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.

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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?

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