Прочел подборку интервью бывших ортодоксов, порвавших с религией.
По словам хозяина блога, цель этого проекта - опровергнуть распространенные стереотипы об ушельцах:

There are so many warped views about the lives of those who have chosen to stop being observant. For example, at some point or another I've heard all of the following ideas put forward by well-meaning individuals: 1. We are deeply unhappy and unfulfilled. 2. We have no morals. 3. All we do with our lives is eat cheeseburgers, have sex, and do drugs.4. The main reason we left is because we wanted to have sex. 5. We intensely despise religious Jews and Judaism. 6.The whole purpose of our lives is just to make money.

Соответственно, проинтервьюированы были только успешные экс-ортодоксы, живущие счастливой полноценной жизнью. В результате картина получилась несколько однобокой - например, полностью отсутствует характерная для этого жанра чернуха. Зато представлен весь спектр американской ортодоксии, от Modern Orthodox до совершенно диких хасидов.

В интервью есть много всякого интересного, поэтому в этом постинге ограничимся одним аспектом - собственно причинами ухода. Понятно, что у каждого они были свои, но чаще всего в интервью фигурировали две:

1. Несовместимость различных научных теорий (эволюционная, теория источников, результаты археологических изысканий, палеонтология) с ортодоксальной картиной мира.

2.Отношение ортодоксии к неевреям (I don’t like the approach to non-Jews in Jewish law, in Jewish culture, in daily interactions. No, I more than don’t like it. I disapprove of it and I think it is wrong....Since I was young, I always hated pashas zachor. On the shabbos before Purim, everyone is required to hear the torah portion in which god requires the Jews to remember that the Amalek people attacked the Jews in the desert when they were wandering to the "promised land" and as such, the Jews should heed god's command to wipe out the Amaleki people. Even as a child, I thought genocide sucked, big time...The sudden realization that the distinction I’d been taught between ‘medaber’ and ‘yehudi’ was just a cultural imposition and not a species barrier. When I started to realize that goyim were full fledged human beings, I started to think a lot about why such intelligent, even genius goyim weren’t converting to Judaism if yiddishkeit was as patently true as I was being told...Well I was never ‘ultra-orthodox’ but what surprised me most about non-Jewish people and non-religious Jews is how nice people can be! Growing up I was always told that non-Jewish people hate Jews, and that anyone who wasn’t orthodox didn’t have morals and was just interested in materialistic things, anyone who wasn’t Jewish was never really my friends, even if they were friendly they would eventually turn their back on me, etc. And not a single one of those things have been the case.)...I had been told at Bais Yaakov that "Esav sonei es Yaakov", that goyim should be stayed away from.

Среди других причин запомнились следующие:

1. Феминизм, возмущение неравноправием женщин в ортодоксальном обществе.

2. Тенденция современной ортодоксии к устрожению, сопровождающемуся интеллектуальной деградацией (When I was still young, my parents encouraged us to go to the public library every week, but by the time I was in high school you’d be hard pressed to find any reading material in our home which was not published by Feldheim or Artscroll...I was once working on a paper having to do with the history of Jewish communities in fifteenth century Italy. In doing that work, I came across a shailah/tshuvah about mixed-gender dancing. I was shocked that in a fairly orthodox setting of several hundred years ago, mixed social dancing was widely accepted, for the purposes of encouraging suitable matches. This led me to other reading and eventually to question the system of halacha.).

3. Невозможность самореализации в рамках определенной ортодоксальной модели (Self actualization simply isn't valued in the frum world, even in the MO world).

Весьма и весьма советую прочесть всем, кто интересуется социологией религии (не только еврейской), и/или ситуацией в современной ортодоксии. И кстати - было бы неплохо собрать подобные интервью на русскоязычной улице. Только у меня, полагаю, найдется болеше десятка соответствующих знакомых. Так что, если подсуетиться, материала может хватить даже на диссертацию.