The 3 Main Reasons Adults Go OTD
And what we can do about it.
In the past, the focus of the OTD crisis was on teens at risk. But in recent years, more and more adults have begun drifting away. It's important to understand where this urge to leave is coming from if we want to make it more conducive for people to stay.
So what about the adults? What is driving them away from frum life?
In a nutshell, it's a combination of feeling pushed away from the community together with a strong pull to the outside world. Here we'll explore three main push factors.
Reason OneThey feel they don't fit in.
Most of the people at greatest risk of going OTD are the kinds of people who feel different from the mainstream. Maybe they got divorced; or they're children of divorce; or perhaps they or their parents are baalei teshuva. This feeling of not being the norm, or not being the "ideal" frum person, creates distance between themselves and the community.
And it's not just in their heads. In subtle ways, the message is inadvertently driven home — for example, when they have a harder time getting into yeshivas, or when they have a harder time in shidduchim.
When a person feels uncomfortable in the frum world, and feels like they don't fit in, this can lead them to seek out a new community where they hope they'll find their place.
Reason TwoThey are incapable of fully participating in frum life.
There's a distance that grows between a person and the frum community when something about their identity strips away their ability to fully participate in frum life. For example, a child of divorce might be embarrassed to show up at shul alone, without his father. That embarrassment can hold him back from davening in shul with a minyan, or going to father-son learning programs.
Other times it's a limitation born of their circumstances. For example, an older single woman living alone simply doesn't have a spouse to make kiddish and havdalah. As hard as this person tries, when she's on her own, Shabbos simply doesn't feel the way it did growing up — the way Shabbos feels with a family, with a husband and wife.
Regardless of the root — whether it's embarrassment or circumstantial — the fact that these individuals are not participating in core activities of the frum lifestyle disconnects them. Their Shabbos stops feeling like Shabbos. Their Yom Tov stops feeling like Yom Tov. They miss out on key opportunities to participate in important and meaningful aspects of frum life. This disconnection can lead them to question or eventually to throw in the towel.
Reason ThreeThey lost their trust in frum figures.
When a person loses their trust in frum figures they can also begin losing their connection to the frum world. Think of victims of abuse — especially when that abuse was perpetrated by a family member or an authority figure. The abuse can lead a person to mistrust family, and to want to disconnect from family they view as unhealthy or toxic. If they feel frum authority figures didn't pull through to protect them from the abuse, or worse, if it was a frum authority figure who abused them, they can lose their faith in religious authority figures as well.
The victim of abuse might have even been afraid to talk to friends about what was going on out of fear the word would spread and it would ruin their reputation in the community. This can drive a wedge between themselves and their friends, too.
When this happens, a person may look for friendship and connection elsewhere — friends outside the community they feel are safer to confide in; people they come to consider their "chosen family."
Keroivim's solution
If adults are leaving because of stigma, because of feeling they don't fit in; because of an inability to participate fully in frum life; and because they've lost their trust in frum figures — the antidote is to help them find ways to address those problems or needs without feeling like the only fix is to leave. They should be made to feel like valued members in the community: not stigmatized, but reputable. They need more opportunities to participate in frum life. They need friends, family, and authority figures they can count on.
This is the work of Keroivim. We help individuals leaving, and their family members, build back these connections to frum life. We strategize with them ways to embrace their identity without fear of stigma and find a place for themselves in the frum world — and we work with their family to reinforce this message. We help them find ways to reconnect to frum practices, and work with their families to find opportunities to include them in these practices. And we help them reconnect: to find the frum friends they can trust, the frum authority figures who will have their back, and to build back bridges to their family.
