The Obstacles

Cover of Trembling Before G-D

That human introspection is so rare has the counter-intuitve implication that we don't try understand others well. Other people's values in our environment inform who we are. One of the largest groups of other people among Western nations are the Jews and most non-Jews know next to nothing about the Judaism of the Jews. Of course, it's also true that most Jews don't know that much about Judaism either. Since Jews and Judaism are such a major component of our intellectual history, we fail to understand how we got to were we are, if we fail to understand Judaism.

I decided to learn about Judaism by converting to Judaism. Jews make religious tourism challenging. We are so used to the normal Jews around us, but we don't step foot into the synagogue to encounter the differences.
They do their services in Hebrew. Orthodox Rabbis don't return phone calls or emails, and if you do get in touch they try to talk you out of converting.
There is another exciting obstacle for me in terms of Orthodox Judaism. I'm gay. But I'm reading all the good resources for gay Jew's: the movie "Trembling Before G-d" and Rabbi Steven Greenberg's Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition. It's strange that I'm rather resolutely celibate but yet it is so important for me to be a gay Jew that these are what I read to learn about Judaism instead of more typical introductory books. (Admittedly, I'm also looking at Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed.) As of now, I'm quite hopeful that I can find an Orthodox Rabbi willing to convert a gay man.


There is the slight problem that I'm an atheist. Luckily, I've observed enough religion and studied enough philosophy to know that "God" is a flexible, slippery word. One simply follows one of the many paths of atheist theism. Just today, I watched Sally Quinn interview atheist theists Deepak Chopra and Karen Armstrong. Not surprisingly, most atheist theist paths are rather confused and not philosophical rigorous. The masses who follow such paths tend to be as muddled in their thinking as Chopra and Armstrong. To state the obvioius, the masses' confusion arises from the fact that atheist theism tends towards the self-contradictory, but there are atheist theist paths that remain in light of logic. It seems appropriate in becoming a Jew to follow the path of an excommunicated Jew, Barauch Spinoza: I attribute some meaning to Spinoza's Deus, sive Natura. While one could conceive of Deus, sive Natura as Paris Hilton's poodle, it would be a bad choice for persuading the holy. Luckily, there is such a wide range of good possibilities for Deus, sive Natura that any atheist can play. And having assigned some meaning to Deus, sive Natura, why not just call it God for short? See how easy it is to believe in God? In fact, you've just read the ontological argument for the existence of God. (In fact, Spinoza was an advocate of the ontological argument for just this reason.) As long as I'm sufficiently evasive, I should be able to convince many Orthodox rabbis of the sincerity of my faith.