Why Running A Jewish Publication Led Me To Leave Orthodoxy

My journey from an idealistic Hasidic creative to an ex-Orthodox outsider, through my experience running a publication.

My Hasidic friends were as varying as yours.  You may see them and imagine that they are somehow different, a different species even, in which they all act the same because they all dress the same.  Well, maybe even in those who wish that were true, the power of humanity shone through.

I never truly found a creative home until I joined the Hasidic world, and it was there I found those friends who just got me.  Just got that sense of being both in the world and out of it at the same time, yearning for something bigger than just this life while also dying to get others to feel that yearning.

Creativity, when it’s accessed in a way that liberates, is a form of inner exploration.  You can’t truly express in any unique way if you can’t find the unique person inside.  So when I found my creative people in my Hasidic world, we all were already searchers of various sorts.  Most of us didn’t grow up Hasidic: we chose it, usually around when we were in college or shortly after.  Those who grew up Hasidic largely never felt like they belonged, as most creatives will feel, and will feel even more in a community where you are told to behave and think a certain way if you want to belong.

We got together, and tried varying experiments for a few years.  We’d start writing groups where we’d challenge each other to write Jewish sci-fi, imagining a world where the Messiah didn’t come in time, and Jews had to contend with the fallout.  A friend of mine who was a rabbi in a small town in New Jersey would come into Brooklyn every year to run a special art exhibit of Hasidic painters.  We’d do open mics, comedy shows, concerts, poetry readings and generally just look for any excuse to spend some creative time together while hopefully pulling in an audience.

It didn’t take a long in such a little world to start to make waves. I was writing a blog right at that perfect time when people actually cared about blogs and when Facebook would spread shares far and wide, so my writing was taking off. Relative to the world of Hasidic Jews who used the internet, at least.

All this came together when myself and a number of writer friends decided that we should start a publication together: we were making our own waves and imagined that together we could do something bigger.

We started idealistically.  We, in essence, just wanted to make this an extension of all the other activities we had done: we wanted to make our lives beautiful, and we wanted to share that beauty with the world.

The essence of the publication was to focus on the inner world of each creative: most of us wrote personal essays, but we also quickly veered into giving voice to other creatives.  We shot music videos featuring our favorite musicians, shot a documentary series, and ran experiments like starting an Etsy-type store and an online creativity class website.  It all felt exciting and new, and it all came from a simple philosophy: the more we empowered ourselves and others to share what was true and deep in our hearts, the more that our religious lives would be enriched.

This philosophy is the key to understanding what happened next: we had built, in essence, a structure by which we would do our best to create art that reflected our inner lives, with an absolute trust that what would come out might be messy, but if it was honest and true to what was within that it could only result in us realizing the deeper truths of our religious beliefs. 

In other words, the art we created simply could never be in conflict with our religious beliefs, no matter how deep we dug into our own hearts.

For the first year or so, that’s exactly what happened. As we predicted, combining our voices helped our site gain a traction it wouldn’t have as just a personal blog.  And we were quickly becoming well-known if not mainstream in the Orthodox Jewish world, especially the Hasidic world.

And more importantly, we were finding our voices. We had built a camaraderie and a cohort of people who were all excited about writing together in a way that empowered each other, even when we disagreed.  In so doing, we encouraged each other to dig deeper, to write deeper, to think deeper.  We started taking more risks, writing more bravely, and thinking more openly.  They wrote about eating on Yom Kippur (the holiest fast day) because of a history of anorexia, another about things she wished she had been taught about birth control, and I continued my writing about being bipolar.

Things sped up. Suddenly, a writer chose to write a piece about sex. Another about their experience as an abuse victim. Another about how a “sexual revolution” was the only way we could really talk about abuse.

Our publication soon became known for writing the things no other Orthodox publication (let alone Hasidic publication!) would do.  We felt like we were doing something revolutionary, that our philosophy was being proven right: despite the inevitable backlash from the more close-minded religious people, we knew that we were speaking to things people were dying to hear, and all of us only felt more Jewish for all of our efforts.

We were soon ready to open our doors: we started taking guest essays, and people inspired by our writing joined in quickly.  Due to the taboo nature of what a lot of us wrote about, in addition to the fact that no other Orthodox publication would consider such writing, a lot of our guest writers took on similar themes.

This became even more true when we became a destination for former victims of Marc Gafni, a well known rabbi who had transformed himself into a self-help guru… and who had sexually abused multiple women in Israel.

One of his former wives wrote for us.  Another victim followed up.  This led to victims speaking up in other publications, and soon the story spread far and wide, causing his attempt at re-invention to be stalled (if only as much as one can hope for).

