Family Proclamations: “Out of the Hasidic Closet,” with Sara Glass

About the Guest

Sara Glass is a psychotherapist and writer in New York City. She earned her a Master’s in Social Work from Rutgers University and a PhD in Psychology from Capella University. She is the clinical director of Soul Wellness NYC, a private psychotherapy practice in Midtown Manhattan, and serves as a Clinical Supervisor for Jewish Queer Youth, a non-profit organization that supports and empowers LGBTQ youth. Learn more at drsaraglass.com or follow her on social media: @drsaraglass.

Transcript

SARA GLASS: I was not allowing myself to think about being gay, because if I thought too hard about being gay I was worried I would go down a path that would cause me to lose my children.

BLAIR HODGES: As an ultra-Orthodox Jew, Sara Glass was raised to believe her purpose in life was to marry a righteous man and bear children, all to the glory of God. On the outside, she was following that plan to perfection. But on the inside, something was pulling her in a different direction. It was traumatic, and she would have to risk everything to find healing.

Today, Sara is a licensed clinical social worker, a therapist with a PhD in psychology, and she's telling her story in a new memoir called Kissing Girls on Shabbat. Sara Glass joins us now to talk about it. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

Fear of Publishing – 01:37

BLAIR HODGES: Sara Glass, welcome to Family Proclamations.

SARA GLASS: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm excited, too. I want to start with your Acknowledgement section. It says, "I was afraid to write this book. The fear was visceral. For decades, silence for me meant safety."

We begin there because getting up the courage to write and publish a book like this, a book with so much self-disclosure, doesn't mean the fear necessarily goes away when the book's coming out. I'm wondering how you're feeling right now. We're about a month away from the official publication date. By the time people hear this, it will be available. Is that fear still with you? How are you feeling about it right now?

SARA GLASS: To be perfectly honest, I am terrified. I'm really scared. I finished recording my audiobook the other day, and then I just walked through the city in total freaking panic. What was I thinking? I was very intimate and vulnerable in the book. It is scary for people to read it, but I'm no longer afraid of losing everything.

BLAIR HODGES: So that fear is gone at least.

SARA GLASS: At least I feel safe in my life and safe in my home and safe with the people I have around me now. But it's still intimidating to put that level of intimate truth and personal truth out into the world.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's play a game of “catastrophe” that sometimes I like to play. What's the worst thing that could happen because of the book, and what are some of the best things you hope could happen because of the book?

SARA GLASS: I love this. You're going to therapize the therapist. This is great. Give me a break from my own job. [laughter]

To me the worst outcome would be, nobody buys the book. Because after putting all this effort in and getting so emotionally naked, the worst possibility is it doesn't even matter.

Best case scenario is I reach some hearts and I help make the world safer for other people who are like me in some way, or the me I was back when I really could have used a book like this.

BLAIR HODGES: What finally got you over the fear enough to actually write the book? Because the whole process has been scary. There are still some fears. But there was a lot of fear before. We'll go into why that fear existed, but what got you through it and made you be able to say to yourself, “I can do this, I want to do this”?

SARA GLASS: I think it was enjoying some of the liberties I get to enjoy now in New York City. Dating women and having my family feel free and my children be able to make choices. I looked back at the world I came from and had so many people who live in different kinds of closets, different ways, live under different stigmas, and I thought I can't stand back and enjoy my life without at least trying to do something to help other people.

BLAIR HODGES: Your career is in that field, too. Doing therapy. You try to help people live better lives. My partner is a social worker and taught me this idea of “the right to self-determination” as a guiding principle here. It sounds like you want to spread that. You've grown from that freedom yourself and want to see other people be able to experience that right to self-determination.

SARA GLASS: Absolutely. That's such a great way to put that.

An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Girl in Brooklyn – 04:53

BLAIR HODGES: Let's give people a better sense of your background. You were born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn. Let's start there so people can get an introduction to the particular Hasidic sect you belong to and the basic worldview you grew up with. Take us to young Sara and her religious world.

SARA GLASS: I was raised in Hasidic Brooklyn, as you said, and it looks exactly like what you see in the documentaries and what you would imagine based on photos of maybe eighteenth-century Europe. The men in my community wore the fur hats and the long black coats. The idea is to differentiate themselves from the outside world and to maintain traditions from the past. Our world looked like a more ancient world.

Women wear full coverage. They're supposed to wear clothing that covers their collarbones and extends to four inches below their knees and below their elbows as well. So that's full coverage on their bodies. Married women wear wigs. Young girls also follow dress codes that involved covering their bodies.

The community was extremely gender segregated. I attended an all-girls school from a young age and the boys attended all-boys schools. The idea was the boys and girls would be set up in arranged marriages once they hit marriageable age, which was anywhere from seventeen and up, and then they would be introduced to a potential partner their family had vetted, and get married and have children of their own who would follow the same path.

BLAIR HODGES: What about your understanding of God's relationship to the community? The reason I ask that is because you had particular views about your body and what it meant to be a woman, and the power of your physical body and your appearance. Tell us more about how God was involved in your worldview and how it affected your relationship to your body.

SARA GLASS: We were taught there is a little piece of God in all of us. I don't know what I believe about God right now, but I do believe if there is a God, it is within all of us and each person matters in terms of our bodies.

It was that our bodies were vessels for service of God. They weren't really personal things. They were on loan to us. If we did with them what God wanted us to do—dress the way we're supposed to, interact the way we're supposed to—then we get to go to heaven and we get to be with God in eternal joy and pleasure and peace. If we didn't do with our bodies what God wanted us to do, then fiery Hell.

BLAIR HODGES: Like a literal fiery Hell. This wasn't an annihilation. This would be literal suffering. You thought about that as a kid.

SARA GLASS: One of the images I got was of Hell being freezing cold, like Siberia. I personally hate the cold. I was just like, I cannot spend an eternity being freezing cold, that's not going to work for me.

BLAIR HODGES: You say you came to understand that your body was really powerful, and that covering your body was a way to protect other people from your body's power. As long as you wore long skirts and long sleeves you would be protected from men, but you would also be protecting men too.

