Can One Be a Non-Observant Orthodox Jew?

When I tell people I’m a nonobservant Orthodox Jew, there is usually a small pause, followed by a look that says: Pick one. I understand it. The phrase sounds like a hedge, or like someone claiming a title he hasn’t earned. But I don’t think it’s a contradiction.

It helps to start with where this came from, because it didn’t come from childhood. Until a few years ago, I wasn’t curious about any of it. I was secular and, on some subjects, actively hostile to religion. What changed was Oct. 7, 2023, and then a semester when I was honored to be associated with Yeshiva University. I came away wanting to know more than I did, and I’ve been picking at that ever since.

I should be clear about the scale of it: I am not a learned man in the Jewish sense of that word. If you quoted a passage at me, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t recognize it. What I do is modest and improvised. I listen to podcasts — “Take One” is one I come back to. I keep books like Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s “Jewish Wisdom” within reach. When something comes up in my life and I want to know whether the tradition has anything to say about it, I ask — sometimes a person, more often now AI, which is either a sign of the times or a small miracle depending on your mood. It’s not a formal program of study; it’s a habit of turning toward something.

So why call it Orthodox at all?

Partly, it’s an acknowledgment. I didn’t come to this on my own. It took an event and a place — and more than the place, the people in it. I came to admire the Modern Orthodox community I found at Yeshiva University: serious about the texts and serious about the world at the same time. The description is the most honest way I have of pointing at where this came from.

Partly, it’s because the word describes where I look, not what I do. It’s about what I take seriously — what I treat as having standing over how I understand my own life. When something happens to me, I’ve learned to ask a second question: not what I think about it, but what “they” would have said about it. What did the rabbis notice in a situation like this that I haven’t noticed yet?

As for the other half of the phrase: I am not observant. But I don’t experience that as failure, and I’m not walking around with a ledger of everything I’ve missed. Nor am I claiming the obligations don’t apply to me, as if I had examined them and placed myself above all that. They apply. I came to them late, with a life already built around other habits, and I have not rebuilt my week around them. That isn’t a principle I hold; it’s simply a fact about me.

What I get out of any of this is harder to describe. Sometimes it is direct. There is a command that a worker’s wages must not stay with you overnight, that you pay him the same day, before the sun sets. I used to let bills sit, not out of any bad intention but in the ordinary way a person puts things off, and I don’t anymore. Now I pay when the invoice arrives, especially when it comes from an individual rather than a company.

More often it is about how to carry myself, and Leviticus is full of it: not to spread gossip, not to hate your brother in your heart, not to take revenge or bear a grudge — the grudge being the harder of the two, because you can hold one for years while telling yourself you have let it go. Those sit in consecutive verses, leading directly to loving your neighbor as yourself. None of it is hard to understand. It is very hard to do, and I don’t always manage it. But going to look for what the rabbis said slows me down, and whatever is in front of me, I am not the first to face it. Having that in view makes me steadier than I would otherwise be — more centered, more at ease, less at the mercy of whatever happened to me that day.

That grounding in tradition takes on an even deeper weight when viewed alongside those who had everything stripped away. Look at the hostages in Gaza, who put all of this in true proportion. Eli Sharabi, who had never been religious a day in his life, began saying Shema Yisrael every morning in captivity, making Friday night Kiddush with water because there was no wine. Agam Berger kept kosher underground, refusing meat when she was hungry, and sewed a cover for a prayer book out of the leg of a ruined pair of trousers.

I was deeply moved by what they reached for in the dark, and by the strength it gave them. Some part of my own reading today is in their honor, and through it my bond with my people has become stronger than it ever was. Keeping less than others keep is not a complaint or a critique. We do Shabbat dinners at home, though not religiously, and when I see friends and family for whom Shabbat is a day genuinely set apart — work put down, the week shaped by the stopping — I look at that with respect, and some weeks I envy the discipline, and the community that comes with it.

The tradition has always been bigger than any one person’s grip on it. What draws me is simple: I think these texts are a good part of why we are still here as a people. I want to know them and, in my own way, embrace them. Orthodox is where I turn. Nonobservant is what I do. It’s where I’ve been standing these last couple of years, and I don’t assume I’m on my way somewhere else. I never thought this was something I needed, or that anything was missing. I didn’t expect any of it, and I wouldn’t give it back.

Mauricio Karchmer was a computer science lecturer at MIT until December of 2023, when he quit in protest over how the institute treated its Jewish community after the Oct. 7 terror attacks.