Question

Hello and blessings, Rabbi Michael Abraham
 
I hear and read that you are often accused of causing weakness in faith and of treating the sources with disrespect.
I have heard your counterarguments, and I want to strengthen your hand.
I grew up Haredi, a graduate of yeshivas and a kollel for married avrechim. The whole standard track.
All my life I was accompanied by questions of faith. When I was a child and asked a question about faith, they silenced me with a rebuke and explained that one must not ask questions about the Holy One, blessed be He.
Obviously the questions did not stop, and others were added to them, difficult ones too, but I learned that one must not ask.
Several years after my marriage, I experienced a very severe crisis of faith. In practice, I became a coerced atheist.
Contrary to what Haredim tell themselves, my motivations did not stem from a desire to sin without a conscience. In fact, together with faith, I lost all desire to live.
After about 6 years of atheism, the person who brought me back to repentance in a miraculous way was דווקא Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
It is true that Leibowitz reduced my “God of childhood,” but he brought me back to the only God that my consciousness and rationality were capable of accepting, and caused me to accept upon myself the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven anew.
So thanks to Leibowitz the “heretic,” I and my children are servants of the blessed God. Would that our deeds be for the merit of his soul, of blessed memory.
I want to strengthen your hand and remind you that there are people like me out there, for whom the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Sages that you offer them are the only Holy One, blessed be He, and Sages they are capable of accepting; and were it not for people like you, they would be completely lost from His blessed Torah.
May it be His will that the desire of the Lord prosper in your hand, and that no stumbling block ever come about through you.
With great appreciation.