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Mormon Stories Podcast

820: Tova Mirvis - Losing Faith and Mixed Faith Marriage as an Orthodox Jew Pt. 3

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.55.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2017

⏱️ 77 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tova describes how she learned to tell her own story

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:21.0

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0:30.0

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0:38.0

So it sounds like the hat wig and the pants weren't the end of it, so how did it continue after that?

0:47.0

I wanted to think, okay, just this, just this.

0:50.0

And that's still three years into the marriage, right?

0:52.0

Three years in, three years in.

0:54.0

And then I got pregnant and I had my first child.

0:57.0

And I had, and then, you know, motherhood became a way of defining me and it felt like those issues, they took a backseat for a little while.

1:10.0

And I felt like, okay, we were orthodox. I was going to send my kids my son to an orthodox school. We were going to follow this.

1:19.0

But I feel like my questioning sort of became masked a little bit by being disengaged.

1:25.0

It was easy not to go to synagogue, I would wait because I had a baby.

1:28.0

And it was easy to sort of be like, to sort of motherhood became my new identity.

1:33.0

And so I didn't have to wrestle with the questions as much.

1:36.0

I also, you know, at the same time, my first book came out and it was about the orthodox Jewish world and it was regarded by many as being critical of that world.

1:46.0

And so all of a sudden I was this figure where, you know, I was orthodox and practiced, but I was sort of regarded by many in the orthodox world as a critic from within.

1:56.0

And I was sort of iffy in that regard.

1:58.0

And so for the first time I had the sense of these private questions were being talked about publicly.

2:05.0

And I heard over and over again the accusation that I was airing the dirty laundry or people in the Memphis orthodox community were angry about the book.

2:13.0

And they said, you know, no one's going to want to move here now or no one's going to, you know, no one's going to, you know, I think that, you know, was good for the community or bad.

2:23.0

And I think that the work of art was going to be judged in the terms of, again, good or bad.

...

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