Advice for a Teenaged Modern Orthodox Skeptic

I am a 16 year old boy who goes to a modern orthodox high school. I have been religious my whole life but am very skeptical about Judaism and God's existence as a whole. A few months ago, I hit the breaking point and for a few weeks I did not keep kosher or shabbos. I spoke with my parents about it and they were heartbroken.

I thought about it for a while and I decided that I will finish up high school and go to my Israel year and then if I am still not satisfied with Judaism I will just live my life free of overbearing laws that make no sense and just go crazy in college.

This leads to my question. When i learn gemara and chumash and what not I have a hard time taking it seriously. So my question is that what in Judaism is actually real and what is just made up, from an atheist perspective at least. For instance, were the Jews actually ever in the desert? Did the forefathers really exist? What about more modern things like the Channukah and Purim story and the wars in the times of navi'im?

The 2nd part of my question is, so lets say there is no god, were the prophets and rabbis like rashi and rambam just delusional old men?

thank you for taking time to read and i eagerly await your response by email or maybe a post on the blog.

Sincerely,
biding my time

Hi "biding",

I'll respond by blog so that other people can contribute answers as well and so that other kids in your situation might be able to read it.

I sympathize with your situation -- that sounds hard. I personally didn't start being really skeptical until college, when I was already out of the house. My parents were also heartbroken, but since I wasn't living under their roof, there were fewer complications. We do have a pretty good relationship to this day, though. I'm sure they'd still prefer I be religious, but it's not really an issue between us anymore. We just don't really talk about it.

It sounds reasonable to finish up high school where you are if that's what you want to do. As for Israel, I'd do some thinking about what you're trying to get out of it. Some yeshivas are intellectual, some are for partying, and some specialize in making people frum out. It can be pretty tough I think if you go to one that doesn't fit. A lot of people end up just hanging out with friends or partying, so if that's what you're into it might not matter that much. I was kind of introverted and not so into partying, so even though my yeshiva wasn't a good fit for me (too right-wing) I mostly just kept to myself and read books all year. It kind of sucked. Something I wish I'd considered more seriously was doing some kind of joint program like the one at Bar-Ilan, which is coed. You can still do some Orthodox stuff for your own sake or your parents', and you get the experience of living in Israel (based in secular Tel Aviv instead of Jerusalem) but you also get more of a college-like experience. Or, of course, you could just head straight to college.

As for "going crazy" in college, if that's what you decide to do, try to be smart about it. :-) Just because you don't believe in Orthodoxy's rules doesn't mean that you have to be some kind of crazy hedonist. Just look at Charlie Sheen to see where that gets you -- it looks fun, but it's probably not the best way to lasting happiness and healthiness. I think some level of experimentation is probably a good idea for most people, but just be smart about it. If you go that route, educate yourself about safe sex, try to have some real relationships, don't kill yourself with alcohol, and try to use other drugs responsibly if you choose to use them.

Onto the questions. I don't think there's a singular "atheist perspective," so I just try to go with what the actual experts on a subject believe. You can usually just look something up on Wikipedia for some pointers.

For example, on the "Were the Jews ever in the desert?" question, Wikipedia offers:

While a Moses-like figure may have existed in Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century BCE, archaeology cannot prove or disprove his existence, and the "overwhelming" archaeological evidence of the largely indigenous origins of Israel "leaves no room for an Exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness."[20] For this reason, most archaeologists have abandoned the archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit."[21] A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus narrative of an Egyptian captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness,[16] and it has become increasingly clear that Iron Age Israel - the kingdoms of Judah and Israel - has its origins in Canaan, not Egypt:[22][23]

If you're really interested, of course, you won't stop at Wikipedia but will follow the references to primary sources.

It's really not possible to rule out the existence of, for example, the forefathers, but suffice it to say there doesn't seem to be a good secular reason to believe that they are anything more than literary/mythical creations. The important thing to realize is that the majority of secular scholars believe the chumash was written by multiple authors over a long period of time and put together somewhere around 600-450 BCE, over 500 years after Moses would have existed. So the validity of the text as a historical document has to be understood in that context.

The story of Chanukkah seems to be at least "based on a true story" in that the Temple obviously existed and there was a war, etc. There is some scholarly disagreement on the nature of that war. See Wikipedia for more information. As for Purim, secular scholars seem to think that Megillat Esther is basically a historical novella and point to various historical inaccuracies in the text.

I think it's possible to continue to study and even enjoy chumash and gemarah on an intellectual level even if you don't think that they represent the truth, but I'm sure it's not for everybody, so I'd just treat it like any other subject I didn't really care about as far as school goes.

The second part of your question asks about the prophets and rabbis. With regard to prophets, some scholars hypothesize that Ezekial, for example, may have suffered from a form of epilepsy, but that's really just guesswork as far as I'm concerned. There are of course many mental illnesses or drug-induced states that we know cause people to act the way the prophets are said to have acted. I have a neighbor, for example, who can talk for hours in a very manic state about all kinds of visions and wild experiences she has had. I'm not a doctor, but she appears to me to be schizophrenic. It could also be that prophets were normal people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and that the stories about them were just exaggerated and embellished.

I don't think it's fair to call rabbis like Rashi or the Rambam delusional, in the sense of the word that implies mental illness. Orthodox Rabbis today aren't delusional, they just believe things that I don't think are true. I assume that the same is true of Rashi and the Rambam, although they at least have the excuse that they lived before the scientific revolution. It's fun to think about if the Rambam, who was obviously a brilliant man interested in philosophy, would have become an atheist if he were born in the last couple of centuries, but there's really no way to know.

Anyway, I hope I've been helpful. Good luck in getting through the next few years and making some big decisions. It might be helpful to see a psychologist to help you think through everything. I advise even adults who become skeptics to consider seeking therapy just because leaving Orthodoxy and all the things that go with that (family issues, big changes in personal philosophy and the meaning of life, etc.) can sometimes be hard to work through on your own. I've found it helpful myself.

Feel free to write to me again if you have any questions, etc.

Airborne Rabbis Fight Off Swine Flu

(Video removed because it auto-plays. See it at the link.)

BBC:

A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics have taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial trumpets to ward off swine flu.

About 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing the horns called "shofars".

The flight's aim was "to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it," Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying in Yedioth Aharanot newspaper.

The flu is often referred to as H1N1 in Israel, where pigs are seen as unclean.

While these are crazier-than-average Orthodox Jews, I can't say the scene looks much different from the average prayer service at my yeshiva in Israel... except for the plane, of course.

Sometimes 60 seconds of video speaks louder than volumes of intellectual argument.

Israel and Gaza

Supporters of Israel's actions in Gaza have attempted to frame the argument on the questions of whether Israel has the right to defend itself (of course) and whether Israel is in general morally superior to Hamas (who cares?) I assume they frame the argument that way because it makes them feel like their side is obviously correct and anyone who disagrees is just an antisemite or a liberal, and probably both.

Here are the questions which should be asked about any military operation:

1) Is the strategic objective a good one?
2) Will the operation likely bring about the objective?
3) Does the objective justify the means used in the operation?

Israel has a good strategic objective -- to stop the arbitrary bombing of Israeli civilians by Hamas. More broadly, it aims to reduce the number of Israeli casualties as well as to reduce the terror caused by the rocket attacks. These are understandable and perfectly commendable goals.

But will the attacks on Gaza bring about that objective? I'm quite skeptical, and the recent failure in Lebanon only brings more skepticism. The truth is, it's just not that hard to fire missiles into Israel from right next door. Killing a bunch of Hamas policemen isn't going to stop it. Qassam rockets don't need uranium or centrifuges or radar or aircraft or special fuel or even a big launcher. Anybody can make one in his basement with a few common tools and components.

Not only will the attacks probably fail to bring about the objective, but there is a good chance that they will bring about the anti-objective. By killing so many Palestinians and terrorizing and inconveniencing and making the lives miserable of so many more, they mobilize anti-Israel and anti-semitic sentiments among the Palestinians. The inevitable reprisals will no doubt kill more Israelis than all the Qassam rockets in the history of the conflict. And that's not even counting Israeli soldiers who die during the operation.

The biggest problem with the operation, though, is the answer to the third question. Does the objective of stopping the rockets justify the means Israel is using, even if it did acheive that objective? I guess that depends on the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties you deem acceptable. Is it acceptable to kill a hundred Palestinian civilians and destroy the homes and livelihoods of thousands of them and the infrastructure that supports millions of them to save a dozen Israeli lives?

I'll leave you with two paragraphs from Matthew Yglesias:

One way to reply to [the idea that intentions are what matter] is à la Ezra Klein who observes that at some point you need to judge based on what’s actually happening. And what’s been happening is that whatever Hamas’ ambitions may or may not have been, they were scattering short-range inaccurate rocket fire on Israel that was causing little damage. Israel struck back with actions that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and pushed over a million more closer to the brink of starvation. And in general this is an important aspect of the conflict — irrespective of intentions, over the years you have many more dead Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians.

But another piece of the puzzle is that though American Jewish liberals tend to take a lot of comfort in the idea of Israel’s good intentions and good faith throughout this whole process, there’s a reason approximately no Arabs anywhere in the world see it that way. All throughout the “peace process” years — through the good ones and through the bad ones — Israel continued expanding both the geographical footprint of its settlements and the population living upon them. For most of this time, Israel has often appeared unwilling to enforce domestic Israeli law on the settler population, to say nothing of abiding by international law or agreements made. And while Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the “disengagement” from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation. Israel’s policy objectives in the West Bank appear to be first seizing the choice bits of it, and then withdrawing behind a wall with the residual West Bank treating like post-”disengagement” Gaza.

