We're all Orthopraxists

A Meditation on the "as-if" life

There’s a story I first heard from Rabbi Tatz. It goes something like this.

A young man living in a Jewish shtetl¹ loses his faith and becomes an “apikores,” i.e., an apostate, a Jew who no longer believes in Judaism, maybe no longer believes in God, or who, at the very least, doubts “rabbinical Judaism.”

Now, you can imagine it would be difficult in the shtetl to be such a young man because everyone around him is religious, because his whole life is infused with religious Judaism. His parents are observant as are his siblings. He’s been educated in the yeshiva system. Everyone he knows is a believing, practicing Jew, and he knows almost nothing about life outside the shtetl. What’s a young man to do?

Well, he hears of a famous apikores in a village some three days journey from his home, and one morning, he sets out to find and speak to this apikores, hoping to learn from him how to live as an apostate. He travels across difficult terrain, through harsh weather, crossing dangerous territory finally to arrive at the village where the apikores lives. He asks around and is directed to the man’s house, knocks at the door, and a woman, the wife of the apikores, answers it.

She tells the young man he’ll find her husband at shul. The young man is surprised but follows her directions to the synagogue and, when he gets there, asks around for the apikores.

“He’s over there,” says one congregant, pointing to a man in a black suit and white shirt, wearing a tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries) and davening (praying) the Amidah, the central prayer of the service. The young man is shocked and thinks maybe he has the wrong guy, but he waits patiently for him to finish praying and then goes to speak to him.

He explains who he is and why he has come to the village and asks if the man is, indeed, the one for whom he has been searching. The man says he is.

“But I don’t understand,” the young man says. “I heard you were a great apikores, the greatest apikores in the land, and here you are in shul, wearing tefillin and davening the morning prayer.”

“I may be an apikores,” the man says, “but I’m not a barbarian.”

---

I think about this story a lot. I thought about it this morning when I read a short substack by the Frum Observer about Jewish “Orthopraxy.”

“Orthopraxy,” the author, Yitz, explains, is a phenomenon in the religious Jewish community in which a person loses their belief in “the traditional understanding of Judaism” and then practices the “quite horrifying day in and day out of hiding these beliefs from those around him” while continuing to present as Orthodox.

These are people

. . . who feel trapped, who can’t reconcile what they’ve been taught with what they now believe (or don’t believe), and who live in constant flux between faith and heresy. These are individuals who go through the motions, sometimes for years, to avoid the social and familial fallout of revealing their true selves.

Yitz depicts this phenomenon as the inevitable product of a closed-minded culture that doesn’t permit dissent or allow for the expression of doubt and predicts that if these shadows remain unaltered by the future,² “the entire structure [will start] to crumble.”

There’s no question this is a real phenomenon, and Yitz is better qualified than me to write on it, coming as he does from within the community. I thought, however, I would offer some thoughts on the subject from a different perspective, the perspective of a quasi-ba’al teshuva who also practices a form of Orthopraxy.

---

The first time I met someone like the one Yitz describes was back in Chicago at a community dinner led by a Jewish Renewal³ rabbi. I got to know him during a long Shavous night when he, I, and a few others from that congregation stayed up and had what in the old days would have been called a “rap session.”

This young man expressed a lot of frustration with Orthodoxy and distrust for Orthodox rabbinical authority, felt he’d been deceived by a tradition that covered up and distorted the truth, lying, for example, about the lives of supposedly saintly rabbis. “If we can’t trust what they say about the lives of rabbis, how can we trust the commentary in the Stone Chumash?”⁴ he asked.

But he still lived in the religious neighborhood of West Rogers Park, wore a black kippah, and visited the Renewal services in secret.

I asked him why, if he didn’t believe, he didn’t just drop the whole thing, and he explained that it wasn’t so simple. His whole family, all his friends, were religious. You could not live in that community as a skeptic, a heretic. It’s not that they’d burn you in an auto de fe, but there’d be no place for you. You’d have to leave and start from scratch, make an entirely new life in a new place, new friends, new family.

Not everybody is up for that, even when they’re tortured with doubt and feelings of inauthenticity. Not everyone can be an Abraham and leave behind their whole community to go, who knows where?

I felt bad for the guy. I still do.

But I come from a very different perspective.

---

I come to religious Judaism as someone fleeing frum secularism.

I had my falling out with religion in college and lived much of the next twenty years searching for alternatives in everything from literature to psychoanalysis to New Age spirituality to hedonism.

I believed (and still do) in the Big Bang, evolution, “Biblical criticism,” and had (and have) a sneaking suspicion that we live in a mechanistic universe where human beings are separated from grubs by nothing more than evolutionary accident—that our much-vaunted intelligence is a Darwinistic byproduct of no greater value than the ability to produce larva, that “spirituality” is a comforting story we tell ourselves so we don’t see ourselves as we really are—stomachs with arms, legs, and a brain.⁵

That, for me, is the alternative to frumkeit.

