How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace My Heritage

My religion always felt oppressive to me, until I realized it didn’t have to be

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According to one of the legends of the Talmud, when the soul of a person from Israel descends to earth, it is accompanied by an angel who guides it along the way. The soul enters the womb of his or her future mother, and during the nine months it is there, the angel repeatedly visits it—whispering parts of the Torah into its developing ears. With birth, the newborn son or daughter forgets the long lessons they received. Yet, something, of course, remains.

Even though it is a Talmudic legend—not necessarily meant to describe a concrete reality—I’ve always felt that this short story fantastically captures an experience I’ve lived throughout my life, and only in recent years have I started to confront it directly. My estrangement from Judaism, the religion and tradition I grew up in, and my journey back to it. It’s not a journey of religious return (definitely not), but more a journey of reconciliation and cautious acceptance. Let me explain.

I grew up in the 1990s as a child in a traditional family in the city of Acre in northern Israel. "Traditional" is a very interesting category concerning Judaism in Israel. The best way I can describe it is through anecdotes, just like religion was for me throughout my childhood and adolescence: When I was 6 or 7, I heard a joke about God from friends. I don’t remember what the joke was, but I was very excited by it and determined to tell it to my father. As soon as I started, he stopped me immediately and said, “I don’t want to hear a joke about God.” At the time, I didn’t know—maybe I didn’t even feel—that this was exactly the defined place God had in my life. God was someone, and as a child, I had a clear image of him in my mind, about whom it was forbidden to speak, and yet, He was very present. Present as an absence? That’s maybe a bit fancy as a description.

In our family, being traditional meant we went to the synagogue and celebrated all the holidays, but not much more than that. So, several times a year—ten at most (but probably less)—we would go to a place that, for me, was nothing short of torture. Even when I knew how to read and understood something of the prayers sung and recited there, I didn’t feel like I understood the whole situation. And I still don’t. Anyone who has ever been to a synagogue knows that reading from the machzor (the prayer book) is not linear but jumps around. And that’s how I felt as a child sitting next to my father, trying to follow. We read quickly, without pauses, moving from page 40 to 23 and then to 70 (just as an illustration—I don’t actually know how many pages we skipped). The prayers themselves, aside from the singing in Yom Kippur, were incredibly boring for me. I don’t think that if someone had taken the time to teach me what was written in the texts, I would have necessarily become a great rabbi—probably not, as the modern life I experienced was too different, and television was too tempting with its knowledge and stories. Yet, I do regret a bit that no one (especially my father) bothered to explain what was happening.

In Borges’ story "Deutsches Requiem," the Nazi officer Otto Dietrich zur Linde talks about his initial immersion in Christianity and his eventual distancing from it. The Christian theology and the faith itself appealed to him as a young man, but he distanced himself from it, thanks to the equally infinite worlds of Shakespeare and Brahms, and by Schopenhauer "with his direct arguments". I resonate with this description, though for me, things were much more prosaic. I was never really connected to Judaism—for me, it was a series of incomprehensible and usually contextless commandments (going to synagogue and keeping silent while all the adults did their thing was, for me, the ultimate example of such a commandment). The fantastic world of Pokémon was far more appealing. For years, too many years afterward, I secretly hoped that one day there would be real Pokémons in the world. What a disappointment it was when the dream materialized, as a farce, with Pokémon Go.

Okay, but back to Judaism: as I already said, for years, I ran away from it. After high school and army service, when I needed to choose a subject to study at university, in addition to philosophy, which I knew I wanted to pursue, I chose general history—meaning the history of Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Not the history of Israel and Judaism. There was a significant element of randomness and arbitrariness in my choice. I browsed the Faculty of Humanities website at Tel Aviv University and stopped at the section on general history. What caught my attention was a photograph of a man sitting at a desk examining documents. I remember he had an old and interesting reading lamp. What sealed the decision to become a history major was a condition I hadn’t seen in any other department in the humanities or elsewhere: to complete the history degree, I would have to study a second foreign language (English being the first). Researching an earlier culture in its own language and thus putting even more distance between myself and my own culture? I couldn’t pass up such a pleasure.

And indeed, it was a pleasure. My undergraduate years flew by quickly. It was an immense intellectual experience, so powerful that when I started my master’s degree and the magic didn’t return—and even more when I realized that there was a good chance I would spend a decade researching early American history without finding a real position in Israel’s small academic world (especially in the humanities, and even more so in history and American literature departments)—I decided to give up on academia and continue my studies independently.

After a major crisis in which I thought all my dreams were collapsing—the dream was to be a historian, and I didn’t see how I would achieve it anymore—and thanks to a five-minute failed date where, after my heart-wrenching monologue about how lost I was and not knowing what to do with my life, the girl I was with told me it wouldn’t work out between us, I signed up for career counseling. There, I realized that what I loved about my studies—delving into a particular subject, researching it, and finally writing—could guide me in choosing a profession. At the end of my undergraduate studies, two years earlier, I had started a Facebook page with friends, where each of us would write a short post once a week about a historical event or figure. I loved it—the research, the writing, and no less, the enthusiastic responses. I decided to turn it into a profession.

After six months working at an online car magazine (in the interview, I said I had no knowledge about cars, except that mine was red), I found a job as a writer and editor at the National Library in Jerusalem. And suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the angel returned. The National Library of Israel and the Jewish people—no more writing about American constitutional history, the English Civil War, or anything else unrelated to Judaism and Israel.

When I started working at the library as a writer, several topics that particularly interested me began to take shape: beyond colorful, cutesy articles, I knew that writing about literature and books would always captivate me. And my love for Hebrew, my native language and the language of my (and supposably God's) creation, has only grown stronger as I learn about its history. For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew was the language of prayer, somewhat similar to the status of Latin today. People wrote letters and religious and literary works in Hebrew, but it was almost never spoken. Yes, if two Jews from distant places met two hundred years ago in Morocco or Germany and had no other common language, they would probably speak Hebrew. But it wasn’t a living spoken language. All of this changed with Zionism (a forbidden word today). The history of how Hebrew returned from a sacred language to a secular one fascinated me. Another field that immediately attracted me, though I feared it and didn’t feel capable of writing about it, was Jewish mysticism. I had always been interested in theology and general thoughts about religion, and in my undergraduate studies, I focused exclusively on Christian theology: early Christianity, the Christianization of the Empire, the persecution of heresies, the Reformation, the rise of Puritanism, and more. At the National Library, I discovered my love for Jewish mysticism. It took me a few years to gather the courage to write about it, but once the dam broke, the words began to flow.

In 2019, I led a major project on the life and philosophy of Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher. The more I delved into his thought, the more I realized that I had failed in my attempt to distance myself from Judaism. It was then that I also understood what had bothered me all these years: up until then, Judaism for me was a collection of customs with no connection to my life, that no one bothered to explain to me, and that I genuinely didn’t believe in. I’m still an atheist, but the stories, the history (which, after all, is also a story—a story about the past), the folklore, the mysticism, and the mythology—these are what captured my heart and reconnected me to this vast and complex entity we call Judaism. Judaism differs from many other religions in that it is also a nationality. So even when I distanced myself from the religion, I never denied being Jewish. After all, King David and I speak the same language. And the psalms, that magnificent book of poems attributed to him have always touched me in a way I struggle to explain, even though I don’t believe in the God the old king speaks of and sings to.

As I delved deeper into the history and the theology of Judaism, I understood that there was never just one kind of Judaism. Even among the scholars and movements I thought I disliked, such as the decrees of the Talmudic sages, I found an incredible richness of things to love: their stories, their legends, and their thoughts on various subjects. I'm much more interested in hearing the rabbis from the first centuries CE argue about what existed before the creation of the world—like the Throne of God, the chaos of the pre-creation, darkness, and light—than in trying to follow the decrees they left us.

Over time, I also discovered various side doors, ones no one ever talked to me about. For example, an entire literature—the ancient literature of the Hekhalot (palaces) and the Merkavah (chariot)—whose whole purpose was to teach you how to ascend to the upper worlds and gaze upon the figure of God. I also learned that in ancient times, God was believed to have a body and a form. It was Maimonides in the Middle Ages who introduced the idea of a formless, abstract God.

Okay, I'm getting carried away. So, I'll end with a short story that might illustrate something of that feeling of loss. In 2012, I traveled for two months with a friend in Europe. As our trip was nearing its end, the Jewish High Holidays began, including Yom Kippur. I remember my friend, an outspoken atheist even more militant than I am, someone who had never grown up in a household that even considered going to synagogue, suggested that maybe we should fast and even go to a synagogue. The distance from home and the desire to hold on to something from the tradition we knew—despite not participating in it when we were in Israel—resonated with me too. Yet, we didn’t fast, we didn’t go to a synagogue, and we didn’t mark the day in any way. Both of us felt embarrassed about doing it. To connect with something we are usually detached from. I think part of the reason is that Judaism, as it is generally understood in my country, often comes with a sense of coercion. A sense of all or nothing. Either you are secular, or you are religious. And if you’re religious, it’s best to be of the most extreme and stringent kind.

I’m glad I’ve managed to fix that foolishness for myself, even if not for Israeli society as a whole. After all, I don’t feel any emotional difficulty reading texts from any culture—so why should I feel that distance from my own tradition?