Losing My Religion
People are surprised to learn I’m an atheist. Perhaps because I bake challah or am a Jewish communal leader, or send my kids to religious school and Jewish camps, or attend shul regularly. Perhaps because I use words like “shul,” an insidery word, instead of synagogue.
“You mean agnostic,” they often say, grasping for a path towards understanding. But I don’t. I mean atheist, and I mean it without compunction.
I think that my parents and in-laws believe in god. I think some of my children believe, too. For six years of my career I was “rabbi-adjacent,” totally immersed with brilliant and thoughtful rabbis across the country who all, I think, believe in a form of divine being. And many writers whose work I greatly admire—from Anne Lamott and Marilynne Robinson to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Evelyn Waugh—say they believe in god. I idolize Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who both sing about god. In other words, some of the people I love and respect the most, and with whom I choose to spend much of my time, believe.
For me, the understanding began dawning around age twelve, an age at which, ironically, I also felt particularly spiritually activated. I began then to understand that much was unknowable, to view sacred texts—including the Torah that I read from at my Bat Mitzvah that year—as literature, and to begin to appreciate the breathtaking scientific explanations for things that for so much of human history had seemed magical, or religious. The great intellectual gift of Judaism is that questioning is inherent to the way we learn and process, and my parents, teachers, and community leaders were always firm on their own beliefs while welcoming and engaging with my questions. Over years, I refined many beliefs at my parents’ generous dinner table, including opposition to the death penalty, belief in reproductive justice, the value of a work ethic, the importance of civic activism and perhaps least impactfully but most controversially, my non-belief in god, intentional design, or a mystical master force in the universe.
As I became a teenager, I was first drawn to new age mysticism before I was drawn to Richard Dawkins. I wanted to immerse myself in the idea of the wild thrum of nature and nexuses of energy and color, before I engaged with probability and intellectual rigor. An ill-conceived and not-parent-approved tattoo at age sixteen (RIP to my lower back) almost directly preceded a shift in my thinking, a shift from unknowability to a rigorous scientific base. By the time I was seventeen I could no more tolerate astrology than I could a snake oil salesperson. I read widely and went down rabbit holes, perseverating on Richard Feynman for a spell, or what I could understand of quantum physics. For a couple of years I was a quietly angry atheist, not understanding how others could believe in god, how I ever had. But in early adulthood I settled into my own skin more comfortably—as people do—and no longer felt I needed to be on the defensive or the offensive, secure in my own non-belief. Later, discovering the musical comedy of Tim Minchin with a library of Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens on my bookshelves, I felt like I could finally laugh at my journey, at least a little bit.
Yet the organized religion of the accident of my birth holds a powerful sway. Much the way that Philip Pullman—the author of the church-critical His Dark Materials books who has called himself a “Church of England atheist”—talks about cookies and community in the basement of an Anglican church, I found a powerful pull in the communal practices of Jewish community. Especially the kind of intentional, post-denominational Jewish community one can find more often now, a community where access is created through music and social values, where each week a three-hour meditative Sabbath spell allows me to focus on what is truly important in my life, and how I might center it. Each week I have the gift of 25 hours of peace with my family, the best food of the week, of a palace in time for me to read, rest, think. I inherited a practice where once annually I take deep stock of my life, my choices, and my relationships, and half a year later I have to do a deep spring cleaning, followed by 49 days of intentionally marking time so that I never take time’s passing for granted. I have the example set by the sages of the Talmud, an example of maklochet l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of heaven, a worthy and rigorous pursuit even for those of us who don’t believe in, you know, heaven.
I have a covenant and a history and thousands of years of inborn excitement at seeing a Torah held aloft on festivals; hundreds of years of inborn knowledge of how to roll a matzah ball and braid a challah. My community delivered kugel when my babies were born and groceries when I had surgery. They stood crying with me after world tragedies and showed up to work side-by-side with me to help neighbors in need. There is so much beauty in my history and culture, and so much trauma tied up in it.
So when I was crafting my first novel, Olive Days, I couldn’t help but address these ideas. What would it mean for someone raised to believe monolithically in god to begin to doubt? How can someone hold both the bone-deep beauty of Jewish community and also acknowledge the burden inherent to upholding it? How can a person, with intellectual and emotional fidelity, hold what in Judaism we call elu v’elu, these and those? Perhaps most importantly: does a tradition that values questions hold true to that value when the meekest among them tests the theory?
The Jewish people got our name, Israel, from a particularly important piece of Torah. After Jacob (Ya’acov) wrestles with god, he is renamed Israel. And that’s our legacy. We are wrestlers. We wrestle with ideas, including god. I feel very comfortable wrestling. And so I write characters who are eternal wrestlers, who are on journeys of learning and understanding, and who I hope will find empathy and admiration in readers, including those I hold dear who themselves have wrestled, and have come to a different conclusion.
