Happy with my Judaism

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Reading about the struggles of so many to find a balance between their Orthodox lifestyle and their skeptical outlook, I feel lucky.

I'm pretty happy & comfortable where I am. I'm a quasi-skeptic who is happy with an observant lifestyle (with some social innovations) and finds divinity in what is probably a human-written Torah.

I've always been fascinated with the ancient origins of Judaism. Now the human story of creating this religion actually is making it more meaningful to me than when I thought it was given as a complete product by Hashem.

One always takes more pride in what one builds oneself. As a nation we can take more pride in what we or our ancestors built ourselves rather than it being handed to us all finished.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 14, 2008 at 3:03 PM

    I'm there too, but it took me a long time to get there. (Though I'm way more skeptical than you.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yehudi HilchatiJanuary 14, 2008 at 3:23 PM

    Anonymous:

    I think the key is that I still have my emunah, albeit in a modified version. I was forced to acknowlege, and eventully to appreciate a human-authored Torah, but nothing I've learned forces me to remove all divinity from that document.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJanuary 14, 2008 at 3:26 PM

    "I think the key is that I still have my emunah"

    I don't. For me the key was relearning basically everything about Judaism. From there I could build a Jewish identity for myself that I wanted. Naturally, it took a while.

    ReplyDelete
  4. הצעיר שלמה בן רפאל לבית שריקי ס"טJanuary 22, 2008 at 4:35 PM

    Don't you Deists hear what you're suggesting? That G-d never communicated with Mankind! How could that be?! How could he expect Man to be ethical if not making some kind of statement as to what is proper in G-d's eyes?!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yehudi HilchatiJanuary 22, 2008 at 4:45 PM

    Shlomo:

    Who said he never communicated with mankind? My whole point is that I do see divinity in the Torah, it's just that I can't accept that the Torah was given word-for-word at Har Sinai. But there was some revelation from Hashem, maybe through nevuah, maybe through ruach hakodesh, maybe some combination of the two. The Jews then wrote it down in ways that they could understand.

    ReplyDelete

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