Conditional Love And Orthodox Judaism: A Little Mussar From A Jewish Atheist

There were a lot of conditions for love and affection and continued membership, And they were serious, and they were ludicrous. It was, "You don't wear a yarmulke you can get out. You intermarry, we sit shiva for you. You eat non-kosher and our children are not allowed to hang out with you." --Shalom Auslander

When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’

The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.

What these and other studies tell us, if we’re able to hear the news, is that praising children for doing something right isn’t a meaningful alternative to pulling back or punishing when they do something wrong. Both are examples of conditional parenting, and both are counterproductive.

The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who readily acknowledged that the version of negative conditional parenting known as time-out can cause “deep feelings of anxiety,” nevertheless endorsed it for that very reason. “When our words are not enough,” he said, “the threat of the withdrawal of our love and affection is the only sound method to impress on him that he had better conform to our request.”

But the data suggest that love withdrawal isn’t particularly effective at getting compliance, much less at promoting moral development. Even if we did succeed in making children obey us, though — say, by using positive reinforcement — is obedience worth the possible long-term psychological harm? Should parental love be used as a tool for controlling children?

Deeper issues also underlie a different sort of criticism. Albert Bandura, the father of the branch of psychology known as social learning theory, declared that unconditional love “would make children directionless and quite unlovable” — an assertion entirely unsupported by empirical studies. The idea that children accepted for who they are would lack direction or appeal is most informative for what it tells us about the dark view of human nature held by those who issue such warnings.

In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.

Rogers didn’t say so, but I’ll bet he would have been glad to see less demand for skillful therapists if that meant more people were growing into adulthood having already felt unconditionally accepted.

That article sent a pang through my heart, because I recognized so much of my parents' disciplinary style in the "what not to do" sections.

Just last week, I kind of casually mentioned to my mother-in-law that I'm something of a disappointment to my father (in that I'm not Orthodox.) She was, of course, horrified and insisted that it must not be true. And maybe it isn't, but this article sure explains why I would feel that way. My parents probably have always loved me unconditionally, but it felt to me that their love and affection were contingent on my behaving in certain ways... and I either could not or would not always behave in those ways.

I think that that kind of parenting goes hand-in-hand with fundamentalist religion (although it appears everywhere.) The Orthodox community itself is the same way. They are so warm and accepting as long as you Do As They Say. Be (or appear to be) a mainstream Orthodox person and you can have dozens of friends two weeks after moving into a community. But if you don't fit the mold, you don't fit the community, and they get rid of you, if only by not making you feel welcome.

Yes, Modern Orthodox communities will tolerate a blue shirt, some mixed dancing, and even eating non-kosher dairy out, but the entire community is built around the set of behaviors that is Orthodox Judaism. If a kid becomes an atheist or is openly gay or even just becomes a Reform Jew, he (generally speaking) no longer has a place in that community.

It's important to note that no harm is intended by Orthodox communities, just as no harm is intended by parents trying to teach their children to behave themselves. But harm is caused. Gay kids, atheist kids, apatheist kids, weird kids, outspoken kids, freethinking kids, boys who don't like gemara, kids who don't want to go to Israel -- they get the message that they aren't loved and don't belong. In more right-wing communities, kids who like secular books and movies, girls who don't want to be housewives or even mothers, girls who want to go to college, boys who wear blue shirts -- they get that message too.

I remember when I first told my parents that I didn't believe anymore and wasn't going to remain Orthodox, I asked them if they'd prefer me to be happy or to stay Orthodox. They refused to answer, arguing it was a false dichotomy (and probably it was.) But it gets at an important issue. There is so much focus in Orthodox families and Orthodox communities in making sure that children turn into this one kind of adult that it does a lot of damage. I genuinely did not (and do not) know how my parents would answer that question honestly, assuming they had to pick. A happy son or an Orthodox one?

And don't you liberal Orthodoxers pat yourselves on the back if you allow a little more leeway, say a blue shirt or a secular school. If you make it seem like your love is in any way contingent on your kids (or brothers or sisters or friends) remaining Orthodox or straight or marrying another Jew, you are part of the problem. Love (or the perception of love) should not be used in that way.

This is NOT to say that you can't argue for someone to marry a Jew or remain Orthodox or try to become straight (even though I'd disagree with those arguments.) It's about letting your loved ones believe that your love is contingent on their behaviors and life choices.

