Judaism, Atheism, and the Language of the Sacred: A Religious Mini-Memoir (UNLOCKED)

Some reflections on the evolution of my views on God and religion over the years--and why, even now, I have mixed feelings.

My family background is a patchwork of Ukrainian Jews, Croatian Catholics, and hillbilly Protestants but no one had really practiced any of it for a couple of generations by the time I came along. I remember my late grandmother saying she wished she could have had a Jewish wedding but that’s really the most affection for the institutions of organized religion I can remember from any relative while I was growing up. Later, during my flirtation with Orthodox Judaism in my late teens and early twenties, she was disdainful—largely on feminist grounds.

I grew up in a house with plenty of residual Jewish cultural influence—homemade bagels, klezmer albums on heavy rotation in the CD player—but no trace of religiosity. During my first year of college, though, I took some Religious Studies classes and started thinking a lot more about my own religious impulses. I discovered Tikkun magazine and a version of what I’d learned to call “Jewish spirituality” that I found compelling. I ended up reading a bit of Mordechai Kaplan and a bit of Martin Buber and a ton of Abraham Joshua Heschel and I attended religious services all along the spectrum from Reform to Chabad—easier to do because by the time I was partway through this particular journey I was living the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

In an area full of synagogues, one I can remember walking past every single day was Tree of Life. That’s a location a lot of people who’ve never set foot in Pittsburgh know, because in 2018 a deranged anti-Semite walked into it with a gun and murdered 11 people and injured many more—some of them survivors of the Holocaust. The place I was usually walking to by the end of the year, though, was a “Modern Orthodox” shul a few blocks away. I’d dropped out of college by then, largely because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life and I’d gotten to the point where I was only there because if you’re an American from a middle-class background going to college is what you’re supposed to do. I stocked shelves at a kosher grocery store for a while, and washed dishes at a restaurant for a while, and I attended a weekly class that was supposed to lead to formal conversion to Orthodox Judaism.

There are a few reasons, personal as much as philosophical, why I never ended up going through with it at the time—though I was still toying with the idea well after I went back to college. Looking back on it, I think part of what held me back from making the final leap was that I’d never quite resolved the contradiction between my deep attraction to the texture and the rhythms of Orthodox Judaism—frankly, the Reform, Reconstructionist and even Conservative versions always felt way too Americanized to me, not like the real thing—and the fact that, when you get right down to it, what I meant by “God” just wasn’t the entity in which Orthodox Jews are supposed to believe.

The conception of “God” that I cobbled together from all that Abraham Joshua Heschel and Tikkun magazine and the rest was pretty vague and hippie-ish-ly pantheistic. It certainly wasn’t the kind of personal God who’s supposed to have not only dictated every word of the Torah to Moses but given him such specific instructions, so faithfully preserved over the millennia, that the Kabbalists read profound meaning into the misspellings and the exact spacing of the words in Torah scrolls. I tried to convince myself to believe in that God—or, as I’d learned to type it out back then, “G-d”¹—but the truth is that it was never a particularly successful attempt.

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To be fair, what I did believe in was pretty much what plenty of Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Rabbis currently occupying pulpits believe in, and my sense is that it’s not too far off from the theologies of plenty of liberal Protestant ministers. (I’ve read enough John Shelby Spong to have an inkling.) But what’s also true is that all that was really separating what I believed from what a lot of “spiritual but not religious” types believe is that what they prefer to call The Universe I preferred to call “G-d”—and associate with the layers of poetic resonance surrounding that concept in the Jewish tradition.

Ultimately, what changed is that I got more and more interested in “analytic” philosophy and I ended up going to graduate school for that, and I started to teach Intro to Philosophy courses to undergraduates—all of which led to me thinking a whole lot more than I ever used to about the philosophical debate “about the existence of God”.

In that context, what pretty much everyone means by “God” is the “all-PKG” (all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good) being who’s supposed to have created the universe rather than to be—in some hopelessly vague, poetic way—more or less the same thing as the universe. Or maybe the same thing as some aspect of the universe, as in Mordechai Kaplan’s confusing formulation that “God is the Power in the cosmos that gives human life the direction that enables the human being to reflect the image of God.” (Your guess is as good as mine.)

Increasingly, immersion in the philosophical debate brought home to me the gap between the sort of all-powerful creator worshipped by most pious Jews, Christians and Muslims over the centuries and whatever I’d managed to convince myself to think of as “God” for the sake of connecting to “Jewish spirituality.” The latter now struck me as a cheap and flimsy substitute for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The interesting argument, I now thought—the argument to be had with clever theistic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga—was about the existence of the latter. And on that question, I became a very thoroughly convinced atheist.

