There’s a tipping point where you go from a thinking, probing independent, human being who is trying to move his life forward to a slave. As Steve Hassen notes, nobody knowingly joins a cult. You get tricked. You don’t realize what is happening to you. With Orthodox Judaism, it’s not after you met the first frummie for at that point you are looking on with suspicion at the strange dress, practices, and speaking manner of this odd colony of penguins. But after enough exposure, you get accustomed to their rabid confidence and their bold promises about how wonderful it’s going to be for you to join them. You don’t know that whoever you are talking is interested in getting paid in cash or a bigger payout in the world of upstairs prizes.
You’ve expressed your hesitations about how you don’t want to give up your friends, your life, and your mind, and he comes back with doublespeak that sounds like doublespeak, but you move forward anyway. Because they are all so quick to answer. And they sound alike so you get fooled into thinking you have encountered a new school of thought. They are so sure of themselves and they make you doubt yourself. You, little pathetic you, can't understand all this. You need decades of study and even then will not be equipped. You must trust us. And you think, we’ll, I can’t understand their crazy oversized books that are written in that cryptic language they refuse to teach me. Maybe I am dumb. Your brain slowly gets beat down. Your eyebrows no longer pop up when you hear of their disgust for the human race, their self worship, and their justifications for every bizarre thing they do. In the beginning, they were strangers. They had as little credibility in your mind as an Islamic Imam or a Catholic priest. Eat a wafer? What? Go away. But over time they become more familiar, not so shocking, and their particular threats of hell take hold of you. You meet more and more of them. Once upon a time, you knew zero people like this. Now you know a hundred. Their jargon and cliches become familiar. If one or two were actually ever being nice to you, you might pretend you have a new home. They talk of the nation, the club, and it's wonderful acts of wonderfulness. You never seem to witness it but like the joys of Torah study and Sabbath observance you hear about it. The problem must be you. They tell you so. The advertising is relentless. And this weakens your resistance further.
And there comes a point, particularly after they start pounding you with the rabbinical authority talk and the fantasies about these magical wizards they call gadolim, that you give up your mind. They’ll tell you to give up your mind. They tell you how faulty it is. You can’t trust yourself. You need a rabbi. He’ll think for you. He’s so much better than you. But who is he? You are not impressed. You cringe when he says anything. The coarse bravado characterizes so many of them. But they call him rabbi. You know the title means nothing, that it's easy to buy one. But you are trained to utter the name with reverence and to stand up for them all.
You are excoriated for not having one of your own. You search for one of your own. You beg some strange stupid obnoxious man to be your leader. He gives you six seconds of his precious time and you think he must be important. It all hurts. You start to crave pain. The pain feels like pleasure. If he is humiliating you, he must be your leader. And then it's game over. You have tipped.
It can take a long time, decades, to get your mind back. You are not allowed to question anymore. You can never question the leaders. How dare you? Do you want to burn for eternity? They have so many ways of describing all the ways you'll regret your actions, so many ways that you'll burn. Questioning the leaders is an act of arrogance, an act of evil. You can't express your complaints. If you do, magical punishments will happen to you. The company is watching. They have invisible little spies. You will be seen. You will be found. You can never question the company, certainly not before the world. You are terrified into silence.
At that point, you change in every way, in immoral ways that at least give you entrée into the lower realms of their club. It’s like any cult. Don’t think Orthodox Judaism is immune to engaging in the worst tricks of any cult. It invented half the tricks. Before long, your money is gone, your friends are gone, and your identity is gone. And you are terrified of becoming one of those who leave. They have an entire vocabulary, an entire literature about those terrible people who assimilate, who go lost, the losers, the ones who give into their evil urge and leave the sacred club. The penguins before you are those who stayed. Don't you want to be one who stays? Or do you want to be evil? You should ask, maybe joining these people resulted from an evil urge. Aren’t you sort of evil now? Aren’t you crazed, over-confident, immoral, heartless, and twisted? Don't you feel superior to the entire human race even as you feel pathetic within your own group? Aren't you sort of stupid now?
You sort of don’t notice because you are surrounded by people exactly like that. You went from a person of some educational capability to something that would be a step down for Archie Bunker. You are a boor now and so is everyone around you. They are racist even against their own sub groups, they are sexist against both sexes in different ways. Only the leaders are safe from the ridicule. Like billionaires they steal all the profits, all the praise, all the complements. They have all the money. You find yourself now around people that used to revolt you. And you are ordered to love them and to hate everyone else. You aren’t allowed to be around anyone else. It’s an old cult trick. Us versus them. We are good. They are bad. The truth is here, not anywhere else. Is this how they talked on that first day? It was all promises and high minded talk that day. If someone had said, hey want to feel like garbage? Want to see your life be destroyed? Would you have joined. Like a pimp, they slowly seduced you. You are a whore now. How the heck did that happen? Then comes this. No sex, no romance unless you are married. Your body starts to boil. You are so unhappy but marriage will save you. You see the photos in people's houses. You see the entire society obsessing about marriage and leaping up and down at weddings. That's the answer. That's the missing piece. So you start the dating process and get degraded even more. Now every part of you is assaulted and humiliated. Your mind, your body, your sense of being a human being. You hate the people you are meeting but are told your job is to make one of them happy. Serve her. She is conventional. She doesn't grasp that she is in a cult and you must join if you are to have her. You have been turned out. You are no better than a fag in prison. You don't know how to proceed. Every date makes you feel as bad as every encounter with a rabbi, as every unending Shabbos lockdown. It's all so boring, all so artificial. You barely even know that you don't like this person at all. But on paper it's close enough. They pressure you. And you move forward with it. You get your day of jumping up and down and the rabbis are there again with their paperwork and their devilish glare. You are trusting them again. And you marry some nut who is completely ill fitted for you. And now you can’t ever get out. Even if you figure this all out, you are stuck. They got you. They came in for the kill and they killed you. Oh, the devil knows all the tricks.