All of this, still, felt like part of a holy mission: the art we were creating was helping people, and that felt like the perfect validation of our philosophy.  Our belief in art being an access point to our souls, and thus truth, was in perfect alignment with our religiosity.

That’s about when things started to shift.

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I am still working to figure out how it all went down, but there was always one consistent truth: the more we exposed abuse, the more our movement split.

As we became known for publishing pieces about abuse, we were no longer seen only as a place to publish pieces that the Orthodox world wouldn’t publish, but a place to publish pieces the Orthodox world wouldn’t accept being published.

Some of our writers grew concerned that we were becoming “activists” and “political,” both things when we started our publication we were committed to avoiding.  To us, religion was above such trivialities, and could only unite.  Religious art all the more so.

But this, in my mind, seemed to conflict with our commitment to truth: surely, if these people were telling their stories of abuse, stories that were being covered up or hidden in some form, then we were committed to a higher version of truth?  Surely this was in line with everything we had believed up until now?  

Not only that, the truth telling seemed to make a difference, if only to the writers. They’d tell us how much it meant to be published, to be heard.  And this writing seemed to create a snowball effect: the more people we published, the more who wanted to be published.  Surely this was a sign of our religion calling on us to empower others, I wondered?

And yet, the more we published, the more resistance we faced. Not just from within, but from outside.  Suddenly, people were accusing us of being “divisive” and “negative.”  Even those sympathetic to the stories felt we should keep these discussions behind closed doors.  I wondered why those same people seemed to appreciate all the other things we didn’t do behind closed doors.  Why some taboos and not others?

Another thing happened: the sheer number of submissions started affecting me.  Up until that moment, I had been sure that none of these stories resembled anything but specific, one-off stories.  For years, I had heard the accusation that the Ultra-Orthodox world was facing a similar abuse scandal as the Catholic church, and I had always dismissed such stories.  There was nothing systemic, and I believed without questions what my friends and my leaders said: we were no different or worse than any other community.  We couldn’t be, since we represented truth.

But reading the submissions gave me a sort of eagle eye view I had never had.  

In fact, our publication received so many submissions that we eventually started a sister publication devoted just to these stories, and specific to anonymous stories.  And that’s when the stories truly opened up.

Suddenly, I was reading dozens, then hundreds, of pieces about abuse.  Stories about husbands raping their wives. Rabbis abusing their students.  Fathers.  Brothers.  Worse.

And one consistent theme: no one believed them.  There was nowhere to go, no one to tell.  More than that: a deep, deep fear of what would happen if they did speak out.  Those who did open up were often told to keep quiet.  Others were abused worse once they did say something.  Sometimes, schools hid stories.  Synagogues.  Leaders.

It was everywhere, and it was only from the people who were brave enough to actually put their thoughts down onto paper and send them into us.  

And so, the tenor of the backlash against these pieces getting published suddenly took on another form in my mind: they weren’t just negative reactions. They were the exact same thinking that these abuse victims faced on a personal level, but now shared yet again on the internet.  All those lines I was getting from those commenting negatively sounded scarily similar to the lines our writers had experienced when they tried opening up in other forums.

Learning about this pushed me to face one more truth I had been hiding from: the scandal was indeed as bad as I had heard.  It turned out that the talking points about us only having individual cases just wasn’t true.  And I couldn’t pretend that personal stories would ever be enough if we were to face this honestly.

Suddenly, I found myself less and less concerned with being considered “divisive” or “political” or “negative.”  The philosophy still held: if it was true, it deserved to be written, and it couldn’t possibly contradict my religious beliefs.  The issue wasn’t the beliefs, and so they had to work with the truth, no matter how uncomfortable those truths ended up being.

If people didn’t like it, then they had a problem with truth, and so they were implicitly admitting that they couldn’t imagine how their religious beliefs could still hold up if the truth created a tension with those beliefs.  I decided to ignore the negative reactions when writing, and to just get in a flow and share what I was seeing.

As a leader, I could sense trouble brewing from within our publication and our group of writers.  I could sense that I was veering from the originally stated mission, but I felt convinced that they could see that I still believed in the philosophy, but just was now adjusting to new truths I was learning.  And so I didn’t communicate much with them about my changes, I just kept writing.  I didn’t think that it would possibly be too upsetting.  I was just one writer, I thought.  Just one person.  We all expected each person to live their own way according to their philosophy, so surely my role as leader was not as important as my role as writer in that regard.

I was wrong, of course.  As I became more outspoken, the publication became associated more with my rebellion.  We were no longer seen as good people telling our own stories, but troublemakers stirring the pot.  

