When Jews Leave Faith Behind

If nonbelievers are doomed, Avishai Simantov suddenly thought one day, why aren’t the Christians and Muslims dying? Could all secular Jews truly be sinners and thieves? Is the purpose of life to study the Torah all day, or might there be something else worthwhile?

Simantov was a 16-year-old yeshiva student in Jerusalem when he posed these questions to his rabbi. The learned man told him to put his head down and study harder, that the Bible and Jewish law would provide his answers.

But the religious books did not speak to Simantov. His queries turned to doubts and frustration, and, though he did not confide in her, his devout mother sensed the change.

“My mother felt something, and she told me that if I did not want to be religious, I would have to leave home,” Simantov said. “I heard that, and I left.”

Simantov turned his back on ultra-Orthodox Jewish life and set out across the border into the secular world. He left his religious family and friends for an unknown horizon, ignoring their persistent warnings that he would fall off the edge.

The journey from Orthodoxy to secular life is a lonely and sometimes treacherous one that perhaps only a few dozen devout Israelis make each year. Most of this nation’s more than 400,000 ultra-Orthodox remain in the faith and in their tightly knit religious communities, which are bulwarks against modern temptation and troubles.

While there are no precise figures, experts believe that more Israelis “return” to religion than leave it. In part, the experts say, this is because the road out of Orthodoxy is so difficult. Those who do cut their side locks or take off head scarves and long skirts generally are viewed as defectors and are cast out of their religious communities so that they will not contaminate others.

To leave ultra-Orthodoxy is to risk losing one’s parents and siblings. Religious parents have been known to sit shiva--the traditional mourning for deceased relatives--over children who left. Young mothers who abandon the faith fear losing their children in rabbinical court.

The costs of leaving may be so high that some people opt to lead a double life rather than pay the price; they follow the rules of the devout at home and live a secret, secular lifestyle outside. Others who step into the secular universe find it too dark and cold and return to the fold.

Those who do renounce Orthodoxy usually feel that they are ill-equipped to confront independence and the myriad decisions of the secular world. Haredi, or devout Jewish life, is highly organized, down to the details of when to rise and wash, how to pray and what to eat. Religious texts lay out all-encompassing rules for marriage, sex, birth, child-rearing, business and death, as well as for rituals and holidays.

Children learn basic grammar and arithmetic, but the rest of their education centers on the Torah: the Scripture, the Talmud and the codex of Jewish law. It is a solid religious foundation, but it does not prepare them to pass a high school exam.

The devout are exempt from military service--the melting pot of Israeli life. Television is banned from most haredi homes, as are secular newspapers, novels and other potentially corrupting influences. So-called modesty squads enforce moral behavior in the neighborhood.

Religious communities are hierarchical societies in which parents and rabbis make the big decisions and are called upon to resolve crises. Weddings are arranged. Freedom, equality and independence are not valued, and young haredim have little experience with them.

“There is no contact between boys and girls,” Simantov said. “I didn’t know how to talk to someone from the outside world. I didn’t know what to wear. I would buy something and feel it was not right for me. I didn’t know about music or slang.”

That was six years ago. Now, at 22, Simantov calls himself secular. His brimmed hat and side locks are gone, and his biblical Hebrew has evolved into modern Israeli. Wearing jeans, a sport coat and hiking boots, he looks at home sipping espresso in a stylish coffee bar.

Simantov owes his success in the secular world partly to the fact that he did not make the transition alone. He read a newspaper ad for Hillel, an organization offering confidential counseling and logistic assistance to “exitees,” and gave it a call.

The organization, founded in 1991 and supported by the New Israel Fund--a progressive, U.S.-based grant organization--represents the devil to the haredi world, which views Hillel followers as secular missionaries. (The Israeli group is not connected to the U.S. organization with a similar name.) Hillel spokesman Itay Nevo denies that the group tries to persuade anyone to become secular. Rather, he says, it helps those like Simantov who are already looking for a way to leave Orthodoxy.

“If a secular person wants to become religious, there is a whole system to take him in--find him a job and family, a shiduch [marriage match]--and he can start a new life free of worries. On the other hand, if he wants to leave religion and become secular, there is no one to help. He’s on his own,” Nevo said.

Hillel found Simantov a new home on a kibbutz, a place where he could work and build a future. The group helped him to enroll for army service, which is required of all secular Israelis, and to begin studying for his high school equivalency exams.