The idea was that men are sex driven, that this would be tempting for them, and so you were taught as a girl in this culture that you had tons of responsibility for how men perceive you and what they would do in relation to you.

SARA GLASS: Exactly. We were taught that if men were to see so much as a flash of our elbows that might inspire them to sin, to masturbate, or to have sinful thoughts, and that would then be our sins as well. We would both be punished, ourselves and the men we cause to sin.

It was a huge responsibility for a child.

Living in a Fear-Based System – 08:38

BLAIR HODGES: It sure is. I love the idea of there being a piece of God in everyone. That's beautiful. But there was also an underlying fear. You talk about fear as a primary motivation in the community. What did that fear look like? What were you supposed to do with that fear?

SARA GLASS: It was this inborn fear of God's wrath. When we talked about the traits of God, it was like God was very slow to anger. We were taught that God was slow to anger, but that wasn't how the stories went down. The stories we were told were of God's wrath. Some people believe that tragedies like the Holocaust were because God was upset because Jews were assimilating, for example. The fear just went through and through to everything we were taught.

Our teachers would use fear in the classroom. If we weren't listening during Judaic Studies class, the teacher would say, "Aren't you afraid of God, what God will do if you're not listening to this piece of Bible we're trying to teach today?"

The fear was used to keep us in line. I can't think of a better, kinder way to put that.

BLAIR HODGES: I appreciate the attention you pay to this as someone who's been now trained in psychotherapy, because you also point out this can be really scary for a kid, but there was also a backwards kind of comfort with the fear, because your universe was very orderly. You had a pretty clear understanding of right and wrong and the fact that punishment would happen, and there was a comfort in that clarity and certainty, even though it was stern and fearful.

SARA GLASS: I think that's the reason why organized religion is so popular, and why cults become so popular, which I'm differing between. It's different from organized religion. But there's a certain comfort in being told this is the way to heaven. You do this, you're good. You want to deviate from that you know exactly what your punishment is going to be. It's all really clear.

You don't need to make a lot of decisions on your own. You don't need to grapple with your own psyche as much.

Young Romance with Dassa – 10:28

BLAIR HODGES: I wondered if you could read a section from the book for us. Before you do, I want people to understand that you were a believer. You were part of this community. This was your world. But you also had some questions, as this moment from the book suggests.

SARA GLASS: "Still, I had questions. Hardest of all was to understand why I felt love that I was taught to hate. All love, except the love of God was suspect. But one kind of love was singled out for extra damnation: loving someone of your own sex.

I was taught that God found my desires repugnant, that they are unnatural and wrong, and I spent my days in prayer trying to understand, why would God create me this way? The excitement my friend spoke of, about meeting a boy and living with him for a lifetime, was a strange and unfamiliar desire. The last thing I wanted was to live with a boy for the rest of my life.

Still, I was prepared to do just that. I knew that by giving my life to the service of my husband, I would reach closeness with God and receive his heavenly bounty, his love, his blessing. I would reach fulfillment."

BLAIR HODGES: You weren't yet nineteen at this point when you really had to start thinking about living with a boy forever, becoming partnered and creating a family. As you're starting to look to that next step, you took this detour, an unexpected detour. You found yourself in Miami.

Now this might throw people for a loop that this ultra-Orthodox girl would find herself in Miami with a woman called Dassa, in a romantic affair. How did the two of you even discover each other to make this possible?

SARA GLASS: I was nineteen years old and I was teaching eighth grade students at a school in Brooklyn. Then this woman was brought in, this young woman, to be a guest lecturer to my students. She walked in and started giving the lecture. I felt something. I guess I had gaydar before I knew what gaydar was. [laughs] There was this recognition, like, okay, there's a static here, there's a buzz. She was beautiful and inspiring and charismatic and we shared a few glances.

Then we went out for ice cream under the guise of, maybe I'll invite her back to lecture to my class again. Before long, we were both dropping little hints that we had gotten ourselves in trouble by being alone with girls before in the past.

BLAIR HOGDES: Next thing comes to next thing and you end up taking a trip to Miami together, and to you it's beautiful. You get to feel what it feels like to be close with someone, a person who you're attracted to physically and emotionally and intellectually.

In the back of your mind what were you thinking in terms of what rabbis would say about this? You say there are differences in how they might treat men who are attracted to other men and women who are attracted to other women. There's almost some erasure that goes on in the community, almost like women can't be gay, it's not really a thing. It's wrong, but it's also not really a thing. Did I pick up on that right?

SARA GLASS: Yeah. If you're a gay man, that's really evil, really bad. If you're lesbian, what are you even doing anyway? We don't even know if God really cares, which does delegitimize the experience of women loving other women, and it is gaslighting. It did make me think the desires I had were just not real, because if they were real then we would at least get one line in the Bible saying it was bad. But if God didn't even bother to acknowledge it then maybe it didn't really exist and maybe I was just making it up in my head.

While I did enjoy going on a trip to Miami and having a long-term relationship for months with Dassa, I found it really effortless for my body to adjust to being with a girl who looked at me and who was soft and who I loved being near. Also in the back of my mind I was like, this is temporary. The real thing I need to do is get married to a man. This is irrelevant, like a little game, until the real thing comes along, which is marriage.

BLAIR HODGES: Dassa even wanted to maybe run away to California or do something else and you were convicted here, you wanted to follow that set path of being matched with a man.

What was that process of being matched like? This is where Yossi comes in. Is that how you pronounce it?

SARA GLASS: It's "Yu-see," like with an "uh."

Courtship and Marriage – 15:22

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks. So this is where he comes in. He's the person you eventually marry. What was that process like? It's not the dating world of like, you look around and see who's cute and then you ask them out, and then you might get married. There was a process you had to go through.

SARA GLASS: You can't do that because I wasn't seeing any boys. I wasn't talking to any boys. They weren't in my life. My whole life was gender segregated, even as a nineteen-year-old.