There are some Orthodox people who get this right, even when "tested" by gay or OTD or whatever kids. I don't want to make it sound like I think every Orthodox person is guilty of this. There are probably even some Orthodox communities who get it right, probably in very small communities where they don't have enough people who are the same to cast out those who are different.

But this is a problem that's built into the very notion of "Orthodox community." "Orthodox" should refer to an individual's beliefs or behaviors, not to a community. It's fine and natural for Orthodox people to associate with each other and to form communities, but it is not fine (although it is natural) for them to exclude non-Orthodox people from those communities. And it's not enough to welcome non-Orthodox people for meals or events with the intention of bringing them closer to Orthodoxy. If you don't value people as people regardless of their choices, then you do not love them. And I don't think even the Torah commands you to love only your Orthodox neighbors.

Oh, and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, you might be able to make a serious dent in your OTD "problem" by not using your love as reward and punishment. There are plenty of potential OTDers who probably wouldn't care enough to leave if they weren't made to feel so unwelcome.

(HT: Abandoning Eden)

Reasons To Believe

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away -- Philip K. Dick

Brooklyn Wolf asks, Do You Really Require Proof?

I don't have any absolute proof, and, truth be told, I don't need any. Just by looking at the wonderfulness of nature, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, I am convinced that God exists. When I look at the universe and consider the possibilities that it either sprung into existence by itself or had help, I take "had help." Yes, it's only a gut feeling and yes, it falls far short of proof, but that's all I need to live my life. But I'm also honest about it. I know that it's not proof, and I state the same up front to anyone who asks. I don't require "solid proof" for my beliefs -- and, if you seriously consider what I said, neither do you.

This was my response:

"Proof" is the wrong word. What people need are reasons. For some people, the fact that they like Orthodox Judaism is reason enough to believe. For others, the fact that their parents and ancestors believe is reason enough.

And then some people just want to know what's TRUE, period. We don't want reasons to believe if those reasons don't help us believe what's true. We want to avoid the traps other minds fall into: denial, logical fallacies, and sheltering ourselves from people and ideas that might destroy our beliefs.

We see that people with Muslim parents tend to believe in Allah and people with Jewish parents tend to believe in YHWH and we realize that people who believe for the kinds of reasons that we believed basically believe whatever they want to believe.

So we become skeptics. We set out to find what's true. And we steel ourselves to face the truth even if we have to give up some cherished beliefs and even if accepting the truth means that our families and friends and communities might reject us.

I'm not saying this makes us better people, or more healthy psychologically. I'm sure the psychological reasons for believing what our communities believe evolved for a reason. What I am saying is that we're more likely to believe in what's true.

If you'd rather believe what your loved ones believe and what your parents believed and what lets you live in an Orthodox community, you should probably stick with whatever it is that lets you do that. If you want to know what's true, become a skeptic.

Religion Improves Group Cooperation

Several econ blogs linked to this interesting piece in The Economist.

Excerpt:

To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.

As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community—what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified.

Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group co-operation, the principal difference between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within religious communities, men are expected to pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while women are not. It should, therefore, be possible to observe whether group rituals do improve co-operation, based on the behaviour of men and women.

To do so, Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel. They devised a game to be played by two members of a kibbutz. This was a variant of what is known to economists as the common-pool-resource dilemma, which involves two people trying to divide a pot of money without knowing how much the other is asking for. In the version of the game devised by Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle, each participant was told that there was an envelope with 100 shekels in it (between 1/6th and 1/8th of normal monthly income). Both players could request money from the envelope, but if the sum of their requests exceeded its contents, neither got any cash. If, however, their request equalled, or was less than, the 100 shekels, not only did they keep the money, but the amount left was increased by 50% and split between them.

Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the common-pool-resource dilemma because the communal lives of kibbutz members mean they often face similar dilemmas over things such as communal food, power and cars. The researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.

It'd be interesting to look at intergroup cooperation -- I wonder if religious groups would be less cooperative with other groups than secular ones.

Believers in Community

Atheists Enjoying Social Benefits of Church Even if They Don't Believe in Religious Rituals

There's a mention of Humanistic Judaism as well.

Essay Question for the Orthodox

I thought this would be interesting:

Imagine that, through no "fault" of your own, you come to believe that God does not exist and that Orthodox Judaism is not factually correct. Furthermore, you are so convinced of your new belief that you can't imagine ever going back to your previous beliefs.

What do you imagine doing and thinking about over the next few weeks? How does this affect the future you always imagined? How does it change your relationships?

