I’m never surprised when Jews avoid the burdens of Orthodox Judaism. It is a difficult religion and only an elite are ever going to be able to shoulder it. Most people would rather do easier things, get easier spiritual highs by going to yoga or watching Lord of the Rings.
Here were my principle difficulties in converting to Judaism.
* It’s hard for somebody to move from a non-ritualistic religion (Protestantism) to a ritualistic religion (Judaism or Catholicism). When I grew up, it was drilled in to me that rituals were meaningless man-made tradition. What God wanted primarily was the heart and religion should be a spontaneous response to God’s love. This is not the Jewish approach. Rather than relying upon faith and spontaneity and intention, Judaism mandates hundreds of specific behaviors. It can feel stultifying. And takes up a lot of time. Just fulfilling your prayer requirements each week day for the Jewish man takes about an hour and on Shabbat and holidays, it takes up many hours. Most people find it hard to pray with conviction for longer than 20 minutes.
* I find it easy to get bored with all the Jewish rituals, so I have to make an effort to keep finding things in Torah study that excite me and breathe new life into the rituals. For my first ten years in the religion, the teachings of Dennis Prager excited me. For the past ten years, I’ve been inspired by the scholarship of historian Marc B. Shapiro. Whenever I read a Shapiro essay or book or listen to one of his lectures, I get enthralled by the intellectual life of Orthodox Judaism.
* As you become more Christian, your world expands. You want to bring the world to your faith. You want to reach out to the poor and homeless and lost and lonely. As you become more Jewish, your world dramatically constricts. You spend all of your spare time with fellow observant Jews. The Jewish dietary laws make it difficult to socialize with anyone not an Orthodox Jew. (Pointed out in a salon.com review of David Klinghoffer’s autobiography)
I can’t reconcile this. I want to be able to mix with people in the wider world and to have success in the wider world and to go to all the places I need to go in the wider world to have success. I have no desire to eat trayf, but is eating vegetarian food in a non-kosher restaurant so terrible?
Becoming Orthodox is like shackling yourself. You walk around in chains. It’s stifling. It’s claustrophobic. Everybody knows your business.
I remember going to LimmudLA at the Costa Mesa Hilton and most of us did not leave the hotel for three days. We just went to classes and ate.
As you become religious Jewish, you lose your spare time. Orthodox Judaism takes up a ton of time. You spend an hour a day davening and then you visit the sick and help people out and try to study Torah and the lifestyle is so expensive and you’ll tend to have a lot of kids. Jewish day schools will cost about $20,000 per year per kid and the little nipper will be at school from 8am to 5pm. No wonder kollel guys did so little for Trayvon Martin.
* I’ve found it impossible to constrict my writing and speech to the dictates of the Chofetz Chaim (who gave an extreme though popular presentation of Judaism’s laws of speech by taking aggadata (stories) and turning it into halacah (law)).
* Nothing could prepare me for peoplehood. Growing up a Seventh-Day Adventist, I knew about joining a religion. My parents, including my mother and step-mother, had converted to Adventism in their teens. I didn’t know about joining a people.
Peoplehood is much tighter and more challenging than just religion. As an Adventist, you don’t see your pastor every day. You don’t turn to him for help with work or business or housing or medical matters. The pastor is there to help you find salvation to the next world, but your rabbi is at shul with you every single day, morning and evening.
* Perhaps the hardest part of my conversion was realizing that the way I was doing it was not affecting my character. That my addictions were just as strong and still distorting all my relationships. So as I journeyed into Judaism, I lost my illusions that by practicing the religion to the level I wanted to practice it, it would mold me into a good man. That didn’t work.