It didn’t help that I publicly broke from my Hasidic community as this was going on, or that I was a vocal Trump opponent, or that I became more political as time passed and less likely to look the other way when I saw bigotry.

I wasn’t just going against the grain one way, in other words.  I was pushing and pushing and pushing.  I was generally more negative, more angry.  Seeing the pushback against our publication and against me in particular further enraged me: working so hard to help tell the stories of those who had been abused only to then be told that I was hurting the Jewish people for doing so further reinforced to me that the world I had joined was largely in denial of its problems, further exacerbating them.

And as my rage grew, and my writing reflected it, the writers who had signed up for something else couldn’t really be blamed when they decided to move on.  I wasn’t just creating a storm for myself: my position as leader caused my beliefs to be associated with the publication as a whole.  

And so some left.  Most quietly, calmly, sadly.  This hadn’t started as a job: it was their passion, and we had all started as volunteers.  It was only in the later years that we could afford to pay our writers a bit. And so leaving was a matter of choice, of having found other passions.  And for some, of disassociating.

As they left, others joined and those, along with those who had decided to stay, had in a sense been self-selected since the publication had become more associated with activism.  And so the reputation became even more cemented.

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It all came to a head the day I published an article calling for queer rights in the Orthodox world, and specifically for the laws to be reinterpreted based on the fact that people being able to live as queer Jews in public in their communities was necessary for their health.  I took it a step further and argued they should be able to have sex, something almost all Orthodox Jewish law and belief expressly prohibits.  

At this point, I was used to people being upset with my writing, and I knew that this one would cause a stir.  So when the reactions started pouring in, I wasn’t very fazed.  What I didn’t expect, though, was the stir it caused from within.

Almost immediately, we lost a number of donors.  I received emails from some of my longtime supporters who felt I had gone too far and violated the mission of the organization (now also an in person community based out of my home).  They felt betrayed, although I can’t imagine they could have been very surprised.

And then, on the same day, two writers quit. Both had been there from the beginning, and had held on hard despite my activism.  And I knew that for both, this was likely a long time coming.  This just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Even so, it hit me hard.  I had been holding desperately onto the vision of a community where both those who were deeply committed to the more traditional forms of Orthodoxy as well as those who were veering away from it could share the same space.  This felt like the final message: it would never actually happen.  The question I was faced with was why.

Having to face writers deserting and rebelling over some of my writing forced me to face my own failures as a leader.  There was a lot to examine, and a lot of wrong turns.

But even as I learned about myself, I could not help but feel I was seeing something larger and more important than myself or any one publication in the experiences we were all facing.

First, there was this mission we had started with: that we would stay away from anything political or negative.  The fact that we even thought this would be possible while writing about topics like abuse, I believe, was hopelessly naive.  

In a world where abuse is ignored, covered up, and advocates are silenced, it is impossible for any discussion around abuse to be apolitical.  The very act of writing about abuse throws the writer and the publication into a political arena, in which power, leadership, and communal norms are all part of the story.  

This hope that by sticking to the personal we could avoid the political was similarly starry-eyed.  What happens when you let people tell their story without filtering and controlling them?  Then their stories will involve power dynamics, wider issues, societal issues.  The only way to avoid this is to stick to stories that fall within the accepted discourse or to varnish out the details that would draw attention (incidentally, this is why so much religious art is so utterly banal).

Then there was this idea that we could somehow build a community of writers who were totally diverse.  From the beginning, this was a lie I told myself.  One of our early writers had wanted to write a piece about how he felt the Torah was written by man.  For the first time, we told a writer he couldn’t publish a piece: we felt it encroached on the “no negativity” and “no politics” rule.  That it attacked a group of people, and so belonged somewhere else.  He got so upset that he left us as a writer.

In other words, we always had guardrails.  It was just that they evolved over time, and that our pretending they weren’t there made us more susceptible to hurt those who trusted us when we told them they’d be accepted.

But even these issues felt almost small compared to something bigger that I have only begun to truly look straight in the face. It is something so much larger that I actually think it may have had to do a lot more with the group of people we got together and the context we operated under than the actual publication itself.  

When we started, we were largely a group of creatives who had found ourselves in one way or another connected to Orthodox Judaism.  More specifically, the majority of us were part of a Hasidic community.  And of those people, most of us had either not grown up in the community or had parents who joined at some point.  This made us outliers, and relatively progressive compared to our communities.  And by definition, it almost guaranteed we were in a state of identity flux: we were on a waystation of identity more than a destination.

