Fifty-five percent. That's the share of self-described secular Israeli Jews who, according to the surveys that get run every year around this time, still fast on Yom Kippur. Not traditional, not observant, not believers in any functional sense. Secular. And they don't eat.
And it's not just fasting. The highways empty out. There's no television. Businesses close. Kids ride bicycles on the Ayalon, which is something you cannot do on any other day of the year without getting arrested.
Which is the whole paradox in one image. A country that mostly doesn't keep the rules keeps this one. And Daniel wrote in about it, so let's get into what he actually asked. He's fasting today, so he apologized in advance for the phrasing, which I'll pass along, though honestly the prompt is cleaner than half the ones he sends.
It's Yom Kippur. He gets a pass.
He does. So here's what he's asking. Two threads. First, the statistics on how religious observance actually gets handed down in families, across world faiths, not just here. What the data says about continuation and discontinuation. Second, the harder one. How differences in observance between generations produce alienation, a feeling of lost understanding. And he's specific about a particular dynamic, which I want to get right, because it's the sharpest thing in the prompt. He says that in difficult family systems, a very specific level of observance gets used as a weapon of shame. Even when the parents are less religious than they claim to be. Even when they're hypocritical about it.
That's the line that matters.
It is. And his rule of thumb, which he offers as a rule of thumb and not a sermon, is that you respect anybody's level of observance or lack of it, because it's deeply personal. But in families where religion is a core value, that respect is often not offered, and almost never reciprocated. So. Two threads. The transmission data, and the shame dynamic. Where do we start?
Start with the day itself, because the day is the reason the question exists. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. It closes the ten days of repentance that open with Rosh Hashanah. Leviticus 16 and 23 lay out the observances, and the classic list is the five afflictions. No food or drink for twenty-five hours. No work. No leather shoes. No bathing. No marital relations. The day is built around teshuvah, which is repentance but literally return, vidui, which is confession, and kapparah, atonement. And the emotional peak is Ne'ilah, the closing service, right before the final shofar blast.
Twenty-five hours, not twenty-four.
Twenty-five. Sunset to nightfall the next day, and the extra hour is deliberate. It's not a rounding error.
The people who designed this understood that the last hour is where the honesty happens.
That's exactly the design. You get tired, you get hungry, the performance drops, and what's left is whatever's actually in you. So the day is engineered to strip the social layer off.
And then a country that doesn't believe in the engineering observes it anyway.
Right. And I want to be careful with the number I opened with, because the surveys vary year to year and by how the question is asked. The consistent finding is that a majority of Israeli Jews fast, including a substantial share of people who describe themselves as secular. The precise figure moves. What doesn't move is the direction.
So it's belonging, not believing.
For a lot of people, yes. It's the one day where the ambient culture and the religious calendar point the same direction, and you don't have to decide anything. You just don't eat. Your neighbors don't eat. The country doesn't eat. You're in it whether or not you signed up for it.
So the day is clear. Now let's look at what the data actually say about how this gets handed down, or doesn't.
The best single source I've seen on this is a twenty twenty-six paper in Sociology of Religion, Silverstein and colleagues, using the Longitudinal Study of Generations. Eight thousand three hundred and forty-one parent-child pairs, four generations, data running from nineteen seventy-one to twenty sixteen. And it's the family structure question that makes it useful, because they didn't just ask whether kids stay religious. They asked what predicts it.
Give me the three findings.
One. Transmission of religious intensity was weaker to Baby Boomer children than to the cohort before them. So the secularization we talk about as a general cultural drift shows up as a measurable drop at one specific generational handoff. Two. Transmission was stronger in biological and adoptive relationships than in step-relationships. Three. Transmission was stronger in emotionally close relationships than in emotionally distant ones.
That third one is the whole episode.
It's the whole episode. The strength of the hand-off is not fixed. It depends on the cohort, on the family structure, and on how close the people actually were. Which means the transmission mechanism is not the doctrine. The doctrine is the content. The mechanism is the relationship.
Say that again, because I want it to land. The thing that carries the faith across is not the quality of the faith. It's the quality of the relationship.
That's what the data say. A parent with a shallow, inconsistent practice and a warm, close kid transmits more than a parent with an impeccable practice and a cold house. The content rides on the relationship. If the relationship isn't there, the content doesn't arrive.
Which means all the energy people spend on getting the observance exactly right is energy spent on the wrong variable.
