Those who “switch” out of Orthodox Judaism tend to begin questioning their role in the community in high school and often find the denomination “insular and rigid.” But even when they leave, many remain connected to the community, according to new research from the Orthodox Union’s Center for Communal Research.
The study, which centered on interviews with 29 people who left Orthodoxy, also found that rabbis play very important roles and that many who leave the community experience “forms of trauma and instability before, during and after leaving.”
“If we truly want to make meaningful, positive change regarding American Orthodox Jewish attrition, our community will need to pursue the data that will inform that change and commit to act based on what we find,” stated Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the OU.
Moshe Krakowski, professor and director of doctoral studies at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration, is one of the authors of the study.
“I was very surprised by the fact that most of the respondents overwhelmingly still had very positive feelings towards the Orthodox Jewish community even while sometimes also having very negative feelings,” he told JNS. “Out-and-out hatred or feeling that the Orthodox Jewish community is wrong or bad was really, really tiny. That was not something I expected necessarily, but it was really interesting to see.”
“Maybe it should have been more expected, because people are complicated and people will have complex, sometimes contradictory emotions,” Krakowski said. “But it was interesting to see that positivity.”
One participant in the study told researchers that she doesn’t observe Shabbat but still hosts Friday night dinners. “I eat out at a non-kosher restaurant, but if I’m hosting my friends who I know keep kosher, I have kosher pots and pans,” she told the interviewers. “I order kosher meat, and I can make a kosher dinner.”
Another person told the researchers that she does “the parts of Judaism that bring me joy.” The latter includes those that make her “feel connected to God, connected to the universe” and “connected to the traditions my ancestors have been doing since the beginning of time.”
“I’m leaving out the rules that feel very constrictive,” she said, per the study.
Krakowski told JNS that he thinks, personally, that Orthodox Judaism “does an exceptional job of retention, especially compared to other Jewish groups” but also generally.
“It is very, very difficult to be countercultural in a society where 300 million people don’t share your fundamental assumptions about the world,” he said. “I think that it’s really important to recognize what the Orthodox Jewish community is doing is actually quite hard and you would really expect a lot of people to leave.”
Krakowski’s sense is that there is much less of a phenomenon of people leaving Orthodox Judaism than one would expect naturally.
“From the point of view of communal leaders, that’s not good enough. They want everyone to stay,” he told JNS. “They would like it to be the case that we don’t lose anyone, and everyone lost is a bit of a tragedy.”
“Both things can be true at once,” he said. “The Orthodox Jewish community does a very good job and nonetheless, you still want to understand and better respond to the fact that there are many people who leave.”