Review of "Off The Derech" by Faranak Margolese

I just finished reading Off The Derech by Faranak Margolese, and I thought it was very interesting. She discusses a lot of the causes that drive people off the derech, and does so in a fairly perceptive and truthful manner. She herself appears to be quite religious, and therefore invokes God about as often and as naively as other religious authors do, frequently sounding as though she just recently chatted with Him about his views on chinuch and whatnot.

God created Adam and immediately gave him free choice, knowing full well that not one page later Adam would stumble and choose sin. But God determined that it was better to allow Adam to fall, better to have him betray His will with free choice, than not have that choice at all.

God wants us to walk in his ways, but he doesn't force us to. He leads but does not push. He gives us free will and then does what He can to preserve it by delaying punishment.

This sounds like the climax of a really bad d'var Torah, but if you can read past the midrashic drivel (which, ironically, is what probably drove me off the derech as much as anything else), you will find that most of Ms. Margolese's analyses are pretty sound. I will now discuss some of the issues she raises.

One of the author's recurring points is that Judaism must be able to compete in the free marketplace of ideas on its own merits. That is, it is no longer enough to "scare" people into remaining frum with visions of Gehinom or God's wrath, or to coerce observance through emotional manipulation (e.g., fear of losing the respect or love of one's parents). In the modern world, these classic techniques are ineffective or counterproductive, and often produce nominally Orthodox Jews whose Judaism is extremely shallow or cynical. Instead, Orthodox Judaism must prove itself to be more emotionally and intellectually rewarding than any other available option, or it will continue to lose adherents. This is especially true in the modern era, when one really doesn't have to believe anything. In earlier times, the alternatives to Judaism were largely limited to Christianity and Islam, and for a wide variety of reasons these options were never very appealing to Jews. Today, one can live a completely normal and fulfilled life without subscribing to any religious system at all. Orthodox Judaism must therefor prove that it can provide its members a better option than all the other options available:

The outside world is no longer painful or perceived as evil, but rather enjoyable, attractive and welcoming. So today, in order for observant Judaism to be chosen, it cannot merely be neutral. It must be better than the alternative.

Ms. Margolese focuses heavily in the beginning of the book on "rejection" as a cause of people leaving Yiddishkeit, and I think there's a lot of truth in that. She discusses a number of kinds of rejection, all valid, but I think she underplays the rejection felt by individuals who can't buy into the hashkafa of Orthodox Judaism. Certainly, there is more than a single legitimate Orthodox hashkafa, but it is nevertheless the case that most Orthodox Jews believe that God (literally) gave the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai about 3300 years ago, and that this exact same Torah is the one we read today every Shabbos. Most Orthodox Jews believe that God created the universe less than 6000 years ago in pretty much the same state as we see it today, and many or most believe that this creation occurred over a literal 6-day period. These are basic aspects of Orthodox Judaism today.

Orthodox Jews (me included) who at some point discover they can no longer suspend their disbelief in such stories will undoubtedly feel rejected, regardless of whether or not they actually give voice to their discontentment. Moreover, for the most part, these discontented Jews will not give voice to their concerns, because they realize the incredible emotional and psychological pain that doing so would bring to their friends and family, and to any other true believers. (They realize this because they themselves almost certainly experienced this very same emotional anguish in the course of revising their own deepest-held beliefs about the world.)

So what recourse exists for Orthodox Jews in this situation? What they see all around them in the Orthodox world is rank intellectual dishonesty; that is, the coddling of religious beliefs, and the unwillingness to examine cherished ideas with the dispassionate scrutiny that is the hallmark of all critical reasoning and empirical investigation. How can Jewish people who also value rationality and empiricism find a place in such a culture? I don't know.

On a related note, Ms. Margolese has a chapter on Truth, and how issues related to the search for truth drive people away from Orthodoxy. Again, I agree with most of her points, but find that she underestimates the role of theology and hashkafa. For example, she writes,

So how can we strengthen belief in God? By discussing with students and children, on a level they can understand, the reasons for believing in God: why it makes sense, if it makes sense, what the alternatives are, what some of the arguments are for God's existence and against it.

This is not easy to do. In fact, it can be quite tricky for, while we can make good arguments for the rationality of God's existence, we cannot prove it.

