To Leeba- I commend your comments and your thought out perspective on the issue. Many people who go OTD are normally doing so from an emotional place of anger against the idealism of their parents. Although you mentioned this as the catalyst for your own journey, it seems that at least at some point, it took an intellectual route. I hope you can perhaps listen to my thoughts as someone who also went OTD at a time and my analysis as to the flawed logic which normally goes on here. Although my situation differs from yours as I was lured out from my MO hyper-intellectual upbringing as opposed to the assumed derech you took away from a more frum environment, my analysis for both I believe holds some weight.
I’ve personally found that the root for OTD comes from a much deeper place than the claims on the outside. Even my friends who joined in the rebellion from more RW homes shared the same feelings that I was going through at the time. So what was it? Was it really the stifling atmosphere? Was it the anger, the teenage angst to turn away from controlling parents? Or maybe that was all just a mask to a deeper problem. My friends liked complaining about their prospective environments just as my friends and I liked complaining about ours. But after a little hisbonenus, I realized that the problem wasn’t the parents failing to choose their battles. It didn’t matter what type of Yarmulke you wore, we all went off and it was all for the same reason. We all said that we needed to find ourselves. We claimed to not be able to fit in the mold our parents had set up for us (whatever mold that may have been, RW, Hasidic, MO, etc..), and we therefore felt an anger at being forced to be who we essentially weren’t.
Therein lies the problem. Everything else is just a mask. The prblem is that teenagers aren’t taught how to define their “I”. They don’t know who they really are! They feel as I have felt that the system doesn’t fit and therefore a rebellion is in order. However,the real problem that needs fixing isn’t the the fights to choose, rather its the ability to give children and teenagers a proper sense of self. nce they have something like this, the anger at their “forced” essence doesn’t start. If they’re able to define themselves in association with religiosity, then every chumra you can possibly place on them is met with an added level of simcha.
The question now remains as to what your status is. You claim to be someone who, after the anger subsided, made an intellectual choice that religion is not for you. Really? Who defines you? According to Freudian thought, you define yourselves based on your most animalistic desires. So was that the catalyst for your decision? According to Rav Yisrael Salanter, who YOU are is the spark of light inside you. If that’s your definition, then that clearly didn’t make a decision to remain further from G-d. So to this I ask you- You made an emotionally charged decision based on a lack of a sense of self to turn away from religion. You felt that it didn’t fit. But now what? You intellectually chose not to be close to G-d…. Was that an intellectually honest decision, or was it coming from that same root- the lack of the sense of self, yet now you can use a supposed intellectualism to justify it?