My Religious Retrospective

I`ve always had a complicated relationship with my relationship with God. The underlying question is a simple `is it worth the effort?` I think I`ve basically always assumed that it didn`t matter whether I believed in God, but to ask that question, I must not. I`m definitely a realist, and striving towards something I have no proof of has never felt authentic or worth the effort to me.

We`re doing Friday questions in Tanakh class. I`m tired from another infinitely long week of second-semester-junior life coupled with robotics build season. I never thought Friday would actually come, what with thirteen hours per day spent at school (even on Sundays), and homework and smalltalk with parents to boot. I am eating at least twice as many Oreos per day as the number of hours I am sleeping per night. And I never eat more than 10 Oreos. The whole Friday questions thing is background noise to my thoughts, for now. Robotics is all I can think about. I`m mentally tallying everything I still have to do to for the shabbaton part of our trip to competition. I don`t keep Shabbat at home, but I realized early that there would not be any Shabbat at all if I did not plan it, so I did what I needed to prepare.

By this point, I have become a master of logistics and an expert in halacha. I know everything, and when I realize a gap in my plan, I just shoot Rabbi Stein another email and hope he answers quickly. know who will be ordering and picking up our kosher cold cuts and related foods from Ralph`s. I know when this will happen and where they will be taken. I know where in the hotel there is a fridge we can use to store our Kosher yogurts for breakfast. I know where the crate of travel siddurim is.I am prepared to send a Schoology message reminding all of the boys to bring their tallitot and tefllin. I`ve written and sent countelss emails to parents detailing costs, packing lists, hotel information, and ensuring that we will have a good Shabbat. I know what will happen on Shabbat. This Shabbat will be special, because in addition to being Shabbat, it is also both Rosh Chodesh Nissan, and Shabbat HaChodesh. I know that we`ll have to read from three different places in the Torah.

I know how many psukim are in each aliyah and who will be leyning each one. I know who`s leading hallel and who`s doing the special Musaf amidah. I know how the Torah is being transported from Shalhevet to Pomona and back, and I even know which Torah it is. Our Shabbat chaperone is bringing it, and I know that it will already be in his car when he goes to pick up the Shabbat meals I`ve ordered from Lieder`s, and I know where he will get an extra hotplate from.

Again, I`ve never kept a Shabbat that wasn`t planned for me at camp or on a school shabbaton, but planning this Shabbat is important. I need to ensure that my robotics team will have nothing but the best, most kosher, most meaningful Shabbat that I can make for them, while confined to a tiny conference room in a hotel in Pomona.

I try to keep my eye on the devil in the details to stop myself from thinking about it too much. I don`t want to remember that I don`t really believe in God, because I`ve been told that that`s where the meaning comes from, and does it matter otherwise? I know literally everything there is to know in order for this to be a perfectly halachic trip, but why? What does this have to do with God?

Suddenly, one of my classmates catches my ear and yanks me out of my robotics planning. I am unsure of the context, but I hear the end of `OBVIOUSLY there`s no reason to follow halacha if you don`t believe in God, because if you don`t believe in God, it has no meaning.` This upsets me so much, but it takes me because I don`t really believe in God in the classical sense (I`m not so much upset by the idea that there was divine intervention in the universe in the form of a designer, but I`m not at all into the supernatural stories in the Tanakh, unless they`re meant to be taken as mere stories, which is never how we learn them.), and any belief I might have in a deity of some form is definitely not the reason I do mitzvot, or follow halacha to some extent.

But then I catch myself in this impossible loop—what do you mean you can`t follow halacha if you don`t believe in God? I don`t believe in God, but I still find meaning in Jewish tradition. But, you don`t follow halacha. Yeah, but it`s not because I don`t believe in God. How do you know? Maybe you would feel compelled to if you believed in God, which is the missing piece of the puzzle. I don`t now how other people feel, I only know ho I feel. But hey! The same can be said of those other people- theydon`t know how I feel only how they feel. But what if they know more than me?