Finding a Jewish Life After Orthodoxy
Zalman Newfield on Leaving the Hasidic World and Finding His Path
Zalman Newfield is a sociologist and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey, a fantastic new memoir about leaving the Hasidic world, specifically Chabad, which I reviewed here. Although his work is one in a long line of off-the-derech memoirs, it felt unique. He wrote about his experience with clarity, not bitterness, and found meaning within Judaism even after leaving Orthodoxy.
This is Zalman’s second book about the OTD (off-the-derech) experience. The first was Degrees of Separation, a sociological study of those who left the Hasidic community, and it’s a fantastic read as well. I was lucky to have the privilege of interviewing Zalman about his new memoir. We delved deeper into his upbringing, the journey out, and how he connects with Judaism today.
At 15, you couldn’t sign your own name on a passport form. When a childhood is that sheltered, do you ever truly leave it behind, or does a part of your brain permanently remain a Hasidic kid from Crown Heights viewing the modern world as a fascinating, alien landscape?
Growing up in an environment that’s so different, that’s so much in opposition to the broader secular society, shapes a person’s psyche in really profound ways. It’s hard to know for sure but I think one of the reasons I was attracted to sociology, and the desire to try to understand society, was due to my background. Think about it: In a way it’s an odd impulse to want to scrutinize society from the sidelines rather than simply live one’s life. My interest in understanding society began while I was still in yeshiva and I was desperate to know what’s going on outside of the walls of the yeshiva, beyond the boundaries of the Lubavitch community. And once I got outside of the Lubavitch community I had a strong sense that I was a foreigner, that I was from another galaxy, looking in on secular modern society from the outside. And I think the discipline of sociology allows people like me to continually stand on the sidelines, trying to understand society, and in fact values and celebrates this impulse.
This is your second book on the OTD (off-the-derech) experience of leaving Orthodox Judaism. Why do you think ex-Orthodox people are often so obsessed with the way they were raised and constantly deconstructing it?
Yes, this is my second book. The first is an academic work, and this is a personal memoir. It’s a delicate balance in terms of dealing with one’s past. On the one hand, certainly in academic circles, it’s very common for scholars to write about things that in some way relate to their own biography, their own experiences.
Academic work is extremely demanding intellectually and emotionally. It’s often very lonely work and requires a tremendous amount of dedication and focus. In order for people to be motivated to do their work and actually complete their projects, they may need to have some kind of personal connection or investment in the topics that they’re exploring. At the same time, of course, if you’re too close to your subject, all sorts of aspects of your own story may bleed into your research, making it very difficult to honestly and dispassionately analyze critically the phenomenon that you’re studying. I tried to be aware of my own biases and experiences when I was writing my academic book. I was really trying to understand the experiences of the 74 men and women who I interviewed, rather than simply project my own experiences onto them.
Now in the case of writing a memoir it could be even more tricky because when you write a memoir, you really are writing primarily about your own experience. At the same time, in order to write well and in order to write thoughtfully, you need to somehow detach yourself enough from your own experience in order to put yourself in the shoes of the other people that you’re writing about, your family, your friends, your teachers, and so on. You need to try to understand what they were thinking, what their motivations were, what their interests were, and not just be completely overwhelmed by your own emotions and own needs. I hope I was able to do that.
Your book feels somewhat unique in the OTD memoir space as it doesn’t read as sensationalist or bitter. Is that a result of your academic training, or do you truly not have any resentment?
We need to distinguish how I felt at the time from how I feel today. At the time I was very hurt and upset and frustrated. I don’t remember especially feeling angry, but it’s certainly possible that I felt that as well. However, it’s been over 20 years since I shaved my beard and left the Lubavitch community. In the interim, I have been in therapy for years and went through intense academic training to help me better understand society in general and religious communities in particular. I’ve also managed to get a PhD, an academic career, and get married and raise my own family. I think all of these things have given me some distance from the raw emotions I felt when leaving the community.
