Why I Don't Believe in Judaism (part 1: A Personal Story)

When I was struggling with belief in Judaism towards the end of my college years, I sat down to write an essay which I titled, "Why I Believe in Judaism." As I wrote, I found I had more questions than when I started. I also realized that a lot of my answers for various questions didn't actually hold up to self-scrutiny. The arguments were weak. I erased and rewrote, erased and rewrote, asked Rabbis and friends for perspectives. I constantly watered down the conclusions so they could fit inside a rational world view. Until, at the end, I realized that I couldn't really justify my belief at all. Eventually I gave up writing the essay, it was never completed. Looking back, it was at this point in time that I had turned the corner from belief to disbelief. It would take me a bit longer to internalize this change, but if I had to point to a defining moment, this was it. Unfortunately, this essay has long been lost and no computer archaeology that I could do could resuscitate it.

In some ways this post and the two following it are the inevitable conclusion to that fatal attempt some fifteen years ago. Throughout this year I have laid out the arguments as to why rational inspection into the Jewish texts reveals that it was most likely written by human beings, and that the religion is man-made just like every other one. Next week I will talk specifically about why I came to the conclusion that the Torah is not divine. Following that, I will sum up with some conclusions about what I believe, and what would get me to change those beliefs. But this week, I'm going to take some time and indulge myself, by sharing how I got to where I am today. In the process, hopefully I'll explain why I tried to write that essay in my late teens/early twenties, and why I spent a year writing weekly "anti-dvar-Torahs" for this blog in my thirties.

If the human interest side doesn't interest you feel free to skip to next week (provided your reading this after it's been posted, if not then you'll need a very fast moving vehicle to skip ahead.) But let's follow the paths of a kofer to be.

Strong Conservative Upbringing

In a way, the title of this section is an oxymoron these days, but the environment was different in the 1980s. At that point in time, the Conservative Jewish movement in the US was strong, youth groups like USY were all over; conservative day camps were everywhere; conservative synagogues were common with large memberships. Modern Orthodoxy (MO) was not yet ascendent. Chabad had not yet taken over the university Hillel scene.


My family happily identified as conservative in those years before these labels had any meaning to me. We went to synagogue every week, albeit usually by car. We did not eat pork or shellfish and had separate dishes for meat and dairy, but we cooked those meals in the same oven, and would often go out to eat at restaurants with nothing resembling a hechsher. Most importantly, we were surrounded by many families who were just like us, sporting the same level of observance.

I had three older siblings, all of whom attended public school. However, I was different. For reasons mostly unrelated to religion, my parents enrolled me in a nearby Conservative day school. Yes, those existed back then, and maintained reasonably large class sizes. Although, I've never explicitly asked about it, I have a strong feeling that I attended this school partly on scholarship and partly funded by a wealthy relative.  Ironically, my three siblings would eventually happily become Modern Orthodox, while I -- well we'll get to that in a bit.

A Move to the Right

Starting around age ten, my family started moving to the right. The move was superficially prompted by a transition in our synagogue to begin having egalitarian services. In response, my parents and many of their friends, went to the only local alternative, a small Chabad with services in a run down VFW building.

Around the same time, I also switched schools. The conservative school I went to went under a change of administration and my parents weren't too fond of the new principal (possibly because they didn't want to pay my scholarship). I switched to a local Modern Orthodox school, this one run out of an old paint factory. This same school has since found itself with luxurious new digs, and considerably more expensive tuition as a result. But when I was there, the conditions were poor. Classrooms were small and poorly furnished. Walls were constantly falling apart. Ceilings leaked.

This wouldn't be the first time I was thrust into a new academic environment where I had to play catch-up. However, I have never known myself to shy away from any academic challenge and this one was no different. Besides, the Conservative school I attended allowed students to progress in Hebrew skills at their own level, and I was equally or further advanced than my new MO classmates in most religious subjects.

This is also around the time that I started engaging with my religion. Now that the shul was smaller it was also more intimate, stuff was more accessible. No longer were we confined to pews far away from an offset bimah. The front row of seats was right behind the chazzan. Also, participation was much more readily available even for children. For example, I could lead the Shabbat morning pesukai d'zimra even though I was not yet Bar-Mitzvahed, and we rarely had a minyan by that point anyway. However, the one part that truly fascinated me was the Torah reading.

