Why do people raised as Orthodox Jews leave Orthodoxy?
There is no simple, one-size-fits-all answer.
Claims about “the reason” people choose to leave are condescending; they assume that Orthodoxy is normatively obvious and that unless something goes drastically wrong, everyone raised Orthodox will stay that way. This kind of approach pathologizes ordinary life choices. And it ignores the vast complexity of human nature—the myriad psychological, intellectual, cultural and communal factors that inform every decision a person makes. People are not automata. The choices they make about how to lead their lives don’t follow like clockwork from a single, easily definable life event. Such choices are deeply personal, tied to each individual’s human identity and agency.
And yet, here I am, introducing an issue of Jewish Action devoted to attrition from Orthodoxy, writing as the lead researcher of a study that sets out to identify what factors play a role in people’s choices to stay in Orthodox communities or leave them and to explore the lives of those who leave, building a picture of what those lives look like from the inside.
Why bother?
To understand why we’ve embarked on this study, what we’ve learned, what we hope to learn and why the information matters, it’s worth taking a step back to examine the state of attrition from Orthodoxy in America. On the commonly used spectrum of “left-wing” to “right-wing” Orthodoxy (using these labels as descriptors without any value judgments attached), we might place Modern Orthodox communities at the left end of the spectrum and Chassidic communities such as Satmar on the right end. Chabad, Yeshivish, Heimish, Centrist and other loosely defined groups (all of which can be further divided and dissected along numerous sociologic, religious and geographic axes) fall somewhere in between.
Every one of these communities is devoted to Jewish continuity. They build schools, shuls and batei midrash, create programing for adults and children, and work to reinforce religious and communal norms in culturally specific ways—all with the end goal of raising the next generation to maintain the traditions and beliefs that are at the heart of Orthodox Judaism. When those raised Orthodox don’t stay Orthodox, it is seen—and indeed deeply felt—as a communal failure, as if one of the central functions of the community itself is broken.
The Orthodox Union is devoted to the health of Orthodox Jewish communities. It devotes a great deal of effort to strengthening Orthodox life with education, resources and programming for teenagers, college students and adults. But this effort cannot be successful without a better understanding of what strong—and weak—Orthodox communal life looks like. Where are the cracks? What does it look like when existing communal structures aren’t sufficient to support Orthodox constituents? What are the key features that support Orthodox communal continuity, and how do these features differ from one community to the next?
No single study can answer these questions on its own. But the study we’ve embarked on is a good first start. Studying attrition from Orthodoxy isn’t only important because it tells us something about why a particular person decided Orthodoxy wasn’t for him or her; it’s important because it tells us something about everyone else in the Orthodox world too—about our communities and their institutions, the people in them and out of them, and our religious (and sometimes less-than-religious) lives.
When those raised Orthodox don’t stay Orthodox, it is seen—and indeed deeply felt—as a communal failure, as if one of the central functions of the community itself is broken.
The OU Attrition Study
Our study has two parts. We’ve completed the first part and are now embarking on the second. This first stage of our study uses what researchers call “qualitative” research methods; the second part will use “quantitative” methods. Our qualitative work involved interviewing twenty-nine “leavers” from Orthodoxy. We asked them to talk about their lives and experiences in great depth—the average interview length was well over an hour. We selected these interviewees so that they covered the gamut of locations across the country, including every type of Orthodox community we could think of. We were aiming for breadth, not representativeness; that is to say, we were interested in capturing as many different leaving experiences as possible, rather than figuring out which of these experiences are the most common.
This is part of what makes qualitative research and quantitative research different from one another. In a qualitative study, numbers aren’t that important—we’re not super concerned with questions like “how many . . . ?” “what’s the average . . . ?” or “what percentage are . . . ?” We’re concerned with the qualities of people’s experiences.
Why do we do both types of research?
Because they tell us very different things.
One way to illustrate the difference is by analogy with cars. Imagine you wanted to know which car accelerates faster and which brakes faster: a Tesla Model S or a Toyota Camry. To ensure that you aren’t subject to one or another quirk in a particular car, you might take every hundredth car off the factory line for both models until you have fifty of each, accelerate and brake them, and take the average. That’s quantitative.
