"People who hear my name think it's arrogant," says Yaron Yadan. "They don’t know that I was born with the name Yadan and are convinced that I changed my name to it because it carries the meaning ['scholar'] that I wanted to give my essence. But the truth is that I was born a Yadan." Yadan Yadan is chairman of Daat Emet, an organization whose name reflects his primary concern -- the search for "truth" -- as though there were something so absolute, especially coming from a rejection of what many see as the Divine truth.
The search for truth in its New Age guise has long since ceased to be an internal process which takes place at a writing table or in a library, and it can be seen in distinct changes of form and behavior. In an exceptional article published in the Jerusalem newspaper Kol HaIr in 1983, marking a decade since the Yom Kippur War, Ruth Yoval (later editor of Kol HaIr and then editor of the "Seven Days" supplement to Yediot Acharonot) described people born in the early 50s as the most screwed up, those who suffered the most from the war because they were still of mandatory service age. Many of those who survived the war returned to religion, joined cults, or simply left the country. Back then, when I read the article, I thought about some members of my class at the Hebrew Reali School, and I thought of them again when I watched the tape of an episode of "The future is here" (filmed for Channel 8 and to be broadcast in two weeks) at the home of producer Shula Speigel. The episode I saw deals with the connection between a return to religion and New Age. Yadon Yadan, who now works day and night to help the families of those who return to religion and who tries to "open the eyes of the Charedi about the veracity of the Talmud," stars in this episode.
Anyone who walks around the center of Jerusalem or the area of Shenkin Street or the new central bus station in Tel Aviv sees one of the more accepted links between the return to religion and New Age inspired searching in the guise of Chasidim who jump and sing, garbed in white and wearing crocheted kippot -- the Breslovers, also called by those in the know the "Grasslovers" in an attempt to explain their perpetual ecstasy. Return to religion Breslov style seems as fun as a trip to India, and there are more than a few who turn their prolonged search for truth or existential significance in India into a single absolute answer phrased as a return to religion.
I have a relative, beautiful and blessed with native talent, who has for several years lived a devout life in a Charedi city after her mother, who decided to wean her of her obsession with yoga and meditation and repeated visits to India, took her to a class on Kabbalah.
The smartest and most talented of my friends in high school almost got married to a known Jerusalemite returnee to religion, in a Charedi ceremony in a hall which separated women from the men. She was lucky; about a month before the wedding she decided to leave religion, become a vegetarian, and move to Amirim. She is now active in Emin.
A clerk in my bank, my son's good friend, and the kids of some of my friends have all returned to religion in recent years. When I lived in Jerusalem, I got used to hearing sentences like "We're getting more religious, thank G-d." Every secular person is well aware of the process of Charedization taking place around him, but sometimes we forget that the opposite process, going from Charedi to secular or from Charedi to moderate religious, leaving the closed world, is no less and perhaps even more common. There are also those, not many to be honest, who go back and forth between the two worlds, and there are the very rare cases of those who live in both worlds, in each with a separate identity.
Yadan, 43 years old, was born into a secular family, the fifth child of seven in a middle class family from Tiberias, back when the city was secular. When he was high school aged the family moved to the center of the country and he went to a Tel Aviv high school. He began the process of returning to religion when he was in tenth grade. "Just then, in 1976, the great wave of returning to religion began," he says. His teenaged years were filled with "an obsessive search for significance. I was very disturbed by the randomness of existence; I was very disturbed emotionally and experientially, and I decided to search." He first tried vegetarianism. Then he left his family home in Rishon LeTzion and moved to Tel Aviv and began to study yoga and meditation while continuing his high school studies.
"And then, one day when I was in twelfth grade, completely by chance I met some rabbi on a bus. We stood and swayed and I held a bag in my free hand. He suggested I put the bag down and we began to talk." As a result of this talk Yadan found himself at Naaseh V'Nishmah, which was then located on Rothschild Street in Tel Aviv and which served as a center for the return to religion. "I said to myself, 'I listen to lectures on all sorts of topics, so why not Judaism?'" For eight months he went to lectures by rabbis like Garelick and Sheinfeld while continuing his high school studies, "for part of the process of returning to religion is hiding the process, which makes is so very difficult for parents to identify the process their children are undergoing in time." At the end of this period he decided "to change completely, meaning to change my external image, a change that you're ready for only at the end of the process." Rabbi Sheinfeld sent him to the Ohr Sameach yeshiva in Jerusalem. This was in 1978.