You can argue until the cows come home about who has the moral high ground, but at the end of the day Israel has killed far more Palestinian civilians than vice versa, not only in this military action, but throughout the history of the conflict. Israel has continued to build "settlements," often aimed specifically at expanding Israel's territory and strategic holdings and to make a self-contained Palestinian state impossible. In doing so, it's not only been morally wrong, but breaking its own laws.

There is no excuse for Hamas to fire rockets at Israeli civilians. But just because Hamas is a terrorist organization doesn't mean that anything Israel does in response is justified. Israel must make sure its military operations are both effective and moral. The framing of the argument away from those relevant questions to a place where Israel gets to play the wholly innocent victim ("We aren't allowed to defend ourselves??" "We're worse than Hamas??") and much of the western world gets painted as antisemitic is just disingenuous.

Please don't respond by asking for alternatives, or by saying Israel has to do something, as if the lack of alternatives makes any counterproductive and immoral operation a good choice. And don't whine about media bias or antisemitism or any other change of topic. You have to demonstrate that this specific military action is moral and likely to succeed in order to win this argument.

Obama, the Jews, and Israel, Part II

Sometimes it's just funny how far removed from reality the Republican talking points are. As you may recall, Republicans have been trying to push the message that Obama is bad for Israel and has a long, scary pattern of associating with anti-semites.

Today he chose Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff. Emanuel is an Orthodox Jew. His father is Israeli. During the first Gulf War, Emanuel was a civilian volunteer in Israel, rust-proofing brakes on an army base in the north. He supported this Bush's Iraq war, too.

What an Israel-hating anti-semite that Obama is.

Israel is an Anti-Israeli Appeaser

...at least if you go by the American right's logic, which often uses two ridiculous assertions:

1) That positions held by a majority or plurality of Israelis themselves or even by the Israeli government can be "anti-Israel."
2) That talking to terrorist organizations is "appeasement."

It turns out that Israel is talking to Hamas (without preconditions) in what the head of Shin Bet calls "negotiations."

Obama, has of course, been pilloried by the American right and the minority Jewish right who claim to speak for the Jews and Israel for saying he would talk to various nations and/or terrorist organizations without preconditions.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

On a related note, you can watch Chris Matthews call out right-wing blowhard Kevin James for not having a clue what he's talking about regarding "appeasement."

Religion Improves Group Cooperation

Several econ blogs linked to this interesting piece in The Economist.

Excerpt:

To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.

As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community—what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified.

Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group co-operation, the principal difference between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within religious communities, men are expected to pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while women are not. It should, therefore, be possible to observe whether group rituals do improve co-operation, based on the behaviour of men and women.

To do so, Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel. They devised a game to be played by two members of a kibbutz. This was a variant of what is known to economists as the common-pool-resource dilemma, which involves two people trying to divide a pot of money without knowing how much the other is asking for. In the version of the game devised by Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle, each participant was told that there was an envelope with 100 shekels in it (between 1/6th and 1/8th of normal monthly income). Both players could request money from the envelope, but if the sum of their requests exceeded its contents, neither got any cash. If, however, their request equalled, or was less than, the 100 shekels, not only did they keep the money, but the amount left was increased by 50% and split between them.

Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the common-pool-resource dilemma because the communal lives of kibbutz members mean they often face similar dilemmas over things such as communal food, power and cars. The researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.

It'd be interesting to look at intergroup cooperation -- I wonder if religious groups would be less cooperative with other groups than secular ones.

Israel and Iraq: Cognitive Dissonance

There was recently an astounding poll of Palestinians which showed that 84% of them support the recent terrorist attack at a yeshiva in Israel. (Previously.) (The poll also found, although right-wing sources conveniently omit this, "66 percent favoring normalized relations with Israel if it returned all land won in 1967 and a Palestinian state was established.")

I've more or less given up hope on any significant improvement in Israel in the near future. Pretty much anything Israel does just makes the situation worse, and the Palestinians certainly aren't showing any signs of working towards peace.

This sounds a bit like what's going on in Iraq, doesn't it? (I'm speaking tactically/strategically, not morally.) But for some reason, with respect to Iraq, the American hawks get all starry-eyed and think that if we just stay a few more years, the Iraqi factions will suddenly renounce their violent and hateful ways and decide to live in peace and harmony, blossoming into a democracy that will transform the entire middle east. Suggest that relative peace is possible in Israel/Palestine via tough negotiations and an eventual two-state solution, and they'll laugh bitterly. Suggest that peace is possible in Iraq even without a multiple-state solution and they'll call you a genius. Something does not compute.

Yesterday's Terrorist Attack in Israel

I've got nothing intelligent to say. An attack on a yeshiva like the one I went to hits close to home. These are people like me that were murdered. These are younger versions of my old classmates.

Ezzie has a moving post.