To celebrate the premiere of the opera based on her life, author Leah Lax recently sat down with Tracy E. Gilchrist of Advocate Today to discuss her experiences leaving the Hasidic Jewish community, and how her story has impacted religious youth.
The story of Lax's life, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home, is the first queer memoir to come out of the Jewish orthodox world. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Lax shares that because her parents were passionate about liberal politics, joining a fundamentalist group was her form of rebellion.
In Hasidic Jewish community Lubavitcher Hasidim, Lax was urged into an arraigned marriage, and bore seven children within her thirty years as a member. She explains that abortion and birth control were not available to her.
"Living as I did for thirty years in the Hasidic Jewish group, in a place where birth control was not allowed, so we raised seven children. Obligation and religious law was my life. My feelings didn't matter that much."
Getting pregnant "one time too many" changed something in Lax, becoming her wakeup call to leave the community. She says the feeling was "like a body scream."
"Something in me—I didn't even recognize it as my own inner voice—was saying 'get it out,'" Lax explains. "Going through that experience, and making sure I had that abortion, which I did, is what woke me up. It was what made me say no one will ever rule over my body again, because only I know what I need. And that's what led to my finally coming to terms with the feelings I knew that were very, very much there. That's what led me to allow myself to fall in love."
After she "returned home," Lax found that the world had changed radically in her 30 years away from it. She says she often felt "like an immigrant in my own country," but emphasizes that feeling is much worse for the young people involved in fundamentalist communities from birth, who leave as adolescents.
"When I look at the thousands and thousands of kids who are leaving fundamentalist environments and Hasidic environments today, they don't have the secular education—the upbringing at least until 16 in the world—and they really, really are in exile," Lax says.
The opera based on her memoir was supposed to premiere in 2020, but was delayed to the pandemic. It is the first lesbian-led opera, which Lax describes as being "open about lesbian passion as a love story." Condensing her life into a limited runtime was challenging, but Lax found a passion for putting her work onstage.
"Staging is wonderful because you can take ideas and embody them in people, or in lines of music," she says. "You can get all those messages at once, just like we live with all these messages around us. There's nothing like it."
Of all places, the opera was first staged and premiered at Utah State University, a conservative Mormon campus. Lax shares that several cast members quit after experiencing the material, forcing them to cast new actors, some of whom also quit following their first rehearsal.
Lax offered the cast members who remained on-on-one conversations where she answered all their questions about the script. Many talked through their reserves, whereas others expressed their own queer feelings. By showtime, they had grown to understand and appreciate their characters, which Lax believes to be the purpose behind her work.
She says: "Isn't that what we're all after? Is to turn these issues into human, individual stories?"