But what if you wanted to know why one or the other was superior? How many cars would you need?
Just two. You would open up the engine of both and explore exactly how the Camry engine works and how the Tesla works. Once you had a model of how the different pieces fit together—how a gear connects to a shaft, how the pistons are powered, the electric system and battery or the gasoline combustion—you would begin to understand how and why one car performs better and make predictions about how each car will operate under different conditions. If you sampled more models from different companies, you might come up with a handful of different prototypes for how a car engine can work, a typology of car types: two types of pure battery engines, two pure gasoline, three types of hybrid engines, et cetera.
Building conceptual models of this kind is central to all research. Well before a drug makes its way to Phase 3 trials, researchers spend years in the lab building models of how a molecule might interact with a particular protein or the impact of one bacterium on another. Only once they have a sense for how and why things work do they actually test whether that conceptual model matches the reality in the human body (which will always be more complex than the simplified lab environment).
This part of our study sought to build models in exactly this way. By talking to people from a wide range of backgrounds and ages about their lives, we started to piece together an understanding of the mechanics of those lives. What kinds of experiences did “leavers” have? How did those experiences impact them? How were those experiences different in different communities and how were they the same?
The “OTD” Community: Not Necessarily Representative
In recent years, the term “Off the Derech,” or OTD, has gained popularity as a descriptor for individuals who leave Orthodox Judaism. Very few participants [in this study] consider themselves members of the “OTD” community. Only 14 percent identified as OTD and another 17 percent said they had some affiliation with the OTD community. This is significant as the OTD community is probably the most recognizable and well-known community of leavers, and facts about that community tend to shape the public’s perception of people who leave Orthodoxy. They may not represent a very large proportion of those who leave, however.
The popularity of the term OTD has been fueled by narratives portrayed in memoirs, reality television and the news media, which generally portray the Orthodox community as stifling and cult-like. These narratives capture a sense of loss, displacement and trauma, and their protagonists champion their own resistance to conformity, societal norms and expectations, factors that tend to garner wide public interest. But these stories are hardly typical and tend to amplify the salacious and the scandalous at the expense of representativeness, catering to the feelings of superiority held by outsiders.
This is not meant to challenge the truth of these accounts. Far from it. We are not calling into question the lived experiences of those whose lives have been so vividly captured in these accounts. But they represent only one small slice of reality; the range of experiences of those who leave Orthodox Judaism is much, much, larger than what is captured in the media and pop culture. Because these accounts attract a great deal of attention, many people recognize the OTD prototype reflected in these accounts but may be missing out on the varied and disparate voices and experiences that exist along the broad spectrum of leaving Orthodoxy. . . .
Our goal is to try to capture voices and experiences from all segments of Orthodox society who have left Orthodoxy. We aim to develop a more robust and wide-ranging understanding of the different ways and reasons people leave Orthodoxy.
Adapted from the OU’s Center for Communal Research study, “Attrition and Connection in American Orthodox Judaism.”
Some Important Things We’ve Learned
At the end of the day, we still can’t tell you how prevalent any one of the models we’ve built is—the same way we couldn’t tell you whether there are more Camrys than Teslas by just looking at two cars. But we have achieved a deep understanding of how this group of people’s lives developed as they grew up and out of Orthodoxy.
This understanding has helped us identify some of the features that may act as levers and gears in the personal, communal and religious lives of those raised Orthodox—the experiences that push and pull them in different directions.
Some of our findings are covered in other essays in this issue, and many more can be found in the full report. But it’s worth highlighting here how unexpected some of our findings were—a testament to the value of this qualitative approach. Answers to the fixed choices that appear on a survey, such as those used in quantitative research, only allow us to learn about things we’ve already thought of. That’s why those choices are on the survey to begin with: to test known hypotheses. This approach leaves little room for fresh insight; it leaves us still not knowing what we don’t know. By getting to know our subjects as individuals and letting them speak for themselves, we learned things about their experiences that were completely different from the preconceived notions we had before speaking to them. We also learned that some of these preconceptions fell short: our subjects did not emphasize things we might have expected them to (for example, almost none of our subjects singled out the impact of their college experiences or their year in Israel as important in their life stories).
Responses on surveys also tend to be one-dimensional. For example, if someone is asked to rate his or her feelings toward the Orthodox community on a scale from positive to negative, it may be hard to capture complex, multifaceted emotions. Indeed, one heartening—and surprising—element of our interviews was the warmth and positivity many of the subjects felt toward the Orthodox community. Without negating their sometimes significant criticism, participants often expressed appreciation for the strengths of the Orthodox community and feelings of closeness to it. Those of us who are invested in Orthodox continuity would do well to understand the features of Orthodox communal life that result in strong attachment even by those who have left. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of our communities requires honesty about what goes right as much as what goes wrong. We need to better understand where these profound positive feelings come from.
Another finding we had not anticipated was the enormous emphasis our subjects placed on the impact religious authority figures, particularly rabbis, had had on their life trajectories—both for good and for bad. In a cohort of twenty-nine people who left Orthodoxy, it was amazing how often, completely unprompted, we heard the refrain, “there was this one rabbi who . . . .” The end of that sentence was inevitably something horrible or something wonderful, never in between.
Religious authority figures played a critical role in our subjects’ lives, sometimes traumatizing them forever and causing them to tar the entire Orthodox community with the “crimes” of the rabbis, and sometimes creating durable bonds such that despite the subjects’ distance from Orthodoxy, they appeared to glow when discussing these figures. If we think of people’s lives in terms of the gears and levers that move them, religious authority figures are most certainly an important lever.
Likewise, one of the most consistent themes in our interviews was something we hadn’t even thought of when we started this research and that to our knowledge has not been discussed in any of the previous literature on this subject. When we reviewed the interview transcripts and systematically coded them for themes, we noticed that our participants all experienced some form of religious or communal misalignment in their lives. Some were raised in homes that were more, or less, religiously observant than their school or community. Others grew up in families that were simply religiously different from their school or community (for example, Chassidic versus Yeshivish), or in families where the parents themselves were religiously different from one another. Still other participants were simply culturally different than those around them due to a different geographic or cultural background.
This particular finding may have implications for how we think about our communities and our schools.
Communal Differences
This kind of qualitative study isn’t designed to pick up trends specific to different communities. Still, a number of interesting differences among communities jumped out at us as particularly noteworthy and worth looking at more closely in the second part of our study.
Participants who grew up in more Chareidi environments tended to have sharper breaks with Orthodoxy and to report experiencing more abuse and trauma than those in more modern communities. Conversely, participants from more modern communities were more likely to drift away, didn’t report trauma to the same degree, and were much more likely to report concerns about the role of women in Orthodoxy or the treatment of LGBT community members. When we showed our initial results to different focus groups made up of experts in a variety of fields (such as psychology, youth groups or kiruv), those who predominantly worked with Modern Orthodox communities immediately connected to the “drifting away” story, while those who worked with Chareidi communities connected to the stories of trauma.
Some of these experts suggested that while Chareidi communities may sometimes feel too rigid and confining, Modern Orthodox communities may feel too open. If the boundaries aren’t clear, it may be much easier for community members to slowly leave.
As part of the study, OU researchers consulted with various professionals, including psychologists, rabbis, college campus professionals, Jewish communal professionals and educators, who shared valuable insights during focus groups (anonymity was assured out of respect for the privacy of the focus group participants). Some of their reflections along with the perspectives of those interviewed by Jewish Action are shared in the sidebars in this section.
Some names throughout the cover story have been changed to protect individuals’ privacy.
Porous Boundaries
Rabbi Moshe Benovitz, managing director of International NCSY and the longtime director of the NCSY Summer Kollel who has been working with Modern Orthodox youth for more than thirty years, does not view attrition as a teen problem, but rather as a communal problem. “If we’re going to have a real conversation about attrition among teens, we have to talk about attrition among some adults.”