"The mental break from my parents could not be bridged, but I kept up in contact, technically. When you return to religion you enter a kind of mystical bubble which causes you to lose all discretion and reasonable judgment. Today I see it with kids whose return to religion leads their parents to call me. These boys come with their parents and I see I have no one to talk to. A few days ago a boy came to see me and I told him, 'You know, Chazal said all sorts of incorrect things about the female body.' He got angry and said 'Everything Chazal said is absolute truth.' I asked him, 'If you get married and your wife has some gynecological problem, who would you send her to -- a doctor or a rabbi?" He said, "Of course a rabbi.'"
He managed to convince two of his brothers to return to religion in his wake. He maintained merely cordial relations with his other siblings. "The relatives of those who return to religion quite simply experience a loss. Even if connections are kept, they lose the child they once had and the relationship there once was. I see parents of returnees to religion who experience a process of mourning."
Two years after he returned to religion he was married off to Chana, also a returnee to religion. "From the point of her secular background she was compatible, because we both had high school diplomas, and of course she had returned to religion, because they don't match up returnees with a Charedi unless the Charedi is mentally ill or disabled. That's one of the things I tell parents of returnees to religion: carefully check what matches they make for them." After the wedding they moved to Rechasim, and there they had seven children. "I was supported by the kollel and National Insurance. At some point I also became the head of a kollel, first in Tiberias and then in Rechasim, and Chana stayed at home. At some point we opened a day care center at home, as though we didn't have enough kids." When he had already had five children, he began to have doubts.
"The process of leaving religion always begins with critical contemplation. I had been Charedi for 11 years and I had only five children when I began to get the idea of checking whether what is written in the Talmud matches the body of knowledge which existed in the era of Chazal. I discovered very difficult things. I saw that Chazal were not so smart and that their knowledge was Grade D in relation to their contemporaries. They sat in the study hall and made up reality, and based on the reality they made up they created laws which to this day obligate us. They could sit in the study hall and make up a story about a doe whose womb is narrow and therefore, so she can birth, G-d sends a snake to bite her and expand her birth canal, or they could make up all sorts of things about the build of a woman's body. I understood that the Talmud is not a Divine creation but a human one, and that humans can err. But they taught us to treat every bit of the Talmud as though it were the Divine truth.
"I also began to look at morality and I discovered that Jewish ethics not only don't coincide with universal morality, they contradict it. Jewish ethics are only for members of the club, and members of the club have to be both Jewish and observant. If they are not, according to Judaism they are not eligible for ethical treatment. What infuriates me is that when I say this to secular people they find it hard to hear, because we've been brainwashed with the myth that Judaism is a moral religion, humanistic and a light unto the nations. When I quote Jewish law to them, saying that one does not help a gentile woman give birth on the Sabbath but one does help a Jewish woman, they don't believe me because it is very difficult for a secular person to believe that Jewish law is racist."
At first he was afraid to tell his wife what he was thinking. "I was even afraid that she would go and tattle on me to the rabbi, and there would be a big scandal." He shared his process with her only after he met with Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz. "In 1991-1992 I met with him three times, and these meetings strengthened what I already understood. In their wake I began slowly inculcating my wife with my beliefs, and after two years of this it helped. In 1994, when we had already had seven children -- the youngest six months old -- we all left religion."
Rechasim exploded. "They were afraid of a domino effect and forbade people talking to us." The Yadan family moved to Tivon. The children were enrolled in secular educational institutions. The oldest was already 11 years old, and had to make up a lot of material "because here in Israel we finance the Charedi educational system to teach people to be ignorant and illiterate."
How do you convince children that everything they'd believed in until now and everything they’ve been taught is false?
