Where Judaism and I part ways

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. I am Jewish.

I am what is called halakhically Jewish, which means I was born from a Jewish mother. Judaism is passed matrilineally and my mother was Jewish. Therefore, I am Jewish.

I was not raised Jewish. I was raised in the Catholic Church. My mother converted and my siblings and I were raised Catholic.

We visited my maternal grandparents and occasionally celebrated Jewish holidays with them, but no one ever told me in so many words, “You’re Jewish,”—not in a way that I could understand what it meant. I didn’t find out I was Jewish until I was twenty-six.

A series of events led me to make this discovery. The first thing that happened was this. I was in the public library browsing the books when I discovered a book titled, Blood in the Face. It’s an exposé, later made into a documentary film, about the Neo-Nazi, white supremacist movement in the US.

I started reading this book, and in the process, I read some of these people’s rants against the Jews. My first response was, “There’s something in this. There must be something about Judaism that makes it special.”

So I started reading up on Judaism. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary because I had already learned most of it from my Catholic upbringing. I knew the Bible pretty well and nothing I read really grabbed me as particularly special.

A few years later, I was browsing in the library when I discovered Julius Lester’s book, Love Song.

Julius Lester is an African American professor at Amherst University. He started out as a professor of African American Studies and later converted to Judaism. He decided to teach a course on the historical relationship between African Americans and the Jews. To do this, he had to do a bunch of research on Judaism just to find out what it was all about.

He ended up converting to Judaism and Love Song is his conversion story.

Anyway, I had moved back to California at the time and I was staying at my parents’ house while I went to college. I checked this book out of the library and my mother saw me reading it.

That’s when she told me, “You know…..you’re Jewish.” It was the first time I fully realized that I was Jewish and what that actually meant.

This led me on a long journey and I eventually wound up in an orthodox community where I met my children’s father and we got married. We lived the orthodox Jewish life for many years.

So what went wrong?

It started out very subtly where I would get a repulsive effect whenever I’d read anything Judaism-related. I wasn’t repulsed by Judaism itself. I would just get this powerful sense whenever I read about Judaism or listened to a lecture on Torah or anytime I was exposed to Jewish thought.

Some part of me would think, “This is all wrong.” What I heard and read didn’t match my version of reality.

It took me years to figure out what was wrong about it. The burning question in my mind became: if this is wrong, what’s right? If this isn’t true, what is?

Once I figured it out, I had to go through many more years of searching, study, and reflection before I put together what I really believed. This was one of the crucial factors that led me to write the Proof For the Existence of God. The Proof became a way for me to collate my train of thought, to justify and substantiate my version of reality, and to present what I actually believed to be the truth.

So what’s wrong about Judaism?

The non-dualistic heart of Judaism is buried under mountains of dualistic bullshit.

Dualism is the belief that there’s a right vs. wrong and never the twain shall meet.

Seen another way, we could characterize dualism as the belief that God is over there on the left and the mundane, “fallen” world is over there on the right. They aren’t the same and they never will be. There’s an unbridgeable gap between them and there’s no way for the “fallen”, ordinary, human world to ever attain the holiness or perfection of God.

Non-dualism, by contrast, is the belief that good vs. evil, God vs. man, holiness vs. the mundane are all part of one universal whole. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The Proof is a non-dualistic belief system.

Most people see Judaism as a purely dualistic belief system and there’s a very good reason for this. The vast majority of Biblical, Talmudic, and every other kind of Jewish material reinforces this. The entirety of the Bible is specifically constructed to present this dualistic worldview. Every single facet of Jewish education reinforces it.

The non-dualistic heart of Judaism is buried under mountains of dualistic bullshit. People go their entire lives living orthodox Jewish lives, studying Judaism in minute detail, and never finding this non-dualistic heart. I would be very surprised if any Jewish person would be able to tell me off the top of their heads where this non-dualist heart is located in the thousands of volumes of Jewish literature.

This is the problem. If we have to go looking for the truth buried under thousands upon thousands of stories, ideas, volumes, lectures, and lessons, then we have a serious problem. Some people might come to the conclusion that this system was specifically designed to deceive us and to actively stop us from finding the truth.

I met a man once and we got talking about this. He lives in my town, but he was born and raised in a strictly orthodox Jewish community in Perth, Australia. He attended Jewish schools and received a strict orthodox education all the way through school. He grew up believing he would become a rabbi.

When he graduated, he attended Aish HaTorah, which is a big rabbinical college in Jerusalem. While he was there, everything fell apart. He dropped out of school, left Israel, and completely turned his back on Judaism.

At the time we were having this conversation, he had a little six-year-old son. The father was not raising his son with Judaism at all. The father told me that he didn’t think Judaism had anything worthwhile to offer his son. That is an incredibly damning condemnation.

This man’s parents raised him in a strictly orthodox home. His entire social circle growing up was orthodox Jews attending the same schools, the same shuls, and spending all their holidays and Sabbath meals together.

Imagine what his parents must think—now that this man is grown and he doesn’t think any of that offered him any value—nothing worth passing on to his own children. I can’t think of a more damning condemnation than that.

We had this conversation just a few weeks after I completely walked away from Judaism and this man asked me, “What happened? What went wrong?”

I repeated what I said above. “The non-dualistic heart of Judaism is buried under mountains of dualistic bullshit.”

