The moment Solomon
lost his faith, he was standing on the D train, swaying back and forth
with its movement as if in prayer. But it wasn’t a prayer book that the
young law student was reading – he had already been to synagogue, where
he had wrapped himself in the leather thongs that bound him to Orthodox
Judaism, laying phylacteries and reciting the prayers three times daily.
The tome in his hands now was Alan Dershowitz’s The Genesis of Justice
(2000), which used Talmudic and Hasidic interpretations of the Bible to
argue that stories in the book of Genesis, from Adam and Eve eating the
apple to Noah and his ark, constituted God’s learning curve – a means
of establishing a moral code and the rules of justice that prevail
today.
What
struck him about the book was its depth, and a complexity of thought
that he had been raised to believe was the exclusive domain of the
rabbis whose authority commanded his community of ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The book’s brilliance, coupled with its unabashed heresy, created the
first of many cracks in Solomon’s faith. Seeing the scriptures
interpreted in methods so compelling and yet entirely inconsistent with
the dogmas of his youth caused Solomon to question everything he
believed to be true.
From
Dershowitz, Solomon moved on to evolutionary biology, and then to
Stephen Hawking and cosmology, and then biblical criticism, until
finally, he was unable to deny the conclusion his newly developed
capacity for critical thinking had led him to: he no longer believed in
the existence of God.
‘It
was the most devastating moment of my life,’ he told me. ‘I wish to
this day that I could find the holy grail that proves that I’m wrong,
that it’s all true.’
And
yet 15 years later, Solomon’s life looks exactly the way it did the day
of that fateful train ride, give or take a few infractions. Solomon is
still leading the life of an Orthodox Jew. He is married to an Orthodox
Jew. His children are Orthodox Jews who go to study the Torah at
yeshiva. His parents are ultra-Orthodox Jews. And so, with his new-found
atheism, Solomon did nothing.
‘Religious fundamentalists want to have a monopoly on truth, a monopoly on morality, but the internet undermines those facades’.
But
they are also proof of the increasing challenges fundamentalist
religious groups face in the age of the internet and a globalised world.
With so much information so readily available, such groups can no
longer rely on physical and intellectual isolation to maintain their
boundaries. In addition to exposing religious adherents to information
that challenges the hegemony of their belief systems, the internet gives
individuals living in restrictive environments an alternative
community.
‘It
helps people find others in the same boat,’ said Phil Zuckerman, a
professor of sociology at Pitzer College in California who studies
apostates and secularism. ‘Twenty, thirty years ago, if you were living
in Borough Park, Brooklyn, or Alabama and you were surrounded by Hasids
or Pentecostal Christians and you started to have doubts, well, you were
alone. Now, you can find someone right away who is in the same boat as
you and is also sharing your doubts. You can find community, you can
find a connection that bolsters your own situation and gives you support
– intellectual and emotional. Religious fundamentalists want to have a
monopoly on truth, a monopoly on lifestyle, a monopoly on morality, a
monopoly on authority, but the internet undermines all those facades.’
Yanky
cut an incongruous figure. A tall ultra-Orthodox man with a short,
scruffy beard and short side-locks wrapped behind his ears, wearing
traditional Hasidic black-and-white garb, he was sitting on a barstool
in an out-of-the-way dive bar in South Brooklyn on a Monday afternoon,
sipping a Corona. But Yanky is an incongruous man. Like Solomon, he
lives in an Orthodox neighbourhood, has many children who attend
yeshivas, goes to synagogue to pray, hosts meals on Sabbath. His life,
like the life of any Orthodox Jew, is punctuated a hundred times a day
by the small demands the religion makes on its adherents’ lifestyle,
demands on what they can eat, what they can wear, where they can go,
what they can read, whom they can speak to, what they can touch, when
they can touch it, and how often.
Somewhat tragically for a person so occupied, Yanky doesn’t believe in God.
Things
didn’t start out that way. Yanky, who has a gentle, defeated air about
him, and a shy, cynical sense of humour, was among the most fervent
scholars of his cohort. ‘It’s hard to describe how earnest a person I
was before,’ he told me. He had spent many years studying the Torah in
the most prestigious yeshivas. ‘I had really suffered to be there,’ he
said, by way of explaining how much it had meant to him and how deeply
invested in the holy texts he once was. He even worked as a rabbi on the
side, answering questions pertaining to religious law for lay people in
his community.
