Ayala Fader: How Do Haredi Jews Deal With Religious Doubt?

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin: Hi friends, and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re continuing our exploration of going off the derech, those who leave religious communities. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18Forty.org. That’s 18forty.org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.There’s a whole lot of different imagery that I’ve used in the past to describe those who are kind of grappling with religious affiliation.

Sometimes we spoke about dissonance, points of dissonance, theological dissonance, sociological dissonance, and emotional dissonance, which is what often times contributes to people grappling with their own religious affiliation. Theological dissonance, you know, is like you stop believing in those stories or ideas that you were told when you were in yeshiva or in seminary or growing up, and you start to like see the world differently, and you say, how does that cohere with what I know now? Then there is sometimes sociological dissonance, which is the life that you were leading, the community that you are in is making you question the community that you came from, that maybe your ideas change, you’re spending a year abroad, you are on a college campus for the first time, you are in a secular workplace for the first time, whatever it may be, people can end up feeling the sense of dissonance, the sense of tension where they begin to question and they say, is this really my community or is this really where I affiliate, this is really where I find home, and they start to feel uncomfortable. And lastly, there’s something called emotional dissonance, which is maybe a more general term and more general description of people who have invested a great deal in their religious lives and it is no longer yielding the emotional nourishment. They don’t feel happy, they don’t feel satisfied.

What am I doing this for? If my commitment, you know, when I was in 11th grade or when I was in my early 20s yielded a certain type of emotional fulfillment, if I keep that level of commitment and it’s no longer yielding that emotional return so to speak, I feel, I don’t know, I’m just going through the motions. I’m like, half the time I’m like, what what’s this even doing for me? That’s going to lead to an emotional dissonance. And the imagery that I would use, and I felt this, obviously I don’t conjure this from thin air, but I’m also not like writing an academic paper. You know, this is things that I felt, I think this is things that most people have felt.

But in the imagery, in this imagery, I would think of them all of like driving in a car and the car starts to swerve. And very often, different people have different areas of cognitive dissonance that are so to speak at the wheel. Sometimes the swerve happens with theology. Sometimes the swerve happens with sociology.

I think that happened a lot during COVID for a lot of people. And going in in either direction, I’m not even going to speak it out. I think a lot of people felt during COVID a sense of dissonance where where their community was either too restrictive or too open. And then of course, emotional dissonance, sometimes that’s the first things you feel, you know, depressed or frustrated, or it’s just it’s not it’s not doing anything for you, you just feel empty.

And that could be what is behind the proverbial steering wheel when the car begins to swerve. But once it starts to swerve, then sociological, emotional, theological, everything begins to spin out of control. And normally, following this imagery, normally when a car starts to swerve, your first reaction is to steer away from where the swerve is, to kind of pull it away from where the ice is. And of course, if you do that, it starts to do a circle and swerve totally out of control, start go 180 and make circle eights.

That imagery of a car kind of swerving and what I tried to explain the approach of 1840 in a way was instead of swerving away from the conflict, away from the tension, we swerve into it. We try to give language, we try to talk about it. Let’s speak to somebody who did leave. Let’s not be afraid of that conversation.

I know for many, it can be jarring. It can be, why do we need to listen to this? Why do we need to hear this? I do think that these are helpful conversations to understand someone else’s difficulties with Yiddishkeit, to understand someone else’s questions with Yiddishkeit, even if we don’t have them and even if we don’t relate to them, is not to introduce doubt into our own lives, but I think is a way to build resilience for our faith. And the knowledge that there is a place, whether or not these are conversations you want to have, they’re conversations that we don’t have to be afraid of having. That I believe that Yiddishkeit and commitment, serious commitment, living a life deeply committed to Yiddishkeit is something that can be justified and stand on its own two feet.

That does not mean that everyone, you know, can ultimately be convinced that anybody who isn’t is somehow impinging or diminishing your own commitment. I think part of the reason why I think it’s important to build capacity to listen to people who lead lives other than our own is to remind ourselves that being exposed to people who lead religious lives other than our own need not impinge and need not make us feel insecure about our own religious lives. And I know that is an instinct for many. I appreciate that instinct.

It is an instinct that I think at a point in my life had myself when you get exposed to somebody who is making, you know, other choices and even knows kind of the reasons why you’re making your choices, it feels like they are almost arguing or devaluing, you know, your commitment. It can feel that way or devaluing like, do you not see my logic? Are you not following my train of thought? And I think that’s a deep misunderstanding in the depth and the almost the wholeness of the religious outlook and how religious decisions are made that Yiddishkeit and religious affiliations and questions of religious meaning, I think, cut to the deepest part of how we make meaning of existence and of the world. And it should not surprise us that as human beings, each of us kind of inhabit a different universe and a different world. And the fact that kind of each of us inhabiting this world can draw different conclusions, will draw different conclusions is part of the beauty and part of the nuance and part of the distinctiveness of religious thinking.

And that really it can’t, it by definition is not one size fits all because it addresses our most intimate selves. So anything that is touching our most intimate selves by definition cannot be a one-size-fits-all because it’s touching something that is making us most unique, our deepest selves. Maybe in that place we are all connected. But there’s no question that it should not bother us.

And when I say us, I feel bad. I’m talking about people like myself who are religiously committed. I am speaking to those who are religiously committed. I think we need to learn how to not act so defensively or antagonistically when we speak to people who left our community.

I think we have to learn how not to personalize that choice as if it is a referendum on our faith because I think that leads, even if it feels that way and even if sometimes is that way, I don’t think the conversation that that yields is ever really productive. It doesn’t bring families together. It doesn’t bring people closer to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. It doesn’t bring anybody closer to God.

And I think we have to acknowledge that deeply personal part of religion. And that’s really a very long intro to the conversation that we have today. And the reason why I began with the idea of the imagery and the imagery of the car and reviewing that is because there is a different form of imagery that we have also used, particularly within this series, and that’s the imagery of neon signs. As I wrote about in an article many years ago for Jewish Action called “When Failure Comes to Yeshiva,” which imagined what would it be if we had a course about how to grapple with failure, how to grapple with difficulty.

When I talk about failure, I mean, including, of course, religious failure, not just, you know, economic failure or social failure. But how could we learn how to grapple with our moments, and everybody has them in their own lives, of religious distance or religious brokenness or difficulty? Everybody has periods like that in their life. And what would it mean to teach that? What would it mean to really learn not to feel comfortable in the way that we should accept it necessarily? I think everyone should try to look to enhance, have a growth-oriented look towards their own life. But if everyone is going to experience these periods, whether or not it’s permanent or not, and I think most people do over the entire course of their lives, then is there a way to almost teach people that it shouldn’t be so alarming, it shouldn’t escalate, we shouldn’t immediately feel like we need to fall apart the first time that the ground underneath us, whether theological, sociological, emotionally, when it begins to shake, we shouldn’t feel like the world is crumbling.

We should know that, okay, the castle that I’ve built, maybe that’s a little not sturdy. But to understand that the larger edifice of Yiddishkeit and religious life is something that is so resilient and so strong that we don’t have to be worried or afraid when we feel that unsturdiness or witness that unsturdiness in our own lives or see it in others. And the imagery that we use to talk about that is the imagery of neon signs, that sometimes people feel that, you know, in their own lives that their religious lives is just papered over, you know, in every room that they’ve ever been in, all they see is neon exit signs. Neon exit signs when they try to read Hebrew, neon exit signs when they try to ask questions to a religious authority, to a rebbe, to a teacher.

They see exit signs in every classroom when, you know, they’re evaluated in a very specific way. You know, like they feel like they’re only being tested on things that don’t come naturally to them. Is this the only thing that religion and Judaism is about? You know, that exit sign of going through 12 years of Jewish education and you’re a, you know, a B+ student, and that, you know, metastasizing into the way you see yourself. Every report card that you got was really a referendum on who you are religiously.

Those could all be neon exit signs, and we’ve all seen them and felt them in our lives. And in a way, what I described as these conversations, what this community of 18Forty is trying to build, is neon entrance signs. It’s teaching people how to also see portals of entry, portals of entry that, that wow, listening to this person grapple with faith makes me feel less lonely in my own journey, and maybe I’m not as lost as I thought I was, maybe I’m not quite as broken as I thought I was, maybe I’m not quite as irreparably, unredeemable, unlovable, undeserving of love, or whatever those thoughts are that can bounce around in our heads, that your experience within Yiddishkeit can be neon entrance signs, neon entrance signs of learning how to cultivate that familial love inside of your home, and neon entrance signs that talk about the depth and nuance of Jewish tradition and Jewish faith, and neon entrance signs that remind us that Judaism, Yiddishkeit, can really enhance and elevate our lives. There’s a real vision.

This is real. This is not a country club, this is not a cute bumper sticker. There is a vision for Judaism that is cosmic and real and can address the totality of our lives and gives us a vision and feel like you are a part of something. The language that my friend Eli Shulman one time used is not love at first sight, but hope at first sight.

