Question

Summary:
I believe that (a) beyond giving context and meaning to material, concrete life, there is another essential layer in religious existence connected to recognizing the existence of spiritual concepts, especially the existence of God. At the same time, (b) life in the modern world, with its deep internalization of the centrality of matter and analytical thinking, loses the cognitive tools needed in order to access those existential layers of religion. Still, I am convinced that (c) the religious intuition is correct and that a way back must be found.
Assuming my analysis is correct (and I would be glad to hear your thoughts on that as well), I wanted to ask how, in your opinion, one can awaken existential religious awareness, which until now has had no real place in my life or studies (including in yeshiva). In the background, the book Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon stirred thoughts in me that helped me trace the gap in my religious world.
Details:
About two years ago, around the middle of my military service, I began to feel that something was missing from my religious world. When I returned to yeshiva I tried to clarify the problem, and in a series of conversations with Rabbi Oshri Baruch, we managed to conclude that it involved a certain absence of belief in God as an ontological being, despite emotional and rational identification with a normative religious way of life. At the same time, experiences that I would describe as an encounter with the sublime, mainly in the world of art, together with a sense of the poverty of existence that demands turning to something beyond the world, alongside an awareness of the inadequacy of a purely analytical worldview, convinced me that those layers do exist, and that I need to find a way to approach them.
I think that Rabbi Soloveitchik, in his book The Lonely Man of Faith, succeeded in identifying these two different layers in his description of majestic man, focused on concrete life, as opposed to the man of faith, whose primary experience is cleaving to God. Toward the end of the essay, he emphasizes that even majestic man needs religion in order to illuminate his material life and to provide a basis for moral systems, meaning, or aesthetics. However, he argues that majestic man is unaware of additional layers and even denies their existence. The description of those “additional layers” is very incomplete, but it seems to involve a direct turning to God and to that which is beyond the world, without reference to the material context. Among other things, one might include more “existential” or abstract layers: the question of God’s existence, providence, prayer.
I claim that something in the modern world has lost the cognitive patterns needed to access these additional layers, and as a result I (and perhaps others) am limited to the religious experience of majestic man. Thus, although I defend the religious way of life as right and good, I do so from a subjective standpoint, and I am not prepared to stake my hand and declare that God is real. This loss can be illustrated by the fact that very often the starting point for a conversation about religion is the difficulty of sustaining a worldview without it. As a result, there is no discussion of layers of religion that do not concern the material world.
It may be that behind this shift are phenomena that, on the face of it, reduce God’s sphere of influence in the world. In this framework, there is the denial of reward and punishment in their plain sense, and the internalization of the idea that the natural world operates according to laws [apart from free will], and perhaps also another phenomenon: the denial of the unknown or the non-concrete, which leads to the negation of, or disregard for, issues such as the resurrection of the dead and the World to Come.
And why does this matter? In my view, reducing religion to illuminating our concrete lives strips from it, and as a result from our lives, an essential component. Likewise, it is difficult, to the point of impossible, to distinguish such a view from deism, since the religious act itself has no significance, only the norms it establishes. I would not be surprised if many people share this lack of access to the intrinsic layers of faith in the Holy One, blessed be He, and it may be that this phenomenon significantly increases the rate of people leaving religion. That is, assuming that the religious person has difficulty distinguishing between his own principled world of values and that of his secular yet moral friend, while at the same time he feels the strangeness of religious acts (“Why should it matter to God whether I do…”).
Thank you, and I would be glad to hear your response.