Opinion | Noah Berlatsky: The best thing about Judaism, according to a Jewish atheist on Yom Kippur - NBCNewsTHINK
When I was 13 and preparing for my bar mitzvah, I told my rabbi, in a fit of miscalculated honesty, that I was planning to skip serviceand go to school. He turned to me with an expression of outrage, and literally shook his finger."You will go to services," he said in no uncertain terms."Or there will be no bar mitzvah!"
Thus blackmailed, I did go to services on the high holy days that year. But to my rabbi's chagrin — may his memory be a blessing — not onsince. As a kid I was willing to do the expected thing and get that bar mitzvah, with the attendant gifts. But my youthful ambivalence has in middle age hardened into something like antipathy. I don't believe in God, and don't have any desire to drag my son to services.
When your most meaningful memory of Yom Kippur is getting browbeaten to to care, it seems like the honest thing is not to repent, but to stay home.. In fact, secular atheism has long been one very standard way of being Jewish. For me, one of Judaism's great strengths is the fact that it's an identity not rigidly defined by what you believe, or where you happen to be on Yom Kippur.," in Stalin's anti-Semitic phrasing.
The two most important architects of modern European skepticism, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, were both Jewish. The, like Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno, were secular nonbelievers. So was Hannah Arendt. So was Jacques Derrida. The Christian faith has been used as a constant bulwark for political and cultural power, so it's not a surprise that some of the sharpest critics of that power have been Jewish atheists.
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