Simantov’s Sephardic family did not cut him off completely as he made his new life, but the relationship grew strained and he felt lonely even in his relatives’ midst.

“I miss the idea of my old family, the sense of family that existed before,” he said. “Now, when I am with my mother, we speak a different language. I cannot talk to her. She has one solution to everything: Believe in God and wait for the messiah.”

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The switch to secular life has been far more painful for others. Israel Segal, an author and prominent television journalist, left his devout home more than 30 years ago. As a result, Segal was banished from the family. He has no relationship with his brothers and sister, does not know his nieces and nephews and was prohibited from seeing his father before the elderly man died. Segal says his brother, a rabbi, threw him out of their father’s funeral.

“What my family did to me was a Holocaust. I don’t have a family,” Segal said bitterly. “You know, I think I went into the media to show them, to say: ‘You wanted to exterminate me, to wipe me out. You can’t. I live. I exist.’ ”

Like most of those who give up religious life, Segal was about 18 when he made the decision--old enough to ask existential questions but still unbound by the responsibilities of marriage and children. Two things pushed him out the door, he says: an intellectual hunger and sexual desire.

Segal was an ilui at the time, a star scholar at the leading Ponovitch Yeshiva, where his older brother also excelled. Ironically, Segal says, it was his teacher, Rabbi Shach, who first opened his eyes to secular thought.

“One day, he called me up front and told me there was this guy named Freud who had said that people were the descendants of monkeys. He laughed and said that maybe they, the secular people, came from monkeys, but not us,” Segal said.

“But I was curious, and I went to the public library. Here I was, this yeshiva bocher, and I asked the librarian for the book by Freud about people descending from monkeys. She said, ‘You mean Darwin.’

“I read the book and thought: ‘Hey, what’s going on? This is serious research. You can’t write it off as a joke.’ We had been trained to study and ask questions in a deep way,” Segal said.

At the same time, Segal was becoming aware of women, the forbidden fruit, and of his own body.

“I was at an age when boys masturbate,” he said. “I used to tie my hands at night--I was so afraid. I thought it was a cruel game, that God gave me this body and I couldn’t listen to it. I cried and felt dirty.”

Segal made many more clandestine trips to the library in search of books on religion and philosophy. When he read Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, he says, he ran away to the southernmost Israeli city of Eilat.

Segal’s brother came after him, arguing that the teenager had to be mentally ill to turn his back on religion and urging him to see a psychiatrist. Segal agreed, and the psychiatrist, a religious man but not haredi, validated his decision.

“He told my brother I wasn’t crazy, that I just wanted to live a different life. But he warned me that I would live a life with conflict, and he was damn right. It is not easy to leave religion. On the other side [in Orthodoxy], there is such fulfillment. After you leave, you feel so deserted. Spiritually, there is a black hole,” Segal said.

Segal managed some contact with his parents until 1989, when he wrote a book about his secular conversion. Then his brother, already a respected rabbi, ruled that the family should cut him off. Segal says they see him as a traitor and a murderer--the executioner of his own soul.

Segal says his children, too, have paid for his decision to leave Orthodoxy. His daughter, then 9, wrote her grandmother three years ago seeking contact. “She said: ‘I know you split with my daddy, but still you are my grandmother. I love you.’ And she sent her address and telephone number.” There was no reply.

Segal, 52, says a question mark still hangs over his decision to leave Orthodoxy. His conversation at a Jerusalem restaurant near his mother’s home, where he is still unwelcome, was punctuated with sighs.

“I often ask myself, if I had known what would come afterward, the high price I would pay, would I do it again? I don’t know,” he said. “I wanted to live as a free human being. I live in a much less harmonic world, but it is my world.”

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Freedom, counters Shay Horovitz, is found in religion. Secular freedom is like a car without a driver: directionless, bound to crash.

“Secular people wake up, work to have money to live, and live to have money. There is no higher goal in life,” Horovitz said.

One of nine children from a devout Jerusalem family, Horovitz left home at 18 to spend six years in the secular world. He worked, studied at Hebrew University and co-founded the Hillel organization before returning to Orthodoxy.

At 26, Horovitz now dismisses his secular experience as an adolescent rebellion and calls his return a rational embrace of truth.