Substantially, yes. And there's a second paper that complicates the story further, which I think is important. Min, Silverstein and Gruenewald, twenty eighteen, in Research on Aging. One thousand and eighty-four parent-child pairs, followed from seventy-one to two thousand five. And they found four trajectories, not one.
Name them.
Stable similar. The child stays at the parent's level. Child weakens. Becomes less religious. Child strengthens. Becomes more religious than the parent. And child returns. Drifts away, then comes back. And the return pattern was more likely among children who married.
So the headline we all carry around, that religious parents produce less religious kids, is one of four common paths.
It's one of four. And the return path is the one that should make everyone sit up, because it's the empirical version of what the day is about. Teshuvah. Return. The data say it happens, it's not rare, and marriage is one of the things that triggers it.
The person who leaves at nineteen and comes back at thirty-four with a spouse and a kid is not a failure of transmission. They're a delayed delivery.
The Min paper frames the whole thing through individuation, which I think is the humane reading. Drifting away in your late teens and twenties is a developmental process. It's the self separating from the family. It's not a betrayal. It looks like a betrayal from inside the family, but the framework says it's a stage.
There's a third channel I want on the table, because it explains the kid who finds meaning somewhere else entirely.
Tamariz and colleagues, twenty twenty-six, PLoS ONE. Big study out of Australia. Nineteen hundred students plus four thousand parents, grandparents and friends. And they found cultural resemblance is strongest for religiosity. Stronger than for most other traits they measured. Politics, environmentalism, health behaviors were up there too, but religiosity was at the top.
So it's the trait most likely to be inherited.
Most strongly inherited, and also the one where the other channels matter most. There's clear vertical transmission from parents. But there's also indirect influence from grandparents, and horizontal influence from peers. And the traits most likely to be adopted are the ones shared by both parents and peers.
Which is the answer to the question of why a kid ends up somewhere the parents never went. The peer network is a competing transmission channel. If the parents and the peers agree, the kid absorbs it. If they disagree, the kid has a choice, and the peer channel is the one they're swimming in eight hours a day.
And the grandparent channel is the one nobody accounts for. Skip-generation influence. The grandmother who kept something the parents dropped.
Give me an example of that, because I think people hear "grandparent influence" and picture a cookie recipe.
It's usually not a cookie recipe. It's the grandmother who lights candles every Friday night and says nothing about it. No lecture, no expectation, no guilt. The parents dropped it. The kid spends one weekend a month at her apartment and watches her do it, quietly, for years. And then at twenty-six, in a city a thousand miles away, the kid starts lighting candles. Not because anyone told them to. Because it's the one memory of that apartment that has a shape.
And the parents are baffled. They spent years actively not doing that.
They spent years actively not doing it, and they transmitted it anyway, through the grandmother, by leaving the kid in her orbit. The trait skipped a generation because the relationship skipped a generation.
So the parent who dropped the practice isn't out of the chain. They're just the middle link.
You can't opt out of being a link. You can only decide what you pass along and what you leave to someone else to pass along.
There's a fourth piece, and this one is the one that made me put the pen down.
Lee, Silverstein and colleagues, twenty twenty-six, Journal of Family Psychology. Twenty twenty-one, twenty twenty-two data from the same longitudinal study. A hundred and forty-nine families. And they found mothers and fathers transmit altruistic values through different pathways. Mothers mainly by fostering the child's own religiosity. Fathers by transmitting their religiously formed values, often invisibly.
Invisibly is the word.
Invisibly. The kids don't see it happening. They think they've rejected the father's religion entirely, and they've kept the ethics the father's religion produced, and they don't know where the ethics came from. And the paper names a contemporary shift they call the decoupling of religion from prosociality. Younger adults hold strong prosocial values without religion attached.
So the kid who volunteers, donates, shows up for the neighbor, has a fully formed moral system, and no idea that the shape of it came out of a house they think they walked away from.
And that's a specific kind of lost understanding. It's not that the generations disagree. It's that one generation doesn't know it's still carrying the other one.
Which raises the question of whether that's a loss at all. If the ethics survived and the doctrine didn't, did anything actually get lost?
Something got lost, and it's not the ethics. It's the attribution. The kid can't say thank you, because they don't know there's anything to thank. And the parent can't hear thank you, because the kid doesn't know there's anything to say it for. Both people are carrying the same thing and neither one knows the other is holding it.