These days, when I think about my experiences growing up in the community and leaving it, I really don’t feel a sense of bitterness or anger towards the community. I don’t feel that my parents or the community ever intended to harm me. I really do think that everyone was acting in good faith, that they were pursuing for themselves, and for me, what they thought would be the best kind of life, the life that would ensure our spiritual survival and physical happiness. It’s just that I have very strong disagreements with them in terms of what is likely to produce human happiness, but I don’t have resentment or anger at them for the decisions that they made and the way that they conduct their life.
In fact, when I was writing the memoir, I needed to undertake a kind of emotional archaeology. To dig deep into my soul and remind myself of the anger and frustration that I felt at earlier times in my life so that I could accurately portray that in the memoir in a way that was in line with how I actually felt at that time when I was experiencing those things, rather than how I feel about it now all these years later.
Looking back at your years doing shlichus, do you feel any guilt or conflict about trying to bring people into a lifestyle you eventually chose to leave?
No, I don’t feel any guilt or conflict over my previous activities doing Lubavitch outreach around the world. Like I said, I don’t feel any animosity towards my parents for trying to raise me Lubavitch because they were acting in good faith, and this is what they thought was the best way to live life. I feel the same way about my own involvement in Lubavitch outreach work.
I was acting in good faith when I told people to put on tefillin, when I told people that believing in God would help their life. I truly believed that that was true and that’s why I was involved in those activities. Like other Lubavitchers involved in these activities, I was motivated by a genuine desire to share what I thought were the insights and treasures of the Lubavitch way of life with outsiders. Thankfully, by the time I no longer believed in Orthodox Judaism, I was no longer involved in Lubavitch outreach activities.
Your parents were Baalei Teshuva who chose Chabad as adults. Did their familiarity with the secular world and your relationship with secular relatives give you the psychological space to eventually leave Chabad?
Yes, my parents joined the community from the outside and they maintained a positive relationship with their non-Orthodox relatives. Plus my parents, especially my father, were engaged in various secular cultural activities, like going to art museums, which they introduced to us as young children. At the same time, as a child, I was deeply enmeshed in the Lubavitch community and felt very distant from the secular outside world which remained largely foreign to me. Nonetheless, as an adult, thinking about leaving the Hasidic community, my early exposure to secular culture, and to secular relatives, gave me at least some psychological awareness of the outside world and diminished slightly the terror that I felt about leaving the community.
What is your single most important piece of advice for someone currently stuck in a yeshiva, secretly reading secular books like you did?
Don’t get caught! But more seriously, I would say that reading books is a glorious way to learn about other systems of thought, other cultures, other religions, other philosophies, and lifestyles. It was certainly a key part of what shaped my early interest and understanding of the world beyond the walls of the yeshiva.
I experienced yeshiva as a lack of productivity, as sitting around waiting for something to happen and for the most part, nothing ever did. Now, of course I could’ve learned more Talmud and other things while I was in yeshiva. But I definitely had the feeling that I was sitting in yeshiva with my study partners and instead of studying Talmud for hours at a time, we just sat around cracking jokes, being bored. The boredom was actually one of the things that motivated me to read secular books on my own.
A lot of the other students in yeshiva felt that there’s a system, the yeshiva system, and you have to put in your time in the system, and then once your time is up, once you graduate, then you go on to your real life and you do something meaningful. And I remember very distinctly feeling like, why should I waste my time? Why should I just sit here and warm a bench? Instead, I want to do something of substance. I didn’t have a clear sense of exactly how the secular books I was reading would eventually lead to any defined path, let alone a career. But the sense of boredom definitely acted as a catalyst to push me to read the books because I didn’t want to sit there just waiting and waiting.
At the same time, it’s worth remembering that books have their own limitations and it’s easy to get inaccurate understandings of different peoples and cultures if your only exposure to them is through the printed word. Of course reading books secretly in Yeshiva can be safer than physically venturing outside and trying to speak to people and learn about them. But when possible and when safe, I would encourage anyone who wants to really understand the outside world to combine book knowledge with the vitality and dynamism of actual human interactions.
