A fascinating article appeared over at the Telegraph about an Orthodox Jew Reva Mann. She was born in an orthodox home; her father was a rabbi. She was raised according to Orthodox Judaism’s strict rules, but rebelled. She lost her virginity when she was 15 years old, in the synagogue, after which she shouted “Hallelujah” from the bima (pulpit).” When she found a non-Jewish boyfriend, her father had had enough and kicked her out of his house.

Reva experimented sexually for a while; even with her best female friend. But then, when she grew older, she missed God, she missed being a spiritual human being and she asked one of her friends to find her a good husband. So, she got married to a Jew and had a son.

But her marriage wasn’t all that, seemingly, “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.”

Her quest for God continued, and in the end she says she found him and settled down. Now, at 52 years old, she wrote a book about her life, and thus about her experienced in the Orthodox Jewish community.

Orthodox Jews aren’t happy with the book, firstly because Reva did everything forbidden by God (according to Orthodox Jews) and because she’s not always overly positive about 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,” according to the Telegraph.

But Reva is defending Orthodox Judaism today. Yes, she has more modern and tolerant views and customs, but - she explains - Judaism “isn’t like Islam”: “We don’t have female circumcision or the veil. Jewish women are modest for themselves.”

She was referring there to how Orthodox Jewish women dress; they cover themselves up, basically.

Of course, Islam doesn’t have “female circumcision” either, nor does it have “the veil.” What she probably means by saying that is that in certain Muslim countries, female children are circumscribed (which isn’t a religious thing but a cultural thing), and that quite some Muslim women falsely believe that they should be modest and that a sign of modesty is wearing a headscarf or a veil, even though Muslim women only started wearing that four or five generations after Islam’s Prophet Muhammed lived.

But that as an aside.

Anyway, she wrote about book about her experiences and, so far, she has sold a whole lot of copies of it. But people aren’t buying the book, Mann fears, because they want to know about Orthodox Judaism, they want to read it because she had a lot of sex with a lot of different people. In other words; people read it for the wrong reasons, according to Mann at least.

That may be so, but in the end this gives her an opportunity to share her view on Judaism with the world. The more copies of her book are sold, the more likely it is she’ll be invited somewhere to talk about Orthodox Judaism.