It truly is amazing that I can describe at length for many hours the process of how I chose to adopt a fully observant traditionally Jewish lifestyle, and there will likely be one word mysteriously left out:
God.
After all, you cannot have a religion without God, can you?
On one hand, this makes no real logical sense, but on the other hand, it’s blatantly obvious. God seemed to have very little to do with my life-changing experiences, and to some extent continues to be just a background player in my life, so to speak. You can sit in a yeshiva (a center for studying essential texts of Jewish faith and practice) for thirty years and never mention God once!
On some levels this is very sad. On another level, this is what happens when your system is based primarily on the actions on humans, and not on their beliefs.
In other words, according to my personal understanding of the Jewish religion it would be preferable to live your life with tremendous moral behavior and minimal mention of anything spiritual, then to contemplate God all the time, but behave atrociously. We know, even if we don’t say it at every moment, that God is our ultimate goal. But the rest is up to us.
But I digress.
One problem I had in entering into a full fledged religious lifestyle was a fear of blind faith. How could someone who was brought up in an open-minded, intellectually honest household embrace a system where you needed to believe, regardless of whether or not evidence supported your belief?
In my Survey of Jewish Civilization class in college, we read a book whose theme has stuck with me my entire adult life.
As A Driven Leaf is a work of historical fiction based on a character from Talmudic times named Elisha ben Abuye. He was famed for being brought up in a strictly religious household, instructed by all of the world’s greatest sages. Despite all of this, he would eventually toss away everything. After witnessing an event that he could not reconcile with his belief system, he decided to cast off his beliefs, and plunged himself into a world of philosophical inquiry to try and discover an intellectual explanation for the world and everything within.
He would eventually plunge into objectively heinous behaviors, justifying his every action as being necessary components to his ultimate mission.
After years of searching he would come to a conclusion that would land him in eternal depression.
There is no such intellectual and philosophical “beginning”.
All knowledge and understanding stems back at some point to one or more beliefs. In other words: You can be a master of all the mathematical knowledge in the world. It’s still all meaningless unless you BELIEVE that one is one.
This book helped me to put aside certain latent objections I might have had toward the concept of religion in general. No matter what I did, some aspect, big or small, would be connected to blind faith. Religion is not the home of blind faith. It’s just another example.
My teacher had inadvertently opened doors to me that I never knew were there.
Do not get me wrong. Intellectual and philosophical inquiry have always been a tremendous part of my Jewish practices, and I think they’re a fundamental part of my religion in general. But they are supplements of faith, not replacements.