That's a loneliness, not a disagreement.
It's a loneliness. And it's the quietest version of the whole problem, because nobody's fighting. There's just a wire that got cut and neither end knows it.
So we know the transmission is fragile and depends on the relationship. But what happens when it goes wrong, when the observance itself becomes a weapon?
Then you get shame, and there's a paper on this that I think is the emotional center of the whole topic. Pulakos, nineteen ninety-six, Journal of Clinical Psychology. She looked at adults' shame and correlated it with their perceived childhood family environment, using the Family Environment Scale. And higher shame correlated with lower scores on cohesion, expressiveness, intellectual-cultural orientation, moral-religious emphasis, and organization. And higher scores on conflict.
So the shamiest adults came from homes that were cold, disorganized, conflictual, and low on moral-religious emphasis.
Low on moral-religious emphasis. That's the finding that breaks the stereotype. The intuition is that strict religious upbringing produces shame. What this data says is that a home with low genuine moral-religious emphasis, combined with high conflict, is where the shame concentrates. Not the consistent observant home. Not the consistent secular home. The inconsistent one. The one that talks the talk and doesn't walk it.
Which is exactly what Daniel described. Parents who are less religious than they present, using observance as the club.
Exactly that. The hypocrisy is the mechanism. If the standard is real and you fail it, you feel guilt, which is about the act. If the standard is a performance and you're punished by it anyway, you feel shame, which is about the self. And shame is the one that doesn't resolve, because there's no actual offense to atone for. You can't fix it. You can only carry it.
That's the difference between guilt and shame in one sentence, and it's the reason the dynamic Daniel describes is so corrosive. You can't confess your way out of a charge that was never specified.
And there's a vocabulary for this now. The moral injury literature, the Moral Injury Symptom Scales, originally built for veterans and healthcare workers, includes dimensions of religious struggle, loss of religious or spiritual faith, shame, self-condemnation, and loss of trust. And those frameworks are increasingly applied to religious and spiritual betrayal. When a trusted authority, and the family is the first trusted authority, uses faith in a way that wounds instead of heals.
So what Daniel's describing isn't a family quirk. It's a recognized injury with a measurement scale.
It's a recognized injury. And there's a cross-faith parallel that maps onto it almost exactly, which I want to bring in because it takes the question out of the Jewish frame. Chentli and colleagues, twenty thirteen, a study of Ramadan fasting in Algeria. And the finding is blunt. Not fasting is considered a sin and shameful. And people with diabetes, people for whom fasting is medically contraindicated, fast anyway. Because of family habit, solidarity, and what the paper calls the desire to appear normal.
They're damaging their bodies to avoid a look from a relative.
They're damaging their bodies to avoid a look from a relative. And that's the same mechanism as Yom Kippur, running in a different religion on a different calendar. The communal norm doesn't need a believer. It just needs a witness.
Which is the thing that makes the secular Israeli who fasts legible. He's not fasting for God. He's fasting because everyone will know.
And there's a softer version of that, which is that he's fasting because he wants to be inside the thing. Both are true at once. The shame version and the belonging version run on the same wire. Which is why the day is so charged for people who've left. You can't opt out without it being visible.
You can't opt out quietly. That's the part that does the damage.
Right. There's no private exit.
So take me to the other side of it. What actually helps? Because Daniel's rule of thumb, respect anyone's level of observance or lack of it, is easy to say and I want to know if there's evidence behind it.
There's strong evidence behind it, and it's one of the more striking findings I've come across. Captari and colleagues, twenty eighteen, a meta-analysis across ninety-seven studies, over seven thousand participants. Therapy that respects and integrates a client's own religious or spiritual values outperformed both no-treatment and non-tailored secular therapy. On psychological functioning and on spiritual functioning.
So meeting someone inside their own frame beats meeting them in a neutral frame.
It beats it measurably. Which means the neutral, secular, we-don't-talk-about-religion approach isn't neutral. It's less effective. And the frame-respecting approach isn't a concession. It's the treatment.
Which is the clinical version of Daniel's rule of thumb. Respect isn't just polite. It's the thing that works.
It's the thing that works. And there's a model for how to build it, out of an Israeli clinical training program. They deliberately bring religious, secular, Ultra-Orthodox, Muslim, and immigrant trainees together. And the sequence is specific. First familiarity. Just being in the room with each other. Then what they call productive discomfort. Having people sit with the tensions between their identities, on purpose, with structure.
