He tells his story of growing up as a Hasidic Jew and then losing his faith. Although I would consider his religion more "extreme" than Mormonism, I was constantly seeing parallels in his thoughts and his story to those stories that I see repeated here time and time again. His faith crisis resulted in divorce and eventually being cut off from his children.
I have pasted the quotes below that stood out to me.
He spoke a lot about how they were not supposed to question.It was said that the Rambam’s most notable philosophical work, the Guide for the Perplexed, was so great and so brilliant that it was meant only for the most learned. For everyone else, to study it was unnecessary. The important thing was to know that it contained all the answers, and so all further questions were pointless.
A familiar conundrum.I was being expelled, though in those moments, I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. My initial thought was to defend myself, to declare it all lies, hateful gossipmongering. But the truth was, I no longer belonged here. This was a community of the faithful, and I was no longer one of them. And yet, to be expelled was different from leaving voluntarily. To be expelled is to be rejected, and to be rejected is to be disgraced. There were also Gitty and the children to think about.
It struck me that in Mormonism people who question and doubt are also treated differently than those who "sin". Sin is a problem that they have a packaged solution for.For a long time, I had tried to deny it. A mere sinner has hope: An Israelite, although he has sinned, is still an Israelite, the Talmud says. But a heretic is lost forever. All who go do not return. The Torah scroll he writes is to be burned. He is no longer counted in a prayer quorum, his food is not considered kosher, his lost objects are not returned to him, he is unfit to testify in court. An outcast, he wanders alone forever, belonging neither to his own people nor to any other.
Doubt your doubtsThe Judaism of our ancient texts allows for questions, true, but they must be of a certain kind and they must be asked just so. He who inquires about these four things, says the Talmud, it is better if he were never born: What is above, what is below, what is the past, what is the future. If one is plagued by questions for which there are no answers, it is not the fault of our faith but the fault of the questioner, who has surely not prayed enough, studied enough, cleansed his heart and mind enough so that the wisdom of the Torah might penetrate his soul and make all questions fall away.
Reminds me of the recent lesson on virtue.“‘Respect her more than your own self!’” Avremel would cry during those sessions, quoting the Talmud, his jerky arms and fists slicing and pounding the air. “But how do we understand this passage? What does it mean to respect a woman?” Avremel would twist a hair from his scraggly black beard around his finger, pull it out, and drop it absentmindedly on the table between us. “What it really means, esteemed young men, is that we must be vigilant! Respect what she, a woman, can do to a man if he does not remain careful.” He would wag an index finger over his head, “Let down your guard, and she will lead you into sheol tachtis—the abyss of sinful temptation!”
I saw echoes here of the arguments made by some that women don't need the priesthood and men do.Boys were to keep their minds pure and spend their days with Torah study. Girls were not required to study Torah. He who teaches his daughter Torah, the sages said, teaches her foolishness. Girls, we were told, didn’t have the urges and temptations that boys did. Girls were allowed to gaze at boys, but boys were not allowed to gaze back. Some said that women possessed loftier souls than men and therefore didn’t need to study Torah, weren’t obligated with as many commandments, were allowed to study English literature and history and even a little art and science, too, because their souls were so lofty that those subjects couldn’t hurt them, or not nearly as much as they could boys.
His father sounded like an interesting guy.I respect it, but I do not agree with it. Those words would embody what I saw as my father’s ability to stand by his principles while acknowledging that others lived by different ones, their convictions as strong as his own. Those words provided a counterbalance to the more prevalent view expressed by my teachers and others, of utter contempt for everything but our own worldview. And so I couldn’t help but wonder: Who was right, my father or my teachers? Were we allowed to respect others, or were we obligated to vilify all who believed differently? My father seemed to embrace the former, and my teachers the latter. Which, then, was I to accept?
I am sensing a theme.to be a pious Hasidic boy, to grow up to be a pious Hasidic man, a boy must pay attention to the questions posed by the rabbis, and so not have any questions of his own.
