Losing My Religion

It was only when I was very young, perhaps a year on either side of five years old, that I prayed to god expecting to be heard. During that period, at bedtime every night, under the influence of my governess Maria, I’d say the Christian prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

I don’t remember being scared by the prayer’s suggestion that there was a chance I might die in the night. Rather, there was reassuring comfort in saying the same words every night to an omnipotent protector. When Maria or my mother had left the room, leaving me alone with god, I’d add this to the prayer. “God, your littlest finger is bigger than me.”

I suppose this addition was to ensure that god was not only listening, but that he would be propitiated by my respect for his power, even in my simplistic and juvenile expression of it.

Not only did Maria convince me I was talking to god, she used to call me her “little president,” so I believed the White House was my destiny. I soon learned, however, that no Jew had ever been elected president, and probably no Jew ever would. I don’t remember the source of this information; I do remember a feeling of great disappointment that faded and was gone by the time I got an astronaut costume that included a helmet with a working visor.

By that time Maria had left, the prayers had stopped, and my next religious encounter was going to Temple Israel Sunday School a few hours each Sunday morning in preparation for my Bar Mitzvah.

This was in the early 1970s, when reform synagogues like Temple Israel had an almost secular attitude toward religious Judaism. The young teacher who was supposed to be giving us religious instruction instead talked incessantly about how he and a “brilliant friend” had figured out a way to run a car without a combustion engine or the need for gas (this was during the Arab oil embargo.) We listened spellbound. He was a nice man, probably around twenty years old then, and I hope he later made a fortune on Tesla stock since he had the concept, if not the technology, decades before Elon Musk.

My only other noteworthy experience at Temple Israel Sunday School was running for president. I won because for one thing I gave every kid free candy and for another thing I ran unopposed. An official duty of my presidential office was to draw from a big bowl the winning ticket for the school’s grand raffle of a black and white television. The winning name I picked and announced with some glee was my own. I did not cheat, but in hindsight I’m sure that some of my classmates believed the fix had been in, and I wonder if they classified me with Nixon/Watergate as yet another corrupt politician. 

My Bar Mitzvah ceremony was a farce in that I had no idea what I was saying. I memorized everything solely by phonetic sound. There was no party; instead I got money. The whole operation seemed strictly commercial. As far as I could see, there was neither god nor religion in any of it.

A few decades later, around 1990, our two year old daughter was ready for nursery school. Most of the nursery schools were affiliated with either churches or synagogues, so we applied to three of the “top” synagogue nursery schools, top being defined as the ones we were told were hardest to get into. This application process was the very first time our family and our daughter were being formally judged. We had heard stories of a domino effect­­–––your nursery school led to your high school, led to your college, and so on. And our other children would likely follow in our daughter’s academic footsteps.

The future of our family hung in the balance.

Of the three schools to which we applied, two accepted our daughter and one, the Rodeph Sholom School, waitlisted her. To us, the two acceptances reflected poorly on those two schools. Clearly they had admission standards less demanding and discriminating than the school that had waitlisted “us,” the Rodeph Sholom School, the one we now keenly desired precisely because they didn’t want us.

My wife, pregnant with our second child, trudged through the snow to deliver to the RSS headmaster a letter pleading our case. Our daughter was admitted, we discovered we loved the school, kept her there until sixth grade, and sent our two sons there too. 

The Rodeph Sholom School taught Judaism, both its values and its traditions, and I was delighted that our children were learning about their heritage. Delighted until my daughter started her Bat Mitzvah prep in 2000, and it became clear just how embarrassingly little I knew about the Torah.

So I set out to learn and study my heritage and I did. The more I studied, the more I wanted to find a way to believe, a way to have faith. But the more that I learned, the more my chance at belief seemed elusive, my stubborn rationality an insurmountable barrier.

I used to think faith was an intellectual cop-out, but I’ve come to envy believers who have nurtured and maintained their faith. People who can pray and find solace and meaning through their faith.

The closest I can come to belief is the Deist concept of the “great watchmaker,” setting nature in motion and then exiting the scene. The devastating, disenchanting word being “exiting.”

I know I’ll never recapture the pure, innocent faith of the five year old me. But perhaps on the other side of the age spectrum I might find an undiscovered path, the religious equivalent of Waugh’s “low door in the wall,” that leads me to faith again.

I think about how often I have changed my beliefs in other things these past years. Why not at some point my belief in god?

Hope abides!