Q&A: Guidance on Faith and Keeping the Commandments
Guidance on Faith and Keeping the Commandments
Question
Hello Rabbi,
First of all, thank you very much for all the lectures, articles, and answers—they open my mind and raise many important questions for me.
I wanted to ask a personal question, coming from a sincere place of searching. I feel a strong lack of desire to keep the commandments—not out of rebellion, but simply out of a lack of inner connection. I don’t feel any inner movement or need pushing me to pray, observe the Sabbath, be careful about keeping kosher, etc. At this point, religion feels to me more like part of the cultural folklore of the Hasidic-Haredi family I come from—atmosphere, holidays, family—and less like a system I truly understand or feel connected to.
And yet there is a part of me that does want to understand deeply, that really does want to clarify things honestly. I don’t want to make decisions about my life based only on passing feelings or habits, but to build something internal, thoughtful, and deep. I’m not sure whether I truly don’t believe—or whether I just haven’t understood enough in order to believe.
Does the Rabbi have recommendations for study—books, articles, a lecture series, maybe also particular thinkers—that could help me build, in a systematic way, a better understanding of the world of faith, religion, the commandments, and even the world of values and personal character traits? I feel that I’ve matured a bit, and I want to start organizing my thinking and drawing closer to the truth—even if in the end I reach complex conclusions.
Thank you very much in advance for your time and response.
Answer
Hello,
When you say you are not “connected,” that can be understood in two ways: 1. It doesn’t speak to me. 2. I don’t believe in it.
The first way is a psychological problem and not an essential one. Do it even if it doesn’t speak to you. The second way really requires clarification of faith in general. That is too broad a question, and I don’t know how to answer it here. I also can’t recommend books, because only you know what kind of literature speaks to you.
Discussion on Answer
I think you were educated on an overstuffed theology, one that I also do not believe in. The indication of this is that, from your point of view, faith is based on all kinds of midrashim and stories, and in my view it is not. I do not deal with midrashim at all and do not see any value in them. If you want to follow the path I suggest, there is my trilogy. Its purpose is exactly to lead a person to a clear-eyed faith, not on the basis of dubious midrashim and folk tales, and without all the unnecessary additions that were attached to it over the generations. I cannot go into detail here on such a broad topic.
Thank you very much, Rabbi, for the answer.
I think that what you described as the second option—”I don’t believe in it”—is more accurate for me, even though there is also a certain element of the first option.
There is probably also a psychological element of rebellion in me, some desire not to feel obligated, or not to feel that I’m being led without being asked. But in the end, what really troubles me lies in the depths of faith itself.
I feel that my difficulty is understanding why we believe in this whole story at all. If a significant part of the stories is based on midrashim, aggadic literature, or sources whose historical accuracy is doubtful, then what distinguishes our tradition from any other folk tale?
I come from a very closed Haredi background, where there was no room for questions of this kind—everything was accepted as “Torah from Sinai,” literally. There was no access to outside ideas or critical thinking, and there was a feeling that any attempt to examine things was already a kind of deviation. It is precisely that feeling that pushes me outward—even away from the good within the tradition—because I lack space to think.
So it seems to me that the main question is not only what one does when one doesn’t believe, but how one even begins to build faith when the heart asks: why Judaism in particular? Why not see all of this simply as a system of stories with a drop of truth?
And if there is truth in it—what is that truth?
And more broadly, the question of divinity: isn’t this simply a deep human—psychological—need to produce a “God” who gives meaning, framework, and order to a chaotic world?
I would be glad if the Rabbi could guide me or shed some light on a path forward, perhaps through a question or a direction for thinking.