That neon entrance sign that reminds you that, hey, maybe there’s really something here worth engaging in and being patient enough with ourselves to continue to dream about. And that’s why I thought today’s conversation is so fascinating. It’s somebody who has written both about the neon entrance signs of religious life and the neon exit signs. And that is Professor Ayala Fader, who is a professor of anthropology at Fordham University.

She wrote a book that I read when it first came out. I actually bought it and own it, and I really loved it. It is called Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. And then later, she wrote a book that she’s probably much more well-known for that is called Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, where she really as an anthropologist lived among those in the Hasidic community who live double lives, who both are within and outside the community.

And I think we had a really fascinating conversation about religious affiliation, how it’s cultivated, how it’s lost, and ultimately the neon exit and entrance signs of our religious lives. Ayala Fader, thank you so much for joining 18Forty today.

Ayala Fader: Thank you so much for having me, David.

David Bashevkin: So it’s really interesting because you’ve done quite a bit of interviews and press about your book Hidden Heretics, which explores really Hasidic people from the Hasidic world in the United States who are living double lives, have a life within the Hasidic world and then a life that is outside of the Hasidic world.

Ayala Fader: Not only Hasidic, by the way. It’s Hasidic and Yeshivish.

David Bashevkin: And Yeshivish, correct.

Ayala Fader: Frum.

David Bashevkin: Frum, but properly frum, not Modern Orthodox, but like

Ayala Fader: Heimish.

David Bashevkin: Heimish. Yes, exactly. And you also wrote another book prior to that which is called Mitzvah Girls, which is how the Hasidic community retains almost through language and culture.

And that’s really why I was so excited to speak, because the imagery that we have used very often on 18Forty is the imagery of neon entrance signs and neon exit signs. That liminal space of where people enter and where people exit, and you have written books really that study both. And I guess my opening question is really, what drew you as a scholar to specifically explore this question of communal affiliations, specifically within the Jewish Orthodox community? What drew you to explore this question of entrances and exits, so to speak?

Ayala Fader: Sure. My dissertation research, and that’s what became Mitzvah Girls.

That’s what became the book Mitzvah Girls, was written at a time during anthropology. I knew I was interested in linguistic anthropology and the study of language and culture, but I entered graduate school at a time when anthropology, much like now, actually, was doing a lot of self-examination about the ways that it othered exotic people far away. And so one of my motivations in choosing to work with ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York where I’m from was really to not study myself so much, but to study a community of which I was part of more generally historically. So my interest in turning to the Jewish community, and in particular Hasidic Jews, was really both personal and professional in terms of intellectual.

There was very little work on Yiddish, which I was very curious about. Like, at that point, it was in the mid-90s, really the only people who were fluent in Yiddish remaining in New York were Hasidic Jews. So I was very interested in how that happened. And at the same time, I was interested in my own family history.

David Bashevkin: Do you come from a Hasidic family?

Ayala Fader: No, not at all. I come from an Upper West Side Reform background. But my family in Europe, some of them were not at all. Some of them were passionate Zionists and secular Jews, and some of them were more observant, more traditional.

And so I was curious about my own relationship to a field site where I shared history and social space as a New Yorker and a Jewish woman.

David Bashevkin: Wow, that’s so fascinating. I’m just curious, do you know like which Hasidic movement you had relatives affiliated with?

Ayala Fader: I don’t think our family was Hasidish.

David Bashevkin: Oh, Hasidish, just more like

Ayala Fader: Yeah, they were more Yeshivish.

David Bashevkin: Yeshivish. Yeah, really, really, really fascinating and so curious what if you’ve dug up any research on like where great-grandparents studied.

Ayala Fader: We don’t know that much. No, we don’t know that much about that.

I know that some of my family was from Palestine, from Romania originally, and then from Palestine, but at least my direct line of great-grandfather was not religious at all there. But there were religious members in Europe. So you asked me about entry. So that’s why I began my work with Mitzvah Girls, and it morphed into something that was much broader than just maintenance of Yiddish.

It turned into ways that language and the body actually created a desire in young Hasidic, it was Bubov women, young girls to become Hasidic women and it followed the life cycle. But after I finished that book and the fieldwork was intense and it was morally challenging in a lot of ways. I followed a lot of the life cycle moments of the women I was working with. I got married at the end of fieldwork.

I had my first child. I thought I’m going to move on to Jewish secularism. You know, that’s my second book project. And then I thought I had one more article that I wanted to do some research on before I took that on, which was about the Hasidic bloggers.

Like I had just started reading Shulem Deen because when I started fieldwork 10 years earlier, there was practically no cell phones. So I got really interested in this and I discovered a whole, I wasn’t particularly interested in doubt, religious doubt, or ultra-Orthodox Jews who left, but the project sort of found me, so to speak, because of my relationships and the changing nature of, I would say, frum life with the integration of the internet and the rise of digital media, and that’s how I came to work on Hidden Heretics. It wasn’t like, it sounds good, like their bookends, you know, getting socialized into and leaving, but in fact, the people I worked with in Hidden Heretics, most of them don’t leave. They stay and live these double lives.

And so that’s a very different kind of situation. But I will say that a lot of the memoirs about people who’ve gone OTD came out while I was doing my own research, and those were very helpful and those were helpful people to speak to, although their experience was so different from the Hidden Heretics or the bahaltena apikorsim that I worked with.

David Bashevkin: Bahaltena apikorsim, that is a Yiddish term which is literally a hidden heretic, but that’s using that kind of internal language. Your Yiddish, allow me to add, is not your first native language.

You didn’t grow up…

Ayala Fader: No, I learned it in graduate school to do my dissertation work. I learned it at Columbia in the YIVO program. But after I learned Yeshivish Yiddish, like Litvish Yiddish there, and then I studied with a very wonderful young woman in Boro Park who taught me a Hasidic pronunciation and a lot of the different vocabulary, words including how to integrate English into my Yiddish, which was frowned upon.

David Bashevkin: I’m just so curious, how would you rank your own Yiddish right now? Do you feel like when you’re within a Yeshivish or Hasidic speaking community, will they be able to detect right away that you are not native?

Ayala Fader: Yes.

David Bashevkin: Okay. It’s it’s better than mine, so that definitely…

Ayala Fader: Well…

David Bashevkin: …that definitely counts. No. It’s really so fascinating this notion of the bookends, and I wanted to return to an idea that you said because it may be foreign to a lot of our listeners, but this notion of like studying linguistic culture. How do we preserve culture specifically through language and the importance of language? You know, very often when you live within a certain world, you take the language for granted.

It’s just the way that we speak, and in a different community, they speak the same way, but it’s just a different language, but they’re saying the same thing. But obviously it means so much more. So maybe you could share a little bit about how this notion of language preserving culture was manifest specifically in your study of the Hasidic community in Brooklyn as the ultimate, so to speak, neon entrance sign, the language that we use.

Ayala Fader: Yeah.

So there is a very particular idea about language that comes out of anthropology and the sub-discipline of that is linguistic anthropology, and that is that language is a form of social action. So I’m not interested in language as a, I mean it’s interesting, but I don’t study language as a almost mathematical system, and I don’t focus on language as preserving culture. What an anthropological approach to language really does is study how people use language to do social kinds of things. And one of the things that they do, and that’s what Mitzvah Girls was, is they teach their children how to be competent members of their communities, both linguistically competent, since children are not born knowing any language, and also culturally competent, knowing how to behave in whatever language that your community uses.

Actually, I was inspired by my teachers, Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, who developed this paradigm for studying how children are socialized into language and socialized by language at the same time. So that means they learn how to use language in culturally appropriate ways even as they’re learning language. And what’s so great about studying little kids who are language learners, you know, even through like five and six-year-olds, is they often make mistakes, the same kinds of ways that anthropologists do, because we are in some ways almost like children entering a foreign land and learning the language, as I was learning Hasidic Yiddish. We make mistakes, and children make mistakes, and then adults explain things to them.

And that is a really pivotal moment where anthropologists are like, oh, so young little girls are not allowed or, not allowed, but not supposed to speak in loud, rough voices. That’s not considered eidel. It’s not considered refined, like a nice Hasidishe girl should be. And so I didn’t know that.

Like I learned that I could scream as much as I want as a little kid, but it was interesting to me to hear teachers and moms correcting their little daughters or telling them to pull down their skirts, you know, even as two-year-olds, like sit tznius, pull down your skirt, whereas when their little sons would do that and try to pull down their shorts, their moms would laugh and think that was really funny. And that confused me. Like, how come boys are funny and girls like you’re warning them to sit a certain way?

David Bashevkin: I just want to interject, sit tznius. Tznius is the Hebrew term for modesty.

Ayala Fader: And the Yiddish one.

David Bashevkin: And the Yiddish one. So colloquially, if you would ask someone to sit modestly, and I love that example because it called to mind for me. I remember when I studied in yeshiva in Baltimore in Ner Israel, there was a family who’s now actually living now in Passaic, and the way the mother would always say is that she would remind her children to sit like a princess.

