The world is always fascinated when someone leaves a closed religious group for the outside world.
Think Amish teenagers fleeing the faith; family members leave the Westboro Baptist Church; women fleeing arranged marriages from Somalia to Pakistan and the peeling off of ultra-Orthodox Jews.
What’s up with the latter?
Turns out there’s a form of Orthodox Judaism extant in Israel that Americans barely encounter on our shores. Those are Jews whose lives are controlled from cradle to grave by strict Torah observance.
But what if you want to leave?
The Washington Post tells you what comes next.
JERUSALEM — Ruth Borovski, doing a bit of homework, sat in a library and Googled “phosphate” on her smartphone.
That could not have happened 19 months earlier, when Borovski was a 27-year-old living within one of Israel’s cloistered ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. Then, she had never heard of phosphate. Or of smartphones.
She says she had never seen a library. Now it’s hard to get her out of one…
Borovski’s race into the wider world started in 2018 when, trapped in an arranged marriage, she dialed the hotline of a -Jerusalem-based nonprofit called Hillel and said she wanted to leave her family and her community. With Hillel’s help, she became one of a growing number of Yotzim, or “Leavers,” who have bolted from closed religious communities into a secular world they are ill-equipped to navigate.
One assumes there were no children from this marriage, as the article mentions none.
Borovski said she left behind the ultra-Orthodox, known in Israel as the Haredim, never having opened a bank account, ridden a bus, applied for a job or talked to a stranger.
She has done all of those things now, in what she describes as a sprint to make up for the decades she spent in a cultural cocoon, never wandering more than 500 yards from the house where she said she and her 12 brothers and sisters learned nothing of science or math, or of history outside of religious texts. Borov¬ski — who belonged to the Satmar Hasidic group, known for its especially strict religious adherence — said she wasn’t just denied television, radio and the Internet but was unaware of their existence.
I too am trying to imagine what kind of rock one can live under in a modern western city whereby you don’t even know that radio or TV exist?
Thanks to books like “My Name is Asher Lev,” the ultra-Orthodox have been a topic of fascination for decades. More recently, there’s a popular Netflix drama, “Shtisel,” out there about an ultra-Orthodox haredi family that I’m guessing doesn’t go into the less savory aspects of being penned up (almost literally) in such a small geographic area.
The article throws a short sop toward the these traditional folks in the first sentence of the below paragraph, then continues:
Ultra-Orthodox communities often provide their members with a sense of meaning, certainty, beauty and belonging that can prove elusive for those in the secular world. But more people than ever are asking Hillel for help in entering that world, 1,700 so far this year, with the number growing about 20 percent a year. A recent Tel Aviv University study suggested that 6 percent of Haredi adults leave their family’s religious communities.
So it sounds like life in those parts isn’t all a Netflix drama. After explaining how Hillel’s staff has quadrupled in four years, the article says that most of the leavers eschew any sort of religious garb. Left unanswered is whether these folks still consider themselves Jews or whether they’ve given up belief altogether. This 2007 Jerusalem Post piece says most are now secular.
Borovski is almost entirely cut off from her former life. When she was a child, she and her eight sisters kept house with their mother while her father studied Torah for 12 hours a day at the yeshiva. Her four brothers followed him as they came of age.
When she was 23, the rabbi called, and she soon found herself sitting silently next to an awkward young man while their parents talked. After a half-hour, they parted. Two months later, she saw him again at their wedding.
“No one asked me if I liked him,” she said.
Actually, 23 is old for that culture in terms of getting married. Sounds like her parents punted and got whoever was available to take on an older wife.
Sometimes, the Hillel hotline preaches patience. When Avi -Tfilinski first called as a 24-year-old rabbi experiencing a crisis of faith, unable to accept that his community’s strict religious rules reflected God’s will, Hillel warned him that leaving would mean never seeing his children again…
It took him 12 years to call the hotline again and to flee to the Hillel offices. His family, including 13 siblings, sat shiva, the Jewish ritual of mourning. To them, he was dead.
One other thing I wish the article had done was point out that many Orthodox Jews are highly educated, are open to the world and don’t make their women bear a zillion kids. There’s many varieties of Orthodox out there, yet the reader isn’t told that.
I’m also curious if any of the staff at Hillel are Orthodox. And are there cases of people who’ve left the ultra-Orthodox, then returned? The Jerusalem Post reported in 2014 that a number of leavers end up committing suicide because,
If the transition is to a secular way of life, rather than to another stream of Judaism, the background usually involves a loss of belief in God, the validity of the scriptures and the existence of a single irrefutable truth.
Add that to the loss of one’s family and yes, it appears that all one’s moorings have been removed.
There are a number of articles out there about Hillel’s work, meaning there’s no lack of grateful leavers to interview. YNet News did one this past spring about haredi soldiers in the Israeli army whose families have cut them off. There are many sides to this unusual culture and those who choose to leave it and the more articles we can get on this unresolvable religious conflict, the better.
Main photo by Blake Campbell, courtesy of Unsplash
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