Answers of "that could never happen to me" will be roundly booed. I'm especially interested in answers from Orthodox people with no serious doubts, but this is open to everybody.

Correction: Feldman Photo Was Not Altered

An anonymous commenter pointed me to this article in The Jewish Week:

Noah Feldman, who ignited a firestorm of criticism last week with his pointed attack on Modern Orthodoxy in The New York Times Magazine, admitted this week that he learned before publication of his article that he in fact was not intentionally cropped out of his reunion photograph.

...

The photographer, Lenny Eisenberg, told The Jewish Week Monday that he had difficulty capturing as many as 60 reunion participants within a single frame. Eisenberg ended up taking several shots from one side, then the other, and several people on the far side — not just Feldman and his fiancée — happened to be out of the picture when it finally appeared in the newsletter.

...

However, Wolff acknowledged that the school’s alumni updates had indeed rejected Feldman’s subsequent submission of his lifecycle events once it became known that Feldman eventually married his girlfriend, who did not convert, making his children non-Jewish according to traditional Jewish law.

...

The photographer, also a Maimonides alumnus, said that after the 1998 reunion he ran into Feldman at a “Conservadox temple” when the conversation took place that Feldman recounts in the Times: Eisenberg told Feldman, “don’t blame me,” with Feldman assuming he was referring to the yeshiva’s cropping because of his girlfriend.

Eisenberg now says he wasn’t thinking of Feldman’s girlfriend, only the photo’s unwieldy circumstance. “I would have said the same thing” to any one of “16 other people” who didn’t appear in the final picture.

“Maybe we didn’t understand each other correctly,” Feldman now says. “I thought he knew what I was talking about.”

The original article (now locked behind the Times's stupid pay wall) did not state that the photo was cropped or altered, but I erroneously assumed that it was. I don't know whether to believe that the choice of a photo that excluded Feldman and his girlfriend, among others, was intentional or not.

Regardless of the specifics of this case, from my personal experience and from the comments of the Orthodox bloggers that I read, most of whom also assumed the photo was altered but thought it was largely acceptable, I continue to think that Orthodox Judaism has a denial problem about those of us who leave or marry out and that they are unfairly cruel to us, albeit unintentionally.

(My original post on the subject and a follow-up.)

Am I a Person or a Jew?

dgordon left an interesting comment on my post Modern Orthodoxy's State of Denial:

There's a really basic conflict involved in the Feldman/Maimonides-School encounter. The Maimonides School, and by extension OJ in general, promotes a CORPORATE identity: a cardinal obligation of sb. who is born Jewish is to perpetuate the Jewish people by marrying sb. Jewish and raising Jewish children (esp., OJ argues, in the wake of such environing threats as anti-semitism and assimilation). Feldman, on the other hand, believes in INDIVIDUAL identity: the point of having any sort of religion at all is to explore and extend one's relationship w/ God or whoever/whatever may be out there (this as an aspect of self-fulfillment within a context of respect for others' choices). These two models comprise what sociologist Max Weber called a "clash of the value spheres"; they really can't be reconciled to each other...

In the wake of Feldman's admittedly uneven article (discussed here) I saw a lot of comments that I found mystifying. Boiled down, they essentially took Feldman's intermarriage as an affront to his school, his parents, and the Orthodox community in general, if not the entire Jewish people. They said things like his marriage was "a slap in the face" to his Jewish education and that he "turned his back on Judaism."

As I said, I was mystified. If I had a child, say, who married a rabbi or a Buddhist or even a Republican ;-) I might be concerned for them and perhaps express my doubts. But to take it as a personal insult? Of course not, unless they were literally doing it out of spite. I see parenting (and friendship and love) as something I choose to give freely, not something I'm doing because I expect something in return.

dgordon nailed it. Orthodox Jews see Feldman not as a human being who made what was probably a difficult life decision, but as a Jew who married out. In the same way, when I left Orthodox Judaism, my Orthodox friends and family didn't see it as me just making a choice they didn't agree with, but as an affront to my parents and community. Nobody wanted to know what made me do it or how I was handling the transition; if anything they wanted to know as little as possible about it.

My non-Orthodox friends and family, on the other hand, were genuinely curious about my life-change. They asked for my story, empathized with how hard it was for me, and accepted me for both who I had been and who I had become. Speaking to one Conservative (the Jewish denomination) father was particularly enlightening -- he told me that all he wanted from his children was that they were good people. People like him see major life choices as part of the human experience -- he would no more attempt to dictate his child's religion (even though they were active in their religious community) than he would force them to join a profession that they didn't care for.