So we had matchmakers. I went and visited the matchmaker. I was lucky to get an appointment with a really good one after a while because there are waiting lists and all that, and I went to see the matchmaker and she already had a list of everyone in my family, all my siblings, who they had married, what they did for a living, where their children went to school—all of that was as important as who I was. I had a little meeting in her kitchen while she was stirring her chicken soup. She just asked me some questions.

Eventually I got set up with Yossi, actually not by that matchmaker, but by a friend's sibling who's like, this is a great guy from a great family. Then the vetting process began. My siblings called everyone on the list he had provided. Much like a job, there was a reference list of people who knew him, rabbis and friends. Then they call people who weren't on the list who they knew through word of mouth would know his family, just to find out everything about the family. What do they do? What are their customs like? Are they as religious as we are, et cetera.

Then our first arranged date was set up, and that was just a couple of hours in a hotel lobby.

BLAIR HODGES: Then there would be a set number of dates too. You were only expected to go on a certain number, and maybe you could get a little extension if you needed it, but the idea was you were doing a set number of dates toward marriage.

SARA GLASS: It was to be under ten. By around date number five or six you should pretty much know if you're going to marry them.

BLAIR HODGES: So much of this was new to me, like the idea of the need to have a partner that comes from a certain family. Let's say you had a family member who was gay and left the community or whatever, that could be a stain on your family's record that could come up. You say your marketability as a marriage partner depended on the perceived righteousness of your family.

One of the things that seems to have settled your heart about Yossi was that he was open to you getting a PhD. You were an intellectually inclined person and the ultra-Orthodox community doesn't completely forbid those kinds of pursuits. He was open to getting a PhD as you were talking. It seemed like that was big for you.

SARA GLASS: I didn't want to compromise on the religiosity of my spouse. But I really, really hoped I could find one who was both devout and would support my career.

Wedding Night With No Sex Ed – 18:14

BLAIR HODGES: Also, by this time you hadn't really learned much about sex at all. In fact, you describe a woman, Mrs. Levenstein, who helped with that as a bridal instructor. What does that look like? It's basically two days before you're married and suddenly you have to learn what sex really even is.

SARA GLASS: I felt really blindsided. We had a few bridal classes that were mostly about the laws of family purity, which involve counting a certain amount of days after one's period before immersing in a ritual bath, and then doing “something sacred” with one's husband.

I learned about the “something sacred,” but I didn't know what the mechanics of it were. I didn't understand. I had never seen a penis. I didn't know what would happen during the “sacred act.” I found out just two days before my wedding and I was kind of horrified.

BLAIR HODGES: Did it seem unreal to you? You had no context for it. I can't imagine.

SARA GLASS: I had no context for it. I remember coming out of that meeting and I was just green. Dassa actually picked me up from there and she was like, "Are you okay? You look like you're about to throw up."

I was about to throw up. I couldn't fathom that would be the thing I had to do with someone I barely knew. I had only met him a few times. I was okay marrying him for God. But I didn't know I would have to do those things with him.

BLAIR HODGES: That could be traumatic for anyone, and especially traumatic for someone who's queer. Your account of the wedding night is really harrowing. You got married, then you're there that night and you're supposed to be engaging in sex. You just learned about it. You went theological in your head to just think of it as a sacrifice for God. This was something you could do for God. That's how you tried to process it in that moment.

SARA GLASS: That's why I chose the song to walk down to the aisle with. Actually, all the chapters in this book are based on song titles and now I have a playlist that will be released on social media, the Kissing Girls on Shabbat playlist.

The first song is in Hebrew. It's the song I walked down the aisle to. The translation of the song literally is, "I will build a tabernacle in my heart, and upon it I will sacrifice my soul to that, that would be my sacrifice."

That's exactly how I processed it. Then going into that wedding night, I was ready to sacrifice myself.

BLAIR HODGES: You describe the strange negotiations that happened after you tried to consummate the marriage. Yossi on the phone trying to figure out if you successfully had sex or not, having to talk to other people to even find out if what you did counted.

SARA GLASS: Neither of us really knew what we were doing. If you've never had sex before, it's like trying to do a puzzle in the dark. What piece goes where? Did we get it? How do you even know if the puzzle is complete?

We did have to call a rabbi the next morning after we thought we had consummated the marriage to find out if we did. The rabbi had to ask some clarifying questions like, did this part go here? And did this feel this amount of painful? And was there blood? Things like that to determine if we had actually had sex.

Which—spoiler alert—we had not. It took a little while longer to figure it out.

BLAIR HODGES: In part because it's a traumatic thing. That was a difficult part to read. I think it's important though, because it speaks to the pain which purity culture put you through, setting you up for that traumatic experience, because you weren't educated about sex, and because you weren't heterosexual.

It was a very sad scene. It seemed really personal. I admired your courage in talking about it.

SARA GLASS: Thank you. I know this book is a little bit of an intense read. People might want to take it slow.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. As a therapist you invite people to pay attention to how their body feels as they're reading and breathe when they need to, and walk away if they need to, and so on. You definitely have the reader in mind.

We're talking with Sara Glass about the book, Kissing Girls on Shabbat. It's a memoir coming out in June 2024. Dr. Glass earned a master's in social work from Rutgers University and a PhD in Psychology from Capella University.

Secrets About Family Mental Health – 22:38

BLAIR HODGES: Being gay wasn't the only secret you were holding onto on your wedding night, Sara. But you didn't know the second secret was a secret. You thought your partner knew about this—it was your family's history of mental health issues.

Yossi had asked why your sister didn't attend the wedding. You said she's not in a good condition to travel because of her mental health. You kind of explained where she was. And his response was, "Oh, if I had known your sister was mentally unstable, I would never have married you." What was it like to hear that in that moment?

SARA GLASS: I was ashamed. I also understood him because I understood genetics were really important. In a Jewish marriage what we were trying to do was procreate for God's sake. That's what we were commanded to do. And I thought he knew. I thought he had been told about my family history before committing to the marriage.

We were both really stuck, because I was stuck with somebody who I thought had informed consent to be in the situation with me, to procreate with me, and it turns out he wasn't informed. And then he was stuck because we had already gotten married.

