From Doubt to Confidence

I thought I was the only one. You know, the only baal teshuva to go off the derech. Surely, no other BT had gone off the derech before me and my little family. Except that I wasn’t yet thinking about it in those terms. I was thinking that we had to flip the circuit breaker, or we’d lose a refrigerator filled with food, including all of the food for Shabbos. I was thinking how ridiculous it sounded to ask a non-Jewish neighbor to press a button for us. I was thinking how if there was a god, why would he want us to suffer yet another financial loss, and this time, for something we could control ourselves? It was several more months before my husband, children, and I left orthodoxy completely. And those months were filled with questions that that nobody could seem to answer in a way that made sense to me.

– Rebecca M. Ross

 

For at least a decade, I felt like I had a problem that had to be fixed. I desperately wanted to find some rav, some teaching, or even some segula that would cure me of my apikorsus. I spoke to countless rabbanim and frum scholars, and I would get some answers that made sense at the time. But later, when I realized those answers had holes, the questions just came back stronger. After many years of this psychological limbo, I finally had a turning point when I discovered that I actually had no problem at all. I realized it’s actually a good thing that I don’t believe claims that go against what we know today from science, philosophy, and modern Biblical scholarship, and that if anyone has a problem that needs fixing, it is those who make such claims, not I.

– Shloimie Ehrenfeld

 

I think skepticism is part of my nature. I have always been one to question and probe, but until my last year in high school, I hadn’t thought to question my belief in god or the practice of my religion. During that year we had a weekly “mishmar” class that dealt with Jewish philosophy and that is where I started to hear both my fellow students and myself start to express doubts. I think that is very natural at that age, and at the time I felt like my rebbe provided me with some good answers, though I continued to seek deeper theological understanding. I really wanted to understand what god was. This type of probing was too intellectual for the seminary students and teachers in my year in Israel program, and my belief began to founder, while at the same time I felt compelled to increase my stringency in halakhic observance. The upshot I guess of the seminary experience was to learn what god supposedly wanted, but not what god was. I started coming up with my own answers, that I later learned were similar to Spinoza’s god is nature. It helped me keep davening and I remained observant. Though I flirted with conservative Judaism for a bit, I kept coming back to orthodoxy, where I was most at home. I skirted the edge of orthodoxy, however, and stopped following chumras, reinterpreted and accepted the most lenient opinions, and became increasingly disappointed with the clash between my liberal, feminist views and the orthodox establishment. It took me 20 years to get out of this limbo state of adherance to Judaism and doubting. Ultimately I had to make up my mind that I didn’t need to believe, I didn’t need to follow anything but my conscience, and that I could be myself.

– Suzanne Oshinsky

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *