Thursday, June 15, 2006

T3 followup

I just note in passing that question #3 below seems to be eliciting some interesting responses that are completely not what I expected when I posed it.

Perhaps this is just the byproduct of being in an Orthodox Jewish community for all my life, but there seems to be for some Jews a period of life where they go through an unofficial and self-imposed Rumspringa. The strictures of the Orthodox life impinge on them too much, and they decide they are no longer going to be observant.

Some do it surreptitiously - eating non-kosher food on the sly, going out to a club or concert on Shabbos, etc. For some it's a wholesale change of life, and they break with their families (or at least fight with them seriously) and become completely non-observant. There's a whole area of sociological study among some types about the Chasidic communities in particular (see this recent entry in the field). What I wondered about other people and their faiths is if there are those who have gone through such a process and returned.

It seems the rest of you had your own interpretation of the question, which I think is interesting.