Ayala Fader: Yes. And they’re what they’re doing is they’re not admonishing, they’re actually building culture. They’re showing expectations and values. I have a lot of princess stuff in Mitzvah Girls, different than Disney princess, but there’s the idea that a little Jewish girl is a bas melech.

David Bashevkin: Kol kevuda bas melech penima is a verse that is used usually in vogue which says the entire glory and prestige of a princess is her interiority.

Ayala Fader: Exactly. Penima, yeah. And so there’s lots of children’s books, for example, that I analyze, little girls in first grade make crowns because they’re a Jewish daughter.

And so that’s an example of the kind of things I would study, the way that moms, like caregivers and teachers and older siblings use language. At the same time, because I was interested in Yiddish and its interaction with English and lashon kodesh, or the kinds of Hebrew that Hasidim use, I looked at different places and ways that people talked about Yiddish. Like, who was admonished to keep speaking Yiddish? Who had a little chart on their refrigerator that said, you know, my child did great this week, they only spoke in Yiddish, and was it boys or girls? And whose Yiddish was really competent? So some of the Bubov mothers that I worked with hadn’t had the opportunity to go to Hasidic schools for girls. They went to more Bais Yaakov types, more Yeshivish types, and so their Yiddish was great for little babies, not so great for big girls.

So they switched to English, and so girls came to associate English, a Hasidic English, like with a certain intonation and lots of Jewish words mixed in, ‘Yinglish,’ you might call it. They came to associate that with being big girls and it was something that they aspired to, while boys were really encouraged, then once their education was taken over by male teachers and their fathers, really expected to be much more competent in Yiddish. And different Hasidic groups have different customs. Like in Satmar, girls speak much more Yiddish than they did in the Bubov.

David Bashevkin: I loved your example of sitting tznius. For me, I remembered it with my son. I remember I was one time learning, which colloquially is studying Talmud or Torah, and my son came over, pointed at it, and he said, “Oh, these are Shabbos letters.” And he called Hebrew Shabbos letters because that’s usually when he would have the opportunity, he’s around in the afternoon and would see me learning at the table. And it was so cute to me that like his language, his way of identifying and communicating was really sharing a window into his world as he experienced it.

Ayala Fader: Exactly, exactly. And that’s a great example, and it also tells us how aware children, especially in multilingual communities, are of the different values and meanings that different languages have in a community. And that’s not limited to Orthodox Jews, obviously, you know.

David Bashevkin: One question that I would want to ask about because I think your emphasis on the importance of bringing culture specifically to young children and specifically the importance and the medium of children’s books, something that I grew up with and has really exploded through PJ Library even outside of the Hasidic world, but there’s a very thick culture in the childhood, in the Jewish childhood within the Hasidic community.

When you reflected back on your own community where you were living as a Jew in New York City on the Upper West Side from a Reform family, did you ever find yourself either longing for some of the thicker culture in the Hasidic community? Did you find your own ways or ideas of how to import that thicker culture into the child life of the Judaism in your own home or in your own community? How did your, you know, anthropological work, which is so intimate, you’re embedded within the community, how did if at all did it end up following you home and kind of shaping your own worldview and your own Jewish life?

Ayala Fader: People ask me that question a lot and I actually had both of my children during the writing of Mitzvah Girls, so I thought about it a lot. I would say I have always, a lot of respect and curiosity for an Orthodox way of life. I didn’t go in seeking and feeling that my own way was somehow impoverished. We have a very rich Jewish life at home.

It’s different than yours, but it’s equally rich, I would argue, and meaningful for our families. I think what really happened was that I was forced to grapple with what felt natural to me about Judaism as cultural and historical choices that my own family has made and that I made for my own family, my husband and I made for our children. So, for example, I got married, as I said, during the end of my fieldwork and I went to kallah class, so classes for brides to explain some of the Jewish laws for brides, literally two weeks before my own wedding. Which was probably a mistake.

That was fascinating. Yes, and traumatizing. A lovely kallah teacher, really. And it was confusing to me.

Like, who was at that class? I was both a bride, a Jewish bride, and an anthropologist, and a Jewish anthropologist, and it made me really explicitly, I think much more than I would have, kind of struggle with my own beliefs. I sometimes felt like I was returning to being a teenager, you know, like existential questions for myself about what I believed and what I felt was important, of course, talking with my partner, but it did make me have a kind of heightened consciousness, I would say. And similarly in my own child rearing, having studied child rearing, I paid a lot of attention, having listened to endless hours of audio-recorded interactions between parents and children and teachers and children and among kids at play, like how does this shape my life? I don’t think it actually changed my religious practice much. I know that some of my what we call interlocutors, some of the women I worked with, might have been disappointed by that and sometimes they blamed my husband or I was too old when I came.

But I think I wasn’t seeking to become a returnee to the faith. I was seeking a kind of analytical way of understanding how a group of Jewish people lived in the middle of New York City, but also it was personal for me for sure. Like this is part of my history too. Where do I fit in here? These days, I would say a lot of Orthodox Jews sort of position themselves as the correct Jews or like the most authentic Jews, I mean not in a negative way at all, but as Jews who are holding on to tradition and that made me question my own value of tradition.

So I would say it raised, in a good Reform Jewish way, it raised more questions for me that I’m really grateful to be able to grapple with to this day where I question myself and, you know, my kids sometimes say Yiddish phrases that they picked up from me that are related to Hasidic childhood and we have Mitzvah Kinder at home, my kids played with those, the little toys. So they were clearly impacted as well and I brought my daughter to visit Boro Park with me a number of times in both projects, actually. And that was interesting too because we had lots of interesting conversation. In fact, she’s in the coda, my daughter Talia, of Mitzvah Girls, where she asks me all kinds of questions when we’re walking through the streets of Boro Park and I’m thinking like, yeah, these are good questions.

How am I going to deal with these?

David Bashevkin: It’s really fascinating… fascinating because not only the subject matter but even your methodology really blurred the lines of the scholarship and the personal, which is what I think makes your scholarship itself, what it produced, so rich and so engaging and why so many people are so fascinated with it. But if you’ll allow me, I want to linger on this question for a second because I do think it is conversations like this in either direction where a lot of I think Orthodoxy rightfully so is sometimes, I wouldn’t even call it an accusation, of a feeling of superiority, of like that like we are the bastions of authenticity, and that can sometimes translate into maybe others, those outside, feeling looked down upon or feel like they are being judged. And I understand that experience as well.

They are just as much Jewish, assuming, you know, the halachic, they have the share the same definitions. But let’s assume that’s the case. They’re both equally Jewish and they both would fully admit that. How would you explain that feeling? Because you know these people, you know that it’s not, I assume, coming from a malicious place necessarily.

Ayala Fader: No, not at all. No.

David Bashevkin: How would you explain that feeling to a, let’s say, a Reform Jew or a secular Upper East Side Jew who says, you know, I meet these people, they feel like they’re so much more superior to me and so much more authentic to me and like, why do I always feel that way, which is something that many people experience. I’m not gaslighting to make it seem like, oh, that’s coming from nowhere, you know, it’s just.

But how would you explain the phenomenon for them? Because there’s something more at play and I think if you dig a layer, it’s almost where the language breaks down. How would you explain what that experience is for someone who is not part of that community and doesn’t have experiences within it?

Ayala Fader: First of all, I would say, as an anthropologist, I think this is common to any kind of community where you think your way is the right way. That happens from the level of the nation state to your neighborhood or your family, you know? So I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that. I do think given the kind of historical trauma that brought Chasidim here and, you know, the kind of violence that brought my own family and poverty that brought my own family here earlier to the United States, gives that a certain heaviness and weightiness, right? And I will also say that during my fieldwork, which by the way, all anthropologists have a similar kind of intimacy.

I think that’s the nature of the field because it’s built on personal relationships, right? And so I’m not so unusual that I think what the more, and it’s not unusual these days, maybe back in the 90s it was, of having shared history, perhaps a little more intense, but nothing that unusual. But I will say that during my fieldwork, I experienced questions from both sides of the spectrum, meaning people that were not Orthodox Jews, my friends and family were sometimes like, what’s up with these people? Like who are these people that you’re studying? Why are they living like that? Like confounded. And then ultra-Orthodox women that I was meeting were like, why aren’t these people living like us? Like, what’s up with these people? So, it’s I think coming from a kind of the range and diversity of the Jewish experience in post-war United States. And, you know, struggles with modernity and not, and rejection of that or at least imagining a different way of being modern Jews.

And I never took it personally when certain women, you know, seemed to feel sorry for me. I had an interaction that I write about in the book where my Yiddish tutor was like, your parents didn’t care enough about you to make a shidduch for you. They just let you date on your own. Like, how could they do that? And I really appreciated that she said that to me because that was super interesting.

