Religious Bonds Divide Some Parents and Kids

Stephen Rochester, 32, grew up “Jewish lite” in St. Louis, says his father, Marty. “So I was stunned when Stephen went religious with a capital R,” switching to his Hebrew name, Shaya, and adopting the black hat of Hasidic Jews.

Statistically, these devout young people are “floating below the radar,” says Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin of Chabad.org, which encourages Jews to deepen religious practice.

The religiosity gap runs across faiths. Marty and Ruth Rochester rode an emotional roller coaster after Shaya, a philosophy major at Yale, deferred law school for intense Jewish studies at a yeshiva.

Ruth says that when Shaya called to tell her he’d bought his first Hasidic black hat, “I burst into tears.”

“To me, it means he had gone off the deep end, setting himself apart from the family and Judaism as I knew it. But he’s my son, I love him dearly, so I decided this is just something else to get through.”

Shaya, now a lawyer at a Manhattan firm, believes “my father was more opposed than my mother. He was concerned I would drop law school and be this crazy religious guy who would waste my education and never be able to support myself.”

Yet, his father says other things, small things, have been harder. He misses their father-son heart-to-heart evenings, talking over beer and burgers at a favorite hangout, O’Connell’s. The end of evenings at the unkosher pub “symbolized a break in the normal rhythm of our family life. It upset me.”

The swoops and dips have leveled out now with Shaya’s more mature faith, his marriage and the arrival of grandchildren. Although Marty sees Shaya “gently noodge us to become more observant, it’s never been in-your-face, never been pushy, always gentle. Shaya is flexible wherever he can be.”

This was an excerpt from USA Today, CLICK HERE to read the article in full.