But
Yanky had always had philosophical questions, even as a child. At some
point, all of the questions added up, coming to a head when his rabbi
asked him to study with a man who had recently become observant. This
newly religious man needed a study partner to take him through the
religious answers to scientific questions. While able to answer the
man’s religious queries, the partnership forced Yanky to think deeply
about the issues he had been avoiding, such as the conflicts between the
Bible’s claims and those made by science. He tried to put an end to
their study sessions, but his rabbi was confident in his ability to stay
the course. ‘No, no, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,’ Yanky remembers his
rabbi telling him.
‘It wasn’t fine.’
That’s
when his newly observant study partner took Yanky to a presentation by
the British scientist and New Atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion
(2006). ‘It wasn’t so much that Dawkins was so convincing, or
interesting even,’ Yanky told me between short sips of beer. ‘It was
just, I was sitting there with this whole group of people who were
having this one viewpoint.’ He experienced for the first time what
religion looked like from the outside, a series of often ridiculous and
always questionable ideas shattering its absolute hold on his psyche.
And
something else crystalised at that Dawkins talk: Yanky had at that
point hundreds of questions which no one had ever been able to answer to
his satisfaction, ranging from scientific questions about the veracity
of the Old Testament’s narrative (‘woman very clearly wasn’t taken from
man’; ‘ancient humans were not vegetarians,’ he elaborated) to questions
concerning the claims made in the Talmud (‘the laws of cooking on
Shabbos and kosher cooking laws don’t match up with thermodynamics’;
‘bugs don’t spontaneously generate from plants’). It felt like there was
a separate, unsatisfying answer for every burning question. And as
Dawkins spoke, Yanky realised that there was one answer that took care
of all of his questions – God did not write the Torah because He does not exist. ‘So that was basically it for me,’ he said.
He
was an atheist forced to stay under wraps lest his boss fire him, his
wife divorce him, and his children get thrown out of school.
Yanky
was devastated by his realisation that there is no God. ‘It was very
upsetting,’ he said, talking quickly. ‘I remember laying in bed and
feeling like the world had come to an end. It wasn’t a relief. It was
very painful.’
He
was so upset that his first move after this realisation was to search
out the smartest and most learned rabbis, hoping that they would have
answers for him and be able to convince him that he was wrong – that
there is a God, that the Torah is true. He wrote anonymous letters to a
few respected rabbis, and posted them snail-mail (though this was 2000,
he had little to no contact with the internet, as the most pious Jews
don’t). The letters contained his questions, mostly culled from the
contradictions between the first chapters of the Old Testament and
evolutionary theory: evolution suggests that snakes, descended from
lizards, lost their legs long before humans evolved – but Genesis states
that they lost them after an encounter with man. The Adam and Eve story
suggests that humans were created instantaneously, in a single day a
mere 6,000 years ago – yet science reveals the slow evolution of human
life on Earth, describing the gradual rise of our hominid predecessors
over many millions of years.
The
explanations he got from rabbinic scholars were weak and obscure. One
rabbi sent him a bizarre note, including a story about sitting in a
boat, ‘an elaborate allegory intending to describe how we only coast
along over the deep waters of the Torah,’ Yanky recalled. ‘It was cool,
but it didn’t help me. Thanks Rabbi.’ With nowhere left to turn, he was
finally forced to admit what he was: an atheist leading a double life,
forced to stay under wraps lest his boss fire him, his wife divorce him,
and his children get thrown out of school.
They
call themselves ‘Orthoprax’ – those of correct practice – to
distinguish themselves from the Orthodox – those of correct belief.
Every time I met one, they would introduce me to a few of their friends,
though many refused to speak for fear of being discovered. There are
far fewer women in this situation than men, and the women were even
harder to draw out. They risk losing their children, especially in New
York State, where custody is often given to the more religious parent.