Yes, it is tricky, isn't it? That's the problem that a lot of us have with Orthodox theology and hashkafa. We've been told from the earliest ages how obvious is the existence of God, and how foolish and ignorant are all those agnostics and atheists. (Indeed, they are considered far worse than Christians and even Reform Jews, probably because their arguments are so much harder to refute.) At some point, however, when we are able to think and read for ourselves, we come to realize that the very best arguments for the existence of God were already discredited by the 17th century. The author's position that "there are good arguments for the rationality of God's existence" is really quite weak, and it is the historical failure to honestly recognize this that bothers many of us so much. The "good arguments" that the author refers to are really just post-hoc justifications, and have only rarely convinced anyone who wasn't already a believer.

Moreover, the author's suggestion for discussing with students "what some of the arguments are for God's existence and against it" is disturbingly wishful thinking. Does she really think that a yeshiva rabbi discussing God's existence with his students would paint a fair picture of "the alternatives." Or will the yeshivas invite atheists and agnostics to present the evidence in favor of their positions? I think not. No, the "discussion" envisioned by Ms. Margolese will ultimately be nothing other than the same hashkafic brainwashing that has defined Jewish education ever since the Middle Ages. I think the following opinion from a contemporary book on off-the-derech Hasidim comes much closer to the truth of the matter:

Among people who believe that there is only one truth — and that they are in possession of it — tolerating other points of view is, by definition, impossible. (Winston, 2005)

Also, although I realize that Off The Derech is not a theological treatise, one too-often hears this "we can make good arguments" line without ever actually hearing one of these good arguments. So what's the good argument? The Argument to Design? The Ontological Argument? These arguments do not convince anyone except those who already believe. That is not what I consider a "good argument." I think it will be when Orthodoxy comes to grip with the tentativeness of the God-hypothesis — with the idea that God's existence and involvement is something we wish to be true rather than know to be true — that genuine religious inclusiveness will be possible. In the meantime, the zealous and absolute adherence to metaphysical beliefs which have zero empirical support will continue to make a mockery of the notion of religious rationality or rational religiosity.

Ms. Margolese goes on to propose that

If we succeed in intellectually establishing that there is a God, that He gave the Torah, and that rabbinic leaders have the authority to make halachah, we will have succeeded in establishing an important foundation for observance.

Well, yes, sure, but it's crucial to note that the Orthodox educational process does not actually work by establishing any of these things intellectually. If we wanted to establish these beliefs intellectually, we should wait until a person is 20 years old and has experience with the ways of world and some capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, and then we should make our best intellectual arguments about the existence of God, the authenticity of the Torah, and rabbinic authority. What we actually do is brainwash children with religious fairytales from the time they are 2 years old until the time they are 22 in the hope that it will become impossible or irrelevant for them to ever seriously entertain real hashkafic questions, either because we have made them completely ignorant of anything other than Talmud, or because we have constructed their belief systems in such a way that raising such issues would simply be too cognitively or emotionally painful. As Ms. Margolese writes,

Our parents believed, they told us we should believe, and therefore we do, without giving it the kind of thought and exploration that makes it our own. Thus belief in God begins in childhood and pervades the lives of observant people.

As an example of the Orthodox educational approach, consider this charming advice from Wagschal's Successful Chinuch:

[we] need to show children the beauty of Torah and emptiness of the secular way... [we] need to answer questions before children can ask them for themselves... [the] child must be warned not to be taken in by what he may see, read or hear and, above all, to avoid temptations.

This certainly does not sound like a recipe for an open and honest evaluation of "alternatives," and I think it unfortunately represents the typical approach to chinuch in the Orthodox community. All the talk about intellectual honesty and openness and alternative beliefs is really just hogwash, I'm sorry to say. Strictly religious parents and teachers want their children and students to believe the same things they themselves believe, and a long-term process of brainwashing is without any doubt the most reliable way to accomplish this. Individuals who ultimately reject this brainwashing may leave religion entirely, or remain within the religious world as cynics, hypocrites, and antonymous bloggers.

A couple more things I'd like to quote from the book:

Michael, who went off the derech as an adult, experienced intellectual dishonesty when observant people would engage in what he called "selective reporting" as they tried to prove that Judaism was true. He says they would "sometimes look for various scientific discoveries to prove certain age-old truisms in the Talmudic system and, at the same time, disregard scientific studies that disprove them... They don't even necessarily believe in the tools they are using to prove the Torah. They just figure, 'Hey. It's useful. Let's use it.' And when someone discovers that it's not useful, they dump it... It is not the evidence that drives the system; the system drives the evidence."