I had never thought of it that way, you know, like, you see a shidduch as your parents caring about you. I didn’t understand that. And at the same time, first I felt defensive, like, no, they let me have my own free will and I was in my 30s and I knew what I wanted. And at the same time, I really appreciated that we had the kind of friendship where she could say that to me and where I could say, no, that’s not how I perceive it.

And she was like, oh, that’s interesting. I don’t think we convinced each other. I don’t think, you know, cultural beliefs and practices are as fragile as sometimes we make them out to be. Like we each left thinking that we were right, probably, but I think in some ways, the value of the kind of ethnographic fieldwork that an anthropologist does is that it brings you face to face with somebody who might have such different beliefs than you do, and yet you still can find some common ground, which these days is especially important, I feel like.

David Bashevkin: Oh, certainly. And so much on my mind is thinking about your work through the kind of window of the moment in Jewish history that we are in, where a lot of people are kind of waking up to their Jewish identity for the first time or maybe they’re prioritizing it in a different way, feeling it in a different way, and maybe looking around and trying to figure out where is the community that can sustain this feeling and this sense of belonging. And I don’t think the answer lies in any existing community because the current state of affairs happened under the watch of all of the communities. So clearly what we need, that vision of Judaism that can reach even those who have chosen not to affiliate or are living their lives, clearly, it’s not because they’re not aware that there’s even a smorgasbord.

I don’t think that that’s the issue. I think…

Ayala Fader: No. And actually, let me extend your question to a similar issue in my book Hidden Heretics. There were Modern Orthodox Jews who were sure that people with religious doubts would have all their doubts explained away.

And they also felt like, oh, you’re just in the wrong flavor of Orthodoxy. If you become modern Orthodox and switch from Yeshivish or Hassidish, it’s all going to be great. But that religious way of life didn’t feel authentic to the people that I was working with, to the hidden heretics. They didn’t like the melodies, they didn’t like the foods, they didn’t like the Shabbos.

And not that they were critical that it wasn’t authentic, but it wasn’t their kind of authenticity. And so that often was not the answer. It was the answer for some people. I think Naftuli Moster just was on Frieda Vizel’s wonderful podcast and said, you know, he’s become Modern Orthodox, but for many people that didn’t work.

And so it’s not just from frum Jews to Reform Jews, it’s also among frum Jews that we have these kinds of divisions.

David Bashevkin: Exactly. And I guess my question is, do you have a framework? Because this is really at the center of the bookends of your two books. But do you have a conception, some conceptual framework to understand why some Jewish communities work for some people who were raised there and why some Jewish communities don’t work for others? Like what’s the framework? What are the levers or the metrics with which one feels fully affiliated, properly nourished, there’s enough culture here, there’s enough ritual, there’s enough spirituality.

And there’s like some equation, it’s almost like that supply and demand curve. Is it yielding enough? Is there enough commitment and thickness? And what is that yielding? What’s the experience that it’s yielding? And to me, there’s not like one easy answer. I think you have to be a little crazy to think that your, whatever your particular brand of Judaism is, could be the answer for the entire world. But what I’m trying to understand is aside from just saying, make do with where you were born or I guess you’re stuck wherever you are and that should be it, what’s the framework, the conceptual framework on how you approach and understand why communal religious affiliation sometimes works and sometimes breaks down?

Ayala Fader: You’re right.

There’s no one overarching framework, right? And it’s not as if in the quote unquote secular world, there are not people who leave and return to religiosity in all kinds of faith traditions, right? Like secularism doesn’t work for lots of people. And so this is not a religious problem. This is both a temperamental problem, like you’re born with a certain temperament. It’s sort of the nature nurture question.

I would say probably for many people, the communities they’re born into are comfortable, they can make them flexible enough to work for them. In my experience with working with ultra-Orthodox communities, and it’s been like 25 years now, it’s a long time, I’ve seen a lot of changes within the communities, having followed them longitudinally, to see that they’re not static, that they’re constantly changing, both to accommodate and challenge and reject the world around them, the not ultra-Orthodox world, and also to respond to some of the discomforts, the questions, the problems that people are experiencing in their own world. I think one thing that really surprised me when I was an unmarried graduate student in a little girl school was the kind of rigidity of like, stay within the lines, you know, don’t color outside the lines. I have an example in Mitzvah Girls of like, you can’t draw a purple apple because there are no purple apples.

And I thought like, well, that’s a very rigid. And then I followed my own kids’ education in public schools and, okay, they could draw purple apples, but there were many things that they also couldn’t do because they weren’t right. And the rules were kind of equally rigid. Foucault tells us that too, right?

David Bashevkin: That’s a reference to Michel Foucault, whose last name I was very worried that I was not going to pronounce.

I was going to rely on yours. But for our listeners who are interested in his thought and philosophy.

Ayala Fader: Yes, a French philosopher who wrote a lot about discipline and schooling and other things. Power, yes.

But I do think that at least for the Hasidic community that I first worked on and some of the Hasidic Jews who are in my second book, they spoke about having questions, being real smart kids, intellectual kids, successful kids, having lots of intellectual questions and not being able to find good answers, or not even feeling that they were allowed to ask those questions. I think that’s changing somewhat, in part due to the hidden heretics, perhaps, who have stayed in their communities and done different things with their kids. I think there is generational shift going on in Heimish communities, for sure. I think the internet and digital media has really changed a lot of things, including supported new varieties of Yiddish, like a standardized Hasidic Yiddish, which I find very fascinating and counter to a lot of the scholarship that the internet is going to homogenize all language.

In fact, it’s really supported Hasidic Yiddish. But I do think the inroads made by therapy where sometimes therapy has been supporting families who want to live with kids who have made different choices about how religious they’re going to be. Like these are all big shifts going on in these communities. And so, I know that a lot of people when I was doing my research for Hidden Heretics were like, well, why do they leave? Like, tell me how do we address this? Like a lot of outreach rabbis, kiruv rebbes who I spoke to were like, what do we do? There is not one answer for this, right? It’s a socio-historical moment, but I think that a lot of parents and rabbinic authorities are constantly making adjustments.

David Bashevkin: Responding, incorporating, adjusting. And I think the point you’re making is so crucial because I think when you’re at a distance from any community, but all the more so from a Hasidic or ultra-Orthodox community where everyone from a distance looks and dresses the same, though they look the same exact way towards the secular world. Everybody looks the same. But when you’re at a distance, it looks like they have not changed in 150 years.

When even in my lifetime, the Orthodox community has changed drastically, and I was not raised within the Hasidic world, but the Modern Orthodox world, just the locus of power, the culture, how people get initiated inwards, the confidence of the community.

Ayala Fader: The education, the kinds of education, the consumption, the materialism, like all of this has changed dramatically. And that again is not unique to Jews, right?

David Bashevkin: Correct.

Ayala Fader: Culture is an ever evolving, changing set of practices and that’s why it’s really great to be able to follow over so many decades because you see those changes in a way that you wouldn’t if you dropped in and spent, you know, a couple of months in Williamsburg.

David Bashevkin: So one question that I wanted to ask you, and you’ve touched upon this, though, I was curious if you could maybe add a little bit more. What were the patterns you found in the initial seed of doubt? You know, the internet opened up a lot of worlds. And, you know, at least Talmudically, we think of two different types of evil inclinations. There’s a binary in the Talmud.

There is what is known as a Yetzer Hara for Avodah Zarah and a Yetzer Hara for arayos, for taiva, which is desire. So there’s these two, Avodah Zarah, which is literally idolatry, that impulse is associated with heresy, with questions of faith. And then there’s another type of desire and inclination, what’s known Talmudically as the Yetzer Hara for arayos, and that’s desire for materialism, sexual, drug use. You know, you want to see the world.

I want to experience it. I want the pleasure of the world. And did you see patterns in what was either predominant or what was the initial seed of doubt most frequently?

Ayala Fader: Yes. So I made categories actually based on my research about the nature of doubt because doubt is inherent to religious faith, right? Like it’s not always something terrifying and scary.

Doubt is something that defines your faith and it also happens across the life cycle. So teenagers often experience a lot of doubt and they sometimes break Jewish laws. Like many young girls told me, you know, I ironed on Shabbos and I wasn’t supposed to, or I put on makeup and I shouldn’t have. But over the life cycle, once you get married and settle down, you’re supposed to become a little more serious.

But lots of times, I think, when people do have doubts who are from religious communities like from Jews, they go to a religious authority and they ask for help. Like, I’m having these doubts. And usually the response is, just keep practicing and your doubts will go away, you know? The people that I was working with had a very particular kind of doubt. It wasn’t coming out of a taiva, a kind of lust.

Those people, colloquially or vernacularly, were called bums, right? Like, they were people like …like, they were people who were too lazy or undisciplined to always observe and discipline themselves and observe all of the laws. And sometimes they broke them, but every Yom Kippur they’d repent and start again.

Those were not the people that I was working with. I was working with men and women who usually in their teenage years had serious intellectual questions.

