Born Again as an Infidel
By Eleanor Green
2005/04/20
In walking away from organized religion and Jewish
Orthodoxy, I almost expect the abandonment that I faced with relatives
after I filtered Christianity honestly through my sense of reason and
justice and found it wanting. Most people, with very few exceptions, are
able to honestly take an objective stance and consider the beliefs
they hold dear, invest vast amounts of money in, are emotionally attached
to, and whose adherents make up their peer group. Free thought and honesty
of opinion are unwelcome in most religions.
My process of new birth has been a long and winding
one. Born to a fundamentalist preacher, I began to question the beliefs of
my childhood in middle adulthood and left them entirely for Orthodox
Judaism, which was, in the truest sense, reconciliation with the faith of
my maternal ancestors. Yet, after a few years inside the ultra-religious
world, I began to realize that the same problems that had driven me from
the church were to be found here, which led me to finally allow myself to
question the subject of religion in general and ultimately, the
untouchable Holy Grail known as the Bible.
It saddens me that for centuries, priests and rabbis
have spent their entire lives inventing what they think are clever
explanations to justify the cruelty and barbarity of the plain text of
what man claims is God's opinion. It is much like an endeavor to convince
the public that the grand wizard of the KKK is secretly a Jew-, Black-,
and homosexual- lover whose words and actions are simply misconstrued, and
only a tiny, select, and wealthy group who can attend a special school to
learn these justifications is able to understand this "fact." If
God wanted the world to know Him, we would never have to explain His
opinions or tone down His capriciousness. It would be clear to all if He
was just. The one single evidence for me that none of the manmade
religious books is from the Creator is the insistence of the major ones
with which we are familiar that its adherents shun their fellows. Even
worse is the bigoted arrogance of believing that any group is genetically
holy, superior, and favored by the Creator of innumerable worlds.
Our rabbis, bless their well-intentioned hearts, tell
us that "All Jews have a place in the World to Come." No matter
what a monster, jerk, or hateful, selfish criminal a Jew is, he/she is
genetically worthy of eternal bliss. But most Gentiles have no such place
unless they follow an inferior religious system that we ourselves
invented, of which I never even heard and would bet my life that 99% of
Gentiles haven't. By the standard of the Noahide system that we made up,
Mother Theresa does not have such a place because she was an idolator.
Walt Whitman is also condemned because this brilliant, sensitive man was a
homosexual. But Pat Robertson, whose bigotry and prejudice has influenced
millions, whose lavish lifestyle is funded by the poor and ignorant, has
an assured place in the World to Come because he has violated none of the
seven laws of Noah. He may believe in Jesus, but he bows to no
"graven images."
Genetic holiness, an extra part to the soul, or
innate superiority over others, in spite of one's personal behavior toward
his fellow man, is a concept that has the number one thing on the alleged
list of things God hates written all over it..."a proud look."
How can Jews believe such a thing about themselves and then laugh at the
injustice of vicarious atonement?
If we can see that dying for the sins of another
accomplishes nothing, and merit must be earned through good deeds, why do
we then make a mockery of logic and insist that all Jews have a place in
the World to Come by a virtue that is similarly unmerited, unjustified,
and unjust?
While we may take comfort in saying that we haven't
had an Inquisition, nor Crusade, nor have we behaved as the Medieval
church did, the truth is that the church got the idea from our Bible. Our
Bible is responsible for every "witch" that was ever killed. We
planted the vineyard and now we shrug and insist that we did not reap the
harvest, but someone else came along and reaped it. We would have done
better to have not planted it.
We can quote a thousand rabbis and come up with what
we think are wise parables to explain away the plain and obvious
atrocities in the text, but that does not erase them. The fact that so
much effort is required in order to attempt to justify the capriciousness,
impulsiveness, and ferocity of our God (what we think is our God), is
proof enough that we know such efforts are necessary because we know that
many things claimed in its pages are barbaric beyond modern man's
comprehension.