* I was attracted to Judaism because Jews weren’t always going on and on about God and how God loves us and how it is essential to have faith in God and to walk with God. All that God talk in my Christian childhood, it made me sick. So I thought Judaism was this rational behavioral based religion. Of course it was based on God but if I went to shul, I wasn’t going to get overwhelmed with beautiful words about God. I never took davening seriously so the siddur (Jewish prayer book) never spoke to me. Then I started 12-stepping because my exploitive ways to meet my addictive emotional needs had been unchanged by two decades of practicing Judaism in my limited way and in 12-step work, I discovered that having a vibrant relationship with the God of your understanding was essential. That without God, we would fall into our addictions, but that God was a power who could restore us to sanity and enable us to give up our character defects.
* It was disconcerting to find out how Orthodox rabbis were just as likely as the next group to molest kids. I’ve written so many stories about Orthodox rabbis taking advantage of their position to fulfill their addictive sexual needs. I thought rabbis would be better than regular people in this regard.
* As Dennis Prager says, it’s hard to love God and to love people. If you really care about people, you’re going to be angry at God for the world he created. If you’re love with God and feel in union with God, you’re not going to be as affected by human suffering.
* I never had to pass a security guard to get into an Adventist church and yet I need to do this to get into all big Jewish events. Adventists aren’t hated by the world, they’re ignored by the world, while much of humanity is passionate about hating Jews. While I’ve not personally experienced anti-Semitism, I know it is big in the wider world and it could kill me and my kids.
* I encountered a lot of suspicion from Jews when I tried to convert to Judaism. I remember this beautiful blonde grandmother. About 50. I was a guest at her home with other Orthodox Jews on Labor day for a barbecue. And she said, “I don’t understand why you would want to convert to Orthodox Judaism. It only makes sense to be Orthodox if you have kids. I think you’re just going undercover to write bad things about Jews.”
* I’m surprised at the number of Orthodox Jews who’ve told me that they would never be Jewish if they had a choice, but they were born with this burden.
* I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to work and Orthodox Judaism is hard work. Show me your work history and I’ll predict your future in Orthodox Judaism. I got fired from my first few jobs (from age 13-16). Kept showing up at my dad’s office and basically forced them to give me work at 17. I do best when I can do what I want ala blogging. When I started temping at age 28, I lost four jobs for inappropriate speech. When my boss asked me if he was keeping me busy, I said, “That’s what Himmler used to ask Anne Frank at Bergen Belsen.” I was accused of making fun of the Holocaust when I thought I was just making fun of my boss.
I have the sense that Jews are like me. They prefer to work for themselves. That makes it easier to keep Shabbos and the holidays.
* Stop me if I’m sharing too much, but I’m a serial enthusiast. I keep getting excited by changing things and getting convinced that they are the singular key to life. For a while it was marathoning and then it was the Dallas Cowboys and then it was Air Supply and Barry Manilow and then it was journalism and Marxism and Judaism and free-market economics and homeopathy and psycho-dynamic psycho-therapy and homeopathy and Alexander Technique and Kundalini Yoga and 12-step work. Some of these enthusiasms I maintained a behavioral commitment to even though for years the feeling was gone. I was not excited, for instance, between 2001 and 2010, by going to shul and practicing Judaism. I used to ask myself, what happened? I used to love going to temple to see my friends and the musical davening and the teaching and then I found myself for years going to shul and not having any friends there and not enjoying the davening nor the sermons, and I kept asking myself, what the hell happened? But I figured that if I just stuck it out, things would get better. And they have. That’s how I became the man of holiness you see before you now.
* One cool thing about Judaism is that you can talk in shul at all times, while if you try to pull that in church or mosque, you get shushed. I am annoyed when baalei teshuva (late adopters of Orthodox Judaism) come to an FFB (Orthodox from birth) shul and these former pig-eaters start shushing holy people like myself who’ve always desisted from trayf (unkosher food). Dude, ten years ago, you were deep in shiksas while I was studying in yeshiva, who the hell are you to shush me? Stay in BT shuls like Aish and leave the rest of us alone to yak it up in shul.
I conclude by quoting Duran Duran:
But I won’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
A friend says I remind him of the Elton John song Rocket Man:
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