Yet
things have changed: once so isolated in their atheism, double-lifers
passing for Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox and Yeshivish (known for devouring
the Talmud) all gather online in chat rooms. I met undercover atheists
from many different Hasidic sects – Satmar, Skver, Bobov – where the
focus is mystical. They live in Williamsburg, Long Island, New Skver,
Jerusalem. Wherever there is an insular Jewish enclave, there are
individuals who have come to the conclusion that God does not exist, and
yet they maintain their religious cover for social, familial and
economic reasons. Many are well-established in their communities, even
leaders. Many are financially successful, family men and women, moral
people. ‘I am your neighbour with kids in your children’s class,’ wrote
one undercover atheist anonymously on a blog. ‘I am one of the weekly
sponsors of the Kiddush club… I was your counselor in camp… I do not
believe in God.’
The
Orthodox community has grown exponentially in the past 50 years.
Ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic enclaves such as Lakewood in New Jersey and
Kiryas Joel in Upstate New York have the lowest median ages in the
entire United States due to their high birthrate. It is normal for
families to have anywhere from five to 12 children.
‘We’re talking about a ghetto that’s locked from the inside’
These
communities are organised around religion, explains Samuel Heilman, a
sociologist at Queens College in New York, who studies contemporary
Orthodox Jewish movements. As the population has expanded, so have
attempts to keep members in line. But it has been a losing battle,
overall. ‘As a sociological principle, one size can never fit all,’ he
told me, ‘and the larger the community, the more difficult it is to
control.’
That
hasn’t stopped efforts. One method of control is limiting secular
education for children in subjects such as mathematics and even English.
The lack of skills necessary to navigate the outside world can be
crippling to most who consider leaving their communities. Another
strategy is turning everyone else into an enemy. The tactic is hardly
unique. ‘Every fundamentalist group demonises the other – they tend to
be very dualist; you’re either with us or without us.’ In the case of
the ultra-Orthodox, ‘We’re talking about a ghetto that’s locked from the
inside,’ Heilman said. You have to create a threat from the outside to
keep those doors locked.
But
even for those such as Solomon and Yanky who were educated enough to
pursue outside professions, their own psychological states work just as
well as any external rules to keep them put.
The self-policing mechanism
kicked in most strongly through the matchmaking apparatus, the place
where status is determined in these communities. A person leaving the
community puts a blight on their entire family, stigmatising parents,
siblings, children, and even cousins, limiting their ability to marry
into ‘good’ families with no such stain.
Are double-lifer’s a danger to the fold? It depends on your point of view.
‘For every one of them, there’s five kids, 10 kids born,’ Heilman said.
‘We
have 10,000 kids in school in Williamsburg alone. The majority will
stay where they are,’ said a Satmar friend – a believer – in agreement.
‘I could pick off a person a day if I wanted to,’ countered an undercover atheist I’ll call Moishe.
If
anything, the double-lifers are more like ‘agent provocateurs inside a
besieged system’, Heilman contends.
They know what’s real and what’s not
real. They know how to game the system. And they have their
own signals. Surely it’s only a matter of time before they begin to
share their ideas with those who are still believers.
I’m
sitting with Moishe, a scholarly luminary in the ultra-Orthodox world,
in Solomon’s office in Manhattan; the two are colleagues and
confidantes. Moishe is Hasidic, wears a graying beard, lives in the
bosom of a Hasidic sect in Brooklyn and has many children. He has
written books of exegesis that are studied in many yeshivas, uncovering
the hidden secrets of the Torah.
Solomon,
too, lives in Brooklyn, has a wife and a bunch of children, and a good
job. He is clean-shaven, wears a suit to work and a black velvet
yarmulke. Though both are staunch atheists, neither Moishe nor Solomon
has any intention of leaving the Orthodox world.
But
the similarities end there – Solomon is deeply emotional, the kind of
man whose obvious kindness comes from bearing the weight of the world on
his shoulders. He is still dogged by the emotional loss of faith. ‘I
have an emotional bond to a God that I know does not exist,’ as he puts
it.
Moishe, on
the other hand, is driven only by the pursuit of truth, with that almost
childlike quality that geniuses display during discovery, and a sense
of humour wide enough to encompass all of his own foibles.
