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40 Friday, January 17, 1986

.THE.otiRoit4gWi§4i;Ews -.

artwork by Judy Glasser.
01985 by The New York limes Company
Reprinted by permission.

An Act Of Love
And Maybe Revenge

When Susan Schnur wrote honeStly
about her motivations for becoming
a rabbi, she set off a storm of protest.

BY GARY ROSENBLATT

Editor

Susan Sehnuf

"When I was a child, I at-
tended a little yeshiva in
Trenton, where the boys
studied Talmud and the girls
went downstairs and made
tuna fish sandwiches," re-
called Susan Schnur. "The
rabbi at our school — our
principal — wrapped an enor-
mous bandage up to one
wrist' so that he would not,
God forbid, ever have to
shake a woman's hand. Our
rabbi did not touch women."
So began a "Hers" column
by Schnur in The New York
Times this summer that
described the "baleful medie-
valism" of her Jewish educa-
tion and her years as "a hap-
py moron." The essay dealt
with her decidedly ambiva-
lent feelings towards her
religion ("there is too much I
hate in the Judaism I love")
and her motivations kir be-
coming a rabbi; an act, she
mused, that might have been
motivated by revenge as well
as love.
The response to the column
among readers was immedi-
ate,, widespread and, in
Schnur and her editor's opi-
. nion, frighteningly nasty.
"The reaction was outrage, in

letters and phone calls,"re-
called Nancy Newhouse, who
edits the "Hers" column,
whieh appears every Thurs-
day in the Times' Style sec-
tion. "I was astonished at the
tone — so down and dirty —
especially from Orthodox
rabbis." •
Schnur, 34, is herself a rab-
bi, a graduate of the-Recon-
structionist Rabbinical Col-
lege who has held a part-time
pulpit in Princeton, New Jer-
sey. She is also a writer,
primarily of personal essays,
which take her, she_ says, on
"an interior journey." That
journey can be painful, she
learned, when in baring your
own soul you offend other
co-religionists.
One Orthodox rabbi wrote
to the Times that Schnur's
"outpouring of wrath vilifies
Judaism." Another com-
pared her writing to that of
Der Sturmen the infamous
Nazi propaganda newspaper.
A third argued that hers was
"a gross perversion of Jewish
outlook that could have been
written by the most virulent
anti-Smite." • -
And those were the nice let-
ters. Some mail was just too

.