While Rabbi Benovitz admits we don’t see too many “adults leaving the community,” he feels it’s often not due to their strong religious commitment, but rather because “it’s really, really hard to leave your community at the age of thirty-eight when you have four kids.”
Rabbi Benovitz maintains that we can’t “discuss the experience of teens without acknowledging the experience of their families.” Similarly, another educator commenting on the study noted that in some families, there is “little difference between observance and non-observance” as “the boundaries [are] so porous.”
Making a similar observation, the study notes that sometimes leaving the Orthodox community cannot legitimately be called attrition. “For some Modern Orthodox participants,” the study states, “it may not be fair to suggest that they experienced any radical change. Their families’ observances lay so close to the borders of Orthodoxy that their current non-Orthodox life choices cannot really be considered a real departure.”
The Next Stage
How many people leave Orthodoxy from different types of communities? Are the rates different “in town” and “out of town”? At what age do people generally leave? Are there factors in leaving that tend to cluster together? Are people who leave different in some important ways than people who stay?
These are the sorts of questions that can only be answered with a large quantitative study. We intend to survey eighth-grade Orthodox day school graduates who graduated over the span of fifteen years. To find these students, we randomly selected Orthodox schools around the country (representing all the major sub-denominations of Orthodoxy) and are currently compiling alumni lists. Using statistical techniques that help us group people into categories by looking at commonalities that tend to cluster together (in this case, something called “latent class analysis”), we hope to better understand the elements in these graduates’ lives that may play a role in staying in or leaving Orthodoxy.
Indeed, one heartening—and surprising—element of our interviews was the warmth and positivity many of the subjects felt toward the Orthodox community.
Of course, as I noted at the very outset, we will never be able to declare definitively, “here’s why Rivka left Orthodoxy”—nor is that our purpose. But we might be able to identify meaningful patterns that indicate risk factors and protective factors. For example, there are plenty of people who are misaligned with their schools and not only stay Orthodox but become even more committed to Orthodoxy than they started with. Nonetheless, a quantitative survey of this kind might reveal that misalignment is still a risk factor for leaving. If the same person also has parents who underwent rapid religious change, and this person experienced abuse, we might say that he has many risk factors. Does that mean he will leave Orthodoxy? Of course not. The range of factors that go into any individual’s life choices are vast. But someone with those risk factors may be more likely to leave than someone without.
Conversely, we may find protective factors in those who remain Orthodox. The support of a close religious mentor, together with a high sense of personal self-efficacy (the personal confidence and belief that one is able to achieve his or her goals), might be enough to protect some people from the possibility of leaving.
At this stage, we can’t really identify the magnitude of any particular risk factor or protective factor. What I’ve suggested above may be reasonable, but until we run the survey it will remain an educated hypothesis. We’ve learned a tremendous amount about the lives of people who leave and the features of Orthodoxy that matter, but there’s still much more to do.
In the meantime, based on our work so far, there are plenty of pragmatic takeaways—things everyone can do now to facilitate healthier, stronger Orthodox communities. We can educate rabbis and other religious authority figures about their critical role in people’s religious lives. We can pay attention to and support people who experience misalignment in their religious lives. Communities and schools can rethink how rigid or open they are around religious norms and expectations, especially when it comes to students and community members who may be misaligned in some way.
The participants in this study showed enormous grace and generosity in sharing their personal stories with us, and we are deeply indebted to them. Their willingness to talk about their experiences has allowed us to reach insights that would not otherwise have been possible, to the great benefit of the communities they left behind.
Dr. Moshe Krakowski is a professor of Jewish education at the Azrieli Graduate School for Jewish Education and Administration at Yeshiva University, where he also directs Azrieli’s doctoral program. He studies American Chareidi education and culture, focusing on the relationship between communal worldview, identity and education. He also works on curriculum, cognition and Gemara learning in Jewish educational settings.
In This Section
Leaving the Fold: The OU’s New Study Provides Insights Into Attrition
Why Study Attrition? by Dr. Moshe Krakowski
Parenting on Different Pages by Merri Ukraincik