On the Jewish Question

On the Jewish Question

When i lost my faith i still wanted to be "Jewish"  but i kept on asking myself: how can i do that without being religious? I destroyed the bondage of religion but now i had to recreate the tradition in my own image. 

Ethnicity isn't a rigid identity but it's not completely fluid. People coming to America chose to shed their old Identity and take on the American Identity. But ethnic identity revolves around traditions and most people didn't completely abandon them. if you're Irish you can celebrate St. Patrick's day even if you're not religious. Many Chinese Americans celebrate the Chinese New Year. In America, we celebrate state holidays like Thanksgiving and Independence day. Choosing the Jewish identity means celebrating Jewish tradition. The difficulty of that is that once you lose the religion then what does it mean to keep the traditions?

you're born and Jew and you die as a Jew.That comment can be true even if you're not religious. You can still follow the Jewish traditions, eat a little gefilte fish, celebrate Pesach and the High Holidays, maybe even circumcise your boy on the eighth day.There is a vibrant ethnic identity simmering under the religion, one that doesn't require God.

The lack of God is very freeing. it releases you from the bondage of Sinai while giving you the permission to interpret your tradition as you see fit. You can keep Shabbat because you want one day of the week to be just for family. You can choose to celebrate the High Holiday as a meditation on yourself. Pesach can be the transmission of the culture while Hanukuah is the defending of it. New reasons for old traditions can evolve the culture for the modern Jew.

I say all this because times are changing. in the western world more people are dropping their religions faster than ever and for the Jews it is no different. This scares the Jew since the religion was all he had to hold on to his unique identity. He fears that once he drops his faith he'll drop his identity and will ultimately assimilate. That is the Old Jew. That Jew that should have died when those ghetto walls came down. It saddens me because the Old Jew puts up walls between himself and his fellow Jew and we don't need hatred among ourselves since we get it enough from the others. The New Jew should embrace the culture as a whole. They should redefine, refine, and evolve the culture for the time and place so our culture will be proactive instead of reactive. It should start with accepting any religious denomination and individual who wants to identify as a Jew. All i ask from someone willing to identify themselves as Jew is to share not only our joy but also our pain. That is the price to pay for being Jewish. The individual should take part and continue the Jewish adventure and if it is all too hard you can always assimilate.

I am that I am

Something never felt right. i don't know what it was what i always felt it. I never believed that religion in general, and Judaism in particular had the answers it was proposing. I remember in second grade we were being taught about the messiah. i vividly remember hoping that it would come in my lifetime because i didn't think i was worthy to be resurrected when the dead arose. What bad did i do in before i turned seven was beyond me but the brainwashing was taking effect, but yet...Fast forward my bar mitzva, my classmates all went up to Lein their entire Parsha. i didn't. i just did maftir/Haftorah. There was something holding me back from taking all this seriously.  A year later i would ask my teacher a question that ate at my brain for years: if god created us than who created god? My teacher in his infinite knowledge answered: for god to tell us it would be like teaching a toddler Gemara. I accepted his answer but wasn't satisfied.

The erosion of my religiosity continued during high school. i never prayed when the time came. i never attempted to do anything religious except learn the necessary books to pass that tests. i remember getting into stand up comedy and finding George Carlin. this guy changed the way i saw religion. obviously, he criticized Christianity for being a money making brainwashing cult but i was smart enough to realize that this could be applied to my own religion. i was too young and scared to drop my religion but in my head i wasn't religious and i was never going to be religious. the train had left the building and it would take three years for the momentum to shatter my religious chains. At the same time, my grandfather got a stomach cancer. within a few months he went from working at the lumber yard to laying on his death bed thankfully it was quick but it wasn't  painless. I sat next to my grandfather in shul and he'd basically force me to pray mirroring other authority figures who force feed a totalitarian ideology and make you do it too. i didn't mind, i enjoyed my time with him in shul and got to hear stories of his time during the Shoa. i loved the guy with all my heart and saw him disintegrate into nothingness. the day he died, it was the first or second day of Chol Hamoed Pesach, he asked his wife, my step-grandmother, to bring me to his bedside. I knew what i had had to do. five hours later he died. the next day i went to a Mets game and ate popcorn. that generational continuity that religion relies on was severed for me and it represented a new era.

I had a teacher, R' Zucker, this guy was as blunt as possible. All my questions i asked about the faith he answered me using the classic philosophers with a Jewish twist, naturally he loved the rambam. this guy was Ashkenaz but he still ate Yemenite Matza.  He practiced a no frills judiasm and didn't believe in Kabbalah, he held special vitriol from the Zohar since he claimed that R' Shimon Bar Yochai didn't write the book since it was written in medieval Aramaic with some Spanish and Portuguese. Not conceitedly that is the first place where it showed up. I respected the man, i tried mirror my religiosity like him. Maybe i can be "religious" without believing the bullshit? This new view in Judaism sustained even in Israel.

I was 18 when i went to Israel; for the year to learn Torah. i learned a little Torah but never took it seriously, but I remember a bookcase section in the Beit Midrash that i was always drawn to: the History of the Jewish people. Now since Bershit is considered part of Jewish History, one of the first books i read was a book trying to retell the creation story through the scientific lens. Looking back it was the last compromise i made between modernity and religion and the fragile union lasted throughout that year in Israel. Another book i vividly recall on reading was an encyclopedia of the Taanim (writers of the Mishna) and the Amoroim (writers of the Gemara). All that history reading paled in comparison to what i felt living among my people. 

Aside for the everyday drinking, It's safe to say that those once in a month trips we used to take around Israel was the highlight of my year. We used to go to places like Matzada, the supposed location of the Mishkan, and a battleground where the Shaul and David fought the Philistines seeing our history on our land made a lasting impression on me,  I was born in a time where our people can walk the land that gave birth to us, see the history and speak the language our forefathers existed (even though it isn't the same Hebrew). there was a connection I shared with my people, my history, my culture all on my land. No religion in the diaspora can ever recreate that.

when i came back from Israel i stumbled onto atheistic books and the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris had continued what George Carlin started: they took wrecking balls and demolished the the fragile union to bits. Now those who knew me during this time knew that i was militant in my opposition to the cancer that is religion. i left not stone unturned and admittingly i was too intense in my condemnation of this totalitarian theology but as i got older i realized that these people were brainwashed. from a young age, they were crammed with bullshit and was told to follow it so you can go to heaven given that their entire family was religious too a too blunt 23 year old wasn't going to convince them what they were doing was done. i thought as long as they didn't to force it onto other people let them be. Ultimately i realized that religion is a direct result with our fear of death and it will never be eradicated unless death is.