I have honestly sought the truth in my life and that's a difficult thing which I think should be applauded, even if you don't agree with my conclusions. The common Orthodox view that they have a monopoly on truth and that those who leave or marry out are akin to traitors, is ludicrous and arrogant. Human beings are not the property of the community or of our parents. We owe our gratitude and respect to those who raised us, but no more.

We have no moral responsibility to make babies for your community or to adhere to your dogma. We do, however, have the responsibility to support and respect the difficult personal choices our loved ones make in their lifetimes, even when we don't agree with them, and so do you, or you're not worthy of the people you love.

Modern Orthodoxy's State of Denial

I wasn't going to post about this article in the Times because I didn't think it would be very conducive to good conversation. But after being surprised by the responses to it by some Orthodox people I respect (Chana, Gil Student) as being generally tolerant and open-minded, I decided I have to.

The event which opens the piece is as follows:

Noah Feldman went to the Modern Orthodox high school Maimonides as a teen. As an adult, he is not Orthodox and has married a non-Jew, who is Korean-American. He brought his wife (then girlfriend) to his high school reunion. At the reunion, a class photo was taken. Later, the photo was sent out as part of an alumni newsletter. Except he and his girlfriend had been removed from the photo.

This story struck me as something out of Orwell, or from the former Soviet Union. Deciding not to publish the photograph, adding a disclaimer, or even attaching a letter from a Rabbi addressing why intermarriage is unacceptable would have been one thing, but falsifying a photo to pretend that a person doesn't even exist is dishonest and shameful.

It's also emblematic of the Modern Orthodox community's state of denial. Philosophically bound to the traditional Jewish rule of law, halakha, while at the same time overtly influenced by modernity, there are a few subjects they prefer to think about only in the abstract. It's easier to rail against the evils of intermarriage when you don't have to look Prof. Feldman in the face and tell him that he sinned by marrying his wife, that his family is somehow lesser than fully Jewish families. It's easier to maintain that the Torah is correct to call homosexual sex an abomination when you pretend that there are no gay people in your community.

I've seen this denial firsthand. I grew up in a very modern Modern Orthodox community. But what I experienced was not a community courageously combining modernity with its sacred beliefs, but one threatened by reality.

For example, I knew one family that refused to allow their future mother-in-law's live-in boyfriend into their home because they didn't want their younger children to think living together before marriage is normal. My Orthodox readers are probably thinking to themselves that that sounds perfectly reasonable. After all, they really don't want those kids growing up to think cohabitation is okay. But look how they're doing it! They're not having the couple over and then explaining afterwards to their children that it's not the halakhic way to act -- they're pretending the man does not exist because his very existence implies that there are alternatives to the halakhic way of life.

And what of all the debates that rage in the J-blogosphere about evolution and the Documentary Hypothesis and whether the Exodus actually happened? Do Modern Orthodox communities courageously address these issues, encouraging students to ask tough questions? Or do they largely pretend the issues don't exist, or are easily parried by answers like those of the Aish HaTorah crowd?

And what of those of us who simply decided we don't believe in Orthodoxy? Does the MO community honestly deal with the issue, saying that some people simply leave for any number of reasons? Or do they avoid talking about us when possible, pretending that leaving is simply not an alternative, and when the subject does come up, do they pretend that we all left because our daddies didn't love us enough or we couldn't resist the allure of drugs and sex?

Erasing people from a picture because they do not represent the ideal you wish to encourage is a cowardly act of denial. Noah Feldman didn't kill anyone, or commit a robbery, or even deliberately hurt anyone's feelings. He's simply a living example of a normal person who has made a choice that's made every day in this country. Rather than accepting the fact that it's possible to grow up Orthodox and go on to marry a non-Jew, this particular editor decided to pretend it didn't happen.

Listen, if you want to be Modern and Orthodox, you're going to have to have a little more courage than pretending those of us who are living reminders that your path isn't for everyone don't exist. You're going to have to honestly address the challenges to traditional Judaism raised by physics, biology, cosmology, textual criticism, and ethics.

You should also consider the morality of what you do. Is it moral to shun a person for deciding that your religion isn't for them? To pretend that they never existed? People like Feldman and me are as worthy of love and respect as anyone else is. That our very existence is a threat to your worldview is no excuse for the way you treat us.