Faith and doubt

Faith and doubt in Deborah Feldman’s account are not opposing states with a clean boundary between them. Her trust in religious explanations weakens as she confronts suffering, marital unhappiness, and restrictions on her future, yet the search for meaning persists. Even as she questions God and leaves the religious world that shaped her, she continues to interpret events through the possibility of providence, eventually locating faith less in prescribed observance than in an inward sense of connection and agency.

Skepticism and the search for explanation

At six months pregnant, Deborah is given an audience with Reb Chaim, a celebrated kabbalist visiting from Israel. She has no particular wish to consult him: she is already skeptical of mysticism, has been questioning her belief in God, and fears people who claim an all-seeing power. The appointment takes place at two in the morning, with Reb Chaim’s wife sitting in the room to observe the rules against a man and woman being alone together. He asks for Deborah’s birthday and makes calculations. The scene places her doubt beside the community’s reverence for spiritual authority without suggesting that the encounter resolves her uncertainty.

A later worry about the matchmaker who arranged her marriage shows how readily religious ideas about justice can become entangled with everyday misfortune. After hearing that the matchmaker feels underpaid, Eli says they should appease her, since an unhappy matchmaker is believed to bring bad luck. Deborah wonders whether the woman’s resentment might explain the misery of the marriage, then rejects the thought as too simple a system of reward and punishment. If she and Eli are being punished, she reasons, there are more consequential reasons to consider. Her questioning is not yet a rejection of God; it is resistance to an explanation that makes suffering depend on a minor grievance.

From religious doubt to moral doubt

Deborah describes her changing belief as a progression: she once believed in God, then believed while hating him, and eventually wondered whether events were random and meaningless. The apparent absence of punishment for people outside Hasidic life sharpens the question. Their ordinary lives seem to contradict the idea that religious conformity is necessary to avoid divine retribution. Her doubt therefore concerns not only whether God exists, but whether the moral order she has been taught accurately describes the world.

Her discovery that her mother, Rachel Levy, had left Williamsburg because she was gay adds another dimension to Deborah’s understanding of the religious community. Watching a documentary about gay Orthodox Jews, she recognizes her mother among its contributors and learns a fact that had been hidden from her. The revelation does not supply a new religious doctrine, but it exposes the distance between communal appearances and private lives. That distance resonates with Deborah’s own concealed questions and makes inherited explanations less secure.

Motherhood also turns doubt into an ethical question about the future. Deborah fears that when Yitzy turns three, he will receive payos and enter cheder, where boys study Torah from morning until afternoon. She cannot bear the prospect of his life narrowing while she seeks to broaden her own horizons. Her concern is not simply whether she can leave, but whether it is right to let her son be formed by a life she increasingly experiences as limiting. The faith tradition that once supplied the terms of her life now stands alongside a competing responsibility: protecting her child’s possibilities.

Faith beyond religious authority

At Sarah Lawrence College, Polly offers Deborah an example of belief that persists after leaving religion. Polly describes years of expecting happiness and encourages the idea that belief can help bring a desired future into being. Deborah recognizes that Polly has carried her own system of faith with her. The example leaves her asking whether people can live without faith, however they name it. This is not a return to the religious explanations she has begun to question; it is an acknowledgment that hope and trust may take other forms.

The distinction matters because Deborah does not imagine freedom as a simple exchange of religious restriction for material comfort. The women around her may have larger homes and finer clothes, but she sees them as searching, too, for something more satisfying. Luxury is not her purpose. She wants to accomplish something and leave a mark, even while accepting that struggle may remain. Her search for meaning moves away from the promise that obedience will guarantee reward and toward the uncertain work of choosing what a worthwhile life might be.

Signs, providence, and departure

As the house where Deborah grew up deteriorates, its peeling paint and worn stairs become part of how she understands her own weakening faith. The building’s foundations seem to her to be collapsing alongside the foundations of childhood belief. She reads this parallel as a sign that a force greater than herself has set her on a path away from the life she was given. The interpretation is significant precisely because doubt has not erased her impulse to read events spiritually: she now uses that impulse to imagine departure rather than submission.

The same tension returns after the car accident at midnight, as the date changes to September 9, 2009. Reb Chaim had told her to watch for the number nine, associated in his account with death and rebirth. In the hospital, Deborah considers whether surviving the crash is meant to frighten her back into obedience or instead marks a break between her former life and what follows. She cannot know which interpretation is correct, but the coincidence becomes a dividing point in her own understanding. The next day she signs a contract to write a memoir, treating the work as a final remembrance of an identity she believes she has left behind.

A changed, inward faith

The decision to leave does not mean that Deborah immediately feels secure. Readers of her anonymous blog warn that a religious community or rabbinical court may prevent her from leaving with Yitzy, even if she tries to observe the laws. Their warnings make the practical and familial stakes of departure plain. Deborah nevertheless believes that she and her son will one day be free, though she has no detailed plan. Her conviction survives uncertainty about the means and timing of escape.

After leaving, she changes her phone number and withholds her new address so she cannot be tracked down. In the privacy of their new circumstances, she and Yitzy begin to know one another differently. Deborah teaches him English, reads books with him, and watches Sesame Street with him; within weeks, he is speaking English and sharing conversations with her at bedtime. This new closeness gives freedom a concrete, relational meaning: she can be his mother without others standing between them.

Deborah’s eventual account of Jewish identity clarifies that leaving religious practice has not made her wish to erase her history. She comes to understand Jewishness as something rooted in history, including ancestors persecuted for their blood and faith. Her inherited identity becomes a source of resilience rather than a prescription for paradise, and God becomes an inward ally rather than an authority guaranteeing a particular outcome. The movement is not from faith to its absence, but from imposed certainty toward a faith she can claim on her own terms. Its conclusion is self-ownership: she understands freedom as the power to make decisions about her life while leaving open the possibility that others deserve that power, too.