Does Faigy Mayer prefigure the Benedict Option?

The Benedict Option - like the Hotel California?

Yes, I know, the late Faigy Mayer was raised in an intentional Hasidic Jewish community and, so far as we can tell, Rod Dreher's incoherent Benedict Option is ostensibly a movement applicable only to Christians.

The optimistic assumption inherent in such a Benedict Option then becomes: since Orthodox Benedict Option Christians are effectively a different human species from Orthodox Hasidic Jews, the former's radically anti-secular Orthodox Benedict Option Christian communities will naturally be immune to any undesirable elements comprising radically anti-secular Orthodox Hasidic Jewish communities, particularly those which might drive some members to despair and suicide.

Before I go any further let me reemphasize that, as Pauli has just enumerated and as I have also pointed out here and here,  the majority of Christians, traditional, Orthodox, and otherwise see their mission as one of living hip deep in the thick of the secular fray - that's the basic operating instruction that comes with the faith.

Others, however, particularly the Benedict Option's inventor Rod Dreher, have self-documented histories of faring poorly offline, and so a radical repudiation of the world the rest of us all find ourselves in can already be understood as much as a natural psychological tropism as it might a hip new Christian-flavored adventure to assuage pesky modern ennui.

Thus the world of Faigy Mayer could still be instructive to those whose interest has been piqued by the slickly vague marketing behind the Benedict Option to date but who have not yet irrevocably turned their careers or life savings into Benedict Option reality.

She went on to detail things about the ultra-Orthodox that most secular people know — “arranged marriages, strict segregation of the genders, the wife shaving her head, the couple having sex with the wife wearing a bra in the complete dark (hole in the sheet, anyone) but still producing thirteen children generally throughout her lifetime, working for cash only so that Uncle Sam can help with food stamps, Section 8 and Medicaid.”

Then there are things the secular world doesn’t know, things that make leaving seem insurmountable. Imagine not knowing that the sun is a star, or that there’s a solar system. Imagine not knowing what a human cell is, or what menstruation is, or, until you’re 18 and three weeks away from your arranged marriage, what sex is and how it works. Imagine never asking for a puppy growing up, because dogs bark, and that means they are beasts and demons. Imagine you have been told for your entire life that in the secular world, people mainly rape, pillage and murder, that it’s all a lawless meaningless free-for-all, and you are safe only in your little enclave, where these things do not happen.

I was also struck by this interesting tidbit,

 A source close to her family says Mayer suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but several OTD members tell The Post the community commonly makes such claims about those who leave.

given the eerie parallel with the way the Benedict Option's inventor blithely paints those who disagree with him as "sinners" suffering from "derangement". Somewhere L. Ron Hubbard must be smiling.

More:

“Faigy was very independent from the time she was a child,” says Pearl Reich, who left her ultra-Orthodox sect years ago and knew Mayer through Footsteps, a group that helps those who leave. “That kind of child is a threat, and the parents treat them differently — I heard that from her. She comes from a very, very fanatical group. I am extremely upset that the media is saying she died from a mental illness. This is a cult.”

If, as Rod Dreher is now adamantly claiming, BOppers will not be retreating into monasteries, could this be the alternative way they come to be instructed to be "in the world but not of the world"?

To most secular New Yorkers, it seems incomprehensible that even the most devout, observant ultra-Orthodox Jews would be so cut off from the modern world — after all, they walk the streets of New York, are exposed to advertising and storefronts, to the subways and roads, to the shared outside stimuli.

Yet the ultra-Orthodox do all they can to insulate themselves. Most do not have secular jobs. They are married at 18 years of age, arranged marriages all — falling in love is a sin. Women are expected to have at least six children, preferably 12.

Children don’t go to secular schools: Boys study only religious texts, while girls, at least, get the rudiments of math. Many don’t finish high school, and those who do have no transcripts. College is forbidden, and so there are no ultra-Orthodox doctors.

“One of my first transgressions, when I was 24 or 25 and got my first car, was to take a drive to the local public library,” says Shulem Deen, who chronicled his excommunication from the Hasidic community in his recent memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return.

“I accidentally wandered into the children’s section and discovered the World Book Encyclopedia. Those books seemed to contain all the information the world could ever need. I’d be sitting there next to a little boy reading the Berenstain Bears, going back and back to the encyclopedia.”

At the time, Deen was married to a Hasidic woman. They had three children and lived in a Hasidic community in Rockland County, but the more curious Deen became about the outside world, the more the marriage foundered. Deen’s spiritual drift played out over years, each transgression a brief portal into an unknown world.

“Next, we had a Panasonic cassette player with a radio attached,” he says. “Radio is forbidden. If you bought that kind of cassette player, you were supposed to break off the antenna, put masking tape over the channel indicators, and Krazy Glue the play button.”

Naturally, it won't be Rod Dreher Krazy Gluing the play button; such obedience to the lifestyles he is wont to preach about is for those in the cheap seats, not for him.

But if Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is not to be simply a self-rewarding book marketing snipe, a will-o'-the-wisp, a mere cypher, or "precisely what I choose it to mean at any given moment", then, sooner or later it has to become something.

And if that something is to be anything more than an online hipster salon "taking the Benedict Option" by incessantly talking about itself, but rather, in sharp contrast to Christians living hip deep "on mission right here and now", by instead deliberately living as "exiles" - how does anyone imagine any inherent logic remaining to ultimately play itself out?