I can never be an honest person and actually delude
myself into thinking that the Creator of all the worlds favors me for
something I cannot help and had no part in, nor that He disfavors someone
else for the same reason.
I can honestly say that every observation of behavior
that appalls me in the frum community of Jews is the direct result of
deluding oneself into thinking he/she is genetically superior to another.
Any other. Yichus (the insistence that righteous ancestors impart
righteousness through sperm and egg) and its fruit is the result
of thinking one is superior to the non-Jew by virtue of birth. It is only
an extension of it.
That is why secular Jews have accomplished so much,
while ultra-Orthodox ones have accomplished so little good in this world
for the betterment of universal mankind. The more frum, the more insular
and selfish one is. Why? Because the Bible justifies the dulling of good
sense and, more importantly conscience of how it might feel to be in the
"out group." The more frum, the more ignorant one is. Who has
time to study science and history when one has a schedule full of shiurim,
kaballah classes, and other pursuits that serve to dull, rather than
expand, one's knowledge of the readily observable?
There is no more effective way to block the process
of objective reason than to recite hours of doctrinal statements every day
rather than reading in a library. We created our own capricious master,
enslaved ourselves, and now we insist on "praying" from a book which
is only brainwashing ourselves to limit our brains to what we wish were
true, not what is. What a difference religious Jews would make in the
world if they got up at dawn and spent hours reading philosophy, science
texts, and history instead of meaningless prayers! Think how wise they
would become if the minyan of ten would include women and be spent in the
study of astronomy, philosophy, history, geology, and mathematics! A few
pages of Einstein, Hawking, Sagan, Voltaire, Socrates, Shakespeare,
Paine...The list is endless.
We love to take credit for our genes or our religious
books producing our great contributions to humanity, while at the same
time despising the secularism that produced such accomplishments, hating
our brothers who decided to abandon an ancient religious system of rituals
and absurdities for the study of what is here for us to discover if we
will only activate our brains and grant our creativity to explaining the
undiscovered in nature, rather than acting as defense attorneys for the
unjustifiable ideas our ancient ancestors had about God. We should be
improving humanity through education and charity rather than lining the
pockets of our lucky recipients of "yichus" with exorbitant
prices for a piece of fruit and a palm frond! I'm sure God is pleased to
see us waving plants around that we paid so much for and step over the
homeless and hungry in the street on the way to synagogue!
Would we
refuse to attend a close relative’s wedding and cause rifts in our
families for any other reason? Would we castigate a mother for the sincere
belief that circumcising her son is an unnecessary and painful procedure
for any other reason? Would we refuse to eat with a non-Jewish neighbor
for any other reason?
You may wonder, as I did, how, if one decides upon
careful thinking that the Jewish Bible can't possibly be written by any
other than men, one can still be in favor of Israel's right to exist. It's
not a dilemma. Israel is as legitimate a nation as any on the planet,
established in sovereignty by the United Nations, as many other
Middle Eastern nations were in recent ages. Therefore, she has a right to
exist. She also has a right to punish insurrection that comes in the form
of violence, to expel those who hate her as we do our enemies, and to
defend herself. She must protect her legitimate citizens, including those
of non-Jewish origins, by using the most severe and swift judgment against
violence. She must write a constitution and a bill of rights that allows
neither naturalized Jews to throw stones at passing Arabs, nor naturalized
Arabs to throw stones at passing Jews. The Jews are my people, I love
them, and they have a right to defend themselves and their nation, just
like any other.
We must focus on preventing war altogether and
eliminate the entire problem in the future. There is no peace to come from
dividing one nation that is attempting to become a democracy into two
theocracies. Instead, we must advocate the education of all of its
citizens, the end of religious schools that teach only hatred and censor
free thinking. We must find a way to secularize education so that all
Israeli citizens will, in the next generation, realize that it serves all
well to dwell at peace with our neighbor. We could not have an America
with territories for each racial group. We are a great nation because we
are slowly learning to be one without walls and racial division. We have a
long way to go, but we have the idea at last.
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