Am I missing out?

While sharing a croissant at the kiddush, Adam told me he had gone to a sex party.
“Like an orgy?” I asked.
“Oh, god, no. It was really casual,” he said.
“How many guys?” I asked. He said there were maybe forty in their twenties and thirties. The theme was jockstraps. He explained this so casually, it caught me off guard.

Did I know any of the guests? Had I slept with them? Adam and I ran in similar circles. None of the guys I’d hooked up with seemed like the type to go to a sex party. Then again, neither did Adam. We had both just been given an aliyah. An older man told us we chanted beautifully. I felt like a nun.

“Am I missing out?”
I asked my friend Jay. Jay orchestrated a threesome with a guy neither of us knew. He wore a casual ski mask — just in case the other guy recognized him. They might run in the same circles. Every time I saw our reflection in the mirror I thought we all looked stupid. Jay had no time for questions. When it was over, he waited until he was in the foyer to take his mask off.

Jay was no stranger to masks. The first time we met, he told me he was Brazilian. He said he learned French with a Parisian accent instead of a Quebecois accent because he liked it more. Psychotic, but I get it. Then he popped up in my Facebook People You May Know menu. His name was actually Mehdi and he was from Marrakech. This explained the accent and the suspicious lack of foreskin. I didn’t tell him that the algorithm had torn away his proverbial ski mask. It wasn’t fair to him. He probably got off on the idea of having a double life. Under the sun, Mehdi worked in finance and lived with his sister. At night, he was a masked gay Brazilian called Jay. It was more fun to just let him have this.

Miranda was telling me about her new boyfriend over Sangria at Winnies. They met on Tinder. He was a nice guy that lived with his mom on the South Shore. They were extremely compatible, but she was holding on to some reservations.

She took a deep, thoughtful breath before saying, “I’m really scared he’s gonna judge my number.”
Her number? How many guys had she hooked up with? What constitutes a full number anyway? I asked her what her number was. She burried her face in her hands with embarrassment. “Six.”

My jaw dropped. The sixth guy I slept with was a disappointment. In a Notes page on my phone I have his name written as “TMR condo — boring with dog.” I didn’t even know what I liked by number six. Number Seven, though — he was a game-changer. Miranda asked what my number was, and I lied and told her I didn’t know.

Number Seven was into an after-hours club called Stereo. Seven and I hung out a lot. He asked me to follow him on Instagram and then didn’t follow me back. Stereo doesn’t serve alcohol, so mostly everybody who goes does drugs. I’m not big on drugs because I can’t afford them and my would kill me instead of sending another kid to rehab.

I spent an evening at Number Seven’s. In the morning, he made me coffee and I watched while he packed his lunch. He packed his lunch every day. He went to the gym every day. He made good financial decisions and had a great body. Here I was, pale and malnourished, perched on a barstool at his kitchen island in Griffintown, when he opened his freezer and procured a bottle of Visine.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s GHB. I wanna show you something,” he said. He opened a backpack. “Every time I go to Stereo I put this up my ass.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, seriously, I thought my friends were joking when they told me at first but apparently everybody does this.”

From the backpack he removed a large plastic freezer bag containing a bulb douche and condoms. He said, “I don’t wanna be dirty so I douche before but it’s not even that bad when you get used to it.” The Visine bottle goes inside a condom. The condom goes up your butt. It’s as easy as that. Everybody does it apparently. Is that true? Everybody I’ve mentioned it to since was just as shocked as I was. Every photo he posts on Instagram with his gay friends makes me wonder if these are the friends who also keep their drugs in their butts. Is it all of them? Is there some kind of plot?

Is everybody having fun but me?

I was plopped down on the couch with my knees pulled to my chin. “Why don’t you just download Tinder?” I asked. Crystal had been single for months. She wanted to get back out there but didn’t know how.

“I just feel like if somebody’s on Tinder, there’s probably a reason why they’re on Tinder.”

I thought of all the reasons I use Tinder. Companionship. Entertainment. Validation. What she meant was that they were probably desperate.

I said, “I think everybody is using it. It’s not weird people, it’s literally everyone.”
“I guess…” she didn’t believe me. I thought about introducing her to Miranda.

