Hidden Heretics

Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age

Ayala Fader

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201481
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

A revealing look at Jewish men and women who secretly explore the outside world, in person and online, while remaining in their ultra-Orthodox religious communities What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Hidden Heretics tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead "double lives" in order to protect those they love. While they no longer believe that God gave the Torah to Jews at Mount Sinai, these hidden heretics continue to live in their families and religious communities, even as they surreptitiously break Jewish commandments and explore forbidden secular worlds in person and online. Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Ayala Fader investigates religious doubt and social change in the digital age.The internet, which some ultra-Orthodox rabbis call more threatening than the Holocaust, offers new possibilities for the age-old problem of religious uncertainty. Fader shows how digital media has become a lightning rod for contemporary struggles over authority and truth. She reveals the stresses and strains that hidden heretics experience, including the difficulties their choices pose for their wives, husbands, children, and, sometimes, lovers. In following those living double lives, who range from the religiously observant but open-minded on one end to atheists on the other, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe.In stories of conflicts between faith and self-fulfillment, Hidden Heretics explores the moral compromises and divided loyalties of individuals facing life-altering crossroads.

1

Life-Changing Doubt, the Internet, and a Crisis of Authority

Yisroel was an earnestly pious boy growing up Hasidic in Brooklyn, New York. With his side curls grazing his shoulders, thick plastic glasses, and big black velvet yarmulke, he looked like all the other boys in his yeshiva, where he studied the Torah and its commentaries from early in the morning until late at night. But when he was thirteen, Yisroel began to notice contradictions that troubled him in the religious texts he was studying. He didn’t initially doubt the truth of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but he had problematic questions—what are called in Yiddish emuna kashes (questions about faith). Only once did he timidly confide in his teacher, a rabbi, who angrily warned him that such questions came from the sin of masturbation. From then on, confused and ashamed, he kept his questions to himself and tried, as he told me, to “push them under the rug.” At eighteen he got married, and he and his wife, Rukhy, whom he barely knew but grew to adore, had five children in quick succession. To support his growing family, Yisroel eventually stopped studying Torah and began, as many Hasidic men do, to work in information technology.

However, in 2003, when he was twenty-nine, his questions began to nag at him again. And this time, thanks to his work with computers, he turned to the internet, secretly searching for and reading forbidden scholarly articles on theology, biblical criticism, and science. He hoped to finally find answers to his questions about faith in these non-Jewish sources, but they only provoked more questions. He decided then, he told me, that he had to “take his questioning all the way.”

Late at night, sitting alone in the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed and the only sound was the humming of the two dishwashers (one for meat and one for dairy), he began reading some of the then-popular heretical ultra-Orthodox blogs, like Hasidic Rebel and Shtreimel. These led him to online forums of the day, where writing under a pseudonym in Yiddish and in English, Yisroel debated with ultra-Orthodox Jewish doubters and even some who had openly left Jewish Orthodoxy altogether to go “OTD,” or “off the derekh” (path). He tried to convince them (and himself) that they were wrong. All of his searching, he told me, remembering his anguish, “tortured” him, but he could not stop.

Eventually, his questions gave way to doubt in the central premise of ultra-Orthodox Jewish authority: that God revealed the Torah to the Jews at Mount Sinai through Moses. Yisroel was in such agony at this heresy (kfira) that he secretly began to make phone calls to consult rabbis outside of his community who specialized in answering questions of faith. Their arguments failed to convince him. Despite continuing to observe the mitsves, the 613 prohibitions and commandments that had always directed every aspect of his life, he began to doubt their divine truth.

The first time he ever violated one of the commandments was on a Sabbath evening in 2012. His youngest was crying, and he knew that turning on the musical mobile above her crib would calm her down. Observant Jews do not turn electricity on or off during the Sabbath. He stood alone in the dark with his hand on the switch for a long time—yes, no, yes, no, yes, no? And then he switched it on. Each time he broke another commandment, like using his phone on the Sabbath, or skipping daily prayers, or even eventually sneaking nonkosher cold cuts into the pocket of his jacket to nibble on at home, he told me, he felt a sense of “freedom,” finally “in control of his life.”

That was when he became one of a growing number of what most ultra-Orthodox call in English “double life” or “ITC” (in the closet), or what Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox call bahaltena apikorsim (hidden heretics), those who feature in this book: men and women who practiced religiously in public, including at home, but who often violated the commandments in secret because they no longer believed them to be God’s words to his chosen people. Yisroel and others like him kept their double lives secret to protect their families and for fear of being cast out in a world they were ill-prepared to navigate.

In 2014, after Yisroel had developed a growing network of double-life friends on social media and in person, his wife, Rukhy, finally confronted him. She had noticed that in the intimacy of their bedroom, he had stopped “washing negl vasser,” the ritual handwashing upon waking each morning. She asked him if he still prayed. If he kept the Sabbath. Did he still believe? Hiding in their bedroom closet and whispering late at night, so their children would not hear, he told her everything. She was devastated and told me she cried for three days straight. Then, just a few months later, the vaad ha-tsnius (the Committee on Modesty), a group of self-appointed activists and rabbis, contacted Yisroel through his brother-in-law. They somehow knew that he had just bought a book on science from Amazon for his twelve-year-old daughter, which included a section on the theory of evolution, which Hasidic Jews reject.