What is your advice for surviving the “in between” phase where you don’t fit in the frum world but don’t feel totally at home in the secular world either?
The in-between phase is very tricky and there’s a lot of trip wires and psychological traps to be avoided. A lot of practical mistakes could be avoided or handled with the appropriate amount of finesse, making one’s life at least a little bit smoother. So much of these trip wires and problems are tied to particular psychological personalities, social circumstances, family conditions, and so on. But a key thing that applies to anyone going through this process is the need to be patient with oneself and understand that change takes time.
Everyone who’s unhappy or feels trapped in the Orthodox community understandably feels the urge to get out of it as quickly as possible, and move on with their life. The reality is it takes a lot of time to overcome various problematic mindsets from the Orthodox community. It takes time to develop a plan of how to go forward. It takes time to make new contacts and develop new friendships outside of the community, and it takes time for one’s Orthodox family to adjust to your new life. So people leaving the Orthodox community need to try to be patient with themselves and give themselves time to make these adjustments and find solid footing in the outside world without feeling that one needs to have everything figured out right away.
You managed to maintain a close relationship with your parents despite leaving their religious lifestyle. How do you navigate this dynamic so both sides can coexist?
I feel very lucky that I managed to maintain a loving and meaningful relationship with my Lubavitch family even after I left. However, this did not just happen. Initially, my mother responded very harshly to my decision to shave my beard and become less Orthodox, and that was very painful for me. There was a real feeling of rejection at that time that I spent years in therapy to help me deal with. So the relationship that I currently enjoy with my family is a product of years of negotiation and maneuvering to achieve.
Sometimes, this involved explicit conversations with my family, especially in the case of what my wife and I would be required to wear when we came to visit my family. But a lot of the other times it was less explicit, unspoken, as a sort of quiet, subtle maneuvering in order to try to maintain the relationship. At the bottom of all this is the understanding on my part and the part of my family that regardless of our religious differences, we love each other and we care about each other, and we want to maintain our relationship in the teeth of our differences.
Each person leaving Orthodoxy needs to decide how they want to handle their relationship with their family. But if there’s enough love and affection for each other to begin with, it is possible to maintain at least some kind of relationship. The reality is, though, these relationships can be a source of great distress as well as a source of love.
How do you handle the loneliness of those first few Friday nights or holidays without your family or a new community?
Leaving the Orthodox community definitely involved a great deal of loneliness. I was lucky. I made some friends when I was in college and especially through various non-Orthodox Jewish programs that I was a part of, like the trip I took to Ghana with American Jewish World Service. Those friends helped me feel a sense of community and connection and camaraderie beyond the Orthodox world. Having non-Orthodox relatives that I could connect with also helped with the burden of loneliness.
Still, I often struggled with the question of how much they really understood me and my circumstances because I grew up in such a distinct environment with so many challenges that were particular to that environment. If I were leaving these days, I would make much more use of organizations like Footsteps that help create a space for ex-Orthodox people to connect with others going through similar challenges.
After losing faith in God, how do you deal with the existential dread of realizing that no one is in charge, no one has the answers, and you are entirely on your own?
The existential dread that you refer to is very profound and definitely took me years to get a handle on it. It’s one of the biggest challenges for anyone leaving the Orthodox community. The Orthodox community, especially the Lubavitch community, which has a very robust theology, provides a very highly developed system for explaining the purpose of creation and one’s place in the creation.
For people who are leaving the community they really do need to come up with their own understanding of why the world is the way it is and what role they’re supposed to play in the world. It’s a very challenging thing. This is especially the case if these concerns are coupled with the most basic concerns like, where am I going to live? How should I dress? What am I supposed to eat? How am I supposed to make a living? And so on.
I eventually came to the belief that the fact that there is no afterlife and this is the only life that we get to live means that we have to be extra careful in how we live our life and what we do with the precious time we have on earth. For me, this has contributed to my commitment to be involved in social justice movements and try to lessen the burden that other people are struggling under.
What was the hardest lingering guilt or psychological reflex you had to unlearn after leaving?
