Memories...

(No chiddush... just a place to vent )

There were those few years where I was terrified. I was scared to death that I was doing everything wrong and I was expending countless hours in the service of to the wrong God (assuming there really was one). I sat for hours reading books looking for "the answer" and for the magical solution which would allay my doubts and jettison me back into religious bliss. The years went by and I learned a lot about Judaism, much more than I would have known had I confined my reading to the strict Talmudic curriculum mandated by my Rabbis, but alas no answer became apparent and I was simply distraught. I prayed and cried during my tefilot. I prayed for belief, belief in an afterlife, belief in an existence with cosmic significance, belief in a God who I could lean on in times of distress and thank in times of joy. I looked around at the blind believers and burned with envy at their good fortune.

I thought a lot. I weighed arguments in my head building up grotesque theories and solutions and knocking them down one by one at a dizzying pace. Kuzari "proof", Torah codes and gematriot, kiruv seminars, I did them all. I remember the joy at discovering or reading a new "idea" and the distress every time I refuted it to the satisfaction of my logic but not my heart.


The years passed and I just stopped thinking about these issues. I got on with my Orthodox life more or less indifferently always stopping once in a while to shed a tear on Yom Kippur or other significant occasions. Unfortunately because I decided to "switch off my brain" I ended up making certain choices inspired by my old religious convictions which still affect my life today. But that's another story...


And then one night I stood outside in the early morning and for the hell of it decided to turn my thoughts back to Judaism. And I realized that I didn't care anymore, the deep convictions I had once had no longer haunted me and I finally said to myself "Shilton, what was was, you are free." And I stopped worrying and praying for the religion of my childhood and rejoiced in my new intellectual freedom. And all the regret and sadness and yearning for a faith which was beyond my grasp dissipated just like that and I now looked at those same blind believers with quiet pride that I had not just followed the flock but had been clever enough (or maybe just "lucky" enough) to think outside of the confines of Orthodoxy.


Very quickly this momentary happiness was shattered by the realization that I was Orthoprax and I began to wonder if it wasn't time to leave....