Am I having too much fun?

Every time I feel a little tickle in my throat, I’m scared it’s gonorrhea. There’s an epidemic. I deleted Grindr because it was taking up too much of my time, but I have every other app and check them regularly. I tell myself it’s different because they all have less people.

The shul was having an event for young people. Jell-O Shot Shabbat. The name was my idea. Adam was there, as was the regular contingent of 20-somethings. There was Robby, who once told me that he wanted to become anorexic because he wanted his pants to fit like mine. There was Josh and his boyfriend Joseph. They had an open relationship that involved a heavy rotation of very young twinks. Because of them, Instagram constantly recommends me new twinks to follow. Not my type, personally, but it’s indicative of their outreach. Josh messaged me on Grindr to tell me he recognized me from the shul. They’re very friendly. There’s Dov, the gay ex-Chassid. There’s also Aviva and Sloane — lesbians, childless — then Adina and Rachel — lesbians with children. For a while we had Uri, who was bisexual from Israel, and had once brought a friend to Shabbat dinner that both Adam and I had slept with. Similar circles. Somehow I consider myself religious.

“Is anyone here actually straight?”

I was a late bloomer.

In Grade 7, I had a friend named Tamara. She moved to Cold Lake, Alberta, in the middle of the school year. She told me on MSN, “I like it here. I can bribe boys with kisses and they’ll do whatever I want.” My heart sank. Small town life had changed her. We lost touch shortly after. Judging by the age of her first child, she was pregnant a year later. Her Facebook cover photo is her child at a Walmart Portrait Studio, but the picture was taken with her android phone and filtered in hell. Tamara is worse for wear.

Her Facebook tells a depressing story: She has more kids and a scary husband. The linoleum floors of their home are peeling all over. Her wedding dress was white and red, and everyone wore sneakers.

Do I want to get married someday? I think so. I have no idea what I want. I have a million choices in my pocket. If I don’t want to meet somebody new, all I have to do is search through the eggplant emojis in my contacts and write, “Heyy how are you?” and I never have to worry about peeling linoleum.

I was talking to the rabbi about my anxiety surrounding what it meant to be religious. I said that while I felt secure with the choices I made and with where I was, I still felt like it should feel as though I’m limiting myself by choosing to be religiously observant.

When a Jewish person who was not religious becomes very observant, it’s called “baal teshuva.” It’s typically used in the Orthodox sense to describe secular Jews who “return” to Orthodoxy enough fervour and enthusiasm that they alienate their parents. It’s a huge transition that promises community and identity. It’s often difficult for family and friends of BT’s to understand why they would give up so much of the world and live lives defined by restriction and rules.

The rabbi explained a talmudic lesson by Emmanuel Levinas called The Temptation of Temptation. He writes, “[Western man] is for an open life, eager to try everything, to experience everything, ‘in a hurry to live. Impatient to feel… we cannot close ourselves off to any possibility.”

Having unlimited choices empowers people to never make a decision at all. They will always feel afraid that they’re missing out, never planting roots. Planting roots or making big choices does not necessarily mean you’re closing yourself off to possibilities, the rabbi said. My choice to be observant doesn’t stop me from acting like a hoe, and although I have a complicated relationship with halakha, I know what I’m doing “wrong.” I’m not trying to be the perfect Jew. Often I’m not even trying the best I can.

Do I compartmentalize my religion and my sexuality? Have I found an equilibrium? Do I need to worry about having to justify one impulse in spite of another? Jewish tradition adds a richness to my life that I feel very privileged to partake in. Conversely, sex is fun. Having fun doesn’t mean I’m not religious anymore. Being religious doesn’t mean I don’t have fun. Some people go their entire lives having only ever slept with one person, never able to articulate the fact that all they want is to be choked. Conversely, some people crave spirituality and community, bouncing between yoga retreats and faux-Buddhist potluck dinners before finally deciding that what they’ve been searching for is Scientology. I feel most comfortable davening sacharit and complaining about my stomach, and I don’t feel like I have to reconcile that with the barrage of Grindr notifications I get when my phone comes on after shabbat.

What happens in my bed is between me, God, and however many men it takes to count towards a minyan. Amen and amen.

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