There was a lot that I needed to unlearn. In terms of psychological reflex, I needed to unlearn the general idea that the outside world is a dangerous place and that non-Jews are inherently a threat to Jewish people and that they seek our destruction. It took a long time, even once I knew rationally that that was absolutely not the case, to feel comfortable around non-Jews.
And this is something that was very upsetting to me, but I came to realize that this was simply the result of the environment in which I was raised, the racial tensions that existed in Crown Heights when I was growing up, along with stories of the holocaust, the pogroms, and other tragic episodes in Jewish history.
Did you have to actively deconstruct the Chabad theology of Jewish exceptionalism before you could form genuine relationships with non-Jews, or did the friendships themselves shatter the ideology for you?
Lubavitch theology, especially the Tanya, focuses on this idea that Jews have two souls, an animal and a divine one, whereas non-Jews only have one soul, the animal soul. This is something that made a very big impression on me growing up and I thought a tremendous amount about it as I was leaving the Lubavitch community. And this idea stuck with me for a long time.
I didn’t find a way to get out of this mindset on my own. Instead, it was the experience of actually meeting flesh and blood non-Jews and realizing their humanity and how we were so similar, and how those religious differences that I grew up hearing were so important to who you are simply weren’t so. I discovered that I had a lot in common with the non-Jews I encountered. I learned that a lot of the non-Jews I met in college shared similar political interests, and a lot of the people I met in grad school shared intellectual interests and a desire to understand society. As I became friends with non-Jews and felt connected to them, I gradually realized I no longer subscribed to the mindset of Jewish superiority or separateness.
As an atheist who still loves the text, do you view the intellectual nature of traditional Yeshiva study as a method that naturally encourages critical skepticism, or does it ultimately suppress it?
Everything can be used for different purposes. Electricity can be used to power a lightbulb or an electric chair. Books can be used to spread critical thinking or repressive ideas. The Talmud and the intellectual tradition within Judaism can be used to foster critical thought and open discourse or to stifle it. It simply depends on the context in which these studies are undertaken, the leadership involved in that context, and the goals that are set out for it.
As I mentioned in my memoir, I was fascinated to discover that the same page of Talmud that I had been forced to study in yeshiva and found so intellectually numbing was so intellectually engrossing when I was studying it with my wife who has a PhD in Talmud.
You mention your wife’s PhD and connection to Jewish tradition in a non-Orthodox way. Do you think you’d feel as connected to Judaism if you married someone else, maybe who wasn’t Jewish? Were you even open to dating non-Jews?
I have learned so much from my wife, including a deeper appreciation of Judaism in all of its complexities and nuances. Early on in my journey I toyed with the idea of dating a non-Jew but never seriously pursued it. Although I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with marrying a non-Jew, for me, it has been a profound blessing to marry someone who is Jewish and shares so much cultural understanding and historical connections with me.
Some people who leave Orthodoxy go through a phase where they resent Judaism and want to commit every sin in the book. Have you experienced that?
I don’t think I ever had a desire to commit every sin. I was never so ambitious–not that I judge people who do have such ambitions. I just wanted to break the rules that I felt were unnecessarily stifling my spirit and preventing me from living my best life.
How do you experience the feeling of Shabbos or a page of Gemara without the underpinnings of divine command? Is it nostalgia, or is there a genuine spirituality to it?
I don’t feel connected to any idea of spirituality, but I would say my appreciation for various parts of Lubavitch culture and traditional Jewish practice is much more than mere nostalgia. I enjoy having a Friday night dinner with my family every week because it gives us a chance to be together in a way that’s different from the dinners we have the other nights of the week. And learning a page of Talmud or other classic rabbinic texts have not lost any of their appeal, despite no longer believing that they were written with divine inspiration.
On the contrary, I think that my appreciation of Jewish texts now is even greater because I understand that these were produced by human beings that used human intellect in order to understand the Torah and develop these beautiful texts. And I understand the historical contingencies involved in all of these texts, both in the way that various historical factors shaped the development of these texts themselves and the fact that it’s only because of particular fortuitous circumstances that these texts have even survived and that we are able to access them today. All of these have made me appreciate these texts that much more.