BLAIR HODGES: I think it's important to point that out, because your initial reaction was not, “How dare you judge my family,” or that it's wrong to have that kind of ableist mentality, but rather an understanding, like “He didn't know this and he probably should have and now I feel bad about this.”

Give listeners a sense of what that mental health history looked like for you, the family you grew up in, what you witnessed as a child involving your mom and sister and family members who struggled with mental health.

SARA GLASS: My mom had, I think what we would call in those days just “nerves.” She had “the nerves.” We were Ashkenazi Jews. She was first generation post-Holocaust. There are vulnerabilities inherent in that. She had a difficult time adjusting to life as a mother of a large family.

Then when my sister Shani had her first psychotic episode—and just please know all names have been changed to protect my family and to protect all the Orthodox people who are named in the book—when my sister had her first psychotic episode and was hospitalized at seventeen, my mother really fell apart. That was difficult for her to see and our household devolved after that.

Not only did my sister get diagnosed with bipolar disorder and struggle with that for many years, my mother also began to struggle more outwardly with her mental health and was hospitalized a couple of times as well.

BLAIR HODGES: One question I had at this point was, Yossi didn't call it off here. He just said, "I never would have married you." Would it have been easy at that point for him to say, "Oh, I didn't know that. So let's go ahead and void this thing?" Or was he kind of “stuck with it” as well? "Stuck with it" in quotation marks, because that's a gross way to put it.

SARA GLASS: He was, and that's part of what I'm trying to talk about in this book is I don't want to blame him, or even any single individual in this story. These problems are systemic. These things are happening because the system has been set up in a certain way. That's why it's still happening. Just looking at Yossi as someone who's a flawed individual, as we all are, wouldn't accomplish the goal I'm trying to accomplish with this book. I do have so much empathy for him still, to this day. I don't think he was trying to hurt me at all.

In terms of him being stuck, unfortunately, as a reader who is very knowledgeable in Orthodox Judaism might realize at some point in the book, I reference that Yossi was part of the holy tribe of priests called kohanim. Those are people who come from certain lineage in Judaism and they're destined to serve in the holy temple when the time comes.

Now that special tribe of priests, that's passed down through their DNA, they are not allowed to remarry after divorce. They're not allowed to remarry anyone who's been divorced. They can only ever marry a virgin or a widow. When we got divorced I did put him in that situation, or he ended up in that situation. He was more stuck than someone would be by the regular stigmas associated with divorce in the Jewish culture.

Pregnant and Lonely – 27:00

BLAIR HODGES: Wow. Plus, a mere five weeks into this marriage you're pregnant. That might have forestalled separation at that point too. At six weeks, though, you notice some unusual bleeding. This is a hard part to talk about as well because you experienced a miscarriage at this point. Your reaction to this was to internalize it and blame perhaps your own sins, and maybe even your behavior before you had been married.

SARA GLASS: I was taught this really linear way of looking at things that went wrong in the world. The Holocaust happened because the Jews were assimilating. Whenever someone was sick we were told to pray harder so the person would get better. If I had a miscarriage, the only thing I can think of was, what did I do wrong to cause that? It was easy to draw the connection to the sins I had performed with my body.

BLAIR HODGES: And you were so alone because Yossi seemed cold in reaction to it. He was determined to move forward in this process of, you have your period, you have your ritual bath, and then you have sex, and this is the opportunity to procreate and have a child. He's ready to keep going. What are you thinking at this point, because you're still so young! Are you ready to be a mom? Are you wanting to at this point?

SARA GLASS: I did really want to be a mom. Somehow that was never a question for me.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. But you have questions about the way Yossi is participating in your marriage, because his reaction to you, being cold about it, set the stage for a recurring pattern in your relationship.

During the time he wasn't supposed to touch you because of ritual impurity he would just completely shut you out. You weren't sure if that was the way things usually went. There's a word for this you introduce us to, and I'll probably mispronounce it, but it's machmir, or something like that.

Talk about how that worked in your relationship, how that played into your partnership.

SARA GLASS: Yes, he really took it to the next level. I think teenagers today would say he was “being really extra.” My kids would say “that was so extra!” [laughter]

During this certain couple of weeks of the month he was supposed to not have sex with me. In order to not have sex there are extra guardrails the law puts up, such as don't touch each other, don't cuddle. That's to protect you so you don't feel tempted to have sex—not that I would have ever felt tempted to have sex. I was so relieved! I'm like this is great. I get two weeks off, awesome, perfect. But just in case one would be tempted.

I guess maybe he was afraid of being tempted. He was very, very pious and devout. He must have decided at some point if he doesn't look at me directly during those two weeks of the month each month, that will protect him from feeling a desire to have sex with me. He would not look at me, he would limit his conversation with me, mumble things down toward the table, instead of connecting with me as person.

Earning Her Master’s Degree – 29:59

BLAIR HODGES: It seems so lonely to me. You're in this situation, and then he drops this new bomb, which is that he doesn't want you to get a PhD after all. Despite the conversation you had before you were married, all of a sudden he's like, actually no.

SARA GLASS: Basically. He said he asked the rabbi and “we decided,” or “he decided”—the rabbi—"it's not a good idea, and you're going to get a master's degree in social work and here's what will happen next and you will be very happy.”

That's what he said to me.

BLAIR HODGES: "And you will be very happy."

So this was the option you had. You go to Rutgers, this is how you wound up there, where you got a master's degree in social work. Your first semester at school is maybe the first time you're really—other than some little vacations and some time away from home—you're really in the "world." You're out in the world now.

This is when you start to realize why the rabbis and why Yossi were discouraging women from going after an education. What ideas started to come into your head as you were getting educated?

SARA GLASS: Oh my G-d, everything. It was social work school. It's not even like I went out of the community and got a business degree. Social work school would be the most lefty, radical democratic environment to put a Hasidic young girl into!

I was maybe twenty years old by then. I was exposed to so much. Even just seeing people right near me, sitting next to me in jeans, that was a culture shock. I was like, wow, these are people I know. I know their names and they're wearing pants. I didn't know anyone like that before.