He said, “I studied for twenty years and I never found it.”

This is absolutely criminal. There is no justification for this at all.

Can you imagine spending twenty years studying, searching, yearning, hoping, and praying? This belief system promises the answers to the most pressing questions of our lives. Finding these answers is our most fundamental need as human beings.

People have even been willing to sacrifice their very lives to belong to something that gives their lives this kind of meaning. This belief system promises all of that, but it never delivers. This man studied for twenty years, only to walk away empty-handed.

That is absolutely inexcusable. No wonder this man doesn’t think Judaism has anything of value to offer his son. If a cult did that, we would all know what to think. And this is one of the world’s major religions.

I told this man, “I know where to find this non-dualistic heart. I can tell you where it is if you want to know.”

He said, “Don’t bother. It’s too late.”

He was absolutely dead right. If we have to look that hard, then the system is deliberately rigged to hide that kernel of truth. If one sentence of truth is hidden among millions of others that discount that kernel of truth, then the system is deliberately deceptive.

We see this all the time in Jewish literature. Jewish tradition states point blank that the esoteric mystical secrets of Kabbalah shouldn’t be taught to anyone under the age of forty.

This is the worst kind of gatekeeping. This is saying that only people of a certain age or education level or intelligence level should have access to a true understanding of how the world works. Only a certain chosen few should have the information necessary to interact correctly with the world so that they can attain happiness and fulfillment.

This attitude is absolutely criminal. It robs people of years of happiness and renders their lives meaningless and not worth living.

Compare this to Buddhism, Taoism, and other belief systems that make a point of teaching non-dualistic thinking to three- and four-year-olds. Non-dualistic realities are taught right out of the gate. They aren’t hidden or buried or wrapped in countless stories about fictional characters and tales of God’s vengeance against evil-doers.

The fact that the non-dualistic heart of Judaism is in there at all is an insult to the seeker. If the system is going to be that difficult to navigate and so intentionally misdirect the seeker’s efforts, just leave the nugget of truth out entirely. Putting one sentence in there hidden under millions of other sentences is a slap in the face.

Are you wondering by now what this non-dualistic heart is? Some of you reading this may be Jewish. Some of you may be orthodox Jewish. Some of you may have studied Torah every day for decades.

The simple fact that you don’t know where this heart is proves my point. If I have to tell you, then that proves this non-dualistic heart isn’t obvious enough. The system is designed to hide it and to stop the seeker of truth from finding it.

Judaism does more than surround this heart with meaningless misdirection and distraction. The entire Jewish system of thought is designed to stop people from having a direct, one-on-one relationship with God. This is the foundation of dualistic thinking and the whole system of Jewish education is built on ingraining dualism as the dominant way of thinking.

The Jewish tradition teaches that Moses was the only person ever to see God face to face, which is crap. Each of us can and does meet God face to face all the time.

Compare this to Christianity which teaches that basic belief in God is based entirely on a one-to-one relationship with God. Read any Christian material or listen to any Christian advice. Prayer in the Christian world means, “sitting with God”, “bringing your problems before God,” “asking God’s advice,” and, “listening to God’s voice speaking to you.”

Christianity is entirely geared toward bringing the believer into a personal, intimate, daily, communicative relationship with God.

This kind of personal, intimate, reciprocal relationship with God isn’t even on the program in Judaism. Judaism doesn’t teach it. Judaism doesn’t emphasize it. Judaism doesn’t reinforce it in any way. As far as I can tell, Judaism doesn’t even mention this relationship as an important element of spiritual practice.

Prayer in Judaism means reciting passages in another language. For anyone who isn’t fluent in Hebrew, these passages don’t mean a thing. We aren’t supposed to understand them. We’re only supposed to recite them.

The same goes for the dietary laws, the specific garments that orthodox Jews wear, their daily and weekly practices, and all the details of the hundreds of laws they have to observe. The value doesn’t come from assigning them any meaning. The value is found in simply following the rules for their own sake. If they’re meaningless to you, that doesn’t matter.

While I lived in this orthodox community, I spent a few days staying with a disabled woman who belonged to the community. We were sitting at her table eating dinner one night when she started bemoaning the fact that she couldn’t walk to shul for services.

Orthodox Jews don’t drive on Sabbaths and special holidays, so most orthodox Jews live within walking distance of their community shuls. This woman was too disabled to walk, so if she wanted to go, she had to drive which meant breaking the rules.

If she followed the rules and stayed home, she became more isolated from the community which made her feel alone and unvalued. She also felt that staying home was a violation of the rules that called for her to attend services. She was in distress because she felt that there was no solution where she could fully embrace her desire to live an orthodox life.

I told her she should do whatever made her feel closer to God. If driving to shul for services made her feel closer to God, then she should drive. If staying home made her feel closer to God, then she should stay home.

Religions, spiritual paths, and belief systems have one job—to bring us closer to  a sense of meaning, holiness, and personal, intimate connection with our Divine Birthright. If a religion, spiritual path, or belief system isn’t doing that, it isn’t doing its job. It’s making our lives harder than they need to be and the system is useless to us. We would be better off without it.

Then we would be free to seek this intimate relationship with our Divine Source without something standing in the way of a process. The process would come naturally to us if that barrier wasn’t blocking our way.

God Bless You All.

​All posts on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
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