Yisroel’s world was literally falling apart, and that was when I met him. A mutual contact, Zalman, who had been forced to leave his own ultra-Orthodox community a few years earlier for heresy, introduced us, knowing I was conducting anthropological research with those living double lives and those who tried to help them. Over the next year, Yisroel and I met periodically in a wooden booth in the back of a dark bar on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, amid the safe anonymity of Columbia University students. He still had his long side curls along with a long beard, thick glasses, and a big black velvet yarmulke. However, as a small personal rebellion, he had taken off the high black velvet hat most Hasidic men wear, and instead of the usual Hasidic men’s long black jacket, he always wore a cardigan or a parka.

Yisroel told me his story as it was unfolding. Although he was always anxious about protecting the anonymity of his family, he seemed to need to talk, often asking me about his legal rights, something I knew little about. When we couldn’t meet, we communicated on WhatsApp, the secure phone messaging app that so many ultra-Orthodox Jews used. He told me how he and his wife were trying to figure out how to make their life together work again. He had promised her that he would keep practicing in front of the children. He hoped it was enough.

With her permission, he gave me Rukhy’s number, and I began to talk with her, too, on the phone and on Facebook. Rukhy, who used to rely on her husband for spiritual guidance, told me how his doubt had begun to affect her: how she worried about her own faith glitshing (slipping); how she had begun to reach out to other women in similar situations online; and about her new sense of responsibility for the rukhnius (spirituality) in their home, traditionally the authority of the husband. Yisroel’s secret was hers now too. She could tell no one, not even her mother or her sisters who lived across the street. She told me she was scared, angry, and heartbroken all at once.

The Committee on Modesty wanted Yisroel to sign a contract promising he would stop using any social media, part of the growing effort by the ultra-Orthodox to control the internet and protect the community from what was increasingly called the “crisis of emuna,” or the crisis of faith. This made Yisroel angry, and he brought up his constitutional right to privacy, having only recently learned about the existence of the Constitution at all. He was not rebellious, he insisted. He was simply following his conscience. Then the committee threatened to expel his children from school and to tell Yisroel’s parents unless he and Rukhy agreed to see a religious therapist, someone who worked with a rabbi and then reported back to the committee. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that religious doubt might be symptomatic of an underlying mental illness, perhaps depression, a trauma, or anxiety, something that could be treated and cured. Afraid, Yisroel and Rukhy tried a number of different therapists, religious and secular, but none helped Yisroel regain his faith.

What Yisroel called his “journey” was still unfolding. Would he and his wife stay together, and if they did, would her faith continue to slip? Would the religious authorities and institutions be able to control the decisions Yisroel and his wife made? Would they expel his children, which would have serious repercussions for the entire family’s life, especially when it came time for matchmaking? Where did his responsibilities as a parent lie, especially as his children got older? Was there anyone, a therapist or a rabbi, who could help Yisroel regain his faith, something he still wished for?

Yisroel’s story was but one of many, the uncharted territory of ultra-Orthodox hidden heretics living double lives where belief and practice were at odds; these were men and (fewer) women, who no longer believed in the literal truth of divine revelation at Mount Sinai. Nevertheless, they felt bound by love and a sense of moral responsibility to stay with their still-religious spouses and children. Keeping secrets from those they were closest to, double lifers upheld the public appearance of adhering to ultra-Orthodoxy, even as they explored forbidden worlds, online and in person, beyond their own.

Those living double lives are part of a broader twenty-first-century generational crisis of authority among the ultra-Orthodox. Despite their robust demographic growth, there have been increasingly loud struggles over competing knowledge and truths. The internet facilitated the formation of a public oppositional voice, one that included anonymous expressions of life-changing doubt and validated radically changing perceptions of oneself in the world. Gender was key to the experience of and possibilities for living double lives, since gender structures authority in both ultra-Orthodox life and its alternative public. Begun in online spaces, but soon crossing over to meetings in person, this alternative public gave a platform to dangerous questions: Who should have the authority for making life choices? What and who defined Orthodox Judaism or self-fulfillment or an ethical life? The pages ahead ask what double lifers’ everyday struggles can tell us about religious doubt and social change in the digital age.

* * *

Until recently, ultra-Orthodox Jews experiencing the kind of life-changing doubt that Yisroel did had trouble finding others like themselves. One might suspect from outside signs that a cousin or friend was doubting— maybe he had hidden an English book in his Hebrew prayer book in shul (synagogue) or maybe her skirt had gotten an inch shorter—but reaching out meant possibly risking everything. Back then, living a double life was very lonely unless you had the means to venture out of your community. For example, Tsvi, a Hasidic man in his sixties who had lived a double life for decades, told me he had found kindred spirits among less observant Jews he met in public libraries or Jewish seminaries in Manhattan. Women living double lives, especially with children, generally had much less independence than someone like Tsvi, so they were even more alone than men.