As a university student, Horovitz says, he ceased praying or keeping religious traditions and tried to deny the existence of God. “I used science and philosophy to say the sky is empty. . . . I looked for ways to show that Judaism was not right,” he said.

Then Horovitz began discussing religion with a biology teacher, who urged him to resume his study of the Torah.

“And at some point, I realized I had been wrong,” he said.

Horovitz put his black skullcap back on, returned to the religious Sanhedria neighborhood and resumed the rites and rituals of Judaism.

“It is not easy to pray three times a day, to keep kosher, the mitzvoth [biblical commandments], Shabbat. For a secular person, it is huge. For me, it suits my soul,” he said.

Horovitz also tries to educate other doubters about Judaism. He has printed all of the questions he once had in a little booklet--along with the answers he found in the Bible. He argues that so few people leave the ultra-Orthodox world because of the strength of the community and the rightness of the religion, and that the more liberal modern Orthodox communities have a higher defection rate--estimated at 20%--because they open themselves to secular culture.

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If the Torah is the absolute truth, asks Margalit Levy, why are ultra-Orthodox communities so afraid they will be destroyed by the other side? What Horovitz calls a whole system, Levy sees as an ideology to keep people from thinking for themselves. It is, she says, “blind faith.”

Levy’s faith was broken about four years ago when she discovered that her religious husband was having an affair with another religious woman. She lost confidence not only in her spouse but in the rabbinical court that made it so difficult for her to get a divorce--and in devout Judaism itself.

“My husband was taken to be a proper Orthodox Jew because he wore a shtreimel [fur hat] and because of his external appearance. But if I wore a slightly short skirt at home, I could be labeled a slut,” Levy said.

The name Levy is a pseudonym. The 29-year-old mother of three no longer feels that she can abide by the religious rules she finds hypocritical, but she knows that if she abandons them altogether she risks losing contact with her young children. So she lives a double life.

After a lengthy battle, Levy granted her husband custody of their children in order to persuade him and a rabbinical court to grant her a divorce. When she is alone, during most of the week, she lives and dresses as a secular Israeli, in fashionable clothes, makeup and no head scarf. On the two days she shares with her children, she covers herself and pretends to be devout.

“I wouldn’t know what to do if my kids walked down the block and saw me like this,” she said as she sat in downtown Jerusalem wearing a knee-length corduroy jumper, her hair blowing freely.

Levy spoke slowly as she described her switch to secular life, and she chose her words carefully. It was an awakening from an inhibited past, she says. She even took an acting class to help her make the difficult change.

“For starters, in the haredi education, you internalize, minimize your physical presence. You learn to be closed and withdrawn. If you walk the street with a friend, you may speak normally, but you lower your voice whenever you enter a store,” she said.

“When I went into the acting class, it was like I had an invisible wall around me. Everyone was so physical, hugging, kissing, laughing. I couldn’t.

“The first time I went dancing, I saw others had all those big, open, free movements. I didn’t,” she said, still in awe.

She feels lonely outside Orthodoxy, she says, and is looking for the sense of belonging she once had with her family. Each step has been frightening. She feared for her life the first time she turned on a light on the Sabbath; she still will not drive on the Sabbath, although she cannot explain why. And yet she is convinced that she has chosen the right path for herself.

“If anyone asks me if I am religious, it is the most difficult question in the world,” she said, shaking her head and smiling slightly. “I believe God created the world, and that nothing happens by itself. But I don’t understand what that has to do with turning on the lights on Shabbos.”

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Avishai Simantov agrees with Levy that lights and Shabbos have very little to do with religion. Like Israel Segal, he does not keep kosher and drives on the Sabbath. He eats on Yom Kippur, a day of atonement and fasting, the most sacred day in Judaism.

On the afternoon when he was preparing to take his high school history exam, Simantov calmly explained that he had found it necessary to reject all aspects of religion to escape from Orthodoxy. But, he says, he is beginning to feel that he can pick and choose those parts of Judaism that have meaning for him.

“When I was younger, I saw the world in black and white. Now I understand there are a lot of grays and many colors in the gray. The Bible goes in many directions--it is possible to take parts,” he said.

Then, like the young yeshiva student he once was, Simantov added, “Maimonides said, ‘What path is good? The golden path, the middle path. And how does one find that middle path? One must move between extremes to find the middle, because the middle is defined by extremes.’ ”