"Not straight on. We began teaching the children English and allowing them to watch television at their grandparents'. We began traveling on the Sabbath and changed our manner of dress. They changed very gradually."
"When you return to religion everyone helps you solve all your financial problems. When you leave religion, it's just the opposite."
Their main problem was money. The State of Israel does not in any way help people who want to stop living a Charedi life and settle into secular society. "When you return to religion everyone helps you solve your financial problems. You never have to deal with financial problems. When you leave religion it's just the opposite. You feel like a new immigrant without an absorption basket. You don't really understand the reality around you, you have no real experience at real work or in looking for work and you have no money at all. We also had seven kids. I distributed newspapers in the morning and at night was a waiter. In the middle I studied to be an insurance agent. Remember, I was the head of a kollel before this and suddenly I found myself doing a student's work."
As a result of this pressure and because of a "lack of compatibility," Yaron and Chana Yadan were divorced two years after they left religion. He has remarried and has a year and a half old daughter. He supports himself with lectures and research funded by an American foundation. The results are the pamphlets which he distributes to the Charedi community via the five hundred official members of Daat Emet.
In the Channel 8 movie we see Yadan attempting to hand his material to Breslovers dancing in the Tel Aviv central bus station. One of them takes the material and tears it to shreds. "How would you feel if I took a book from you and tore it up?" Yadan asks him. One of the secular bystanders sides, of course, with the Charedi and screams at Yadan, "There's no way you'd tear up a book of Torah."
"I try to distribute material about Judaism to the Charedi community and to the secular community. To the Charedi community I distribute material which proves to them that the Talmud is not a Divine text, but a human creation. Our goal in Daat Emet is to infiltrate the Charedi society and identify islands of doubt and desire for knowledge. There are such islands."
There have been a few threats on his life, and once his house was broken into and all his printed material was stolen. The police are still investigating. "The Charedi public is in a panic about Daat Emet, perhaps because we fight using their weapons, perhaps because we know the outlook of the world we're fighting so well and we have proofs for all our claims."
They work in cooperation with Hillel, the most important organization in Israel in the field of helping those who leave religion. They find adoptive families for teenagers who leave religion, housing, education, work, emotional and social support. "When people who want to leave religion come to us and they need help, of course I send them to Hillel, and sometimes when those who are leaving religion want material or want to discuss the intellectual side of the process, Hillel sends them to me."
"In the heart of every secular person there is, it seems, some fear of G-d or memory of a grandfather who was a rabbi"
Yadan became a sort of Cherut Lapid for the families of those who return to religion. Parents, partners, and just worried friends turn to him for help. In the Channel 8 film he is taped meeting with a man whose wife is now in the process of returning to religion. Like certain violent strains of cancer, "Generally by the time you've identified the process, it's too late," Yadan says.
Aren't you afraid your children will return to religion?
"I'm not afraid because it's not scary. A return to religion would distress me greatly, but I'm not afraid because I think my children are aware of it, and they remember what they got out of."
His battle against religion and the return to religion also takes the form of defense. "We see that the secular society does not know or does not want to know the Charedi ideology, refuses to acknowledge the facts, and therefore gives in to Charedi blackmail without knowing what life in Charedi society is like and what values a Charedi lifestyle represents. I say that secular society in Israel is dancing a double tango -- with the Charedi on one hand and with the settlers on the other. With the Charedi because in the heart of every secular person there is, it seems, some fear of G-d or memory of a grandfather who was a rabbi, and the secular want to continue to believe that Judaism is an advanced, moral, and tolerant religion, and with the settlers because perhaps, in the depths of their hearts, there are a lot of people who want a Greater Israel and the settlers do the work for them."
Yadan lectures nearly every day to the secular, for a fee, on topics of Charedi life, the status of women, gentiles, and converts in Halacha, issues of state and religion in Judaism, democracy in Judaism, etc.
Is this a matter of "know your enemy"?
"Yes, but not only the external enemy; the enemy within ourselves. The enemy within society and the enemy lurking within each person's soul."
From: HaAretz February 2, 2005