Thank G-d, I'm an atheist - Part 1
An excerpt from "Be Like The Moon: a Chassidic memoir", available on Amazon.com
I had encountered hippies in forests and poets in bars. The next stop on the winding road out of adolescence led me to debate an atheist on the UC Berkeley campus.
“If G-d exists, how could the Holocaust happen?” he kept demanding.
While I could defend my mother against mikvah critics, I was now at a loss for words. But the Talmud demands, “Know what to answer a heretic (lit. Epicurean).” So, I responded to his repeated challenge with religious rationalizations. He promptly accused me of intellectually indefensible magical thinking. I parried with, “If G-d doesn’t exist, then where did all this come from?” He feigned and feinted. I accused him of brainwashed scientism of big-banged proportions.
I had expected that after almost a decade of rigorous yeshiva education, I could easily persuade this non-believer. But after an hour of vigorous debate, I failed.
Interestingly, we did agree on one point. In response to the other’s primary question, we both admitted, “I don’t know.”
After the debate, I resumed “tabling Judaism” with Rabbi Ferris smack in the middle of Sproul Plaza, the bustling hub of UC Berkeley where students, musicians, and social activists all converge and congregate. The debate had been one moment in the day’s montage of putting Tefillin on men, giving Shabbos candles to women, and trying to regurgitate the copious amounts of Torah I had studied into easily comprehensible, on-the-go, multi-second sound bites. After a couple of hours, Rabbi Ferris dropped me back home so I could get back to my “real job” of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life now that I had graduated Yeshiva. But all I could think of as I left the grounds of America’s most open-minded university was my failed debate and how closed-minded I felt.
History whispered to me that documented truth is provisional, empirical, and often not true at all. Pseudo-intellectuals polluted social media with angry ALL-CAPS
public service announcements denigrating Intelligent Design as Creationism bamboozling in a cheap tuxedo. And the Torah’s opinion was that the word for “world” is olam or “hidden,” and what we are all looking for, whether we call ourselves scientists, philosophers, or religionists, is the Hand inside the glove.
I couldn’t see G-d, but I still believed. After all, I couldn’t see the radio waves that made my cell phone work and that didn’t seem to stop me from making a call. Yet, after having filled my mind with Torah since I was a child, I had more
questions than answers. (I know, I know. I should have studied more.)
Einstein believed in G-d. My mother was a scientific theist. Dr. Brawer had loved to go on and on about how punctuated equilibrium, fossil evidence, and a commonsense interpretation of the facts fully corroborate the evolutionary process described in Genesis. As the Talmud teaches, “Everything that G-d created in His world, He did not create but for His glory.”
So it wasn’t the alleged irreconcilable rift between science and religion that made me feel closed-minded. On the contrary, I was primed to believe what Nobel Laureate and theoretical physicist, Werner Heisenberg, once said: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass G-d is waiting for you.”
I thirsted for theism in the style of the heilegeh (holy) Reb Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev who once told his father-in-law, “From my Rebbe, the Maggid of Mezritch, I came to know the Ribono shel Olam (Master of the Universe).”
“But even the boor in the marketplace believes in G-d,” his father-in-law protested.
“Ah, that’s true,” the Berditchever answered. “He believes in G-d. But I know Him.”
I, Levi Yitzchok Welton, also wanted to know Him. According to my mother, spiritual knowledge is birthed through a perpetual curiosity to discover deeper truths. Or, as the Chassidic legend Reb Menachem Mendel of Kotzk once said, “Whoever does not see G-d in every place, does not see G-d in any place.”
“But if you can’t see an invisible G-d, how do you know He exists?” those belittling my faith would crow triumphantly. “I can’t see your brain either,” I’d reply. “Maybe that doesn’t exist.” (I had read that somewhere on the Internet).
Yet, the more I ruminated over the debate I had with that atheist, the more I began to feel that this world doesn’t need the G-d to Whom I so desperately clung. After all, who needs a Heavenly Father who tolerates, sanctions, and even commands violence against His own children? The farther out the road of my naïve childhood I ventured, the more I witnessed the brutal pain and heartless suffering this so-called Higher Power tolerated and that we pathetically accept as the human condition. My mind vomited up example after example of oppression, injustice, and the ungodly nature of our existence. The atheist’s question had triggered a bifurcation in the philosophical assumptions of my infantile theology which now began to eat away at my soul.
Desperately and defensively, I fought back with the words of the Alter Rebbe, who once asked, “What would I do if I were G-d?” and then quickly answered, “Whatever G-d is doing right now.” But this answer didn’t work for me. Because I knew exactly what I would do if I had the Creator’s power.
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