The reluctant atheist

I may have mentioned, I'm attending a weekly Judaism class with an eye towards converting.

It's not a journey I ever expected to take.  Raised in the Anglican/Episcopalian church, I dismissed religion early on as just so much voodoo.  None of it seemed relevant to my life, and after looking into a few alternative religions, I finally declared myself an atheist.

But I was always a reluctant atheist, because I recognized there were whole dimensions of religious life I was missing: the association, the ritual, the history; all the reasons that religion had developed in the first place.  I had, as it were, thrown the baby out with the bathwater.  

I didn't even like associating with other atheists, because most of them could not see that rejection of religion was, in its way, its own religion.  It isn't a 'truth,' it's just a belief in a particular view to the exclusion of all other views.  That atheists somehow find superiority in what is, essentially, a limited imagination and a lack of interest in the bigger picture astounds me.

Jess wasn't the first Jew I ever met, of course, but she was the first one that embraced it as a culture rather than a religion, which intrigued me.  The local Reform synagogue ran a weekly 'Gateway' program discussing Jewish history and values and I decided to attend, not entirely sure what I would find.

The first thing I found is that 'reform Judaism' doesn't mean 'Judaism light.'  In fact, in many ways it is just the opposite.  Just as Christianity had its Protestant movement, rejecting the dogma of the Catholic church, so too did Judaism, replacing the rituals of the 'Orthodox' synagogues with a personal relationship to the text.  That meant instead of learning a few rituals, you had to learn the text, the history, the interpretations, the underlying reasons, its societal context, *and* the rituals, and then figure out what made sense to you.  That's a lot of information, and the conversion process takes at least a year, and often longer.

I should mention the US 'reform' movement is slightly different than the UK reform movement, in that it uses English rather than Hebrew, and rejects some of the historical concepts such as matrilineal descent (that Judaism descends from the mother). While the UK requires "study in Jewish theology, rituals, history, culture and customs, and to begin incorporating Jewish practices into their lives," the US permits conversion "without any initiatory rite, ceremony, or observance whatever." (In practice, though, most US converts go through a short program and may go before a beit din [3-judge panel] before being accepted.)

So for the past 8 months I have been attending 3 hours every Wednesday -- one hour of Hebrew and two hours with the rabbi -- plus (irregular) weekly services. And I find it fascinating, engaging, and oddly satisfying.  I do find comfort in the rituals, and appreciate how religion serves to separate the mundane, and marks the passages of time.  I have to admit, though, that part of the reason I find it so relevant is that because my rabbi doesn't believe in God.

As way of explanation, I'll take an example from last week, when we were discussing the rules around keeping kosher.  An Orthodox Jew would simply be expected to follow the Talmudic interpretations, such as having two sets of dishes.  A Reform Jew would be expected to be aware of the difference between the Biblical instructions and the Orthodox interpretation, and decide for themselves where they are on that spectrum. A Liberal Jew would be expected to not eat pork.  My Reform rabbi, however, decided to keep a kosher kitchen, not because he believed that's what God wanted him to do, but because by doing so he acknowledged the importance of food, recognized a 2,000-year-old tradition, and enabled Orthodox Jews to eat at his home.  In one step, he both rejected the mysticism I had such a problem with, and affirmed the things that matter -- the history, the people, and the rituals.  Brilliant.

I don't know that I could ever get the same level of satisfaction from Christianity, because of course the first thing Saint Peter did when establishing the new Church was to reject everything that had gone before, and replacing it with a spiritual paradigm that doesn't resonate with me at all.  I was also never comfortable with the Eastern religions because they are very much a product of their culture, and I am not part of that culture.  Sure, Westerners have been picking and choosing from the religious smorgasbord, but when was the last time you were satisfied by a buffet meal?