Then I got exposed to the idea that not everybody's a Republican. I was like, wow, all these people are talking about these very liberal ideas like they're good things. When my whole life I had heard about those liberal ideas like they're insane, or totally sinful. I was exposed to people who didn't believe in marriage, didn't think having children was a value that was important, it was something that should be optional.

All of that was both fascinating to me and really frightening because it questioned the single-minded devotion with which I was trying to live.

BLAIR HODGES: It seemed like for a time you still really wanted to maintain that identity. Maybe there was a little bit of pride in being the Orthodox woman in the secular environment? Did you ever have a sense of, “I'm really going to prove who I am here, I'm going to maintain my faith, I can hang with these people, that's great. But I'm also going to be super strong in my faith and do both”?

SARA GLASS: During my first year of social work school, I shrunk to the side of the classroom and I was trying to fit in. Then I realized I did better, I wrote better term papers when I wrote about the Orthodox Jewish community and how I wanted to apply social work concepts to them, because I was suddenly passionate in writing about things I knew about a little bit more.

I started to wear headscarves to school instead of wearing my wigs always, and I felt more confident as a Jewish woman wearing that. It felt like I was showing off my religion instead of hiding it.

The Family Grows While the Marriage Breaks  – 33:08

BLAIR HODGES: This is also when you became a mother. You have your first child. As you said, you wanted to be a mom. There must have been some joy here. The process of getting there was painful and not enjoyable for you. But having a baby seemed to be a light in your life at this point.

SARA GLASS: I loved holding my babies and getting to take care of them. That was a holy task I believed in, and I found it extremely meaningful.

BLAIR HODGES: You said “babies” because you had a second one. There was a push to keep going. You were supposed to just keep having babies. After your first you actually got to use some birth control because the community leadership and your partner would say, “we don't want to have babies too close together, let's space these out.” It bought you a little bit of time, but you tried to push that time out more and more. That wasn't ultimately sustainable. You eventually had to stop taking birth control, have another kid, and you're still so young at this point.

Now your relationship with Yossi is getting more and more fractured. What were you facing? You started to believe something might have to change in your marriage and in your relationship.

SARA GLASS: I started to realize he and I would never have a meaningful relationship. We were two extremely different people. He was almost married to the law and to the rigidity of the law. I was interested in the world.

I wanted to be devout, but I also wanted to talk about emotions. I wanted to have thoughtful conversations about psychology topics. I wanted to think about how we would show our kids love in these different ways. I wanted to talk about theories of parenting. But I was with this person who was more focused on, “what time is it” and “is it time for this prayer yet or that prayer?” What day of the week is it and what does that mean in terms of our religion?

He was in this world of black and white and I wanted to burst out and live life in color for me and my children. We didn't end up having that much to relate about. 

BLAIR HODGES: There's another tragic scene you describe, rape, where he forced a sexual encounter with you. That seemed to be one of several breaking points for you.

SARA GLASS: That was a really tough one. It's tough to define. Just to get very upfront about it and direct about it, I don't even know if I would define it as “he raped me” or as the community and the laws were responsible for me being raped in that moment.

It was definitely sex I did not consent to and I did not feel I had a choice about. Yet, in some ways I don't think he felt he had a choice either. I had just gone to the ritual bath. The law mandates once a woman comes home from the ritual bath, you need to have sex that night. Otherwise that's problematic. That's the law.

I had just come back from the ritual bath and I wasn't feeling very good. I also wanted to use birth control because I felt my marriage was on the rocks and I wasn't comfortable engaging in sex without birth control. He, at the same time, felt we needed to have sex that night because that was the law. He called his rabbi who said I couldn't use birth control and that I did need to go ahead with the act of sex.

I didn't say no to him because that would mean saying no to God in my mind at that time, saying no to the rabbi. I did feel I was raped, but I don't know if it was by him. If that makes any sense.

BLAIR HODGES: It does. I appreciate the fact that you're viewing it with nuance. It's difficult to talk about. In your mind you're just thinking this has to end. Regardless of whose fault it was. The book shows that in that moment, it didn't seem like you were trying to assess blame and fault, you just knew something was happening you didn't want. That wasn't even on your mind. You just knew this thing has to end.

Sadly your sisters, your beloved sisters, are siding with Yossi. Sort of like, “What are you doing, Sara? You need to reverse course. Don't break this up.” You call them your “well-wishers.” Talk about that. There's well-wishers around. I think this can resonate with people. Everybody's probably had some well-wishers in their life. What do you mean?

SARA GLASS: Well-wishers to me were the people who, after I made the decision to get divorced, their job was to come by and try to talk me out of it. They would come by “out of love,” “out of concern,” “out of concern for my children,” et cetera and so forth.

They would come over to my house and give me stories of their own horrible marriages—to which I was like, how is this convincing me to stay in mine? [laughter] Now I'm worried about you and me. You're telling me some horrible stuff that's happening to you!

I went through a series of that, and my sisters thinking I was crazy for wanting to get divorced, and me even starting to think maybe I am crazy. I don't know, but I just can't do that anymore.

BLAIR HODGES: It's almost like, “Maybe I am crazy, but okay. That's what I'm going to be.”

SARA GLASS: Right. "I'll take it." [laughter]

The Divorce Agreement – 38:40

BLAIR HODGES: People who read the book will get to see how the whole process is laid out, how the community handles divorce, but we’ll just take a second to say the divorce agreement itself was penned within the community. This wasn't something that was done in an outside legal court of law. This was a religious court that negotiated this divorce agreement, and it included a provision that would affect your life for the next ten, fifteen years.

Which is, you agreed the kids would remain Orthodox, and if you didn't raise them in that way you would forfeit custody of them, which to you meant you couldn't embrace whatever you had going with Dassa before, or you couldn't fully leave the community. You needed to remain within ultra-Orthodox favor and bring your kids up that way. If you didn't, the kids would be taken away.

SARA GLASS: Absolutely. You really nailed it. That's exactly what that meant to me.

BLAIR HODGES: There was a lot of terror there. Now you're on a tightrope. You have some choices, because you could have just ran off to California and left your kids behind. You could have started over. You could have continued to explore yourself in secret or tried to stay in the community.