For men especially, they had intellectual questions about the truth of the laws that they were learning, about their religious study. Like, did God really give Moshe the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai?

David Bashevkin: I want to step in because this is something that we on 18Forty have taken a fair degree of criticism for, because most often when we talk about doubt, the way that it is portrayed certainly in rabbinic circles, and I understand 100% why and I’ve been the subject of this as well, is to really emphasize the taiva part of it, the desire. And that’s really the motivation. You’re not leaving, you know, because you have some intellectual doubt.

Come on now. That’s very much dismissed. There must be some draw. You really, you know, whether it’s a sexual desire, a drug desire.

You want freedom, but it’s not intellectual. And that’s very pervasive, and I think in many ways it exacerbates the pain, where like it’s so crazy to have an actual religious doubt and you could end up ruminating on it. And the only way you can seek solace is by spending time outwards. Like that’s seen as such a tiny figure in all of this.

Like we don’t have to worry about those people. They’re one in 10,000. And what you’re saying now is that’s not the case of what you saw.

Ayala Fader: No, not at all.

And that was a very hurtful kind of accusation when an advisor to one of these people would say like, oh, it’s just your taivos. It’s like kind of minimizing, or the other explanation was you have mental illness, you’re crazy. Like that was the explanation for like, why can’t you stop asking these questions? You must have OCD. But in fact, the people that I was working with actually did have intellectual questions.

And when they did seek either other questioners or they sought outside sources because they were such good yeshiva bochrim, right? They were such good learners, they knew where to search because now the internet made them able to do that, they found answers that answered their questions.

David Bashevkin: Just not to the satisfaction of let’s say the community or not in a way that would justify the level of commitment that they were accustomed to. And that makes the commitment much harder, obviously.

Ayala Fader: Yes, and it was devastating, right? Because they didn’t want to ask these questions.

They thought there must be from answers and they didn’t find those, and they were not really even allowed to ask those questions. I know that now some schools, I’ve read a lot of and talked to different therapists and coaches and some rabbis, fewer rabbis, but that some Hasidic children are now, boys in particular are now allowed to ask certain kind of questions. There’s such a range of schooling options now that people have.

David Bashevkin: I know that there are a lot of answers to these questions that would be deemed, you know, as the title of your book suggests, heresy and you know, people outside of the Orthodox community who are giving answers like, yeah, of course, you know, that didn’t happen.

I’m curious, did you encounter anyone within the community who had a particular gift at articulating the framework of contemporary commitment within the Orthodox and even within the Hasidic world, using more kind of modern philosophical tools of language and thought? Meaning someone who had the gift linguistically to explain why, yes, I understand all of your questions and even with that and my understanding of the, you know, let’s say academic or secular approaches to this, I want to still be able to articulate to you why this is worth it. Did you encounter people who had that ability and any understanding of what exactly they were doing to help encourage that commitment even after the doubt emerged?

Ayala Fader: I mostly heard it from the point of view of the questioners, right? Who told me that they did study with a lot of different rabbis. It wasn’t just like they went to their old, you know, cheder teacher and talked to  him. They were sent to experts who are experts in doubt.

A lot of them were outreach rabbis who did outreach to secular Jews, so they were used to those kinds of explanations to bring them in. They now do kiruv work or outreach work to questioners from …The people I talked to were not convinced, and I also talked to a really interesting Chabad woman who is a mentor and is she was very skilled at explaining different ways and different sources to women who had doubts.

I thought it was interesting talking to her like we sort of went down one of those rabbit holes and at the end of the day, you have to have emuna, you have to have faith or emuna. There is a level of willingness to make that jump. It’s not as if they didn’t hear the right answer. It was that the answers from let’s say biblical archaeology or science that many of these men especially were reading was more convincing than the other explanations.

And they did, they sought so widely and and one woman, for example, whose husband had a lot of doubts that I write about, the community banded together and raised funds and sent her to Israel to consult with these other rabbis. It’s such a generous move and it didn’t work.

David Bashevkin: I’m so intrigued and I’m curious if this is something that has changed. I mean, it’s been a central part of our work on 18Forty since our inception.

It’s so interesting. It is not the work, it’s the kind of distinction, it is not the work of really outreach, it’s really the work of helping people find nourishment where they are or in certain cases saying, yeah, you’ll probably better find nourishment, spiritual nourishment elsewhere.

Ayala Fader: You mean like in other Jewish traditions?

David Bashevkin: Yeah, of course. I mean, I don’t know if there’s an Orthodox rabbi in the world who if you’ve ever really asked them, have you ever encouraged somebody to go to a different denomination or a different community, they would say no.

I don’t want to like dwell on this because I don’t want to like be like dishing out any secrets, but I think that’s probably a dividing line, but most rabbis that I know, you need a familiarity of communities outside of your own or you’re going to be living in that delusional bubble that you think your particular mold can address the entirety of the Jewish people. It’s kind of a wild expectation to have for yourself. And when you have that expectation, it’s going to hurt your work as a rabbi because the way you’re going to react when your community doesn’t reach someone is going to take it so personally and so intensely that like you kind of have to go in really with differing bands of boundaries. Not everybody has to come and say, oh, they’re all the same.

I’m not even a pluralist in that sense. Meaning, that’s why I was really asking you before, I do believe Orthodoxy is more authentic. I’m comfortable saying that, but I’m not delusional to the point where I think in its current state and iteration, New York 2025 or even Israel in 2025, that any communal expression of the idea of Yiddishkeit currently could reach everyone. We need to face that question.

When I say we, I mean the Jewish People.

Ayala Fader: Yeah, and also you can claim that you have a rich authentic tradition, but there’s no need to diminish other traditions.

David Bashevkin: And sometimes that is the case.

Ayala Fader: Like even your language of richness, I think actually suggests that perhaps other denominations are less rich, but they’re not.

David Bashevkin: For sure. I mean, there is certainly, most certainly, without a doubt, richness of Yiddishkeit and commitment and beauty outside of the Orthodox community. That’s undeniable. I would never ever deny that.

Nobody has a monopoly on Yiddishkeit. On the communal level, and this is getting really to some of my next questions, on the communal level, I’ve been, I don’t know, a little disappointed with how on a communal level, Yiddishkeit has been cultivated communally outside of the Orthodox community, personally. That’s my own personal judgment and I’m saying that as my own editorial. There’s a frustration almost.

I have plenty of frustrations with the Orthodox world, so it’s to go around. But that’s really what I’m getting at, which is, I’m curious if, you know, almost the sequel to Hidden Heretics in the moment that we’re in now over the last, I would say five years beginning with COVID and then accelerating with October 7th, and now as I’ve said, I think in this moment on the cusp of some AI revolution, there’s been a real erosion of trust globally in the liberal utopian vision that I think many people were waiting for in Western civilization. And many people in the Western world are frustrated and feel like we were promised a paradigm for meaning and trust and community and we feel like we do not have it. I’m curious to hear, almost as a sequel to Hidden Heretics, have you heard from any of those couples who are living that double life of any sense of, I don’t know that I would call it regret or reorientation or almost a shock at what they have seen culturally in Western civilization over the last five years and how that has affected their dual identities.

Ayala Fader: That’s an interesting question. I’ll answer that question and then tell you something new that I’m working on that I think is also related to that question. But I’ve kept in touch with a number of hidden heretics.

David Bashevkin: I love that you call them the title of the title of the book.

Ayala Fader: Well, I don’t I don’t know what else to call them. Sometimes they call themselves RMs, reverse marranos. But I think they’ve done remarkably well. They’ve married off their children, they’ve made good shidduchs.

Many of them have sort of softened their orthodoxy slowly in ways that hasn’t alienated their families and they have not broken with their families. Mostly their children have stayed, not all, but many of their children made Hasidic, you know, have made a shidduch, made a match within the Hasidic community, even though they’ve encouraged them to go to college. So I actually think over the past five years they’ve thrived in really interesting kinds of ways. I think they were very, just based on some of my communication with them during COVID, they were very frustrated by the from kind of suspicion of medical and scientific expertise.

Sometimes they were the only people wearing masks at weddings, and that sort of became like, if you wear a mask, you might be a hidden heretic, a kind of sign of that.

David Bashevkin: Was it ever in reverse, meaning what I’m asking is, did you sense any disillusionment with the liberal Western model?

Ayala Fader: In Hidden Heretics I write about how they never wanted to be secular. I mean a few did, but many of them were very critical of my world, for example, even though it wasn’t actually totally true, like, oh well you’re separated from your family and you have very thin traditions or you know what I mean, it wasn’t like they were rushing to become Reform Jews. They were critical of that and Modern Orthodoxy.

And so it’s not as if they’re suddenly disillusioned with the Western world. What I think, what I am seeing, is really the post October 7th. I think there’s a wholehearted embrace of antisemitism and anti-Zionism are the same. I hear a kind of vindication that I don’t think is about being a hidden heretic, but is being about a Haredi Jew.