I remember many weeks standing up with the gabbaim following along with the reading. I remember trying to match the lilting tones of the Rabbi to the trop markers. This was frustratingly hard until one of the gabbaim taught them to me and explained that the Rabbi often "guessed," so it wasn't really possible to correlate them anyway. As an aside, I'll note that I was able to do all of this, not only because the congregation size was tiny, but because I am male. Had I been female, I would have had far less access, relegated to the "boring" side of the mechitzah.

At home, our house became Orthodox as well. Our dishes were kashered (by blowtorch), and those that couldn't be kashered were discarded. Our oven was cleaned and made meat only, our dishwasher was replaced (and also made meat only). We no longer ate out at non-kosher restaurants, which really meant we almost never ate out since the closest kosher restaurants were at least 40 minutes away. We stopped driving to synagogue and stopped using electricity on Shabbat. 

As I noted before, at this point my siblings also moved to the right, somewhat independently since they were in college or beyond at this point. Both older brothers found themselves dating MO girlfriends who they would marry shortly after my Bar-Mitzvah. My sister, the youngest besides me, and in high school during this rightward move, was the last to accept MO strictures, but eventually she would also do so, starting her own MO family at around the same time I was shedding my religion.

The Ba'al Korei

My fascination with Torah reading only became stronger as my bar-mitzvah approached. About a year before the bar-mitzvah, a family friend sat down and taught me the trop for the Torah and the Haftorah, providing me with a cassette tape for it. I begun learning my bar-mitzvah parsha on my own.


Oddly enough, I didn't actually complete the bar-mitzvah parsha, and skipped a couple of aliyot. But since our shul was small, and participation was encouraged, I was excited to learn a short aliyah here and there each week. I kept at it and got better and better. When the second year came around, I learned a longer aliyah. And then multiple aliyot. By the time I was 17, I could polish off a parsha after dinner on Friday night. I learned the trop for Megillat Esther and read that. I learned the tune for the high holidays as well, and leined in the backup free service that our shul had grown large enough to offer. I read deeply about biblical grammar and prided myself at pronouncing the shva na's and shva nach's correctly. By the time I was 19, I could finish learning an entire parsha during the drawn out kabbalat shabbat services at university. By the time I was 21, I had all of the book of bereishit and the first two aliyot of the rest of the Torah memorized. Even today, despite being over a decade since I last leined, I still can finish most pesukim from memory.

Because my knowledge of the actual text of the Torah was so strong, I would often find a lot of things that seemed a little off. A word in one place where another felt more natural. A change of phrase, a minor contradiction. I would scour mikraot gedolot looking for explanations, usually coming up empty. I would ask my Rabbi who would listen, and say, "that's a good question, I'll see what I can find." He never found anything (probably because his mikraot gedolot was the same as mine.) Eventually, I stopped asking the Rabbi and started writing down these inconsistencies in a notebook, that is also unfortunately long lost. I do remember wondering about the obvious contradiction in Exod 6:3 during this time, which I would remember some 10 years later when I would learn that it was at the heart of much Academic theorizing.

While I was engaged in Torah reading during these years, the same could not be said for davening. I liked the Torah reading because it was different each week, and because there was a challenge to it. Davening was rote. It was boring. It was a routine to dispatch as quickly as possible. If I wanted to have kavannah, the only way I could do it would be to not say the sterile prayers, but substitute my own. I made it a habit of skipping mincha in high school, and sneaking in books to read during shacharit.

My high school years were also spent in the Modern Orthodox environment which I fairly seamlessly adapted into. Although, to be honest, I may have been the poorest person in the school. I was lucky enough to attend a school with a reasonably good secular education, although mainly due to the high quality of students. I was always attuned to math and science and this trend continued in high school.

While I pushed a little in high school against some of the more right wing expressions of Judaism that I encountered, I mostly adhered to the religion in both belief and practice. Even if I couldn't get behind davening specifically, I at least went through the motions, as if the recitation of the words would have some magical effect. And even though I might ask sharp questions here and there, at the end of the day I definitely believed in the religion and its tenets.