What did the early exploration look like now that you're separated? You talk about some “controlled explorations” you experimented with because you did want to find yourself more, but you had to be so careful and walk that tightrope.

SARA GLASS: It was so hard because here I was, I was twenty-four years old. I had gone to college and so I knew other people my age were drinking, they were partying. They weren't trying to get married. They were having sex. I also got the internet right after I got the divorce and for the first time I watched TV. For the first time in my life!

BLAIR HODGES: Do you remember what the first show you watched was?

SARA GLASS: Grey's Anatomy.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Was it recommended? How did you land on that one?

SARA GLASS: I don't know how I landed on that. I sat down in the corner of my kitchen with this one wire that connected from my laptop to the cable connection, on the floor for hours and watched every illegally downloaded—sorry, Shonda Rhimes—Grey's Anatomy.

I learned in the outside world people my age were having so much fun. They were wearing whatever they wanted. I wanted to be a person in the world and to try some of that, and to live in my skin. But I was not going to lose my kids. That was a non-negotiable.

Back on the Dating Scene – 41:09

BLAIR HODGES: Even though you dated a woman at this point in secret, if I remember correctly you met on an app, it only lasted a few months before you turned back to find a Jewish man. And you found it was kind of tricky, dating Jewish men, even the Orthodox ones, because even a lot of them wanted to have sex, which was technically against the rules for them as well.

You're in a hard situation where if you want to get back and maybe even marry a Jewish man again, you're in a game where you have to play it and have premarital sex. You find some leeway from rabbis that seem maybe a little bit understanding about how it works.

Talk about how this negotiation went as you were dating Jewish men and figuring out what sex could be like, even though y'all weren't supposed to be having sex. And you were gay! It wasn't like you were pursuing it because you wanted to have sex with dudes.

SARA GLASS: It was totally, purely strategic at that point. I didn't think of it like that at the time, but I needed to marry a Jewish man because that was the only way I could keep my children. I couldn't be gay. I couldn't be gay and keep custody of my children.

I dated Jewish men. My value in the marketplace as a potential match had been decreased by being married and divorced. Those things were seen as strikes against me as a person. I had a few strikes: family mental illness, divorce, I had children, that was a strike, I had gone outside of the community for school.

I was damaged goods at that point and the Jewish men who wanted to date me, those were men that were wanting to have sex. I felt that was something I would need to do in order to get one of those men, like the men who would still agree to date someone that was damaged goods.

Also, to be honest, a part of me wanted to at least try out what it was going to feel like with those men before I committed to marrying them. Because I now knew how terrible it could be to have to have sex with someone I absolutely had zero connection with. A part of me was like, “Let me try this out and see if it's more tolerable and if maybe it can even be enjoyable.”

I did get special permission from a rabbi to dunk in a ritual bath and to purify my body so the sex I had with those men was merely a lower level of sin and not the kind of sin that would cause us to be cut off from God and from heaven for all of eternity.

BLAIR HODGES: People might be surprised to know at this point you're still not thinking of yourself as being gay as an identity. That wasn't there yet. In fact, you found some enjoyment in sex with men in the sense that you liked being appreciated. You say sex could actually be enjoyable in some ways because you could see a partner enjoying sex. That could feel good to make someone feel good. So you still weren’t in a kind of super gay identity.

SARA GLASS: Right, I still didn't believe in being gay, actually. It's also important to note I was monitoring my thoughts. I had been taught to monitor my thoughts from a young age. Some of the things we repented for as sins on Yom Kippur were having sinful thoughts. I was not allowing myself to think about being gay because if I thought too hard about being gay I was worried I would go down a path that would cause me to lose my children. I was thinking still in a narrow way.

Blending and Ending a New Family – 44:13

BLAIR HODGES: We mentioned how your family had sided with Yossi, but you did have a chance at this point to reconnect with your sister, Shani, who we talked about earlier, who had mental health issues and who was in Jerusalem for much of the time. It was beautiful to see you reconnect with her, but the beauty turned into tragedy.

SARA GLASS: That's another reason why I wrote this book, is to highlight the stigma that surrounds mental illness in so many communities and still in American culture. Way too many people are embarrassed to seek treatment for themselves or their family members.

My sister had bipolar disorder and she was sent to Israel to receive treatment. Our family also kept thinking there would be a cure, which turned out to be a deadly thought, that this could be something that could be cured. Because that led Shani to go on and off her medications multiple times throughout her lifetime and to be hospitalized over and over and over again. Because there is no cure to bipolar disorder, though it can be managed and it can be treated and people can live wonderful, full lives.

BLAIR HODGES: But she was seeking a cure instead of a treatment, which meant you've got to find out if you're cured. Go off the meds. That would send her spiraling. She had children as well, and you became close with them.

You're connecting with her, and also you do eventually get married again to a man you call Eli. You decide to get married and we've already said why you made that calculation. Now you have to figure out how to blend a family though, because you've got two kids and he's got kids.

Do you have any blended family tips that you picked up on at this point? How was that?

SARA GLASS: I could do a full day on blended family tips! I've worked with it so much in my career.

One of my main tips would be as a stepparent don't try to discipline your partner's children. I had a ten-to-one rule for myself. I would make sure I had ten positive interactions for every one possible redirection of my stepchild. I would be like, “Your hair looks great today.” “Thank you so much for clearing your plate away.” “Do you need me to sign that?” “Here's a sandwich.” Then there'll be possibly one, “Do you think maybe you can put your shoes away when you have a chance?”

We need to balance that because you haven't been their parent. You don't have years of giving and taking care of a stepchild. When they come into your life as an older child you want to show them they're really loved and they're respected as a person. You're not just there to tell them what to do.

BLAIR HODGES: That's great advice. You're trying to figure all that out. And as you said, you could do a whole book on the topic. You're learning all that stuff in real time. You're in a new relationship. You're learning how that goes.

We're not going to share everything about the book with folks. But let's just say something very tragic happens that causes a division between you and Eli. Something very heart wrenching happens to you. He sees you pulling away from him. He's frustrated, because sexual access is changing, your sexual relationship is changing. This starts to fracture your relationship when you had finally got into this new family. You're financially well situated, and you're trying to figure out how to be a stepmom. But now things are falling apart again.

