God

Hashem, Adonai, the Almighty...religion

I was raised in a fairly religious home. As a Jewish family, we had been more or less orthodox. The home was kosher, we kept the sabbath, and all major Jewish holidays. There was no question that the almighty guided humanity’s path forward.

Over time however, home life changed. Well first of all, we moved away from the center of Jewish life here in the US (NY) to the smaller Jewish communities in the south. It became an interesting experience being the only Jewish student in my elementary and middle schools. Well interesting in not so nice ways at times. The unsettling thing about this, is the hate never really came from the kids. It was always the adults around us that caused the issues.

Looking back I find it rather sad truly, that grown people were so horrible to small children. I understand antisemitism and bigotry now as an adult. Growing up, it was just part of life. Something that just was.

Now our family’s religious observance started to change as we moved around the south mainly because there simply was a dearth of kosher butchers, and life has a way of changing your views as well. My mother, being a butcher’s daughter, simply could not abide driving over 200 miles to the nearest kosher butcher to get horribly inferior terribly overpriced meat. So she started buying kosher cuts of meat in the local supermarket.

(My grandfather, z”l, spent days on end looking through religious texts in order to absolve her of any misdeed in this.)

We kept the holidays, but the local synagogues were not orthodox. Some were conservadox (a mixture of conservative and orthodox), but more so they were usually reform.

One of the biggest influences, which changed the way we began to practice in our home, was a particular rabbi that my parents had met. This rabbi was a wonderful Talmudic scholar. He was also a reform rabbi. Understanding that the answers do not always lie in one way of observing became the reality of our home. Just as an aside, my mother was also the first woman in our synagogue to carry a Torah on Simchat Torah. She always had this rebellious streak about her.

Eventually, we left the southern US and moved back to the northeast. There, of course, was a much larger Jewish community and an abundance of synagogues to join, but life was also changing. Hashem (God) would always remain a figure in our world, but life progressed, and as I left home, my practice of Judaism changed.

I would say my Judaism became more informed with Jewish history, zionism, and how it all coalesced to build a 3500 year old historiography. At the time my religion was (and is) important to me, but in a different, a very 20 something way. Yes, I fasted on Yom Kippur (which I no longer do). Kept passover (we have a seder at home, and keep matzah for anyone who wishes to avoid food items with leven). Celebrated hanukkah (of course, everyone celebrates hanukkah. If you ignore Judaism for the rest of the year, you celebrate hanukkah).

But then I married my college sweetheart. A nice Jewish boy whose family used to have a Christmas tree. So things changed. (No, we never had a christmas tree in our home, but his understanding and celebration of Judaism was limited, so things changed how the home would be run, because we both needed to be comfortable with the level of observance in our home.)

During this time I also taught in a hebrew school and in a yeshiva. So my Judaism was not a peripheral part of my life.

I am also going to tell you what also changed my observance level. Autism changed everything. Not because we didn’t have to figure out how to observe with children that had a myriad of issues. Read here for an example. But, faced with a type of challenges that I never knew existed, I felt abandoned and betrayed. Deserted as it were, by the God of Israel, that I had loved so very much. (As you can tell, I am not Job. I never claimed to be Job. Honestly, I think Job was a schmuck.)

I can proudly say the boys were raised Jewish. They went to hebrew school, had a bar mitzvah tutor (a wonderful lady who we still speak to and keep in touch with), and celebrate(d) the holidays at home. (We no longer belong to a synagogue, it’s nice you can stream high holiday services now.) They identify as Jewish, in fact their observance has increased since October 7. You learn who you are fast, when faced with such a worldwide onslaught of hate.

Or as my oldest said to me, by not keeping some simple Judaism observance, “I was allowing Hitler to win….” So now we light Shabbat candles together and make sure to recite The Shema to remind ourselves who we are. (In fact, this son’s undergraduate degree is in Holocaust/genocide studies. Which did not help his relationship with Hashem, which was problematic before his bar mitzvah. But know that the Star of David sits prominently around both boys’ necks now.)

However, as we are all product of our childhood, one of the things I take with me from that impressionable time is still that feeling of being different. Of not being wanted. Of being alienated in a nation who my forefathers fought for, a nation my father risked his life for, a nation whose first president, promised that we are welcome within its borders. In fact, from my husband’s family, my son’s are descended from a Jewish revolutionary war hero (or so the family lore goes. But we do have a family tree that puts his people here in the US by the year 1700). And yet, there are those who would erase Jewish-Americans on every level from our nation’s history.

Honestly, I get really nervous when I hear, that states are trying to put the Ten Commandments back in the classroom. Not simply because it is unconstitutional (the status of which may change depending upon the vagaries of any supreme court make up). But more so because, there are differences in the Jewish and Christian version of the 10 commandments. And for those who don’t know it, there are also those in our country who don’t have a Judeo-Christian religious background.

Listen, I experienced religion in a public school. I was told that “Jews killed Christ,” by the teacher. I experienced being singled out because I wouldn’t sing christmas carols, or say the Lord’s Prayer before lunch (by the teachers). I remember simply not feeling wanted. I was a stranger in my own land. Well according to those who alienated me, they didn’t actually consider the US my land, did they, and they still don’t?

Meanwhile, it makes me anxious when I hear people talk about the hand of God backing one candidate or the other. As if this imbues a human being with the imprimatur of the Almighty. That this individual is more important than anyone else, and that God herself has called on us from on high to push this person’s political agenda.

(By the way, I like to say God is female, even though in the Jewish religion we do only use the masculine gender to refer to hashem. In truth, in Judaism we do not really think of God as male or female. God is God. When we talk about that “we are created in God’s image,” it is not a physical thing as much as it is with a soul. But I leave that discussion to others more adept at it than I. )

One of the things I have learned through my life is that while religion will teach us right from wrong (and yes there have been much wrong done in the name of religion), religion deciding that you have a God given right to anything beyond the right to life, and respect for your humanity, is a dangerous slippery slope.

It also provides too easy answers for some very hard questions.

It also takes from humanity the need for consequences for their actions.

What I fear more than anything else in the future is that religion, whether where there is a God in heaven, or a religion which worships at the altar of secularism/ideological marxism/science, is that there is only hubris, without the sense of humbleness. There is a self-righteousness, a sense of superiority, of religious supremacy, or religious successionism that guides so much in discourse today.

Humility is what is lacking. Without humility, there is no acknowledgment that the universe is beyond our understanding at this time, and we should humble ourselves before the vastness of time and space.

That lack of being humble, of the modesty that your beliefs could be wrong, will only lead to the horrors that has plagued humanity from time immemorial. Frighteningly, these religious based horrors have been growing in our world today. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be any brakes to the onslaught. This race to the abyss is something we need to stop. But at the same time, we also can’t let those who wish to slaughter to win. Yes, we love life. (Martyrs only die. It still is better to live to fight another day for peace, joy, happiness, and life.)

Scientists say there is the God gene in humans. That we need God, or something akin to God. Perhaps that is why when so many turn away from traditional religion, they find an alternative in secularism/DEI/progressivism, which has arisen as a form of worship. Apparently, humanity has to find some philosophy in which it thinks it has all the answers.

But as I age, what I have learned is that humans do not have any religion or secular belief which has all the answers. How could we? Religion is created by humanity, and humanity does not even have the maturity to know how to ask all the right questions yet, so how could we have created any philosophy that provides all the answers.