Ask only the right questions and find answers only in the right places.Others say that heretics cannot repent because heresy is a force so potent that an individual is powerless to combat it, an insidious trap from which there is no escape. One never knows where heresy lurks. It can lie in the seemingly innocent words of a stranger, in knowledge outside the Torah, or in the writings of anyone who has not been vetted by the sages of his generation. It can lie in a seemingly innocent tale, when told in the wrong language, by the wrong person, or through the wrong medium, its nefarious intent so subtle as to pass almost unnoticed.
Again I saw echoes of early Mormonism, and the transition to maintaining distance from "the world" and setting ourselves apart as a peculiar people.Hasidim in the twentieth century seemed to know little of the mysticism, the ecstasy, the melancholy and the joy of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples. Instead, it regressed to the heavy-handedness and the rigidity that Hasidism had come to eradicate. Because of the merit of three things, Israel was delivered from Egypt: they did not alter their names, their language, or their dress. This is the midrashic dictum that encapsulates the ethos of the modern Hasidic world, a world characterized by the simple values of cultural fidelity. The objective is self-imposed ghettoization. Distinct language and dress keep interactions with outsiders to a minimum and help maintain separation from the wider world. Restrictions on secular education and outside knowledge keep foreign ideas at bay. Bans on media and popular entertainment keep away temptation. And so the Hasidim are spared the calamities of modernity.
“Faith,” said the master Reb Mendel of Vitebsk, “is to believe without reason whatsoever.” Anything else leads to an erosion of our pure faith and, ultimately, to heresy.
I think about this all the time.“Has it occurred to you that it is simply an accident that you were raised with your beliefs? That if you were born Christian or Muslim you’d be just as convinced about those faiths being true? If blind faith is all you have, doesn’t it make it all so arbitrary?”
This reminds me of myself. I wonder sometimes why I can't stop reading, can't stop trying to find some piece of information that will make it all go away.Itzik, give me the book that will make the questions go away, I wanted to plead. Yet in my heart, I knew there was no such one book. There could be no authoritative response, no single all-encompassing theory that would explain it all. I was beginning to realize that every book I read set off a tempest of conflicting thoughts and ideas, and this was not something I could find answers to from outside myself. The answers were not in a book but within. I was on my own.
This guy is reading my mind.Wherever I turned, I discovered that ideas I had once taken for granted, trusting in rabbis and sacred texts to convey absolute truths, were dubious at best. The universe was not six thousand years old but closer to 14 billion.
Once you come to this conclusion it changes the way you perceive everything about religion.Nothing, however, had a more shattering impact on my faith than the realization that, stripped of religious exegesis, our primary religious text, the Hebrew Bible, had the markings of human rather than divine authorship; it was beautiful, intricate, layered in poetry and metaphor and heart-stopping drama, but human nonetheless.
I am sure I have seen someone at FAIR use this same phrase: asked and answered. So much of this seems familiar.“Asked and answered,” the rabbi said, as if, once again, I was meddling in the affairs of greater minds than mine. “It’s a little bit … childish,” he added, pausing before issuing his insult, “to think that your questions are anything new.” I could see his patronizing gaze through the veil of his benign smile. “Go learn. Study. And then, if you look inside your heart, you’ll find the truth.” But that was precisely it. My questions did not strike me as novel or profound, but basic and elementary. The evasiveness that characterized so many of the responses, from this rabbi and others, suggested that the answers were a tangled spaghetti of sophistry meant to obfuscate rather than illuminate. And always, there were instructions to look further, elsewhere. I hadn’t read the right books. I hadn’t spoken to the right people. I was asked to place my trust in authorities who had not earned such trust—who had, in fact, declared demonstrable falsehoods as truth, distorted ancient texts to mean things they clearly did not, and recast historical events and figures to align with current ideologies
A question I asked myself so many times before I found this board.I remember only the haze of months, then years, passing as I desperately wished for my faith to return, even as I realized that, like a broken porcelain dish, the pieces might be glued back together and the dish might hold for a while but soon enough it would break again, along that very same crack. Losing your faith is not like realizing that you got an arithmetic problem wrong. It is more like discovering your entire mathematical system is flawed, that every calculation you’ve ever made was incorrect. Your bank balance is off, your life savings might be gone, your business could be in the red when you’ve imagined it to be flourishing. Except you seem to be the only one who realizes it, and how is that possible? Is everyone crazy? Could you really be the only sane one?