And that combined with our naivety about where our writing would lead, I think, led us inevitably into a collision course with the Haredi Jewish world.  Not necessarily even through our publication (although that was certainly the case for me), but simply by virtue of who we were.

For me, it was the thousand micro-moments of having to face a simple reality: the community I had turned my life inside out to join was indeed far more broken than I had ever believed.  Facing story after story of abuse followed by seeing the way people reacted to these stories being told followed by discussions with victims in which they described the way their stories were hushed up led me to slowly but inexorably face a reality I had been hiding from: not only was my community broken, it was in no way a palliative or cure to the secular world.  It was just another community with scandals, lies, power plays, and no monopoly on truth or morality.  In many ways, it was far worse off.

And since I had voluntarily joined this community, this painful revelation was all the more pronounced: I was sold a bill of goods.  And it would eventually take years for me to be able to disentangle all the lies I had been told in order to join.

Others among the writers, especially the ones who stuck with our community, went through similar transformations.  Many who had started off in the Hasidic community left it to varying degrees, some even leaving Orthodoxy altogether.  Very often, it was because they had their own experiences seeing the falseness of what they had bought into.

But something else happened, and to me it was far more revelatory than even my own experience: others became more religious.  More committed to Orthodoxy, and more defensive of the communities they were part of than when they originally joined us.  

When we had started, almost all of us were out-of-the-box but within-the-box: dreamers who imagined a far grander religious world than the one we were currently living in.  In other words, we saw problems, but it was all in the context of a deep belief in the system we were part of.  The people in the system might be failing, but the system itself was beautiful.  And this combination of beliefs allowed us to hold onto a diversity of beliefs in one place: as long as we all bought into the system, we could all have varying views of how it would evolve in the future.

But our lives, and our writing, became pressure tests of how bought into the system we actually were. And the more we got tested, the more a choice had to be made: either buy into the system or let it go.

It really came down to our initial creative philosophy: if our religion and beliefs (the system, in other words) were actually true, then reality couldn’t conflict with those beliefs.  For people like myself, we had tested out this philosophy, and found that the more reality conflicted with our beliefs, the more our beliefs and the system overall were broken.  If everything we had bought into kept failing the test of reality, then the initial theory we had was broken, and it was time to let go.

But that is only one option.

Another is to force reality into your beliefs.  If there is a never-ending scandal of abuse, then you either push it away by denying the testimony of survivors or rationalize the scandal (“It is no different than the outside world.” “Yes, we have problems, but talking about them is making the problems worse.” “These activists have an agenda.”).  If queer people are suffering, then the problem can’t be (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish law: it has to be something wrong with the queer people (or their advocates or the way we’re interpreting the Jewish law or or or..).  

Everyone had their own reasons for doubling down on their beliefs, just as everyone who loosened their beliefs weren’t necessarily doing so because of their experience writing for the publication.  But it was in the publication (and those leaving the publication) where it was expressed.

And in the end, seeing the way so few of us ended up staying in that belief in the system while holding reality as it was, made me even more convinced of the brokenness of the world I had entered.  The system itself was producing people who either left it or doubled down on it.  The only word I had for that was extremism.  And seeing the way people I had seen full of light and creativity and imagination turn more and more towards dogma made me even more confident of letting go.

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Ultimately, I will always be so honored, thankful, and amazed that this time in my life even occurred.  It was a dream, in so many ways, and anyone who can immerse themselves in a creative endeavor for so long, especially with other creative dreamers, should consider themselves lucky.

And in many ways, it makes me even more sure of the original philosophy: reality tested against belief through creative expression is something unimaginably powerful.  People don’t only react against abuse victims: they specifically act against the stories of victims.  They rightfully see stories as gateways to change, and in their attempts to silence reveal the power stories have to transform the world.

I can say in full confidence that I probably would not have left my Hasidic community, and certainly my Orthodox beliefs, if it hadn’t been for my experience as a writer and editor with a birds-eye-view of the world I had entered.  

That’s not a tragedy.  Just the opposite.  In being forced to face reality, I was forced to live life as it is instead of as I hoped it might be.  In so doing, I was forced to be more compassionate, more honest, and more thoughtful.  And while the leaving itself was traumatic and painful, I would rather I live a real life than an imagined one, constantly forcing reality into my mind in a way that fits.

In retrospect, I can see why our publication was likely doomed to failure.  But for a brief flash, it was beautiful because a few of us were willing to combine reality and dreams into one beautiful concoction.

And in that, I see hope: as long as there are people willing to have their feet on the ground and their heads in the clouds, dreams will come down to earth and reality will soar into the atmosphere.