Roberta G. Sands. The Spiritual Transformation of Jews Who Become Orthodox. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Tables. xiii + 297 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4384-7429-8.
Reviewed by C. Lynn Carr (Seton Hall University)
Published on H-Judaic (November, 2019)
Commissioned by Barbara Krawcowicz (Jagiellonian University)
Generalizing the Particular and the Difficulties of Defining the Spiritual
Roberta G. Sands’s The Spiritual Transformation of Jews Who Become Orthodox explores the radical changes of “Jewish men and women in the United States who were raised in relatively secular Jewish homes and later became Orthodox” (p. 2). Employing a “constructivist grounded theory research approach”—involving forty-eight interviews with Orthodox Jewish neophytes who had been religiously observant for two to thirty-eight years when interviewed between 2003 and 2006, interviews with ten “key informants” who worked to socialize the novices into Orthodoxy, focus groups, and participant responses to psychological instruments—Sands sets out to show that these religious intensifiers, called baalot (fem. pl.) and baalei (masc. pl.) teshuvah (Hebrew: “masters of return”), undergo “an all-embracing, protracted, open-ended process” that includes extensive revisions in their “internal being[s] and external environment[s]” (pp. 21, 2). Although several books have been written before on newcomers to Jewish Orthodoxy, Sands claims that her study differs from its predecessors due to its focus on a “post-hippie” cohort (though it includes an undisclosed number of baby boomers), incorporation of “psychosocial developmental theory to understand age/stage-related challenges” of baalei and baalot teshuvah (BT) in entering and integrating into Orthodox life, and emphasis on the process of “spirituality and spiritual transformation” (p. 3).
Sands takes a deep dive into BT’s early lives—their earliest memories thinking about God, spirituality, religion, personal-familial challenges, and inspiring experiences—without finding any patterns amid the diversity. Conspicuous in this initial chapter is a key informant’s analysis (without any discussion of Sands’s) that poor relationships with parents in childhood present challenges for later religious observance: “He said that some people have difficulty with the idea of a loving, compassionate God, but that emotionally balanced people move ahead smoothly. He added that the more selfish a person is the harder it is for the individual to do mitzvot (commanded obligations)” (p. 32). Sands groups participants by their early Jewish education and observance: minimalists, mainstreamers, and modern traditionalists. While these seem initially like categories without consequence, in the following chapter Sands explains that the diverse experiences comprise the first state in a nonlinear process of change that she has constructed by tweaking prior stage models in the religious conversion literature. Her states include: beginning, random exploration, existential vacuum, spiritual shock, active exploration of Judaism, transitioning, reversals, and commitment.
Next, Sands examines the psychosocial developmental stages of participants based on their age when they committed to Orthodoxy and then their age at the time of interview. She describes in broad strokes the issues of participants at each stage as expected in psychological literature. She then presents participants’ mean scores on the Modified Erikson Psychosocial Stage Inventory, finding little, except that length of time as BT was “not associated with greater psychosocial development” and that women scored higher than men in all stages (p. 106).
The book is at its best in the middle, offering in-depth, readable descriptions of participants’ spiritual/religious experiences. Chapter 4 discusses the challenges BT endured in their resocialization process, spiritual guidance, and adaptation to a new way of life. Using quotes from BT, Sands illustrates the difficulties and joys of keeping shabbat (the Sabbath) and of davening (praying). Sands notes that “Baalei teshuvah are encouraged to daven with kavanah (concentration, intention),” which she explains, curiously, by quoting Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a founder of the Jewish Renewal movement—in many ways, a far cry from Orthodoxy (p. 124). In chapter 5, “Marriage, Parenting, and Relations with the Family of Origin,” Sands shows that most BT married other BT, “partially due to attitudes of those who were raised Orthodox and partly the cultural similarity between ballei and baalot teshuvah” (p. 139). Chapter 6, “Spiritual and Religious Struggles,” is devoted to struggles, including those involving gender inequities in Jewish Orthodoxy; “infertility, illness, and death”; maintaining belief; and “lingering attraction to the secular world” (pp. 174, 185).
In chapter 7, Sands again changes tack, offering an analysis of the psychological and social integration of BT. Both are processes beset with challenges; for most BT, Sands asserts, both types of integration are ongoing and partial. Chapter 8 discusses participants’ experiences with healing, gratitude, understandings of and relationship with God, and spiritual aspirations and growth. In her final chapter, she outlines “the spiritual transformation process”: it is “open-ended” and lifelong, requiring resocialization; it is most likely to happen in late adolescence and early adulthood; it “affects one’s life fundamentally”; “spiritual struggles can occur before and after one makes a commitment”; “supportive community” is necessary; newcomers can provide community for each other; it “involves the processes of psychological and social integration” to varying degrees of success; and where BT are concerned, “spirituality and religiousness are intertwined” (pp. 258, 259, 230).
While there are many great insights in this book, Sands’s articulation of her thesis is intellectually troublesome. She defines spirituality as “both a subjective experience of closeness to God and the performance of actions related to living within the framework of the Torah” (p. 5). Merging completely what many scholars and lay persons have long distinguished as the (overlapping) spiritual and religious (Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America [2001] and Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion [2001]), Sands initially explains this choice using Jewish religious texts on the notion of kedushah (holiness): “subjectively there is a feeling of connection to God that is experienced in tandem with performing religious obligations” (p. 5). She doubles down in the conclusion, stating that even though many of the men in the study “rejected the term spirituality, viewing themselves as religious but not spiritual”—associating “spirituality” with the “non-religious and offbeat” as well as yogurt—“in the light of the definition used in this study, I continue to assert that in the case of the spiritual transformation of baalei teshuva, spirituality and religiousness are intertwined” (pp. 260, 224, 260). Having defined spirituality a priori as Torah-based, what does her assertion even mean?
Moreover, usage of “spirituality” slides from one meaning to another throughout the book, fusing emotional experience with religious practice. This merger risks subsuming the real in the ideal, conflating religion as it is lived and experienced by ordinary people with elite, expert religious understandings—in a manner critiqued by scholars in the “everyday” and “lived religion” movement.[1]
Sands asserts that her case study of BT “is a ‘telling case’ of religious intensification, one that can make theoretical relationships visible” and thus contribute to scholarly understandings of religious intensification more generally (p. 17). There are places where this is the case. Her insights on community and integration are food for thought beyond BT. Overall, however, Sands’s ambition is belied by her definition of a central construct in her thesis in a manner that is in many ways limited to particular forms of Judaism. Given the equation of spirituality with observance of Jewish halacha (rabbinic law), what does a “process of spiritual transformation” mean beyond a halachic Jewish context? Despite Sands’s goal of generalizing from the experiences of BT a “spiritual transformation process” applicable to other instances of religious intensification, ultimately, I found most compelling the parts of the book most particular to baalot and baalei teshuvah, where Sands draws on the narratives of her informants to relate experiences with life, loss, and connection.
Note
[1]. See, for example, Nancy Tatom Ammerman, ed., Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); David Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed., David Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3–21.
C. Lynn Carr is professor of sociology at Seton Hall University.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-judaic.
Citation:
C. Lynn Carr. Review of Sands, Roberta G., The Spiritual Transformation of Jews Who Become Orthodox.
H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54204
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |