A Book Made Me Question Everything

The Heresy: The book that almost changed Avi Shafrans mind.

A cottage industry of memoirs detailing their writers journeys from restrictive ultra-Orthodox upbringings into the embrace of resplendent enlightenment and freedom has sprung up in recent years. Reading samples of the genre always reminds me of my own abandonment of the Jewish religious tradition in which I had been raised. I was 12.

My apostasy didnt last. But some of the same things that pushed the Ortho-leavers in the directions they came to take bothered me greatly, too, at the time: scientific facts, social mores at radical odds with those of the observant Jewish world, non-Jew-centric world events and, more prosaic but no less discomfiting, things like dress codes, in my case it was a looming post-bar mitzvah black hat and jacket.

I would never presume to condemn anyone who has left the Orthodox way of life. Some who have fled their communities have recounted witnessing or experiencing harrowing abuse and, often, others denial of the crimes. Judaism requires us not to judge another until you have reached his place that is to say, walked in his or her shoes. Outrages like those some have described would be powerful challenges to any sensitive soul. And so I feel no ill will toward the honest memoirists, only pain both for their experiences and for what they are missing.

But enough about them. This is all about me.

I remember my first exposure to a resolutely secular perspective, my first brush with illumination. It took the form of a book. I was working summers in my uncles Jewish bookstore, which carried not only holy texts but also a broad assortment of literature with only tenuous connections to Jewishness. The store wasnt a busy one, at least not as busy as my tween mind, and I took the opportunities that my job servicing customers afforded me to peruse some of the volumes. There were Jewish joke books and books about famous Jews. There were even copies of Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique (erroneously shipped by a wholesaler from whom we had ordered Ernest van den Haags The Jewish Mystique).

But what captivated me most was a volume by Lewis Browne called This Believing World, a deliciously condescending look at religions, including Judaism, and their evolutions.

The book was just what a cynical kid with a contrarian streak would savor. I lapped it up and realized or so I thought that surely the Judaism in which I had been raised and schooled was but a contemporary sort of magical thinking, different from primitive belief systems (and from other religions) in its particulars, but not in its essence.

Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are Brownes intellectual heirs (or reincarnations, perhaps, if one subscribes to such things). I imagine that, young or otherwise, uninformed people reading those contemporary writers atheistic fare today feel the same sort of heady supremacy that I felt as a 12-year-old enlightened intellectual.

Originally posted here:
When I Drifted Off the Path