I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was raised an Orthodox Jew and I basically took to treating it as “normal” in the same sense that any set of arbitrary social rules is “normal.” It was no weirder than the rules governing, say, when it was OK to wear a T-shirt and sneakers vs. when it wasn’t, or when it was OK to eat the last piece of cake, or whatever.
And I still basically think that. It’s not that there’s some default state where there aren’t any arbitrary rules to follow, against which I can compare the rules of Orthodox Judaism. There are just different cultures, each with its own set of rules.
I suspect that, again as with any set of social norms, the key distinction is between people who are raised with only one such set of norms, compared to people who are raised having to navigate among several. The former group can treat their culture’s rules as invisible and default and “common sensical”; the latter group can’t get away with that so easily.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was raised an Orthodox Jew and I basically took to treating it as “normal” in the same sense that any set of arbitrary social rules is “normal.” It was no weirder than the rules governing, say, when it was OK to wear a T-shirt and sneakers vs. when it wasn’t, or when it was OK to eat the last piece of cake, or whatever.
And I still basically think that. It’s not that there’s some default state where there aren’t any arbitrary rules to follow, against which I can compare the rules of Orthodox Judaism. There are just different cultures, each with its own set of rules.
I suspect that, again as with any set of social norms, the key distinction is between people who are raised with only one such set of norms, compared to people who are raised having to navigate among several. The former group can treat their culture’s rules as invisible and default and “common sensical”; the latter group can’t get away with that so easily.