Question

Hello Rabbi,
First of all, I want to thank you for opening up to me a whole new world of faith and philosophy that I hadn’t known before.
I wanted to share with you and consult with you about my faith.
I grew up in a completely secular family, and until a few years ago religion struck me as something primitive, or at best something that might be good for those who believe in it, but that one cannot really believe in.
In recent years I began to take more interest in the subject, mainly because I got to know religious people who certainly could not be defined as stupid (and in addition were also moral). That’s how I came to your site (and your books), and I began to be convinced, mainly by the principles of synthetic thinking, by belief in a philosophical God, and by the validity of morality as something real (and not merely a human feeling or a tool that indirectly serves a person’s interests). At the same time, I still haven’t been convinced by the fifth notebook and the leap to Jewish faith. Granted, the idea no longer seems completely far-fetched to me, but my belief in it is still very weak, certainly relative to my belief in morality or alternatively in my senses and my consciousness, or even in belonging to a collective such as family and the Jewish people and the sense that they have meaning). At the same time, I also share the view that you have raised several times (as Ahad Ha’am did) that Jewish life (whose basis is observance of the commandments and belief in God) is a good foundation for creating a moral society and for the continuation of the Jewish people (and regarding the continuation of the Jewish people too, I feel with fairly strong certainty that it is something positive). Therefore I am facing a situation similar to “Pascal’s wager” — since if the tradition is true then I have certainly made the right decision in observing the commandments, but even if it is not true, then we have still gained a moral society and the continuation of the Jewish people, so that too would have been the right decision.
However, of course, this is not genuine faith, and in practice I do not observe the commandments (because of the great difficulty — both objective and because of the drastic change in habits that is required, and perhaps mainly because of the expected reaction from those close to me), and these arguments do not succeed in making me overcome those difficulties.
I would be happy if you could help me strengthen my faith (or alternatively help me resolve my hesitations in some other way).