(1) A number of them reported their children were experiencing confusion over their religious identity after the divorce.
(2) Many said their children experienced some form of alienation as a result of the divorce.
(3) Most spoke of new stresses in their lives and in the lives of their children.
(4) Many shared concerns about the absence of suitable role models for the children, especially for their boys.
These are all serious matters and they are all being experienced in the community around us. My hope is that unmasking them will prompt us all to recognize these effects when we see them and to do something about them when we can.
The choice to end a marriage is a painful and difficult one – all the more painful and difficult for the religious Jew, for whom shalom bayit is a solemn obligation and a source of pride. In a community where gender roles are so clearly defined, to find a way to have the role of the absent father filled by someone else is difficult if not impossible.
To be pushed to the point at which divorce seems like the best solution means the problem must be unbearable; and then to discover that divorce solves one set of problems only to create a new set of problems can be overwhelming.
Religious Confusion
When a frum marriage ends, one of the realities that sometimes results is the falling away from religious observance on the part of some family members. For those of us who identify religious observance as part and parcel of the good life we want for our children, this means that children have been harmed by the divorce. Coupled with the guilt and shame a woman may already be experiencing over the collapse of shalom bayit and what she may perceive to be her failure as a wife and as an observant Jew, the breaking away of one or more of her children from religious observance will almost certainly be a source of added pain.
Here is what one of the women said:
My son likes to go to his father and idolizes him. He is no longer frum. I think if I would have gotten a get right away, I would have thought divorce is a good thing…. My son is really torn. I feel so, so bad for him and I can’t even protect him. Life is so, so not fair. I hate it.
Notice how this woman internalizes responsibility for her son’s pain:
“If I would have gotten a get right away ” – as though she bears responsibility for not doing something right in the divorce process. And “I can’t even protect him” – she feels powerless and that she has failed in her responsibility as a Jewish mother. For her, the son’s falling away of from religious practice is directly her fault.
Sadly, this experience of religious confusion is relatively common when there is a divorce. One woman noted, “All three of my children are no longer frum today.” In her case, after her divorce her children followed her ex-husband as he reverted to the non-observant life he had lived before marriage.
Variety of Causes
When the older children of divorced parents abandon their religious practice, they do so for any number of reasons. Some children follow a non-observant parent in choosing no longer to be frum (as in the case cited above). Some children give up on their religious practice out of a sense of futility – as a reaction to their own experience of disillusionment, pain, and hopelessness. Some choose to no longer be frum because it’s a choice they can make, at a time when all the other choices are being made for them. Still others flounder in their religious practice because of the new complications of living a frum life.
