Deborah’s deepening religious doubts

Devorah’s deepening religious doubts mark the gradual separation of faith from obedience in her life: teachings once accepted as unquestionable become claims she tests against her own experience, conscience, and desire for a wider world. The change is neither a single revelation nor a simple rejection of religion. It unfolds through uncertainty, moments of collective belonging, and the eventual recognition that inherited communal rules cannot bind her merely because earlier generations accepted them.

The First Break in Innocence

Devorah later identifies a particular turning point when she stopped believing in authority for its own sake and began reaching her own conclusions about the world around her. At the time, she does not understand that she has lost her innocence. What she does feel is the strain of maintaining a smooth appearance while her private thoughts conflict with the teachings she absorbs. Curiosity becomes difficult to conceal, and people around her try to pull her back before it carries her too far.

An early sign of this questioning appears when she compares rabbinic judgments about King David with the much smaller transgression of keeping English books. The moral scale troubles her: the king’s sexual history is treated as compatible with holiness, while her own reading is cast as spiritually dangerous. Rather than simply accepting the hierarchy, she measures it against what it seems to excuse and condemn. The comparison does not yet amount to a settled alternative belief, but it reveals a new habit of mind: inherited explanations can be examined, and their authority does not automatically make them persuasive.

That habit also alters how Devorah understands Zeidy. She has regarded him as intellectually brilliant, but comes to see that his genius is recognized chiefly in Torah study, while practical judgment is treated as a separate matter. Chaya has often said that Zeidy lacks street smarts. Devorah wonders whether this is a chosen way of life: reliance on God and inherited faith in place of practical defenses against the dangers of the outside world. The question unsettles a familiar ideal. What had looked like unquestioned wisdom may also involve a deliberate refusal to apply intelligence beyond religious study.

Inherited Covenants and Personal Obligation

The tension becomes especially sharp in Zeidy’s account of Shavuos. The family’s dairy and meat meals recall the Jews’ agreement at Mount Sinai to accept the Torah’s commandments, including laws that demand sacrifice. Zeidy insists that every Jewish soul was present at the revelation and therefore shares responsibility for the commitment. Devorah wonders whether her own soul consented because it wanted to belong, and recognizes in that imagined agreement her fear of openly thinking differently.

She distinguishes this ancient covenant from the much more recent commitment Zeidy made to the Satmar Rebbe. When the Rebbe planned a community in Williamsburg, Zeidy pledged allegiance before he knew what the arrangement would entail. In Devorah’s understanding, that pledge bound not only Zeidy but his family and future generations to the community. The contrast matters: a religious obligation presented as timeless and universal is not the same as a particular family’s submission to a modern communal authority.

Devorah also learns that Zeidy’s family in Europe had not lived according to the same extremism. They were educated, lived in homes with wooden floors and Persian carpets, and traveled freely across Europe. Against that history, the present restrictions look less like an inevitable expression of ancestral Jewish life and more like a choice made under particular conditions. Devorah recognizes Zeidy’s fear and loneliness as a survivor, and understands why a community might have seemed safe to him. But sympathy for his circumstances does not resolve her own question: if she was not present when he made his pledge, why should she be bound by all its consequences?

Belonging, Doubt, and the Forbidden Book

Her doubts do not prevent moments of powerful communal feeling. At the Satmar Rebbe’s annual Simchas Torah dance, Devorah is almost carried along by thousands of men singing and stamping on the stone floor. For a moment she imagines that the crowd’s emotion can join heaven and earth, wash away sin, and reveal her role in a shared destiny. She wonders whether her earlier scorn came from ignorance and whether the coldness between her and her people might disappear.

Yet the scene is complicated by her awareness of why she came. She is there with five friends and wants the approval of Miriam-Malka, the socially assured girl whose circle Devorah is anxious to remain part of. Her attendance is therefore at once a search for religious belonging and a performance of belonging before her peers. The intensity of the singing briefly makes faith feel immediate, but it does not silence the self-consciousness beneath her participation. Communal ecstasy can draw her in without resolving the doubts that separate her from it.

Reading makes the divide more visible. Zeidy warns that English acts like a slow poison to the soul and urges her to speak Yiddish, which he regards as the language approved by God. Devorah questions why Yiddish should count as pure when it, too, is made from languages once treated as secular. She has already stopped thinking in Yiddish, and the books Zeidy considers dangerous have become companions she conceals. Looking from her classroom toward the forbidden public library, she wonders whether reading has dulled her ability to respond to holiness. The possibility frightens her, but it also shows how completely she has internalized the judgment she is beginning to question.

Her reading of The Chosen gives that conflict a wider frame. The book introduces her to the history of the Hasidic movement and to a connection between Hasidic life and the histories she had thought distant from herself. As a child, she sides with Danny and finds his father’s Talmudic arguments familiar; she answers Reuven’s Zionist and liberated outlook with counterarguments. Only later does she understand that she could not yet make room for ideas that challenged the foundations on which her life depended. Her childhood acceptance had helped her survive, and she does not look back on that innocence with shame. She recognizes instead that Zeidy tried to preserve it as a valued inheritance, even as she eventually outgrew much of it.

From Private Questions to a Decision

As a mother, Devorah’s doubts acquire an immediate consequence. She imagines Yitzy turning three, receiving payos, and entering cheder, where boys study Torah from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. She fears that his childhood will be narrowed by the school, its religious dress, and the male influences that will dominate his life while she is pushed into the background. The future she once might have treated as simply prescribed now appears to her as a choice she would be making for her son. She cannot reconcile seeking wider horizons for herself with condemning him to a life of limitation.

The practical dangers of leaving remain real. Readers of her anonymous blog warn that no community will let her leave with her child if she is no longer religious, and one commenter, identifying as a lawyer, says it has never been done. They describe the prospect of a rabbinical court judging her unfit even if she continues to keep the laws. Devorah is not persuaded that their examples determine her future, but their warnings make clear that belief and exit are entangled with custody, resources, and the risk of losing her son. Her confidence that she and Yitzy will one day be free coexists with having no definite plan.

In the library, the books that once seemed forbidden now embody a life in which people can state their innermost thoughts openly. Devorah is tired of pretending to be pious and then chastising herself for faithlessness. Her desire is not only to escape physically; she wants to acknowledge herself and present her true face to the world. Writing and seeking publication offer a way to move from hidden thought into public expression, while her fear of losing the opportunity shows how uncertain that transition remains.

After the car accident, Devorah asks whether surviving it is the sign of a clean break she had been seeking. She describes herself as no longer nervous or uncertain and imagines the preceding twenty-three years as belonging to someone she no longer knows. The next day, she signs a memoir contract, treating the book as a final remembrance of the identity she has left behind. This is not evidence that every spiritual question has been answered; rather, the decisive change is that inherited authority no longer determines what she must do. Once away, she changes her phone number and withholds her address, then begins building an honest relationship with Yitzy without the community around them. Teaching him English and reading books together make the break concrete: what had been condemned as contamination becomes part of the future she is choosing for both of them.