On Thursdays, the nonprofit organization
Footsteps hosts a drop-in group for its membership of formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews, who mostly refer to themselves as “off the
derech.”
“Derech” means “path” in Hebrew, and “off the derech,” or O.T.D. for
short, is how their ultra-Orthodox families and friends refer to them
when they break away from these tight-knit, impermeable communities, as
in: “Did you hear that Shaindel’s daughter Rivkie is off the derech? I
heard she has a smartphone and has been going to museums.” So even
though the term is burdened with the yoke of the very thing they are
trying to flee, members remain huddled together under “O.T.D.” on their
blogs and in their Facebook groups, where their favored hashtag is
#itgetsbesser —
besser meaning “better” in Yiddish. Sometimes
someone will pop up on a message board or in an email group and say,
“Shouldn’t we decide to call ourselves something else?” But it never
takes. Reclamations are messy.
At
the drop-in session I attended, 10 men and women in their 20s and 30s
sat around a coffee table. Some of them were dressed like me, in jeans
and American casualwear, and others wore the clothing of their
upbringings: long skirts and high-collared shirts for women; black
velvet skullcaps and long, virgin beards and payot (untrimmed
side locks) for men. Half of them had extricated themselves from their
communities and were navigating new, secular lives. But half still lived
among their Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox sects in areas of New York City,
New Jersey and the Hudson Valley and were secretly dipping their toes
into the secular world — attending these meetings, but also doing things
as simple as walking down the street without head coverings, or trying
on pants in a clothing store, or eating a nonkosher doughnut, or using
the internet. They had families at home who believed they were in
evening Torah learning sessions, or out for a walk, or at synagogue for
evening prayers. On the coffee table were two pizzas, one kosher, one
nonkosher. The kosher pizza tasted better, but only a couple of people
ate it.
The
group was facilitated by a Footsteps social worker, Jesse Pietroniro,
soft-spoken and kind, who had told me that he had his own conflicted
religious upbringing. He allowed the attendees to democratically settle
on a loose theme for the evening. One woman in her early 20s brought up
sexuality. She had started to date and wasn’t quite sure what the norms
were. A young man talked about how hard it was for him to interact with
women casually outside his community, since he was taught that sexual
desire outside the intent to procreate means that one is a sexual
predator, so anytime he was attracted to someone, he worried he was
going to do something untoward, or that he was a kind of monster. The
young woman who had suggested the theme said she didn’t know when
exactly to submit to kissing — the first date? The second? Is she a slut
if she kisses at all? Is it still bad nowadays to be a slut? She’d
heard girls talking on the subway and calling each other sluts, and they
were laughing. Are there rules for this? A few of them made sex jokes.
The O.T.D.ers, newly alive in a world of puns and innuendo, love a
junior-high-grade sex joke. The social worker narrowed his eyes and
pursed his lips and tapped a finger to his chin and nodded and opened
the question up to the group. (I was allowed to document the meeting on
the condition that I wouldn’t publish anyone’s name or descriptive
information.)
Another
woman in her early 20s, sitting on the sofa in jeans with one leg slung
over its arm, told us she had spent most of her life being molested by
her father. She told the group that recently she had taken to
advertising online, saying she followed the laws of family purity —
going to a ritual bath after menstruation, not having sex during her
“unclean” week — and that she was available for sex in exchange for
money. Ultra-Orthodox men visited her at all hours, and they cheated on
their wives, having sex with this ritually pure young woman in her
apartment. When the men finished, they told her what a shame it was that
she was off the derech, that she seemed nice, that she should try again
at a religious life.
A
man, 30ish, still with a beard that he now trimmed closely to his face,
talked about staying with his religious wife, who knew he was no longer
religious but wouldn’t join him on the other side. He knew the marriage
should be over, but he wouldn’t leave, and he couldn’t bring himself to
cheat on her, and he wanted to know if he was unable to cheat on her
because he was bound up by his religious values or because he was
innately a good person. Another married man said that you don’t need to
be taught in a religious context not to cheat on your wife — it’s a
tenet of secular marriage as well, and what the whole operation often
depends on.
“I
guess I just don’t know if I’m a good person because I’m a good
person,” said the guy who wanted to cheat but might not, “or if I’m a
good person because I was taught to be a good person.”
They
went around in circles for many minutes, most of them summoning
scriptural sources on whether morality is inherent, then other sources
to make or disprove that point, then laughing at the fact that they’d
summoned Scripture. The married man who was deciding if he should have
sex outside his marriage put his head in his hands, then through his
hair and made a great, guttural noise of frustration.[...]
Footsteps was started
in 2003 by a college student named Malkie Schwartz, who grew up in the
Lubavitch sect in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and who knew after high
school that she wanted to step off the community’s moving walkway to
marriage and motherhood. She moved in with a grandmother who wasn’t
religious and enrolled at Hunter College on the Upper East Side.
But
just because she left her community didn’t mean that she felt part of
the secular one. She started Footsteps as a drop-in group right there at
Hunter and told a couple of formerly religious friends what she was
doing. About 20 people showed up to the first meeting. Soon they had a
G.E.D. study group — and a human-sexuality-and-relationships group, so
that they could learn about sex education, which was normally taught to
the ultra-Orthodox only in the days leading up to their weddings.
Footsteps became a chrysalis for them through which they would leap into
their new lives, just as soon as they figured out exactly how to live
them.
Schwartz
eventually left the organization in the hands of nonprofit
professionals — Footsteps was a chrysalis for her, too — and went to law
school. Today, Footsteps is a 501(c)(3) with an executive director,
social workers, scholarships, court-companion programs and special
events like fashion nights, at which members learn about modern style
outside the realm of black-and-white dresses and suits and hats.
Ultra-Orthodox communities, whose leaders stand vigil against outside
influences, know about Footsteps; about half the people I met in
Footsteps first heard of it when they were accused by someone in their
family of being a member.
It’s
hard to talk about O.T.D.ers as a group, because like the rest of us,
like ultra-Orthodox people, too, they are individuals. No two people who
practice religion do it exactly the same way, despite how much it seems
to the secular world that they rally around sameness; and no one who
leaves it leaves the same way, either. In the region of New York City,
New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley that Footsteps serves, 546,000
ultra-Orthodox Jews live in one of about five different sects. With a
few exceptions, like the Skver sect in New Square, N.Y., which has
actual boundaries and operates its own schools, the ultra-Orthodox live
not in cloistered neighborhoods, but among secular America in Crown
Heights, Flatbush and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and beyond. Perhaps it’s
easiest to think of them as living in a different dimension — occupying
the same space but speaking a different language (Yiddish, for the most
part), attending different schools, seeing their own doctors, handling
judicial issues among themselves and eating their own food from their
own markets.
So
once they leave, if they leave, they learn how ill equipped they are
for survival outside their home neighborhoods, and that has a lot to do
with the ways that ultra-Orthodox communities are valuable and good: the
daily cycle of prayer and school and learning; how people share goals
about family and values; how neighbors support one another during times
of need. Once that’s gone, and all a person has is her mostly
Judaic-studies education and little familial support and no real skills,
life gets scary. For those who leave and are married with children, the
community tends to embrace the spouse left behind and help raise funds
for legal support to help that person retain custody of the children.
You could be someone with a spouse and children one day and find
yourself completely alone the next.
I
learned about Footsteps in 2015, after the very public suicide of one
of its young members. Her name was Faigy Mayer, and on a hot night in
July, she went to the top of 230 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron district,
where there’s a rooftop bar, and jumped. In death, she became something
of a brief symbol (and also a lightning rod) for the O.T.D. movement,
with her story plastered across local papers, many illustrated by a
Facebook image of her holding a paintbrush and standing in front of a
newly painted mural that said “Life is Beautiful.”[...]