Who Does That?

I know that other blogs have been discussing the recent suicide of a 33 year old OTD (off the derech-no longer religious) woman. The woman chose a different path than how she had been raised and did the honorable thing of not living a lie. She divorced her husband. Most of the people posting about this are other OTDers. For me, I have a different prospective.

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I am a convert. I was raised by a lapsed Catholic mother and my still religious grandmother. My father was brought up in a UCC (it's a vanilla type denomination) protestant church and I learned before his death that he was an atheist. Sure, we had up a Kratzmis tree and Easter eggs/basket at both houses. My mom used to go all out with the decorations. She was big on holidays in general. I just had to wear green for St Patrick's day, red for valentines and orange or a costume for Halloween. 

Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. The point is that I was raised as a secular Christian, if that makes any sense. I guess it's like a Jew whose family does a seder and celebrates Chanukah, maybe throw in a Rosh Hashana meal with apples and honey. We didn't even go to Church as a family. When I became a religious Christian in middle/high school my parents always made sure I had a ride to and from Church activities. They supported this even though it wasn't how they raised me. My mother told me towards the end of her life that she thinks most religious people are fakers, that's why she didn't want to be religious. While converting, her words used to ring in my head, "if you're a Christian, you do what you do all week then on Sunday go to church like you're some kind of good person when you aren't. Jews do the same thing with Synagogue on Saturday." My mom died when I was in high school, so long before I was thinking about converting to Judaism. My dad, actually knew about my conversion. His response was that he was glad that, unlike Christianity, I wasn't trying to convert him. He was also annoyed by my requirement for kosher food, but he was fairly supportive anyhow, taking me to the grocery store so I could find what I needed for a week that I spent at home. 

Anyway, the point is that they were pretty supportive of me being something other than exactly what they expected for me. What strikes me, though, is that how much I hear about the evils of LASHON HARA (evil tongue for anyone not in the know reading this, basically gossip and malicious speech) and yet, this woman's family threw so much evil speech at her. Hell, it's an open secret that this is what happens to anyone who leaves the community, especially the chasidic side and slightly more for women than men. Her own flesh and blood-her parents stood up in court to speak of how she needed to lose the very children she carried for 9 months in her very being. Her children were told horrible things about her. How can people speak lashon hara about a mother to her very children. Who does that? I mean I do know, but I can't help the exclamatory, WHO does that? Driving her with painful words and painful gestures until she commited the irreversible act... WHO does that? Yeah, I know... I know her family and her community....