Since the early 2000s, however, the internet has created new possibilities for those living double lives to find each other and build secret worlds together. Through blogging and then later on social media (forums, Facebook groups, and texting platforms like WhatsApp), many began to anonymously critique, parody, and mock what they called “the system,” the structures of rabbinic authority and their affiliated insitutitions, such as schools, synagogues, charities, kosher businesses, and summer camps. They also wrote about and discussed, in gendered varieties of Yiddish and English, their changing sense of themselves in the world. Once they trusted each other, they met up in person too, secretly exploring their new desires, ideas, and feelings in and around New York City.

Those living double lives formed an anonymous public with its own morality. This public, selectively rooted in North American liberal morality, included ideals of individual autonomy, choice, and self-fulfillment. Double-life women had fewer avenues for participation in this public, however; they had less access to new technologies, less mobility for getting together, and were sometimes less comfortable speaking up or writing in mixed-gender groups.

In reaction to this growing chorus of anonymous critics, ultra-Orthodox Jewish rabbis, rebbes (Hasidic leaders), educators, and self-appointed communal activists (askonim) began to rethink their approaches to what they called “the internet” or, in Yiddish, tekhnologia or keylim (devices), and especially smartphones. They came to the conclusion that the internet was more dangerous to Jewish continuity than the Holocaust. As a public poster that circulated on WhatsApp warned: “The Holocaust burned our bodies, but the Internet burns our souls.”

At the same time, rabbinic leadership began describing the contemporary period as “a crisis of faith.” They claimed that exterior material signs and embodied practices (khitsoynius)—for example, distinctive clothing (levush), head covering, ritual practice such as prayer—could no longer assure, as they had in even the recent past, the cultivation of shared interior faith, one strong enough to resist the temptations of the Gentile world. As a rabbi noted in the popular ultra-Orthodox magazine, Ami, “Before levush was enough. . . . Nowadays we have the Internet, where everyone is anonymous and no levush can act as a shield.” To staunch what many worried was a growing wave of secret doubters and those leaving the faith, rabbinic leadership began speaking explicitly about how to protect and cure Jewish interiority (the pnimiyus)—hearts, minds, and souls.

Rabbinic leadership’s public talk and writing about interiority integrated two different authoritative bodies of knowledge, or what anthropologist Talal Asad called “discursive traditions”:¹ Jewish theology and American popular psychology. To protect Jewish souls against the corruption of the internet, rabbinic leadership began holding fiery anti-internet rallies (asifes), including the 2012 event in Citi Field Stadium in Queens, which drew over forty thousand men and boys. In rallies, leaders denounced the internet for disrupting the healthy struggle of each Jew to defeat the innate inclination for evil (yeytser hora), including a willingness to submit to hierarchies of religious male authority. They posted edicts limiting access to the internet and enlisted the ultra-Orthodox school systems to support them.

However, when life-changing doubt was revealed or confessed, rabbinic advisers almost always referred the person to a religious (frum) therapist or less formal satellites—Orthodox Jewish life coaching or outreach (kiruv) rabbis. Religious therapy as a discipline was founded in the nineties, and there was a wide range of professionalization: some held master’s degrees from reputable universities, while others practiced without licensing or training. Some therapists cast life-changing doubt as a symptom, either of insufficient spiritual education or of underlying emotional issues. They pathologized doubt using medicalized models of emotional health, which designated faith the normative default. This was a change from decades past, when those who left or doubted were seen less as a threat and simply as weak and undisciplined, in thrall to their evil inclination or Satan.

In this latest chapter of North American ultra-Orthodox life, the crisis of emuna and struggles over the internet should be understood as a wider crisis of authority. On the heels of political, economic, and social conflicts, in the context of exploding population growth, a small, homegrown generational backlash has begun challenging the authority of ultra-Orthodox leadership and their claims as the legitimate arbiters of tradition (mesoyra). In this social drama, the internet became a lightning rod for wider communal debates about religious authority through public discourse about interiority. While numbers of those living double lives and fellow travelers are not reliably known, with individual estimates varying from a hundred to tens of thousands worldwide, they increasingly figure large in the ultra-Orthodox imagination.² Using the public yet intimate anonymity of the internet, those living double lives rejected the heightened religious stringencies of their communities following the Second World War and wrote their changing interior lives into being. Ultra-Orthodox leadership, in contrast, defined the contemporary crisis of authority as the latest threat—the most recent in a long history of such threats—to the very survival of the Jewish people.

Arriving in the 1950s after the Holocaust as refugees, primarily from Eastern Europe, ultra-Orthodox Jews today make up about 10 percent of the estimated 5.3 million Jewish adults in the United States, with 89 percent living in the Northeast, especially Brooklyn and upstate New York. In the eight counties that make up the New York area, 22 percent are ultra-Orthodox, roughly seventy-two thousand households. Despite public talk about the crisis of faith, in fact, demographically ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities continue to grow, owing to so many having large families (48 percent have more than four children).³ There was a growing fear among many ultra-Orthodox tha...