Solomon
suffers from intense guilt; the psychological toll of leading a double
life weighs heavily on him. ‘I used to be tormented by doubt,’ he said.
‘But now I’m tormented by certainty.’ Moishe can’t understand these
feelings. He experienced his new-found intellectual freedom with the joy
that comes from liberation.
Moishe
is still publicly Hasidic. He wears a shtreimel – the traditional fur
hat – on Sabbath. At one point, the Hasidic rabbi leading his sect asked
him to become even more religious, referred to as ‘going right’.
‘At that time I was like, what do you mean more
right? I’m already at the end! What’s north of the North Pole? But he
knew what he was talking about.’ Moishe’s journey from believer to
atheist happened in a matter of weeks, after a few passages from
Maimonides convinced him that the greatest Jewish scholar was, like
himself, an undercover atheist.
Moishe
explained: on the one hand, Maimonides felt that the belief that the
earth was eternal could be destructive to the Jewish religion. On the
other hand, he also said that if the infinite character of the earth
could be proven, he would accept it as true. Moishe’s conclusion?
Maimonides ‘knew the first part of the Torah was iffy at best and bunk
at worst’. Moreover, Maimonides’ attempts to reconcile what he thought
was true with what he claimed was true were, in Moishe’s words, an ‘epic
fail’.
The greatest tragedy for undercover atheists is the barrier it erects between them and their loved ones
‘Nothing
he said made any actual sense,’ he explained. ‘So I was left with one
option and one option only: he was an atheist but was hiding it. There,
now that made sense. So now I look at myself as a reincarnation of
Rambam [Maimonides]. I’m an atheist in hiding just like he was.’
Still,
despite his confidence that he could convert a person a day to atheism
should he so desire, Moishe balked at the consequences. Perhaps the
greatest tragedy for undercover atheists is the barrier it necessarily
erects between them and their loved ones.
‘I’m
desperate to tell my kids the truth,’ Moishe confessed. And yet, he
doesn’t dare. Moishe is not alone.
Many I spoke to stay inside the
confines of their Orthodox lives for fear of harming their children,
opting instead to let them continue to believe what they themselves now
consider to be fairy tales.
‘To
me, lying to my children was the worst part,’ said another undercover
atheist – I’ll call him Yisroel. Yisroel has a very good job – he makes
in the high six figures – and is very attached to his wife and children,
the opposite of the stereotype that prevails in religious communities
surrounding those who lose the faith, namely that they are ‘liars who
want to do drugs, cheat on their wives and eat cheeseburgers’, as he put
it.
Yisroel’s greatest wish is that his children will learn to think
critically and figure things out for themselves. But he has no plans to
accelerate that process. ‘I take it one day at a time; I don’t have any
long-term goal about that,’ he told me when we met in a Manhattan deli
on a rainy afternoon.
Every
person I spoke to had a different relationship with his spouse on the
subject of belief. Moishe and his wife have an agreement that they will
marry off the children before making any changes to their lives, though
he doesn’t quite know what change would look like. ‘What am I going to
do – move to Kansas?’ he joked.
Yanky
felt immense relief after he confessed to his wife – he had felt like
he was betraying her. ‘It was making me nuts,’ he said. He told her on
Tisha B’Av – a fast day commemorating the destruction of the temple and
the end of the Jewish Empire, because, as Yanky put it: ‘It was a good
time to suffer, you know? She suffered a lot. She wasn’t too happy.
She’s still upset.’ The way he told her was: ‘She hadn’t wanted me to go
to the Dawkins talk. And I said: You were right!’
But
divorce is not an option – Yanky thinks children should have two
parents in the same household. ‘It wouldn’t do good things for them in
general, and in the religious world, it would damage them, all that
stuff,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think moving them out of the religious
world would be helpful for them, if that was even an option, so… that’s
basically it.’
A
few lucky men convinced their wives of their new-found convictions,
giving them a partner in crime. One man I spoke to – Yechiel – who lives
in Jerusalem told me it was not as painful for his wife when he
convinced her. ‘Women are in a much more minor role in the community,’
he said. ‘Women are expected to express religious devotion by raising
the kids, by much more physical things – getting a job, supporting their
husband’s learning. Much less a direct spiritual experience, so for her
to give it up wasn’t giving up much.’
