Expanding the Palace of Torah

Once at her daughter’s preschool Chanukah party, Minna Bromberg watched as the song leader urged the parents to get up and join in the dancing, “unless you’ve gotten too fat from those sufganiyot [jelly donuts].” Bromberg was personally offended, but she also found it ironic: “‘Doesn’t this guy know,’ I thought to myself, “that Chanukah celebrates the miracle of fat?!?’” In Every Body Beloved, Bromberg seeks not just to expose antifat bias in the Jewish community but also to broadcast the “miracle of fat liberation.”

Bromberg, who was ordained at the liberal nondenominational Hebrew College and is the founder of a Jerusalem-based organization called Fat Torah, draws on biblical stories and rabbinic wisdom to rage against the injustice of oppressive standards of beauty. In a chapter titled “From Narrowness to Freedom,” she describes herself as “one proud fat woman against a world of stigma and bias” and invokes the story of Exodus, with her wrath as a pillar of fire, “guiding me through oppression’s darkest night.”

She also persuasively criticizes the common trope of diet and exercise as acts of repentance: “If losing weight is teshuva, the only logical conclusion is that gaining weight, or staying fat, is sinful.” But deprivation is not a Jewish value, she argues, citing a teaching of Rav in the Talmud Yerushalmi that each of us will one day be held accountable for everything we craved but didn’t eat. Hunger or desire, she notes, is a starting point for relationships, including our relationship with God. So why is it stigmatized?

Throughout her book, Bromberg recalls instances when she was shamed, mocked, excluded, or insulted as a fat person. At times, this is a bit much, particularly in the pseudoepistolary interludes between chapters in which she addresses those who have wronged her, including the people at Yom Kippur services who wouldn’t move their chairs to let her through, the rabbi who was excited for her to speak at his synagogue because so many of his congregants were upset about gaining weight, and the long-ago boyfriend who broke up with her because she was fat (and Jewish).

But rather than obtain a prescription for Ozempic, as many others in her situation now opt to do, Bromberg courageously and passionately insists on accepting herself as she is:

I aspire to love my own fat body . . . not because it is especially virtuous or is better or worse than any other body. I do not need to argue for or even prefer to have a fat body in order to desire to live as fully as I can in the only body that I have, the only life that I have.

“There is no ‘wrong way,’” she writes, “to embody the image of God.”

In her new Hebrew memoir Mishkal odef (Overweight), the prize-winning Israeli poet Bacol Serlui describes her own lifelong struggle to accept her body in a world that does not. Once when she took a blind friend to the bathroom at a family party, a relative walked over to offer dieting tips. Serlui politely assured her that she wasn’t interested. When her friend came out of the bathroom, she said, “I never knew you were at all fat, but now I know you have good values.” The compliment loses something in translation, since the phrase for “good values” can be literally translated as “well-proportioned sizes.”

Reading Serlui after finishing Every Body Beloved, I was reminded of the many encounters Bromberg describes in which “complete strangers . . . expressed concern about my fatness.” Of such ostensibly well-meaning people, Bromberg writes, “You cannot claim to care about my health if I experience your every expression of caring as its opposite.” Although Serlui’s book is more memoir and Bromberg’s more manifesto, this is a point on which they are in complete agreement.

Serlui, who is both a journalist and a distinguished poet, grew up in the 1990s in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe. Her parents were from a right-of-center religious Zionist community associated with the distinguished yeshiva Mercaz HaRav. Although issues of weight, eating, and body image are central to the book, Mishkal odef is also about Serlui’s life as a deeply religious woman.

Her first name, which is unusual even in Israel, comes from a biblical verse: “Abraham was now old, advanced in years, and the Lord had blessed Abraham with everything (Bacol)” (Gen. 24:1). This prompted a talmudic discussion about the nature of Abraham’s all-inclusive blessing. According to one sage, it was that he had only sons. Another countered that, to the contrary, it was that Abraham actually did have a daughter. Then what was her name?—Bacol. As Serlui explained in a 2013 interview, “When she was pregnant, my mother woke up one morning and said—If it’s a girl, we’ll call her Bacol.” Although she clearly regards herself as blessed, less than three years later, her parents divorced.

As a child of divorce, Serlui came to understand that Jerusalem was a divided city—divided between her mother’s and her father’s homes. “Sometimes, on very rare occasions, they would say something good about one another, or tell the same story, and for a moment—just for a moment—the world was whole.” Serlui, who is herself now divorced and remarried, writes eloquently about her decision to keep covering her hair and observing other laws of modesty until she remarried. “When the covenant of marriage fell apart, I knew that the real covenant had not dissolved: My covenant with God.”

Serlui describes her intense love for Torah, which she became conscious of as a girl. Once, while reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (in Hebrew translation), she came across Alcott’s description of Amy’s feelings for Laurie, the boy next door, and found the words to describe her spiritual longing:

In Torah, in midrash, in Mishnah, and in halakhah, I find a richness that astounds me each time anew with its beauty, like a palace in which you discover each time another hall, more intricate and more magnificent than the one you previously encountered.

Serlui’s sense of unending spiritual enchantment is an interesting contrast with Bromberg’s admission that “sometimes being a rabbi feels like one long moment of being made aware of all the things you did not learn in rabbinical school.”

Certainly, Serlui’s memoir is less single-minded than Bromberg’s book, but she is deeply concerned with standards of female beauty in Israel, to whose shores the American body positivity movement has not quite reached. Bromberg, who is presumably a product of that movement, is unyielding in her opposition to such standards. And yet, Serlui admits that “even in a world of economic privation, worldwide plague, mental illness, and war,” her deepest wish, if she had just one, would be “to lose twenty kilo.”

In one of her book’s most distressing sections, Serlui describes her adolescence in an achievement-oriented religious high school where eating disorders were rampant. “We were the normal ones,” she writes of her social circle; “we knew how to walk the thin line between playing games with eating and full-blown anorexia.” Looking back on that period now, Serlui echoes Bromberg in her description of dieting as a modern religion in which women weigh not their misdeeds and merits but rather their bodies, and sin not with fruit from the Tree of Knowledge but with an extra square of chocolate. “With all the fervor of a young and very religious woman, I held fast to my diet. . . . Like every believer who aspires to cleave to God, I tried to fulfill the desire to lose weight by fulfilling the commandments—eating less.”

In Israeli media, Serlui observes, fat women are almost invisible. As a result, typical women in the real world tend to think of themselves as “formerly skinny” or “soon-to-be skinny.” In a brilliant pun, she exchanges the well-known rabbinic phrase for selfishness, midat Sodom (the trait of Sodom), for her own neologism, mitat Sodom, a Sodom bed. In doing so, she draws on a talmudic description of the inhospitableness of the people of Sodom, which itself plays on the Greek legend of Procrustes’s bed. The people of Sodom forced all visitors to sleep in a bed of the same length—if their legs were too long, they cut them off; if their legs were too short, they stretched them out. As Serlui provocatively asks, “Doesn’t this Sodom tendency, to see the human race as if it is cast in a single mold . . . still exist today and cause distress to so many women?”

Serlui’s beautiful memoir is not an activist’s call to action, but there are indelible moments like this one in which she raises her voice to join in Bromberg’s demand for “less body shaping, more world shaping.”