A personal essay on faith, cinema, psychoanalysis, and the search for meaning through food.
Why am I so obsessed with documenting these recipes with such precision? This essay explains the philosophical and deeply personal journey that led to the creation of this blog—where film theory, psychoanalysis, and my conflicted experience with Haredi Judaism intersect. It offers the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’
The Aesthetic of Resistance: My Starting Point
My journey into intense religiosity began not from spiritual revelation, but from an intensely intellectual one: I was a PhD student of Art, specializing in Cinema. This background is the crucial starting point. My academic training taught me to analyze the world as a structured Symbolic Order—a system of signs, narratives, and, most importantly, The Gaze. Indeed, my doctoral research focused specifically on the aesthetic of resistance, and the work of thinkers like Jacques Derrida—whose own philosophy grappled with the unconditional demands rooted in Judaism. This pursuit trained me to see the Gaze as the unseen, structural point from which the scene (the world, our lives) is observed and judged. It causes us, the subjects, to feel constantly lacking or under surveillance by a mysterious, omniscient Big Other (the ultimate authority or source of meaning).
When Judaism’s religious imperative finally captivated me, it wasn’t the appeal of God’s love, but the profound Aesthetics of Absence that resonated with the very core of my intellectual training. I was drawn to a system that forbids the Image (the Second Commandment)—a practice shared with Islam, yet for me, Judaism was uniquely intertwined with the specific anxieties of Western intellectual history that I was immersed in. This intellectual pull was amplified by a clinical reality: my own psychological makeup, specifically a personality disorder that predisposed me toward magical thinking and a desperate desire for order. This clinical need found its immediate fulfillment in the literal customs of Hasidism and the most stringent religious literality. This felt like the ultimate, most sophisticated art theory: a faith that defined itself by what it refused to show, making the Unknowable Thing (God) a pure, absolute Sublime Object. My pursuit of The Law was, in effect, a cinematic experiment: I was seeking to know if a total refusal of the visual image could, through the rigor of ritual, generate the most compelling, profound reality. I loved the customs and rituals deeply, not just as abstract rules, but because they felt saturated with my personal history and the collective history of the Jewish people. I desperately hoped that the sheer, meticulous discipline of performing these rituals—the precise movements, the ancient schedules—could overcome my intellectual atheism and finally grant me the authentic, rooted sense of self I craved: me as a rooted Jew. What I was repressing, however, was the cynical, atheistic truth I already knew—a truth that, today, is both the source of my deepest shame over my former delusion, and the very thing that paradoxically saved me by providing the critical distance necessary to finally break free.
And I can honestly say I was honest: My subjective truth lay precisely in my desperate fidelity to the unconscious lie. Let’s see how that worked out for me.
The Sublime Object: The Structural Impossibility of Faith
To understand my life in the Haredi world, one must grasp the core concept of The Sublime Object of Ideology (Slavoj Žižek’s central idea). This concept transitions us from my intellectual fascination to my lived reality.
In its simplest terms, the sublime object is the unattainable “thing” that an ideology promises but can never deliver. Its power lies not in its presence, but in its structural impossibility. For me, the sublime object of Judaism was not a physical idol, but The Law (Torah), which stood in for the Unknowable Thing (God). By strictly forbidding any image, the Jewish God is established as a pure, unrepresentable Void. He is the ultimate, absolute Sublime Object, whose power resides entirely in the lack of representation. This void is the traumatic kernel around which the entire community’s social and psychic reality is organized. Since God is a void, all that remains is His constant, overwhelming demand—The Law. The Law is a relentless set of rules and commandments that are humanly impossible to fulfill perfectly. This impossibility is not a flaw; it is the engine of the ideology. It creates a perpetual gap between the subject and the divine demand, ensuring the subject must strive eternally.
Cynicism and Jouissance: The Hysterical Subject
This structural setup perfectly framed my internal existence, leading to an almost theatrical level of internal conflict. I want to briefly explore the painful contradiction between my beliefs and my actions.