How do you raise children with a deep appreciation for Jewish texts and traditions while completely removing the part that Hashem chose us and gave us commandments? Aren’t you essentially excising the central aspect of Judaism?
No, I don’t think so. There are many schools of thought with Judaism. There are many movements, many rabbis, and many traditions. They each have their own values, their own meaning. Obviously there’s a theological tradition within Judaism, but there are many other traditions and many other aspects of Judaism.
You don’t have to accept the theological framing of Judaism in order for it to be meaningful. I think people find meaning in all different ways. For some people, believing in God and seeing all Jewish practice as rooted in God could be meaningful. But I certainly don’t think that that is the only way of finding meaning within the Jewish tradition.
Orthodox critics argue that treating Judaism as a “cultural treasure” rather than binding divine law is a luxury that only lasts one generation. If you want your grandchildren to be Jewish, you need to be Orthodox. How would you respond?
The claim that only Orthodox Judaism guarantees Jewish continuity is deeply flawed. To begin with, so many of the people that are raised Orthodox end up leaving at least in part because of the structures and restrictions of that way of life. We’re seeing a very high rate of people leaving Orthodoxy today. Also, there are many people who are raised in non-Orthodox Jewish traditions and many of their children and grandchildren remain in the movement and are committed to that way of life.
The very idea that regardless of how the people who are practicing them feel about those practices it’s important to keep on doing them, merely in order to ensure Jewish continuity—that itself is a very deeply problematic mindset. And it’s indicative of the Orthodox way of looking at things which prioritizes certain abstract ideas over the lived experience of the human beings involved. No way of life is more important than the human beings involved. In other words, if Judaism is meaningful and people find purpose in it, if people find the benefit in it, people find that it helps their life in one way or another, then it will perpetuate itself. It will continue not because people feel obliged to perpetuate it, regardless of how it impacts their life.
Given the theme of this blog is Torah and heresy, I have to ask a final question: What is a heretical belief you hold today that would shock the circles you run in?
Something that may be a kind of heretical thought for the secular modern circles in which I usually spend my time is the idea that although I’m a proud atheist and don’t feel any kind of theological kinship with Lubavitch, I still appreciate the community and its way of life. Although I would never want to place myself under the restrictions of Orthodoxy, I still appreciate a great deal of what it stands for.
There are many parts of the Lubavitch community that I still appreciate today and maybe one of the most profound parts is the solidarity and the camaraderie within the community where people are willing to help out their neighbors, help out their friends, help out strangers within Lubavitch in a way that is very uncommon in secular American society.
There’s a lot of aspects of my Lubavitch upbringing that are still a part of me. One thing that I become aware of is that within Lubavitch there is a certain kind of chutzpa that exists that allows teenagers who don’t know anything about the world to be able to go all around and actively engage in Jewish outreach. And I think that chutzpa stayed with me and I think it helped me to overcome some really daunting odds. The fact that I was able to go from an environment where I didn’t learned the ABCs to attend college and eventually earn a PhD takes some chutzpa! I certainly still felt like a fish out of water and I was worried about imposter syndrome, but the fact that I was able to pull it off at all I think partly relates to this kind of Lubavitch chutzpa that said “Oh yeah sure I could do this. I’ve got this!”
If his parents had the freedom to become religious then it's only fair that he have the option to discard it
(Slight correction, if I may: I think you meant to write strictures - not structures.)
Couple of quibbles:
The headline speaks about the "Hasidic world", but Chabad is not the Chasidic world. They are "chassidim" like Mormons are Christians: they think they are, and claim they are, but everyone else thinks they aren't.
In that regard, the claim that he "taught himself to read and write English" rings very false. Even genuine chassidim like Satmar are taught to read and write - but we are to believe that an American Chabadsker, the child of ballei Teshuvah, was never taught even basic English?? It's just not true. And if that's not true, ask yourself what else he says isn't true.