Familiarity first, then the hard part.
Familiarity first. You don't start with the argument. You start with the person, and then you introduce the friction. And the reason that matters for families is that most families do it backwards. They lead with the friction and never build the familiarity.
So the family that argues about observance at every meal is doing the productive discomfort without the familiarity underneath it. Which means it's not productive. It's just discomfort.
It's just discomfort. And it compounds. Every argument without a relationship underneath it makes the next one worse, because now there's a history. The training program gets this. Families mostly don't.
And the last piece, the one that complicates the whole picture.
Dilmaghani, twenty eighteen, Canadian data. Both the highly religious and the secularized reported excellent mental health more often than the middle group, the average-religiosity people. But both extremes also reported poor mental health more often. So the extremes are more variable. The settled middle is the least settled.
Which means you can't romanticize either pole. The devout and the atheist both have a clear floor to stand on. The person who's half in is standing on nothing.
That's the person the shame dynamic finds easiest. The one who hasn't decided.
A 1974 Ford LTD. Bought it for four hundred dollars.
Sorry, Hilbert, go ahead.
Hilbert: I was a shammash at a Conservative shul for two years. Caretaker. It came with a small apartment above the social hall and I was between things. Locking up, setting the timers, fixing the furnace. This was in a neighborhood that was mostly secular by then. The shul was the last one standing.
Hilbert: The year I'm talking about, a member's son showed up on Yom Kippur. Grown man, forty-something. Stood at the back. Didn't pray. Didn't fast. He drank a bottle of water in the parking lot, standing next to his car, and then came in and stood in the doorway for the whole Musaf service. His mother had died that spring. He wanted to be in the building.
Hilbert: Somebody on the board wanted him asked to leave. There was a conversation about it. I was the one who had to go tell the rabbi what the son was doing, because the rabbi hadn't noticed and the board wanted a ruling.
What did the rabbi say?
Hilbert: He said leave him alone. Then he went back to the service. That was the whole ruling.
Hilbert: But here's the part I keep thinking about. The son drank the water outside. In the parking lot. He didn't want to offend anybody. He didn't believe a word of it, and he still walked out to the lot to take a drink so nobody would see him do it. He was more careful with that room than the room was with him.
That's the parking lot detail. He kept the norm he'd already rejected.
Hilbert: He was raised right. Just not in the way they meant.
Hilbert: I've seen that more than once. People who don't believe any of it and show up anyway, because the building is where their dead are. The board's instinct was to police his observance. It missed the point entirely. He wasn't rejecting anything. He was grieving.
The thing that gets me is that the building was the only place his grief had somewhere to go.
Hilbert: That's what it was. Anyway. I've got a thing booked at six.
That story about the son in the parking lot. That's the whole thing, isn't it. He kept the rule he'd already stopped believing in, out of care for people who wouldn't have extended the same care back.
It's the transmission data in a single image. The relationship carried something the belief didn't. His mother is gone, the faith is gone, and the courtesy is still there, standing in a parking lot with a bottle of water.
The board wanted him removed. Which is the shame dynamic in its purest form. The room he was grieving in tried to police his observance, and the only person who got it right was the rabbi, who said one sentence and went back to work.
One sentence. That's the whole intervention. Not a ruling, not a policy, not a conversation with the board. Just leave him alone.
Because the rabbi understood something the board didn't. You don't get to decide how somebody else mourns. And the son wasn't there for the service. He was there for the room.
He was there for the room. And the room almost threw him out.
Here's the open question I want to leave with. If transmission depends on emotional closeness more than doctrine, and the closeness is already damaged, what do you do with that? Can respect be rebuilt in a family where observance was the weapon, or can it only be mourned?
I don't have an answer to that. The research tells you the mechanism. It doesn't tell you how to repair one that broke thirty years ago.
The Yom Kippur paradox, the secular country that shuts down, may get rarer as the younger cohorts secularize further. Or it may get more precious. The last shared ritual in a landscape that's coming apart.
Either way, Daniel's rule of thumb is the right one, and it's harder to practice than to say. Respect anyone's level of observance or lack of it. Especially in the families where it was never offered. The alternative, the shame, the alienation, the lost understanding, is worse.
Thanks as always to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts.
If you're enjoying the show, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps.
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