This is where a therapist helped you. [laughs] This is one of the most ironic parts of the book, Sara, I have to say. A therapist—when you're being trained as therapist—helped you discover you were dealing with PTSD, something you couldn't see yourself even though you'd learned how to see it in others.

SARA GLASS: It's the wildest thing in the world. I would say I'm reasonably good at my job. People do come and see me for psychotherapy. Then sometimes I have these huge blind spots with my own self. I'm like “What? Oh my G-d, that's what I'm doing. I have PTSD!”

BLAIR HODGES: That therapist asked you a question, because you're talking about your sexual relationship and sexual history and stuff. The therapist says, "Sara, have you ever actually wanted to have sex with a man?"

You say this was a lightbulb moment for you, to really have to address that question.

SARA GLASS: I did not know I was allowed to “want,” period. To want anything. I wasn't allowed to decide, do I want children? Do I want a sandwich? Do I want to go to the bookstore on a Saturday? "Want" wasn't really a big part of my vocabulary at all.

So many of the things I did every single day were things where the question is, “should I? Should I want this?” Only then would I decide if it's something I wanted. And so when he said, “Have you ever wanted to have sex with a man?” I was like, oh damn, that's something I'm supposed to have an opinion about? I didn't think that was in that category. I thought that was a thing I should just do.

BLAIR HODGES: This is going to, again, set you down a path, because this is a second divorce for you. Did you worry about that? Was this another bad mark on your record, of a second failed marriage? Did you have self-doubts about yourself, like “this is another ‘failed marriage,’ am I the problem?”

What were you feeling going into that second divorce?

SARA GLASS: I really at that point stopped caring what people thought. I was just so done. I had been working as a therapist for quite some time by then. I knew that too many people stay in bad relationships because they are afraid of what people think. They put themselves and their families through so much bitterness and resentment and anger. I see the damage on families and partners and children when people make those decisions.

By that point, yes, it was going to be a second divorce. I did not care what people would think. I was just like, this is what's right for me. I will hold my head up high. I know people will have thoughts about this, and that's on them.

BLAIR HODGES: You could take ownership. You become your own judge and advocate rather than outsourcing that to the people around you.

A Trip to the Stonewall Inn – 50:34

BLAIR HODGES: This is also when you came to finally embrace the fact that you were gay. What led you to that? What did you experience that made you say, “actually this is who I am”?

SARA GLASS: I can't believe I wrote this in the book! I think it was one of the hardest things to narrate in the audiobook, was my sex scene, that one with a woman.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] I have to say, by the way, it’s a very chaste and very sweet scene, but yes, please go on!

SARA GLASS: I'm still a little Hasidic girl at heart! I'm like, wow, I'm writing about intercourse in my book for everyone to read. Oh my G-d!

The other day my daughter was reading the book and she comes running out of her bedroom and she goes, "You had a pink Coach leather purse. Where is it?" I'm like, "Jordan. That was 2009. I don't have it anymore. It's gone." Then she goes, "Here's a pen and can you cross out the sex scenes?" So I crossed them all out for her. She's like, "Thank you." [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Kids aren't interested in that stuff yet.

SARA GLASS: She's like, "You look so happy to be doing that." I'm like, “Thank G-d you let me do that!”

What happened was—that was the little sidebar behind the scenes—but I cheated on my husband. I did cheat on my husband. I left our home for a weekend, told him I went to a conference. Some people actually go to conferences. Don't always think when your spouse says they're going to a conference they're cheating, but I was going to New York City that weekend and I went to Manhattan.

I went to the only place I could find on Google that was gay because I didn't really know anything. I actually went to the Stonewall Inn, which is this historic gay bar in West Village. I didn't even realize it was mostly men. But I was lucky because on Friday nights there are women on the second floor. So I went upstairs.

I thought, I need to know if I'm really gay before I break up my whole life and before I put my kids through a divorce. I didn't care what anyone else would think about my divorce, but I did care that I was putting my children through another divorce. I needed to know if this was the truth. So I went—and I don't know how I did this, because again, I didn't know what I was doing. But I did get picked up by a really cute girl. We had a wonderful night together that was transformative. It was the first time I truly allowed myself to be with a woman without holding back and without trying to stop, without trying to hold my heart back.

Once I actually allowed myself to do that, I realized why my life felt like it didn't fit right up until that point. I just knew this is it.

BLAIR HODGES: I love this line: "I was gay. I was thirty-two years old and I finally knew, one million percent, I was gay. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. I wanted to run in the morning light and twirl around with my arms out."

This was an awakening for you, but it did require you to really let go to experience it. You had to be fully present in your body and with someone else who wanted to be with you to find that out. You were thirty-two years old. And now your daughter can read all about it. [laughter]

SARA GLASS: My poor daughter! She's seventeen. So she's okay.

BLAIR HODGES: You showed her where it was so she didn't have to read through it.

That's Sara Glass, a psychotherapist and writer in New York City. She earned her master's in social work from Rutgers and a PhD in Psychology from Capella. I should mention she's also a clinical director of Soul Wellness NYC, a private psychotherapy practice in midtown Manhattan, and she serves as a clinical supervisor for Jewish Queer Youth, a nonprofit that supports and empowers LGBTQ youth. We're talking about her book Kissing Girls on Shabbat. It's an excellent memoir. You can also follow Sara on social media. She has a great presence on Instagram.

I haven't checked if you have a TikTok. I am too old.

SARA GLASS: I just can't. I don't know how to a dance or sing.

BLAIR HODGES: I don't know how to get the algorithm going. I don't know. I feel you.

SARA GLASS: But thank you for mentioning the Instagram. That is where we'll put all the book updates, and that's @drsaraglass.

Therapist Versus Memoirist – 55:11

BLAIR HODGES: Perfect. All right, Sara, let's talk about you as a therapist and a writer because your book also includes a letter at the end that you wrote for clients you've had in your professional life. To them you're a therapist, you're not a memoirist, and so reading this book you tell them, Hey, you might encounter someone in this book that doesn't match the impression you have of me in our professional relationship of me as your therapist.

