Hidden Heretics by Ayala Fader

Author:Ayala Fader
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chavi’s Treatment of Doubt and Its Discontents

Chavi was a thoughtful Hasidic woman, a deep thinker. Her treatment history highlights the potential danger when rabbis and therapists collaborate to prioritize keeping a client within the fold. At the same time, despite a lot of suffering along the way, Chavi gradually figured out how to get help to clarify some major decisions she needed to make. This included therapy with a non-Orthodox psychiatrist, reading online, and meeting others living double lives, who had lived through very similar experiences.

Some years ago, Chavi found herself wondering, “Why am I not like everyone else? Why don’t I like to just stay home and bake kakush-cake [a delicious Hungarian “cocoa cake” similar to babka]?” Chavi, in fact, had gotten very depressed at the birth of her fifth child, when she began to feel trapped and hopeless. She said, “You know, the drudgery of having babies and not wanting to be locked in. That’s how it started.” She described getting increasingly cool to Judaism, despite having always been a very “emotional, spiritual person.” This coolness led to inappropriate desires for a Hasidic woman, like telling her husband, who was stringently pious, that she wanted to stop shaving her hair under her wig. She wondered if she had postpartum depression or if she was “crazy,” she told me. Over the next three years, as she slowly became an atheist and began living a double life, she would end up seeing a social worker, an activist, psychiatrists (one Orthodox, the other not), and a religious psychologist. She was also mis-prescribed medication for disorders she did not have.

It all began, as it does for many, when Chavi’s husband discovered her breaking the Sabbath with her phone. Very upset, he asked her to see a rabbinic activist, an askn, Rabbi Frank. She agreed because in fact, she and husband were at an impasse about more than her phone. Rabbi Frank came over, and they spoke for hours. They began meeting regularly. At first, Rabbi Frank was sympathetic and constructive, helping Chavi and her husband communicate better and encouraging her husband to be less religiously rigid. However, as she started trusting Rabbi Frank, Chavi let her guard down, revealing that her dissatisfaction was not just about her marriage; she had emuna questions too, and she felt trapped in her life. Rabbi Frank did an about-face. Wanting to be different, he told her, that wasn’t normal for a Jewish woman, a wife and mother. He wondered if she might have a mental illness, and he recommended she go to a Modern Orthodox therapist he knew, who would even meet her right in his office.

Rabbi Frank’s initial referral to the Modern Orthodox therapist at first seemed like a good fit. The female therapist was quite sympathetic to Chavi’s feeling of being “locked in.” Chavi remembered that the therapist said to her, “I get you because when I go to shul, I don’t have an issue chatting with my husband’s male friends, and if you were to tell me I couldn’t do that, that would be very stifling for me.

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