My internal state while in the community was an excruciating paradox, best described using Lacanian concepts: I was a deeply divided subject caught in a classic internal struggle, which psychoanalysis names Hysteria. On one side, my intellect was atheist and cynical. I was not a dupe of “false consciousness”; I knew, consciously, that the sublime object (God/Divine Command) was a theoretical placeholder or a social fiction. I was cynical against my will because, on the other side, I honestly wanted belief to be true. My greatest anxiety was the fear that the system was, in fact, empty. I desperately wanted the belief to be delivered to me, and I thought I could force it through action. My adherence to The Law was an endless, anxious plea, a Hysterical Question posed to the Big Other (God/The Law): “What do you want from me? Please, tell me I’m doing this right! Prove to me that You are real!” The rigorous, demanding practice of Haredi life was the source of my surplus enjoyment (). This isn’t “happiness”; it’s a kind of perverse, painful satisfaction derived from obsessive repetition and self-restriction. The enjoyment was found in the striving for the impossible. The totalizing nature of the Law—structured down to the minute detail—was satisfying because it eliminated the anxiety of choice. By perfectly observing the rules, I was fully defined, and this feeling of absolute control and definition was the . I was engaged in an unconscious fantasy: my actions (the strict practice) were designed to force a symbolic reward (genuine belief). My body and my daily routine were living out the faith as if the Law would eventually conjure the truth. This was the ultimate victory of the ideology: my feet believed, even when my head was cynical.
The Breakaway: The Trauma of Freedom
The relentless pressure of this internal divide eventually became unsustainable, forcing a cataclysmic rupture that defined my new life.
My decision to break away was a traumatic surrender. I realized I could not force belief into existence through practice, and that the Law would never reward my perfect performance with the gift of genuine belief. I had failed to conjure the Gaze I so desperately sought. Breaking away meant traversing the fantasy—stepping out of the cinematic narrative that had defined my existence. The most profound loss was not God, but the loss of the structure itself—the loss of the jouissance. The Law, for all its strictness, provided an over-determined world. Its disappearance created a massive void, a radical anxiety in the face of unlimited freedom—the freedom to choose everything. This painful, devastating loss of my organizing principle proved just how powerful the former jouissance had been. I finally accepted that my meticulous performance for the Big Other’s Gaze was futile because the Gaze itself was empty. I was forced to confront the horror: The Other (God) does not exist, and the Law demands an obedience that leads to no final, satisfying truth.
The Culinary Symptom: The Secularized Gaze
The resulting void demanded a new structure, and I found it not in a new ideology, but in a symptomatic, culinary project. My current obsession with Jewish Viennese food, recipes, and their attached stories is the ultimate, symptomatic outcome of my unique journey from Film Studies to Fundamentalism and back. This project is my Symptom, the final destination of the sublime object.
The recipes themselves—the specific, meticulous documentation of historical Jewish Viennese cuisine—function as the material remainder or “lump” of the Real. The food is concrete and non-intellectual. The dishes and their preparation embody the very strictures and customs (the Law) I intellectually rejected. They are the lump I couldn’t discard; a piece of the traumatic Real that resists being rationalized away. Crucially, they are a substitute for the lost Gaze; they provide a concrete, consumable thing to focus on, diverting attention from the terrifying void left by the Unknowable God. My act of writing the blog and “digesting” the stories is my effort to symbolically master the trauma. I am using the rigorous, analytical methods of my former academic life to take the overwhelming, unquestioned Divine Law and convert it into manageable, historical, and personal Narratives. I am dismantling the Law’s power by contextualizing it as History and Taste. The satisfaction derived from this meticulous research and writing is the echo of the surplus enjoyment. I am still engaging with the Law’s core mechanism—its demand for perfection—but I have secularized my Gaze. I am no longer performing for a demanding, invisible God. I am now the director, meticulously curating a body of work for myself and my readers, using the tools of art and cinema (storytelling, scene-setting, editing) to finally bring closure to the ultimate, failed script of my life.