At the end of high school, I did not go to spend a year in Israel attending a Yeshivah, as some 75% of my class did. My parents gave me the details of my college fund, which was enough to survive on for four years at a local university with a significant tuition scholarship (or one year at an ivy league school). If I wanted to attend yeshivah it would be out of those funds. I decided against Israel. Instead I enrolled in the Cooper Union on track for a degree in Mechanical Engineering, a school where the automatic tuition scholarship meant that I could graduate without debt.

The Early College Years

These years were the most critical for my development and eventual abandonment of Judaism. And while the next two posts will explain why I left, this section will just give some of the surrounding details from a personal perspective.

I started out at university behaving as any other Modern Orthodox Jew would. I kept Shabbat and Kashrut strictly. I attended Shabbat services with the larger nearby NYU community, often leining on Saturday morning whenever no one else wanted to. I did not go to classes on the Jewish holidays, but was diligent about making up the work. Academically, I was a fairly serious student. I didn't party. I did my work on time. I tutored NYU friends on math and science subjects and offered to do recitations and homework sessions at Cooper Union. I always tried to take the most challenging courses, and eventually finished university with about a semester's worth of extra coursework. From my perspective, the courses were free, so I'd be a sucker not to take them. I wasn't a perfect student, but I was a good one.

It's amazing how one's life can be so strongly affected by the people around oneself, and college years are probably the time period where these interactions are strongest. I probably owe a lot of the outcome to my close friends in these years, in several different ways. For one thing, while it may have been possible to isolate myself inside the Jewish community at a school with a larger Jewish presence, the same could not be done at Cooper Union. The entire school numbered about 1000 students. The friends I made were of very varied backgrounds, economically, ethnically and religiously. In religious Jewish circles we are taught to implicitly distrust non-Jews, but many of these people are some of the kindest and most trustworthy people I have ever met.

However, there is one individual who I must speak more deeply about, because of the profound influence he had on my life. For the purposes of this narrative, we'll call him Joseph although that is not his real name. Joseph was the only other guy who wrote down "kosher" on his freshman dorm application. Joseph didn't actually keep kosher, but his father was an Orthodox Rabbi. Joseph was sort of an ex-Jew in hiding, a reverse Marrano, following the religion where necessary, to keep up the illusion. Although even this description is not quite accurate, as he once told me, he actually did believe in the religion, and assumed that one day he would follow it completely. Just not now.

Joseph was also gay, or bisexual. To this day I do not know his true sexuality, since he was not open about it during these years. However he sported a lot of the stereotypical gay mannerisms. In other words, if he was hiding in the closet, he was doing it while loudly singing "It's Raining Men." If he isn't gay, he sure was fooling everyone around him. As you can probably guess this caused significant friction between Joseph and his father. At one point, Joseph complained to me that his father had "replaced" him with one of his students around his age who presumably was more like the son his father wished he had.

In many ways, Joseph was the opposite of me. He went out partying regularly. He drank, and smoked pot. He had casual sex when possible. But he was a smart guy, and his academic achievements were solid. He started with me in engineering and then transferred into the art school, which is an extremely impressive feat. (The last time I talked to him, he was working on a PhD in History and the internet tells me that he's since done a post-doc at Harvard). Yet, he was also a remarkably good roommate. We wound up sharing a room for three and a half out of the four years of college, with the half year coming when Joseph went to study abroad for a semester.

In these years, we had many conversations about everything. The perspective offered was entirely different from anything I had encountered before. While I can't actually attribute any of the specific reasons I had for leaving Judaism to Joseph's influence, it's inarguable that he made a significant impact on me. I've since lost contact with Joseph, but perhaps one day I'll be able to reconnect.

The Collapse of Faith

It is really hard to pinpoint any particular point where I started transitioning away from Judaism. I always asked questions, often tough questions about Judaism. I was always taught that this was perfectly fine. The religion had little to hide. Questions were encouraged. However, I started discovering that there were questions that I could ask that would cause Rabbis to get frustrated if not outright angry at me. I started exploring these topics on my own, asking Rabbis when I felt I was at an impasse.

One of the first topics I looked at was regarding the treatment of women in Judaism. I had always been troubled at what looked like inherent sexism in the religion and wondered how Judaism looked like from the women's side. I asked a Orthodox feminist friend of mine to recommend some books for me on Jewish feminism. She recommended several books. Of them I remember Rachel Adler's "Engendering Judaism" and Judith Plaskow's "Standing Again at Sinai." I also remember reading something by Blu Greenberg, but I cannot remember what.

These books did not have an immediately profound effect on me. However, they certainly raised questions that I was unable to answer at the time. I had already suspected that Judaism had a problem with misogynistic tendencies, but I had assumed somewhat blithely that there were reasonable answers, or at least that when approaching it from a feminine point of view, these issues weren't as problematic as they seemed from my male outsider's view. These authors made it clear that Judaism still had big problems, and they were visible when approached not from either a feminine or masculine point of view, but from a human point of view.

I also asked questions regarding other major moral issues. One topic that I asked multitude of Rabbis for opinions on was regarding genocide and the treatment of non-Jewish nations. The Torah's commandments on the matter were problematic to me, and I always felt a little off when reading these verses to a congregation. Actually, it was more than a little off. When I read the exhortations of Moshe to kill all the irredeemably evil Canaanites, the image that came to my head was that of Hitler raving about the genetic pollution that is Jewry. When I asked Rabbis about the problem of genocide, the answers I got then were little different from the apologetic answers I still find today. I never was able to accept them and spent a long time searching for answers on my own. In addition, I also had difficulties accepting religious approaches on homosexuality and slavery.

Academically, I was mostly cruising along. However, somewhere in my Junior year, I realized that Mechanical Engineering wasn't really the most exciting track for me. The classes I loved the most were the purer math and physics classes. It was at this point that I began considering a path that would take me to graduate school in physics. The problem was that my small college did not offer a physics degree, nor a lot of the needed courses. This meant, that I had to do a lot of self-learning on top of the normal class workload. Throughout the last two years of college I self-taught myself advanced mechanics, advanced E&M, quantum, stat-mech and anything else I was missing so that I could take the Physics GRE (which I did terribly on). I certainly would have fared far better had I taken actual courses, but I didn't realistically have that option.

I found that my mind was somewhat naturally attuned to the scientific way of thinking. I greatly liked that science has no sacred cows, or rather, it delights in slaughtering them. If I didn't believe a specific scientific theory, I could rederive it myself, or examine the experimentation. Some things, granted, were and still are beyond my ability to test, but as I began to assemble the tools, there was a remarkable amount of stuff that I could verify for myself.

Another thing that greatly appealed to me in scientific work is that there was always a correct answer. It is possible that we can't yet measure the answer, or the answer is given probabilistically, but you can write it down and then check it with experimentation. Compared to something like literature (which I admit, I am also a huge fan of) there's no such thing as a "right" answer. Multiple, contradictory answers are permissible. Literature would be a hobby for me. Science was a way of approaching the world.

I mention this because scientific thinking also had a significant impact on my approach to Judaism. For example, when someone reads the account in Genesis about the creation of the world, and puts it into context of Jewish tradition, that person is bombarded by all sorts of different ideas about what those verses actually mean. One Rabbis says it means this, another says it means something else. Just like literary theory, there is no objective way to determine which allegorical explanation is correct, and which is incorrect. However, when you ask a scientist how the world was formed, they can give you several hypotheses along with the supporting evidences for them. You can objectively weigh one hypothesis against the other and determine which better fits the data. Eventually you can reach an answer that is objectively correct. So when you ask a scientist which came first, angiosperms or insects, the scientist will inform you that insects must come first because angiosperms are a later evolutionary adaptation that can only exist after pollinating species are present. The scientist can then provide fossil evidence to support this theory and you can clearly see that angiosperms first come around some 200-250 million years ago, which is long after the insects arrived on the scene. The scientist says that the Torah, which says that fruiting trees existed on the third day before insects on the fifth, is wrong. The end result is that when I wanted to learn information about the world, I didn't look at the Torah, I looked to science.

With these two big assaults on the religion, one from the moral ground and one from the scientific, I often wonder how I remained faithful to the religion for so long. If the Torah can't be trusted for either moral or factual purposes, what good is it? One reason I remained religious is that I needed to be sure; perhaps there was a better answer I hadn't come across yet. Another reason is that I put way too much stock into traditional apologetic answers like the modern Kuzari argument, and other apologetic explanations that give divine answers to the Torah. But were these explanations justified?

One area of inquiry that you might have noticed was missing was Academic biblical criticism, being that this was the major area of inquiry for this blog! This line of reasoning wasn't even on my radar. I had been taught in high school that there was some silly JEPD theory regarding the composition of the Torah, but that same theory says that Moby Dick was written by 10 authors (a preposterous claim, but I didn't look). I was told that academic criticism was the domain of anti-Semites with no knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, let alone the myriad of Jewish exegeses that clearly explain the various contradictions. I never followed this line of questioning during my college years. In fact it would be a long time before I went down this path.

This was when I started to write, "why I believed in Judaism." I wanted to explore these rational reasons for my belief. Poke them and prod them with my fledgling scientific instincts. The paper would grow in length, and then shrunk dramatically when I reread what I wrote and find the argumentation full of holes. I probably would have spent a lot of time talking to Joseph about these issues, but this was his semester abroad, so I was on my own. As I wrote, I became more troubled. I retracted into my own shell. I would not go to shul on Shabbat, instead I'd take the day and walk the length of Manhattan and back, lost in thought (for those NYC residents, I lived on E 12 st, and would walk to Riverside Park by Columbia University).

There was no sudden moment where I decided that I didn't believe in Judaism, although there was a sudden moment when I realized I didn't believe. This came towards the end of college. While I still held out hope that I would find answers to my questions, I was highly doubtful that any answers existed. I started planning my transition. In the fall, after my senior year, I would begin grad school in Applied Physics in Boston. I would also begin my life as a non-religious Jew.

A Physicist in Training

For the most part of my grad school career, Judaism played a very small role. I did try at first to attend more left wing religious events, in the reform or conservative sects, but it didn't feel right there. While it took a while to adapt to my life as a "normal person" who could do things with friends on Saturday, eat at restaurants, and attend classes on Rosh Hashannah, by my second year I was pretty much comfortable in my new "skin." Going to a new place surrounded by new people who didn't know my past helped a lot with smoothing this transition.

However, there is one anecdote about the early years at grad school worth mentioning. As any grad student will tell you, qualifying exams are one of the most stressful milestones. Our qualifying exams were no different, sporting a 50% pass rate. Add to this that I was coming in with far less classwork than any of my peers, essentially having been accepted on "promise" and strong letters of recommendation. I had a lot of work to catch up on. But just as with the transition many years ago from a conservative school to an MO school, I never really shied away from academic challenges, so I met this one head on too. When the qualifying exams starting looming over us, I met with two other grad students nightly to go over derivations, practice problems and review material.

One of these two friends was a practicing Mormon, and as might be expected topics of conversation sometimes drifted away from physics to other topics. I had zero experience with Mormonism, with only the very basic information about its beliefs. He was astounded that I had a sizable amount of the Torah committed to memory and could quote at it from will. And yet, I was not a believer. We talked a lot about religion, why he believed in it, and why I didn't.

These conversations were interesting to me in two ways. For the first reason, after I left religious life, I had never really discussed this topic with anyone, and certainly not with anyone who wasn't Jewish. Secondly, I got to look into the mind of someone who believed strongly in a religion which I had absolutely no personal investment in. When I asked a question about Mormonism and was met with a canned answer (at least canned to anyone familiar with Mormon apologetics) I was able to readily see all the problems with that approach. Furthermore, I could relate it to a similar apologetics answer from Judaism that I had been brought up with. When I offered him these Jewish apologetics, he would explain why the answers favoring Judaism were unconvincing to him. What I learned was that apologetics were merely a tool to assuage concerns of believers. If you don't believe, they are never convincing. I also learned that we are always capable of accepting specious arguments if they lead to conclusions which are pleasing to us. Even though scientific methodology is a tool designed specifically to root out and eliminate these confirmation biases, we can never remove them completely. Someone can be a top-notch scientist, with a critical eye towards their research, but can also believe all sorts of preposterous things when their religion, their family, their romantic partner, or even their preferred politician is the subject. The end result of these conversations, and the subsequent ruminations was that I transitioned from a non-religious Jew, to a fairly firm atheist.