You wanted to give a heads up and acknowledge that, because the traditional role of a therapist is to have a little bit of a wall between you. Maybe not even a little bit of a wall, but basically to separate your personal life from what you're doing with your clients. Self-disclosure has been seen as inappropriate.

Let's talk about that and how you're negotiating with that as a professional therapist, but now also someone who's telling your story so publicly.

SARA GLASS: It's a really interesting thing to think about. I even still have so much self-judgment. As you're queuing up this question to ask me, my inner old therapist judgment voice is shaming me for writing the book, still to this day.

I did want to include a letter to my clients in the book because I wanted them to know how thoughtful I was when I made the decision to write. I'll share a little bit of my thought process. I don't know if this is the only way to be—it isn't, it definitely isn't. This is just the process I went through. Part of my thought process was this:

When I was initially trained as a therapist, the father of psychotherapy was Freud. Freud had this whole idea that therapists are this blank slate. We're supposed to be this mirror. Clients come in, they tell us all their vulnerable things. They can cry, they can laugh, they can question, and we are supposed to remain blank. That was something I did for a while. But I always felt it was a little bit disingenuous. It was almost like clients would be going through all these emotional experiences and then looking at me, and I was in this superiority mode. I wasn't going to be feeling with them. It felt like “cold parent” to me.

Then when I got trained in trauma therapy, polyvagal theory, and somatic experiencing therapy (SE), Bessel Van der Kolk's work on the nervous system, The Body Keeps the Score, I learned clients actually need to sometimes feel like there's a human being on the other side. It's not a blank mirror. That it could be traumatic to have this blank mirror, and that it's okay to laugh and to cry a little bit, and to feel with your client.

That resonated for me much more. I am a very embodied, empathic person. I am the kind of person that when someone's crying in front of me, I do feel it in my body. It felt much more natural to be able to be that.

As time went on—and I won't go through all that's in the letter—I started to see different therapists, modern therapists practicing in different ways, having social media presences, writing some of their own stories. I started to think about how therapy was invented by men, white, cisgender men from decades ago, from a time when there was no internet and a time when they could keep their lives separate at home. They weren't Google-able. They were able to keep their wives at home, bearing the children. And maybe that wasn't the only way to practice. Maybe therapists having to be a blank slate—that's impossible to do out in the world where you're Google-able. What are we supposed to do? Have no lives that can ever be found online? How is that an oath anyone can take? It's unrealistic. Maybe that's not even helpful. Maybe it is helpful when people do see us as human beings.

I still think it's important to have boundaries in the therapy room. When a client goes into the therapy room, that room becomes their sacred space. That's not a time to impose one's personal views, opinions, or anecdotes. However, that doesn't mean therapists are not allowed to also be human beings out in the world. Maybe if we tell our stories and we're open about that, maybe that can help people out there, maybe it can help people need less-intense trauma healing. Maybe we can help people prevent trauma.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Sara Glass. I do want to say there's so much in the interview we couldn't cover! There are some unexplored spoilers. You talked about your daughter, so people obviously know the divorce and the way you were able to go through things with Yossi worked out somehow in terms of staying close to your kids.

But there are other things in the book, I promise people, we have not covered nearly everything. There are big reveals, big feelings, and really big things that happen to you we haven't covered. I strongly recommend people pick up this memoir because we've only scratched the surface. The name of the book is Kissing Girls on Shabbat, which by the way my kiddo said to me, “So does she kiss girls on Shabbat a lot in the book?” And I said, “Actually, I don't remember any actual Shabbat kissing1” [laughter]

SARA GLASS: Yes, it was a way to honor the intersectionality of this experience of being both Jewish and queer.

BLAIR HODGES: It's a great title. I thought it was so funny that was their question, "Oh so she kisses a lot of people on Shabbat?" And I was like, “Oh, maybe but not really in the book.”

SARA GLASS: I do now! [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, now! Okay, excellent.

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises! – 1:00:55

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Sara, before we go, we always have a segment here called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is your chance to choose your own adventure. Something you regret about the book. Now it's coming out this next month, but that means it's baked in, so maybe there is something you wish you could change. Or what was the most challenging part about writing it, or something you discovered in the process of actually writing it? You can speak to any of those you wish.

SARA GLASS: I'll talk about a challenge, because I think this will be helpful to anyone who's trying to write memoir. One of the challenges is that I actually wrote this book four or five times. The first iteration was really angry. It was from a more flattened, one-dimensional perspective of me as a victim of a terrible circumstance. Then I had to rewrite it and rewrite it until I could find compassion for all the players involved and tell a more comprehensive story.

I love that that was the process. It was challenging, and it was also extremely cathartic to be able to go through all those iterations of the book and then to find a story that actually felt like it did justice to all the characters, not just to myself, and also included my own flaws and didn't make me come off as some hero.

BLAIR HODGES: That's certainly true. There's a certain chameleon nature to you, of always trying to—I never knew where you were going to go next. I never quite knew where you're going to be. I should say right before we go, too—I'm not making this up—I finished this book in Chicago, I was on a business trip. I was in this hotel and I stayed up till three in the morning my time because I couldn't stop reading. I was like, “I've got to finish this book. It's so good!”

SARA GLASS: Thank you so much. Thank you for reading so carefully and thoughtfully and for asking such great questions.

BLAIR HODGES: It was my pleasure truly, Sara. This has been a great conversation and there's so much more in your book. Again, Kissing Girls on Shabbat. Thank you so much, Sara.

SARA GLASS: Thank you.

Outro – 1:02:50

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Family Proclamations. I'm looking forward to the next episode in two weeks. You can send any questions or comments my way. The email is blair@firesidepod.org. Also, give me a follow on Instagram to get little previews of upcoming episodes. Look for @famprocs. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and I hope to stick around. Check out some of the other episodes or let a friend know about the show.

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Thank you for that review, Cynthia!

Also, thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor, as well as Mates of State who provided the theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

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Note: Transcripts are lightly edited for readability.