I could not have said it better myself, but there are still a couple of points to make. The first is that Ms. Margolese treats Michael's story as a "for instance," when actually the intellectual dishonesty Michael describes is completely rampant in the yeshiva world, and widely embraced by kiruv organizations. (Note the liberal use of "Torah Codes" nonsense in certain kiruv programs.) Michael's story is far from an isolated incident. But the essential problem is that it's almost inevitable. When people have a certain unassailable belief — a view of the world that cannot possibly be wrong, then all valid evidence must inevitably point to that particular conclusion, and all contrary evidence must be in error. What we therefore see in the yeshiva world is that when empirical evidence cannot be suitably twisted to fit the Jewish mythology, this evidence is then recast as the deceptive production of evil, amoral, atheistic scientists, who are worse than Nazis and would dissect their own mothers given half a chance. (If you think I am overstating things, please read Avigdor Miller.) Thus, any evidence scientists produce which does not happen to support prevailing Jewish fairytales is immediately attributed to Satan.

So the essential problem of Truth is that Judaism, like all other religions, is not about Truth at all. It's about a particular set of beliefs and traditions which come from an age of mystery and magic, long before the introduction of critical reasoning, empirical methods, and natural laws. Those who try to sell Judaism as a "quest for truth" are selling a bill of goods. The closest thing any of us have to a real "quest for truth" is the scientific method. Even with all its imperfections, the achievements of science in illuminating the workings of the natural world long ago surpassed the sum total of everything religion had ever accomplished in this capacity.

The author goes on:

So truth must be acquired truthfully. If we want to argue effectively for the truth of Torah, we must not only speak of truth, we must speak with it in the classroom, in our actions, and all our pursuits. We must be honest about ourselves and honest about Judaism. Hiding the truth undermines truth, which is one of the strongest arguments for Torah observance...

The basic problem is that true intellectual honesty would require that we modulate our belief in God and Torah in correspondence with the evidence presented in the favor of these propositions. In science and critical reasoning, hypotheses are "believed" with a strength that is largely proportional to their evidential support. For example, the causal role of smoking in cancer is strongly believed because of vast empirical findings that support this hypothesis. On the other hand, the existence of life beyond our solar system engenders more tenuous belief, because although we suspect that other habitable planets may exist and may produce life by the same mechanisms that produced life here, we thus far have no actual evidence of life outside of Earth. We also have available rational and quantitative methods for belief evaluation (Bayesian probability, for example) that are frequently used in artificial intelligence. In any case, the main point is that intellectual honesty (i.e., rational cognition) requires that the strength of beliefs be contingent on the strength of evidence. Unfortunately, the fact is that Orthodox Jews are not prepared to appropriately modulate their beliefs in God or Torah. Instead, they put God and Torah beyond the reach of evidence or argument, thereby ensuring that Orthodox Judaism cannot achieve true intellectual honesty. I think it's really that simple.

The author claims that "After all is said and done, we must take a leap if we are to believe in God." I simply ask "Why must we?" The intellectually honest approach is to attach a degree of belief to the God-hypothesis and Torah-hypothesis that reflect their evidential support. Why can't we just do the honest thing?

Omissions and Commissions

Let me now mention something that "Off The Derech" leaves out entirely, as does almost every other "frum" book on child-rearing, such as Successful Chinuch, Love is Not Enough, Timeless Parenting, Being and Becoming, More Effective Jewish Parenting, Chinuch in Turbulent Times, and so on, and so on.

That is sexuality.

From reading almost any "frum" book on child and adolescent development, you would think that nothing of any significance happens to boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 15. They just get bigger and possibly become "moody." The wholesale omission of any discussion of the sexual aspects of puberty reflects the monstrous fear of sexuality in the Orthodox world. The approach to sexuality adopted by frum authors, educators, and parents alike has been to ignore as thoroughly as possible any discussion of sexual development, and to rely on the hope that God will make it all just go away.

We can conclude, therefore, that as long as a child is sheltered, his heart will remain pure and he will be protected from sin. (Wagschal 1999)

In other words, sexuality is a kind of alien virus that is beamed in from the "outside world," a contagion that can be prevented by carefully surrounding a child with fedoras, shaitles, and rabbinical fairytales. This hear-no-evil, see-no-evil attitude toward sexuality (along with the inevitable cover-up of sexual abuse and sexual maladjustment) is one more factor that gives the lie to the notion of intellectual honesty in Orthodox Judaism. The Orthodox approach to sexuality is not honest; it is cowardly.