---

I understand the doubt. I feel the doubt. Do I believe everything the rabbis tell me? Nope. Do I believe everything happened at Sinai exactly as it’s reported? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.⁶

Do I believe in God? Well, my friend Sarah says don’t ask, don’t tell. But I’ll tell. Yes, I do. Kind of. Sometimes. Much of the time. But sometimes, I’m not so sure.

And so, yes, I come to Orthodox Judaism full of doubt, live with it every day, and yet I still practice it, kind of. I keep shabbat. I keep kosher in the home (and “kosher-style” outside the home). I go to shul every Shabbat and daven for hours. I keep my head covered for everything except sleeping and showering. I read the weekly parsha, learn Tanya, say a blessing before eating, say the Shema before I go to sleep. The list of what I don’t keep is much longer than what I do, but still, most people consider me “religious.”

And yet, my religion is not so much based on faith as it is on an “as-if” proposition.

It goes this way. I look at the Orthodox community and see big, thriving families that seem at least as happy, if not happier, than the ones I know in the secular community. I experience with the Orthodox community joy in prayer, learning, “simchas” (celebrations) “farbrangens” (drinking parties where you talk Torah). I watch these guys singing niguns passionately, caring lovingly for their children, and strolling happily with their wives. I see them stretching their minds with what might very well be kabbalistic mumbo-jumbo but is far more life-affirming than the Euphoria that popular culture pushes.

I also see the secular world pushing its share of lies, demanding its pound of cognitive dissonance, and discouraging, if not actively punishing, dissent.

So I live a life “as if” I believe, which I sometimes do and sometimes don’t.

And that “as-if” life, truth be told, is not the same as believing because, to paraphrase the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,”

If [God] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can. . . .

In other words, true belief in God requires obedience, demands it, makes it almost logically impossible to avoid.

Nobody speeds or runs a red light when they see a squad car in their rearview mirror. Everyone pays their fair share of taxes when they know the IRS is watching.

If we knew for sure God was there and monitoring us every moment of the day, we could not help but “do the right thing,” whether that meant keeping a negative mitzvah like not stealing or a positive one like laying tefillin in the morning.

This, of course, is standard Orthodox apologetics. If God made his presence known clearly, we’d all be robots. But it’s hard to argue with.

And, moreover, it proves something unexpected.

We all have doubts. Because if we didn’t, we’d all be saints. Or at least, the ones who truly believed would.

And yet, I don’t know too many saints.⁷

Whether during davening, benching, speaking loshon hara, or otherwise, I have seen many an Orthodox rabbi and/or frum person take shortcuts or simply disregard halacha. They would not do so if they saw the great Cop in the Sky in their rearview mirror. They would not do so if their faith were perfect.

What is the truth, then?

The truth is that all of us—as-if quasi-ba’al teshuvahs, apikoresim, rabbis, rebbetzim, and anashim—all of us perform Orthopraxy to some degree or another.

Should we be more open about it? Maybe. Though I can see arguments for maybe why not.

But my point is also that secularists practice their own version of Orthopraxy. They also live “as-if” lives:

As if there is justice in nature, as if there is meaning in the life of a grub, as if a stomach-with-legs has empathy, as if “empathy” has any value in a world that really is nothing more than atoms clashing against atoms and in which we, as Thomas Ligotti has written, are nothing more than “hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” All the social justice, all the “sieze-the-day” optimism, all the worship of “The True Self,” all the yearning for world peace, brotherly love, pursuit of objective knowledge, all the evolutionary wishful thinking about “goodness genes” or whatever, is, in a Godless universe, so much whistling in the boneyard.

So, yeah, I’ll take a side of inauthenticity with that Orthopraxy. That or the hemlock.

1. Small, mostly Jewish, village in old Europe or Russia.

2. Points to those of you can can identify the allusion.

3. I don’t know much about the Jewish Renewal Movement. But it seems to be a kind of hippy version of Reconstructionist Judaism. The version I saw emphasized joy over practice while at the same time expressing a love of Jewish tradition and learning.

4. The standard Jewish Bible in some Orthodox communities.

5. What do I mean by this? We often see our stomachs and limbs as organs that exist to provide nutrition to our brain, which is the true source of our being. But what if our brain actually exists only to direct our limbs toward nourishment for the true essence of our being, our stomach? What if our true nature is simply ingesting, digesting, and excreting, and everything else is just window dressing? I believe I got this idea from Thomas Ligotti’s highly depressing The Conspiracy Against the Human Race but I’ve been unable to track down the exact quote. Or it may have been from Max Stimer’s The Ego and His Own, a lost classic of pessimism.

6. Sometimes, I wonder, for example, why Moses had to be so careful to keep everyone off the mountain during his revelation. For on the third day people will see the Lord come down on Mount Sinai. Let the people know the places all around that they must not pass. Tell them, ‘Be careful that you do not go up on the mountain or touch any place around it. Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death. Was he protecting them from God, or was he hiding something?

7. I won’t say I don’t know any because I do know a few people who seem blessedly and consistently pious.