But it was for him. He remembered the direct aftermath of his loss of faith. ‘I was praying to Hashem [God]: Give me back my belief, prove to me that it’s true,
begging and begging. At some point, I realised it’s just plain stupid.’
Still, he said: ‘If you would see me in the street, my white shirt and
black yarmulke, you wouldn’t know anything at all.’ His wife is now
pushing for more changes to their lifestyle, but fear of hurting his
parents keeps Yechiel in line.
One
Hasidic woman I will call Fruma lives in the Satmar enclave of Kiryas
Joel in New York State. Fruma’s husband doesn’t know she has lost her
faith. If he found out, he would certainly divorce her and take away her
children. The last time she showed signs of non-conformist behaviour,
her husband consulted the community leaders. They sent her to see a
mental health specialist, who medicated her. ‘The mental illness card
has been used often in cases like mine,’ she wrote. She has since seen
another mental health specialist; he gave her a clean bill of health.
Fruma
lives in constant, crippling fear of her husband finding out her true
beliefs, so much so that she refused to meet me, and would communicate
her thoughts only via Facebook. The one time we spoke on the phone, she
called me from a restricted number. Fruma lost her faith a few years
ago, but she found that exercising new freedoms only added to her
unhappiness.
‘Lying
creates so much inner conflict: breaks down all forms of trust, makes
you hate the person involved, but especially makes you hate yourself’
‘At
first it felt extremely liberating to finally feel validated,’ she
wrote. ‘That I’m not crazy – as some would like me to believe – because I
can’t conform and because my thinking is different. After a few months
it dawned on me that it’s not all that great. What happened was that
those pockets of freedom where I got away for a bit contrasted too
sharply to my daily existence, and made the staying so much harder. The
feeling that I need to leave was very strong.’
Though
Fruma never had a happy marriage, the toll that dishonesty is taking on
her is immense. ‘Lying creates so much inner conflict,’ she wrote.
‘Breaks down all forms of trust, makes you hate the person involved, but
especially makes you hate yourself.’
After
Yisroel, the Manhattan high-earner, told his wife that he no longer
believed in God, she was devastated. When he suggested coming out, she
threatened to divorce him, ‘a non-starter’, in Yisroel’s words. She felt
it would be too confusing to the children, and Yisroel more or less
agreed. So, to save his marriage, Yisroel vowed to his wife never to
break any of the religious laws, and he never has. And to mitigate his
wife’s hopes that he might one day rediscover his belief in God, Yisroel
buys a lottery ticket every week, ‘just to keep that door open. I buy
the ticket, just for her, and I say: Please Hashem, let me win.’
It’s
not all bad. Solomon, who lost his faith on the D train, says there’s a
lot of good in the Orthodox community to ameliorate the psychological
toll of living a double life, such as ‘the focus on family, the fact
that I’m probably not going to have to worry that my daughter’s getting
pregnant or stoned at 16. There’s a lot of good, even if none of it’s
true. I think it’s a nice life.’
Yisroel calls it ‘performance art’. ‘To a certain extent everyone leads a secret life, showing different sides to different people,’ he said.
Do
the undercover atheists herald the end of ultra-Orthodoxy, or only a
new, more insulated and controlled beginning? Here, Solomon and Moishe
disagree.
As long
as ultra-Orthodox communities continue to marry people off at such
young ages, doubters will remain stuck, Solomon contends. ‘Religion has
survived a lot of major challenges,’ he said, and the recent turn
towards fundamentalism within ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities is just
that – a coping mechanism to weed out the non-conformists. ‘The
radicalisation of ultra-Orthodox Judaism is a sign of its success, not
its failure.’
But
Moishe believes that the phenomenon of atheism is deeply entrenched in
the Orthodox way of life. ‘Everybody’s faking,’ he insisted. ‘I think
it’s all going to come crashing down. I say 20 years.’
has a PhD in the 18th-century novel. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Coercive Pleasures: The Force and Form of the Novel 1719-1740’. She is also a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.
