Thank G-d, I'm an atheist - Part 2
An excerpt from "Be Like The Moon: a Chassidic memoir", available on Amazon.com
Traveling the world to try and find myself. But I had left my heart in Yeshivah.
In my search for answers, I asked Dr. Ariel Burger, assistant to the late Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel of blessed memory, to teach me something about his mentor that no one else knew.
He shared the following: “Every night, Professor Wiesel would daven maariv (pray the evening prayers). But he changed the script subtly — and with a kind of eternal Jewish sigh of knowingness and pain— from ‘v’emunah kol zos’ (‘faith in all this’) to ‘v’emunah B’kol zos’ (‘faith despite all this’).”
I felt bad.
If a Holocaust survivor like Professor Wiesel could still believe, who was I to indulge in skepticism? I turned to the tool of prayer for strength and sanctuary. When I was a child, I had davened to save my bubbeh’s body from the scorching fires of cremation. Now I davened to save myself from the Satanic flames of self-doubt.
There were only two possibilities: either G-d exists or He doesn’t.
And, in nine or ten short decades, I’ll die and find out for myself if Heaven is real. So the smart bet is to abide by a few religious regulations while still alive and take the chance that I won’t disappear into oblivion but ascend into an Infinite World to Come where my reward shall far outweigh my investment.
But my inner apikores (Jewish term for “heretic”) continued to mercilessly persecute me as if I were a leaf driven in the wind. I prayed for an entire year, multiple times per day. Beseeching the Almighty to “Open Your hand and satisfy every living thing [with] its desire (Psalm 145:16).” In the privacy of my mind, I changed the script to “satisfy every living thing with [the] ‘ratzon’ (‘desire’).” My kavannah (intention) was simple. “If You’re really out there, give me the ratzon to believe in You!” My prayer for personal redemption was predicated upon sobering up from the drunkenness of self-indulgence.
Perhaps faith is the ability to accept the unknown until that time when Heavenly Father will reveal His logic for creating the facade of evil (Talmud Yoma 23A). Or maybe Moses was right when he accused G-d of “doing evil (Exodus 5:22).” I was no Moses, but if Moses wasn’t willing to accept that G-d knows best, maybe I didn’t have to either. Even if that meant fighting against G-d (Exodus 32:10)?
I was struggling with my faith in all this, despite all this.
Months passed.
I did not witness G-d repenting from the evil which He had done unto His people (Exodus 32:14). So my religious idealism cooled.
After all, if G-d wouldn’t stop hurting the world, who needed Him? Why not embrace what the other side had to offer? But the other side has nothing better to offer. It took me a while to grasp this. During that time, I drank from the jug of hedonistic forgetfulness and numbed my restless soul with intoxicating nihilism.
And then one day, I woke up from my spiritual stupor. Not in a shul (synagogue) or yeshivah but in a nightclub in Tahiti.
…To Be Continued.