The Sole Author: Claiming My Own Script
The path I’ve traversed—from the anxious pursuit of the Sublime Object to the trauma of its loss—has finally yielded a strange, hard-won freedom. This is what it means to say: “I am now the sole author of the sublime object that defines me.” In the Haredi world, the Sublime Object (The Law) was an external, overwhelming force that demanded my submission and structured my anxiety. Now, through the rigorous act of writing this blog and dissecting the recipes, I have reversed that power. I have taken the arbitrary, meticulous demands of the Law and transformed them into a secular, narrative project. The obsession remains, the jouissance is still present, but it is no longer the property of an absent God or an impossible Law. I have claimed the aesthetic rigor, the historical depth, and the anxious perfection for myself. My culinary symptom is no longer a submission to an external authority, but the construction of a self-made structure—a new, detailed framework that I, and only I, control. My life is no longer a performance for the Big Other’s Gaze, but a text I am actively writing and… painting (see my drawings and paintings).
P.S. On the Coherence and the Remaining Gaze
This addendum is prompted by the keen insight of a friend and psychoanalyst, who suggested my narrative might be “too coherent to be true.”
I acknowledge that the meticulous, highly-theorized structure of this essay—its neat arc from Cinema to Law to Culinary Symptom—may itself be a final, stubborn act of resistance. The very act of constructing such a perfectly coherent map of my trauma is, in effect, a last-ditch effort to impose the Symbolic Order I lost.
If the Law demanded flawless action, my new project demands flawless explanation. The intense need for this essay to be watertight and definitive is merely the jouissance of perfection redirected. I realized, immediately upon hitting “publish,” that my meticulous analysis of the empty Gaze may be just another sophisticated attempt to summon a secular Gaze—the Gaze of the brilliant, critical reader—to judge my narrative as worthy.
The anxiety remains: the fear that the system is, in fact, empty. This blog, therefore, is not a final mastery of the trauma, but an ongoing, messy negotiation with the persistent fear that I haven’t fully escaped the need to perform for the Big Other. The search for The Law has become the search for the Perfect Text. The trauma, in this sense, is not over. It is simply being re-written, one meticulously documented recipe at a time.
P.P.S. On Livability and the Ethics of Symptoms
Perhaps the question is not whether I have escaped the structure entirely—this may be impossible—but whether I have found a livable symptom.
Yes, this P.P.S. itself might be yet another layer of sophisticated self-awareness, turtles all the way down.1 I could spiral endlessly into meta-critique of my meta-critique, proving only that the need for mastery persists. But here is where I must stop the theoretical regress and make an ethical claim: not all symptoms are equal.
The Law was fundamentally unlivable. Not just for me in my hysterical striving, but structurally unlivable for those it marginalizes and erases. Its perfection demanded real violence: the silencing of women’s voices, the brutal policing of queer existence, the erasure of those who cannot or will not perform the script. The jouissance of that system was built on the suffering of bodies—particularly the bodies of minorities.
My culinary symptom may still carry obsessive traces of the old structure, may still be performing for some imagined Gaze. But it produces soup, not suffering. It creates stories, not silencing. The blog’s meticulous perfectionism doesn’t require anyone’s erasure or discipline anyone’s body.
So perhaps I haven’t achieved liberation from structure itself. Perhaps even this recognition is another performance. But if I must have a symptom—and it seems I must—then let it be one where the only thing getting slaughtered is an eggplant, and the only law being obsessively followed is the proper lamination of strudel dough.
The trauma may not be over, and the turtles may go down forever. But it has become livable—and this imperfect livability is the only Law worth following.
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Footnotes
- An expression for the philosophical problem of infinite regress—an endless chain of justifications or foundations. The phrase is drawn from the classic anecdote where a woman claims the Earth rests on a turtle and, when asked what supports it, replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.” It was popularized in modern discourse by figures like Stephen Hawking and Bertrand Russell.
Brilliant and deeply appreciated.
Thank you, Stacia!