Another bright side to leaving religion is it allowed me to have new experiences that would never be possible if I still kept Kashrut and Shabbat. I took a two week vacation to visit Japan and Korea, countries I never would probably never have stepped foot in if I was still religious. Once you start expanding your worldview, it's nearly impossible to shrink it back down to one where Judaism is central. When I was invested entirely in the Jewish community, when it was all I knew, it was fairly easy to view Judaism as all-encompassing. Now that I was on the outside looking in, it was clear to me how parochial it all really was. It is impossible to attach cosmic importance to Judaism when it is viewed in proper scale with the actual cosmos.

After this, any serious thoughts about Judaism fell to the wayside. Religion was only a part of my life inasmuch as it was something that the rest of my family and some of my childhood friends believed in. My disbelief caused tension with my parents and my siblings, but it was apparent to them that I was in a better place now than I was towards the end of college, both mentally and emotionally. This probably softened the blow.

Torah as an Atheist

I completed my doctoral work at the end of 2011 and began a post-doc in Wisconsin in the following year, where I am to this day (now as a research scientist). Near the beginning of my time in Wisconsin, I started reading through the Tanach on somewhat of a whim. I was a bit saddened that I was losing my Hebrew abilities, and wanted a way to practice. Plus I thought that it might be interesting to see how I related to these texts from a detached view. I skipped the Torah, since I already knew it well, and began with Nevi'im.

Very early I started noticing stuff, similar to the stuff I noticed in the Torah a long time ago and would pester my Rabbi about. Little inconsistencies here and there. For example, I remember reading about the duplicate accounts of David when he has a chance to murder Shaul and doesn't do it. I noticed that the accounts are repetitions of the same story, both including the obscure word for "flea" in them. I noticed that there were a bunch of times where Shaul is introduced to David, each time not recognizing him. Immediately I thought back to those things I was told back in high school about how ridiculous the ideas of multiple authors were, and I thought, "wow, maybe there's something to this after all."

I purchased Kugel's "How to Read the Bible" looking for an introduction to the topic. It is about 800 pages including footnotes. I read it in a week. From there my hunger was insatiable. I searched the library for all books I could find on biblical criticsm, and ancient near east history and culture. I read books supporting the Documentary Hypothesis, and I read critiques, evaluating the strengths of the argument on both sides. Knowing Hebrew as well as I did, it was often trivial to check a proponent's argument to see if they were blowing smoke (they sometimes were, not all arguments were equally strong). I read about archaeology, including detailed reports about dig excavations and Bayes reconstructions of probable date ranges for destruction layers. I watched every lecture in the UCSD Exodus conference. I spent about 2 years where my "for fun" reading consisted entirely of non-fiction regarding the Hebrew Bible, the history of Israel, and other details about Ancient near-east history.

And then I thought to myself, what would have happened had I know this stuff in high school? What would have happened if instead of begin given a one-off strawman version of academic criticism, I was given information regarding the tremendous problems with the historicity of the Tanach? Would I have been receptive? Back when I was struggling with these sorts of things, the internet was a different place. Google was just gaining traction. Wikipedia had just recently been launched and was slowly growing. A lot of the influential articles discussing issues with Judaism like Naftali Zeligman's "Letter to my Rabbi" had yet to be written. But now. All this stuff is available, although almost never as detailed as I would like. Furthermore, I had to ask whether these arguments in favor of Academic Criticism are actually strong, or were they just as weak as Jewish apologetics. Would they also fall apart under cursory inspection? Am I subject to confirmation biases regarding them just as I once was for the Modern Kuzari? For those reasons, I began this blog, and that brings us to today.

Next week we'll talk about why the Torah is not divine, and then we'll finish up with why I don't believe in Judaism and what it would take to convince me of it.