I have heard many here ask these same questions.Worst of all was the realization that I had to build myself a new value system. When everything you’ve ever known is suddenly up for question, what are the values you retain and what do you discard? What is the meaning of right and wrong when there is no guidance from a divine being? And most of all, if we are all but accidents of matter and energy, with no greater purpose beyond our immediate natural needs, what, then, was the point of it all?
I hate the lying.it was no small comfort to me when I realized that to continue to live in this community and within this marriage, as I negotiated my own needs in accordance with my secret nonbelief, lies would be a necessity. Soon enough, my lies would become routine, the destiny of anyone in my circumstances: I was a heretic among believers.
Zeal compensates for fear. A soldier is whipped into a jingoistic frenzy before battle—because how else does one withstand the fear of death? The religious zealot who shouts, beats, and kills is perhaps not the one who is secure with his faith but the one who is so fearful of the challenges, so aware of the fickleness of conviction, that he has no choice but to strengthen it with the drumbeat of mindless fanaticism.
I thought this was interesting - a familiar outlet.the stresses of a double life channeled into day-to-day irritability and resentment. The Internet provided a small remedy, a therapeutic outlet through which to express what felt like an unending inner battle over how to negotiate my circumstances. Interacting with others online helped to solidify my identity as a heretic, lending me the confidence to accept the side of myself that I had been suppressing.
I think this may be slowly changing but this is something we also hear a lot.Those who leave simply cannot resist temptation. This mantra was repeated so frequently that I felt the accusation acutely, whenever the prospect of leaving crossed my mind, even if only as a fantasy.
The breaking point - do we all get there eventually?I wanted no more than a world in which I was not lying and hiding. I wanted the freedom to simply be who I was, without fear or shame. When caught in a world where your very essence feels shameful, life turns into a feverish obsession with suppressing your true identity in favor of a socially accepted one. I knew that something, soon, would have to give.
This is something I observe in our wards too - people who are happy to be treated like children.In our world, however, adulthood did not exist, not really. Everyone was influenced by someone, who was in turn influenced by someone else. Both good and bad behavior were guided not from within but by the books and authority figures who declared one thing forbidden and another thing virtuous. Self-determination was an unrecognized concept. To the bezdin, it was clear: Leiby’s escape was my fault, and mine alone.
It was Shabbos afternoon, and I was desecrating it by hiking and eating trayf. I would reflect on the fact that such simple pleasures were so meaningful. It felt exhilarating to be able to do what had for so many years been forbidden for fear of not heavenly but human judgment.
Almost everyone spoke of feeling suffocated, compelled to act and behave in ways that were not true to themselves, until finally they could take it no longer, and risked ostracism and alienation in return for a chance to live more authentic lives.
I thought it was good that he recognised this and pointed it out.Each of us has a story to tell. Rarely, however, are our stories ours alone; typically, we share them with family, friends, colleagues, and so on. And yet, our subjective experiences remain unique. This is true of everyday events, but even truer of contentious moments. When we feel aggrieved, we stew in the passions of our own righteousness, our very experiences often leading us to see only what we want to see. In shaping our narratives, we select facts to our advantage, even if only unconsciously. Throughout the writing of this book, these thoughts were never far from my mind, hovering like a gray cloud in the middle distance, reminding me that my truth was not the only truth.
! ( I usually cannot join a telephone conference call due to work demands, but I can sure join an online book club). I'll be glad to join.