There’s a kind of vindication that we knew all along that this could happen at any time and it’s happening again. It’s just like Russia. I’ve heard that many times. But I think the affiliation with Israel is something different.

Like sometimes I saw, especially among women, and I write about the difference among hidden heretics between men and women, very different experiences of religious doubt. But

David Bashevkin: Can you linger on that for finish your sentence but I want you to return to that, yeah.

Ayala Fader: Yeah. But it used to be before the war in Israel with Gaza and October 7th, saying you were a Zionist was kind of out there.

It was sort of a hint, it was like wearing a slightly shorter skirt, not exactly, but like a hint that you were thinking outside your box. But I think now that’s become much more acceptable.

David Bashevkin: Mainstream, even in the Hasidic world, yeah.

Ayala Fader: Yes.

Absolutely. I’ve seen that too. Yes, absolutely. I’ve seen that so much, except for like those four protesters from Neturei Karta, right? But like, in general, there’s a support and embrace of Israel that is new and that I think aligns hidden heretics of many different sorts with the more from community.

I haven’t heard regrets. From what I’ve seen, people have thrived on their own terms.

David Bashevkin: It doesn’t surprise me that they have thrived on their own terms because I don’t know if you would agree to this, but I think it could be that what we are actually seeing now is not a movement of heresy but actually the emergence of a new expression of Orthodoxy, a new religious movement or community, what I would call Orthodox adjacent. Meaning the Orthodox community and this I’m not here to convince you and I know it’s new, but what I see, what I see emerging is that the Orthodox world is seen by some, not all, as like you want that communal expression of Jewish life.

You want that home base and it sustains a thick type of culture that most people, maybe I’m talking literally about myself, like this thick kind of culture that like I couldn’t do this on my own and I want it. I want it to be a place that I can go to. I want a community that can sustain, let’s say, minyan three times a day or a beis medrash, but I don’t want to be beholden to kind of superimpose that communal expectation onto my home and my private life. So what we see emerging is very similar to what happened in the Orthodox world, which is known as being Orthoprax, which was a cover story in Commentary a while back by Jay Berkowitz, I think.

And I think we’re seeing something interesting emerging from the Hasidic community and perhaps what we’re seeing emerging is not a bad thing, I’m speaking to people with a Orthodox point of view, is instead of looking at this phenomenon as something worrisome or terrible, this is actually something extraordinarily beautiful where we see people who normally would have completely left or gone in the other direction find a means of remaining in dialogue with their traditional upbringing, but being able to live their own life and feel like they’re not suffocating by having a communal expectation superimposed on their day-to-day life.

Ayala Fader: I mean there were still some people I’m in touch with who have continued to feel that kind of oppression. It’s people who were kind of privileged who could maneuver and not everyone has had that positive experience.

David Bashevkin: What do you mean by privileged in that regard?

Ayala Fader: Meaning that they usually had money, they had good standing in the community, they come from a nice family, all those kinds of things.

David Bashevkin: That’s a really important point.

Ayala Fader: Yes, it’s class.

David Bashevkin: You have more mobility when you’re higher, when you have social class. And it also relates to gender. It’s much easier for men to dip in and out than for women. Not even close.

Ayala Fader: Yes. I write a lot about that, about even when women were doubting, they couldn’t even meet other people because they had to be home with the kids. it, you know?

David Bashevkin:  Yes, very different kinds of experiences.

Ayala Fader: I would also say what you’re talking about is probably from a Modern Orthodox perspective. I wonder about that way that you’re talking about culture as thick, like there’s not thick and thin culture. All cultures are thick. They’re thick with different things.

You know what I mean?

David Bashevkin: Oh, that’s fair.

Ayala Fader: Yes, and so I think that’s kind of pejorative to say that actually, as if to imply, it’s about authenticity, really. But I do think even before COVID, what I was seeing among a lot of Hasidic Jews, it’s a kind of, and this is different from what you’re talking about. I think it was also happening in Israel but not related to the situation in Israel, is that there was a kind of neo-spiritual movement going on, especially among men, related to kind of psychedelics, a lot of experimentation with new healing practices, some with mushrooms and ayahuasca.

And so I see that as like a kind of new spiritual awakening in a really interesting way, sort of after, so this is like fifth generation probably here in the states where like people were comfortable and then frustrated at the kind of rigidity that had been imposed by rabbinic authorities. And so really began exploring, again, mainly men, but not only, exploring alternative ways of being spiritual.

David Bashevkin: Mm, yes. Sure.

Ayala Fader: That’s super interesting. But in terms of Israel, what I’m seeing in frum communities is a kind of sense of we’re all Jews. This is like that whole Am Yisrael Chai thing.

But that does leave out a huge segment of Jews who are younger generation who are incredibly disaffiliated from Israel and who have lots of questions and are not necessarily becoming more observant, who are actually questioning more. So I think that’s a very one-sided picture that you’re giving.

David Bashevkin: I think that’s very, very fair and I think the common denominator is that over the last five years, I feel like, and again, this is just my own anecdotal kind of point of view, that there’s just been more attention to our religious identity. It’s had more weight, and not necessarily that everyone’s being drawn towards it.

There’s a lot of people who are being repelled from it, quite seriously. The gender differences you saw in the initial Seat of Doubt, how would you explain the gender differences that you saw?

Ayala Fader: They were both intellectual, but I think coming from very different intellectual experiences. So men was from, you know, learning, and women might also be from learning, but from learning in high school. So with different resources, but men actually found community members online, basically, on what I wrote about is the J-blogosphere, the Jewish blogosphere of the mid 2000s, it seems quaint now, but they found people who were smart, who were knowledgeable and who had similar questions, so they found a sense of community.

Some women found that too, but fewer, women were much more isolated. What I was really fascinated was the kinds of reactions to the religious doubt, like men were devastated, some contemplated suicide, they became depressed. They didn’t want that. They wanted to stay in their communities.

Women were often angry. They told me, the women I talked to, they were angry. They had made what they felt were all of these sacrifices for something they no longer believed was true. And so they felt betrayed, actually, by their teachers and rabbis and the community at large.

And again, the gender differences in how they could explore their changing ideas were totally gendered, where men had many more opportunities for mobility and friendships and women had many fewer chances for getting together. A group of women tried to get together for so many months, and finally they picked a day, but it was many months, you know, like from July 4th to like the following May that we actually got together because there are a lot of responsibilities that women have, you know?

David Bashevkin: The term you used, that sense of betrayal has such interesting effects on people. And I remember there’s this really interesting book by, it’s a classic by Leon Festinger called When Prophecy Fails, which explores what he calls cognitive dissonance. It’s really where the term emerged.

But the pain you feel when your ideology is in conflict with reality, the moment that begins to happen, it’s probably some time goes by before they even, you know, begin dialogue with someone like yourself. It can be really, really painful years, and I think that sense of betrayal and feeling like the fool, feeling like, you know, I’m the sucker almost. Like I got taken in. There’s something very painful when you look at your own life that way.

You mentioned in passing, but I don’t think you shared, though, it piqued my attention, that you’re working on a new project.

Ayala Fader: Yes. Well, it’s relevant to what you asked me about in terms of what have I seen in the last five years. So I got really interested in the measles epidemic in 2019 and in changing ideas of expertise and authority based on my work from Hidden Heretics where I think in lots of ways social media in particular, like really challenged certain sources of authority or gave people the tools to challenge that.

It didn’t do it itself. And then COVID happened. So I’m working on a project now on health and wellness, mostly focused on women, but the ways that these have become part of the new political landscape in terms of people’s following of their own sense of authority about how to raise their kids.

David Bashevkin: That is exciting and we are definitely looking forward to that because all of your books that I’ve read at least and and I think you have more.

I think I missed one. Did I miss one of your books or?

Ayala Fader: Nope, just lots of articles.

David Bashevkin: Oh, a lot of articles. I have one closing question before our rapid fire and it returns to, you know, kind of my own fumble and you mentioned, you know, that it can be pejorative to talk about thick culture and thin culture, and I think that’s a really interesting point.

Everyone’s culture is thick within it and it just looks thin from where you’re sitting, and I appreciated that. But I want to hear from your own voice because I think I did stumble and I do stumble when talking about this, but I live kind of on the margins where I am speaking to a host of different people who are coming from a host of different backgrounds Jewishly and are looking for what makes sense. I was wondering if there are any tools or how you would suggest for how people should evaluate different communities. Meaning, I understand why anthropologists needs to take kind of a very neutral tone and you’re not making a value judgment of one community being better, thicker culture, this different than the other.

I understand that. So is there any way, a sensible way for how someone can decide between communities? Meaning, someone’s looking now, they just woke up and they’re looking at how they should sustain their Jewish life. They’re looking for a Jewish community. How would you suggest somebody goes about that process of finding Jewish community, knowing what you know about the entrances and exits so to speak about these books.

