Well, that's a very good question. One day, when you were in 11th Grade, your Akiva high-school went to the Birmingham lake to do Tashlich before Yom Kippur. Some of us have our own car, and after we're done, some of us decide that we're going to pay our Bais Yaakov friends a visit at school, b/c we remember that they're having their lunch period now. So, we all get in the car and head over there. Our friends are excited to see us, but they're not the problem. Unfortunately, their classmates were very immature about the whole occasion. They were squealing like the circus came to town. They were making such a raucus that they started disrupting other classes who's lunch periods were over. We kept trying to quiet them while we were taking pictures, but they just wouldn't shut up. We ended up having to run out through the gym, where the younger grades were benching, before a teacher could kick us out.

Later that day, a few of us were called into the head Rabbi's office. We couldn't believe we were going to get in trouble for visiting our friends. It seems our Rabbi was called by the head Rabbi over from Bais Yaakov, who complained that we disrupted the whole school with our schenanigans. I was ready to go off. I didn't, but I told the Rabbi that they should be happy that we were good friends with girls from Bais Yaakov, that it was a great thing that could come out of the horrible things that existed b/t our 2 schools. The Rabbi agreed with me, said he was happy that we were friends, but that we weren't allowed to go over to Bais Yaakov during school hours.

In the end, the few of us walked out of the office and smirked to each-other and shook our heads at eachother. Here we were trying to just be friends, and the "evil" Bais Yaakov school was trying to rip us apart. The next week, our Bais Yaakov visited us during our lunch break. Go figure...

Well, we're all still friends, and they've broken off from the chains of Bais Yaakov. The community should learn from us...

-OC