The Judaism I Thought I Knew

"For most of my life, I attended reluctantly, dreading the long hours of prayer. I was proud to be Jewish, taking satisfaction in my people's survival and success despite the attempts to annihilate us. But I was also embarrassed by what I perceived as Judaism's weirdness and obsolescence: all those nitpicky laws, and that implausible, reward-and-punishment God I thought was portrayed in the liturgy."

""I'm just a cultural Jew," I would tell people, though I knew nothing about Jewish culture, history, languages, arts, or philosophy. I more meant that I liked edgy humor and bought too much food for dinner parties. Or I'd say that I was "an ethnic Jew," not realizing that there are Jews of just about every ethnicity, and every race too. Sometimes I proclaimed that "social justice is my Judaism," without any idea what Jewish tradition says about social justice."

"As far as I knew, Judaism consisted of little more than a handful of holidays, some universal values-help the vulnerable; don't lie-and the Holocaust. Then, about a decade ago, I started studying Jewish tradition. What I found was nothing like the Judaism I had known, and it turned out to be an answer to the question that I and many others would be asking years later, about how to be a Jew in a time of rising anti-Semitism."

A person who once attended Yom Kippur reluctantly and identified as a 'cultural Jew' came to study Jewish tradition and discovered a far broader religious and intellectual inheritance. The study revealed diverse conceptions of God, including non-theistic approaches and abundant Jewish atheists, as well as complex legal, historical, linguistic, artistic, and philosophical strands. Jewish texts emerged as multifaceted sources of law, moral reasoning, and communal guidance rather than simple rulebooks. That discovery reframed Judaism as a living tradition with ethical teachings and interpretive depth. The tradition offered frameworks and resources for confronting contemporary challenges such as rising antisemitism.

Read at The Atlantic