Questions

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