I enjoy arguing about philosophy and—regardless of which area of philosophy is under discussion—I tend to be a happy warrior about it. By my late twenties, I’d started doing this thing when I’d be out at a bar or a restaurant with some group of friends and we’d get into a “phil of religion” argument and someone would try to split the difference with agnosticism. I’d illustrate why I found that option implausible by sticking out my hand and turning it over to show my palm.

“Look,” I’d say. “Imagine that I told you that there’s a tiny invisible leprechaun dancing around the palm of my hand, singing ‘Danny Boy’ at a pitch that human ears can’t hear. And if I go like this”—I’d swat my palm with my other hand—“he’ll teleport to safety, and he knows how to magically evade any test we could devise to see if he’s there. Would you reserve judgment about whether there was a leprechaun, since there’s no way to either prove or disprove with absolute certainty that he’s real? Or would you just, y’know, think that there is not in fact a leprechaun on my palm?”

That is, I suppose, a pretty obnoxious way of framing things—but the core point that considerations of ontological simplicity can sometimes add up to a good enough reason to assert the non-existence of something, even in the absence of other reasons to think it doesn’t exist, still seems right to me. And that’s before you even start thinking about the Problem of Evil. If the universe was created by a morally perfect being with unlimited power, why on earth is it so full of cancer and genocide and natural disasters and child abuse? There are, of course, any number of traditional “solutions” to this problem—but none of them quite convince.

To crib a line from my grad school friend Mark, if someone tells you that an invisible giant walks around all day every day painting the sky yellow, your first question won’t even be, “Where’s the evidence?” It’ll be, “Why isn’t the sky yellow?”

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I said earlier that I grew up with no trace of religiosity. Somehow, though, mild celebrations of Hannukah have crept into my family’s life over the years now that my brother and I are adults and especially now that we both live reasonably close to our parents. (Our sister lives in another country.) Just everyone getting together for latkes and kugel at some point during those eight days and lighting grandma’s menorah, nothing beyond that.

And, whatever fond memories I might have of the atmosphere and feeling of going to that Orthodox shul twenty years ago, I’m good with keeping things just about exactly this level of connection-to-Judaism. I’m perfectly happy to call myself an atheist—which is in any case an accurate reflection of both my position on an all-PKG deity and my thoroughly secular life—and I feel no need to come any closer to religious observance than lighting a few candles once a year.

But.

Since the horrible new phase of the conflict in Israel/Palestine that started on October 7th, some part of me has started to wish that “God”—even in the vague, roughly pantheistic sense I used to use that word—was still part of my vocabulary. That the imagery and metaphors of Judaism still fit into my framework for thinking and talking about the world in a way they no longer do.

When I say that desire comes from my reaction to events in the Middle East, I don’t mean that some instinct of tribal solidarity is kicking in as Israelis and Palestinians kill each other on the nightly news. I mean something closer to the opposite of that.

Let me take a run at it:

First, say what you will about the embarrassing imprecision that often results from trying to spell this out in explicit terms, but even now I can’t help thinking there’s something to the idea that there’s a dimension of the human experience of…

…everything…

…that transcends anything humans quite know how to put into words—and that contemplation of this fact about our relationship to the larger cosmos actually can help us to more clearly grasp something about our connectedness with one another. And the language that’s been built up through thousands of years by various religious traditions really is the best poetry that we—the big “we,” we-as-a-species—have managed to come up with to express what I’m here fumbling my way through trying to say without that language.

And when I see photographs of apartment blocks reduced to rubble like some enormous monster has been walking up and down the length of the Gaza Strip stomping everything in sight, when I watch a video of a Palestinian father holding his dead daughter in his arms after an airstrike, when I read about thousands of people sheltering in hospitals, desperately afraid of the destruction raining down on them from the sky, and then the hospitals themselves being mercilessly bombarded, I want the religious language back.

I don’t want it back because it would be politically useful to condemn these things as a Jew. To be clear, I’m all in favor of people with far less ambiguous connections to Jewishness than my own doing the “Jews for Peace” thing. Yes, please. More of that. But no matter how you slice it that’s not going to be my role.

The reason some part of me wants the vocabulary of the sacred back is just this:

It feels like the most vivid, the most morally appropriate, the truest language for expressing a soul-deep horror at this rampant reduction of human beings in Gaza, who are each of them infinitely precious, who are each of them made in the image of God, to the status of insects you can crush under your boots as so much “collateral damage”.

1. Pious Jews aren’t supposed to speak out loud or write on a piece of paper the full name of God—by which I mean the actual name, in Hebrew. That’s why the Hebrew word you actually hear a lot of is “Adonai” which isn’t the name of God but more like the phrase “my Lord.” But also these rules have absolutely nothing to do with the English word “God” and so when I see people leaving out the “o” in deference to rules which are actually about a combination of Hebrew letters it feels like a bit of a silly affectation.