What advice would you give them? When I was speaking, I felt like, you know what, I am pejorative and that’s because I do, I’ll I’ll admit it, like I do look at it as hierarchical. I think communally, the Orthodox world offers things that the non-Orthodox world at least currently, as currently constructed, is unable to offer, you know, like to me, the big one is Shabbos observance, halachic Shabbos observance. Not to say that there’s no Shabbos outside of the Orthodox community and some of the education in like a strong Jewish education, not to say that that doesn’t exist outside. But I’m talking in terms of major communal structures and emphasis.

And I just want to hear from your vantage point, what advice or what direction would you give someone who is trying to make sure that their marriage into Jewish community doesn’t end up in divorce?

Ayala Fader: That’s a very hard question. I don’t I’m not in the business of giving out advice.

David Bashevkin: But even like a framework for like, how do I know which community is working? Like, you know, someone wakes up and they say, I should find the most authentic community, and they’ll go all the way to one extreme, or they might look for the most permissive community or the one that gives the best reference. Like, I’m trying to understand, does the discipline even exist? How should people approach the decision of finding the community that fits them?

Ayala Fader: I think the first step would be not to assume that non-Orthodox doesn’t have discipline and morality.

David Bashevkin: I’m so sorry. I hope I didn’t say that it’s immoral.

Ayala Fader: No, you didn’t, but that’s often the implicit. No, but I’ve been asked that a number of times like, if you’re not Orthodox, how do you have a moral compass?

David Bashevkin: Oh gosh.

Ayala Fader: Right, but that is often the assumption that you operate without a set of values and guard rails for yourself as a person. So I think that’s a very destructive way forward and I think it’s a very ethnocentric way forward, right? I mean, you begin with the family that you’re born into and the community that you’re born into, right? And so as a parent, you’re making decisions about Jewishness and Yiddishkeit for your kids, like what level you’re comfortable with. They might decide differently. I would advocate some compassion and empathy because at the end of Hidden Heretics, somebody said to me, what if your husband became frum? Like, and I imagined all the problems that that would create for us, you know? And yet it would be his journey and I’d have to respect that.

So, you know, people change all the time from the kinds of families that they’re born into. It’s not as if Orthodoxy is the only community struggling with like keeping people in the fold. Like there are lots of people in the secular fold who become religious and it creates all kinds of divisions and tensions. But it does seem to me like Judaism in the United States is undergoing a moment of questioning, right? I mean, the rise of antisemitism, conflicting positions around Israel, the rise of certain kinds of political movements across the globe.

Like all of these are happening right now. I guess I can’t help but always operate with a Reform notion of Judaism as choice, right? Like that’s where I’m coming from. Like I choose what speaks to me. That’s not an Orthodox perspective at all.

David Bashevkin: Even though I think it’s the case everywhere, honestly.

Ayala Fader: Of course it is.

David Bashevkin: What else do we have?

Ayala Fader: Well, but there’s at least a discourse about obligation. And not to say that Reform Jews don’t feel obligation.

Of course, Reform Jews have obligation, and I wouldn’t call myself a Reform Jew right now. I would say I’m not affiliated, but I think the best thing to do is have compassion and also to keep the door open for all kinds of questions. It doesn’t seem to me like questions could ever be bad.

David Bashevkin: I cannot thank you enough and I think that is the answer and I hope it’s okay.

I really just want to emphasize. I happen to feel unusually comfortable talking about affiliation choices with people because that’s where my family is from and we have these conversations. There is something deeply personal that it like touches against and I think that your instinct at the heart of your response, though I would be so curious to develop some conceptual framework because it’s a question so many people struggle with. That everyone’s struggling with this.

How do I find a community that nourishes me? You know, sometimes it’s too suffocating, sometimes it’s too, and like how do you find that alignment? It’s such an important question. It’s not even a Jewish question. It’s such an important question for this very moment where I think we’re re-entering and reimagining what does community mean, what does it provide? And do we need it at all? I’m just incredibly grateful for your scholarship, your patience and time and really your voice. It really means a tremendous amount.

We always end our interviews with more rapid fire questions. My first question, I’m particularly curious about how language and building culture through language can be applicable for Jewish parents who are raising kids right now. Do you have any books that could be helpful to recommend about how to kind of build culture in a family in a strong way?

Ayala Fader: A book I always like to recommend is Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days, which is a book about senior citizens who are Jews. It’s an old book.

It’s written in ’78, who are living in Venice Beach and the ways they use stories to make meaning in their lives. So I think that’s a great book. There’s a lot of really great ethnographies, especially about Latino, Spanish, English speakers, like Ana Celia Zentella writes a lot about Spanish Harlem and about the ways kids use Spanish and English on el bloque, on the block, right? And I think that like I read a lot of that kind of material about multilingualism in New York that helped me understand.

David Bashevkin: And I could see that really resonating in the Jewish world.

I used to say the best depiction of Modern Orthodoxy I’ve ever seen on film is a show about a Muslim guy. Has nothing to do with Modern Orthodoxy.

David Bashevkin: Was it that guy Ramy?

Ayala Fader: Yeah, Ramy. Exactly.

David Bashevkin: Yeah, that’s a really good show. Yeah.

Ayala Fader: There was just this one scene where he sits down with like the Imam, the rabbi and asks him if he reads Quran daily. The rabbi pauses, in translation or not in translation?

David Bashevkin: It’s like, do you use an Artscroll Gemara? It was like.

Ayala Fader: Exactly. Exactly. That’s actually very true.

I love Shtisel for its very sensitive depiction of somebody who doesn’t quite fit in but who makes it kind of work for himself. And the way his family.

David Bashevkin: Yeah, Akiva.

Ayala Fader: Yeah, and how his family and community kind of help him not to fit in, but to stay his own self and stay in the community.

Like it wasn’t an unorthodox story. I thought that was very delicate.

David Bashevkin: Very, very beautiful.

Ayala Fader: And again, I’m not going to give advice about how to find your Jewish community except for being empathetic and asking questions.

But I think experimenting and finding what works for you.

David Bashevkin: A thousand percent. My next question is, somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever to go back to school and get a second PhD. What do you think you’d go back to school and study?

Ayala Fader: Oh, I would love to do that.

Not get a PhD, but just go back to school.

David Bashevkin: Anybody who’s gotten a PhD is like, I would never ever do that again. But getting to write like a seminal piece and study a different area.

Ayala Fader: Maybe I would do comparative literature.

I really like that. Maybe something text-based because I love doing ethnographic fieldwork and I feel so grateful that people are willing to talk to me and spend time with me and I get to explore different worlds like Monsey and Williamsburg. But sometimes it seems really fun to also just be in an archive and reading by yourself, you know?

David Bashevkin: Yeah. I hope one day that you give the public the gift of writing fiction because you’re so good at bringing people alive through dialogue, through language.

And like.

Ayala Fader: Thank you, that’s a compliment.

David Bashevkin: Yeah, I think people would really, really love it and you would be unrestricted in the canvas of the stories.

Ayala Fader: Actually, maybe I would get a master’s in journalism.

Ultimately, right now, not the most practical, but because I am really trying in this next project to write in a different way that is both kind of scholarly, but more journalistic. We’ll see if I can do it, but that’s a real challenge, to focus on the.

David Bashevkin: I think both of those degrees would focus on writing in a way.

Ayala Fader: Exactly. Yes, thank you. Please fund that.

David Bashevkin: Absolutely. It was one of our former guests was Samuel Friedman who wrote the book Jew vs. Jew.

Ayala Fader: Yeah, I like his work. Yeah.

David Bashevkin: And I’ve been saying it came out 25 years ago. We need a sequel.

Maybe that will be your work. My final question that I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Ayala Fader: That’s funny. I go to sleep around 12, 12:30 and wake up around 7.

David Bashevkin: Okay, right down the middle, in between the book ends.

Ayala Fader: Yes, in between the book ends. In a nice liminal place, in between.

David Bashevkin: Yes, exactly.

Professor Ayala Fader, thank you so so much for your time, your scholarship, your wisdom, and for joining us today.

Ayala Fader: Thank you so much. This was a really wonderful conversation. Thank you.

David Bashevkin: I was so fascinated by the conversation and the specific parts where, I don’t know if you felt it, it got, I wouldn’t say heated, but it was so eye-opening, the question to me of can we develop a conceptual framework to help people figure out what form of Jewish community or what form of community would be the right fit for them? And I think for a lot of people, that question, especially now, is so difficult because our society places so much emphasis on our individual identities, our individual religious identities, it often comes at the expense of feeling alignment in our communal identities. And we’ve spoken before about there’s three forms of our religious identities. We have an individual identity, a familiar identity and a communal identity. And I wrote about this in the different methodologies for each in the series we did on Jewish denominations and how I think the way that at least I structure and reflect on my own individual identity, familial identity, and communal identity, I use a different methodology for each one, and I don’t think they necessarily need to match up in a straight line.

But the question that I wonder right now, in a moment where so many are awakening to their own Jewish identity, what is the vision of Jewish community that they want to see for themselves? And how can we ensure, and when I say we, I mean it in the broadest sense of the term, how can the Jewish people ensure that we have a vision of community that can properly serve the entirety of the Jewish people? And this is a really difficult question and I don’t know who else is kind of thinking about this. And I I wish there were frameworks for how people could think about it. And is it even appropriate to talk about hierarchies in community? I look at it in some ways like a matrix where there’s like a sliding scale. And in some ways in our previous conversation with Moshe Krakowski, this also was the way that he framed it in some ways.

It’s a scale and a tradeoff between an insularity that yields a great deal of closeness and it yields a great deal of communal nourishment at the communal level, but obviously it’s going to impinge and erode to some degree, you know, individual identity and personal autonomy. But then you can go all the way to the other extreme of the scale when, you know, communities or visions of Jewish life that emphasize personal autonomy, which I appreciate, and it could just come at the expense of having any communal feel from your Judaism. Like that’s the question that I very often ask. Any vision of community that I would want would need to be able to sustain a mincha minyan on a Wednesday.

Now, I want to be perfectly clear. That’s not because I insist that I’ve never missed, you know, mincha, the afternoon prayer services on a Wednesday, you know, and I’ve never missed a mincha minyan and daven with a minyan. No, that is not the case. But I am looking for a community that can preserve that level of commitment, that can preserve that level of community.

And I think for me at least, and this is not a theological argument, it is very much a pragmatic argument. The level of commitment that I think the Orthodox community yields on the broadest basis is just higher. And I wonder if there is a way that even within, you know, the non-Orthodox world, and this is something I think about all the time, and many of our listeners are not Orthodox, and I’m very comfortable having these conversations out loud. I am not foolish enough.

I am Orthodox through and through, but you know, I grew up in a world understanding we’re not the only Jewish community in the world. I understood that growing up intuitively just because of my family. Maybe I felt always comfortable, like I had a different vision of pluralism where not that I thought everyone was equally right because I honestly don’t believe that. You know, for a host of reasons, but I don’t believe that, but I acknowledged that we were not the sole claimant of saying, this is the only way it can be done.

No community has that, because even within the Orthodox world, there are different gradations. And my question is, is there a conceptual framework? For those waking up now and looking for an expression, for looking for Jewish community, is there a road map? Is there a way to how to guide people? Almost like without consideration. I’m not even coming from a, this is not a denominational scheme. This is not, you know, let’s try to put the thumb on the scale and like usher people into Orthodox synagogues.

My question is, is there a way we could have the conversation out loud to figure out like, is there no way to have a conceptual framework? Like the way I imagine it almost is the way that people think about Jewish life on campus. You know, it’s so interesting that there are so many different ways that high school students can learn about what the Jewish life on that campus is like. Does it provide kosher food? Are there Shabbos services? etc, etc, etc. And then they choose to engage in those different communities in a Chabad, in a Hillel, in JLI C and in Olami and MEOR, and they’re, you know, a gazillion different communities on campus and Yavneh, etc, etc, etc. But I guess I’m asking, I wish that existed not for college, but for the rest of our lives. For like, is there a guide for like, I am looking for this kind of Jewish community that can appeal or like a place, a centralized place where people could learn and that would have some sort of matrix or conceptual framework to describe different types of Jewish community of what you’re looking for.

This is me thinking out loud. And the second thing that I found was very interesting was is there a way, is it ever appropriate for a community to claim a hierarchy, which was a point of, I would call it contention, but maybe disagreement between Professor Fader and myself. She’s a professor of anthropology, so I’m not making a claim about what anthropologists should think or feel. It was just something I was wondering out loud.

So maybe not within the field of anthropology could you make a claim. But how do we make a claim of communal hierarchy in 2025? How should we talk about it? You know, we live in a world where I think it’s hard for anybody to honestly make the claim from somebody who isn’t, you know, raised in any one community to say, we are the ones that have it right. It’s much trickier now. It’s much harder, I think, to make a compelling argument to others.

I think there are those in in Jewish outreach who try or attempt to do it. I think it’s somewhat challenging. And my question is, is like, maybe there’s a way to rethink that conversation, how we have the conversation with others about finding the appropriate level of religious commitment and acknowledging that not everyone is going to have the same level of religious commitment and realizing that not everyone is going to find the same level of nourishment in any one community. But we can at least figure out or avoid obvious mistakes that we know will not yield, you know, any of that spiritual nourishment that any one person may be looking for.

It’s not like we’re working with zero information. I hope this makes some sense and this is me talking out loud. I hope it is sensible. I am vaguely feeling imprecise, but these are big questions and they’re ones that I think about and I think that they are ones worthy of thought because if we put so much effort into fighting antisemitism and we put so much effort into preserving the safety and security of the Jewish people as we should, I think we should have places where the effort and the thought and the conversation are about Yiddishkeit, about Judaism and the Jewish people themselves.

What is our vision of Judaism? What is the idea of Judaism that we are trying to preserve? And this is a conversation that I think any Jew, no matter what their level of affiliation, background or personal identity, I think everyone should feel comfortable and should be a part of this conversation because it is a very important one that we should be having in this very moment. And that’s why I am so grateful for people like Professor Ayala Fader who have written so beautifully about these questions. Really graciously and beautifully. Her answer to that question, and maybe that’s the answer all of us need, that’s the compassion that we look towards ourselves and towards any community.

I am reminded of something that Rav Moshe Weinberger shared in our first interview together. This is what he said.

Moshe Weinberger: Those people oftentimes need some packages to be put on and to have a healthy dosage of like, you know, madreigas adam, some something strong, uh, yiras shamayim. Uh, on the other hand, the uh, the Jews who have been through the uh, the yeshiva system with all of the wonderful people that are part of it, many of those are are survivors of a system in which from an early age, Yiddishkeit was like piled up big, like in in Hashem’s anger, you know, that you’re a you’re a sinner, the hands of an angry God type of stuff, and it was piled big time on their shoulders.

And we have to come to them and know when to take a little bit, you know, how to pull that off. And to reveal a gentler side of the creator. So that that that’s the that’s the trick when it comes to uh, dealing with uh so many people.

I could be talking to a group of I could be talking now especially with the Zoom. I did something with Shlomo Katz uh at the beginning of of the COVID that I, you know, we had, we had 10,000 people and there was something recently was like 40,000 people. So I don’t know who I’m even talking to. So there’s no question that some of the things I’m saying could be could be crushing a person while for another person who’s hearing that, it could be giving him taking off that and giving him the air to breathe.

It’s it’s scary. Did did Rebbe ever have a period, you know, coming back to that chasidus rishona where you felt like you took on too much and there needed to be something lifted off? I didn’t identify it as that, but but it was that. In other words, I had become there was a certain intensity and my friends were like being scared away. I wasn’t getting invited to the softball game Sunday morning, you know? I I just wasn’t getting the you know, I wasn’t getting I knew that they weren’t going to invite me to the sweet 16s anymore.

Moishe doesn’t talk to girls. You know, I I I took this whole frum persona on in a very, you know, modern Orthodox setting. And uh, so okay, but I I wasn’t insulted not to be invited to the Sweet 16, I got it. But uh, like I’m a good I’m a good ball player, like, you know, I I was the star, I was the star left fielder.

I was I batted third. And I’m not getting, you know, I’m not getting invited. So I spoke to that Rebbe that I had in Queens that that this Satmar Chassid. I spoke to them about it, you know, I told them like, uh, what’s the matter with the guys, you know? So he said to me, Chaim Moishe, Chaim Moishe, Chaim Moishe, I think maybe he’s you want to be too much like me, you want to look like me and you want to be like me.

And he says, I’m not even like me that you think I am. That’s aleph. And beis, if you do want to become an authentic oived Hashem, just take it slowly. That’s what he said, just take it slowly, buddy.

He says, just. Now, I didn’t know exactly how to do that. What does that mean? that I can still be with the guys. So I have a good sense of humor and I tried to use my humor as a way to get back to the ball park, you know, to to the uh, playground.

And to some degree it worked, but to some degree, there was an intensity that that did that did set me apart. I think what was life changing for me, um, without a question where I was able to find more of a healthy way was was my wife. My wife, she just she just took upon herself this project of Chaim Moishe. I was her project.

And uh, and I learned how to with her and through her to to laugh more freely again.

David Bashevkin: And I think that’s the question that so many have. I think for some people, we need to help them load up, so to speak, and have a little bit more spiritual nourishment from their Jewish identity and from their Jewish affiliation. And then there are many, many in our community as well who need help unloading, and maybe they need a little bit more breathing room and a little bit more personal agency and individual.

And I think everyone is trying to find the right balance in this, and that’s really the journey that we have together. And truly, from the bottom of my heart, it is a privilege to be on this journey all of us together. So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our incredible friend Denah Emerson, who did this really last minute, very late at night, and I would not blame her if she was really, really angry with me.

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