The Point of No Return

There is a period after Apikorsis begins where one still reacts like a frumme Yid to things going on in the world. I think that phase lasted a good ten years or so. I can remember thinking to myself as I was having sex with a shikza or eating a steaming bowl of clam chowder “Oh man! Is this ossur!” I recall thinking and then having to rethink something to adjust to my new way of life. Old habits were hard to break and even when my body was doing one thing, my psyche was stubbornly clinging to the shtetl-kopp. Treife was still treife and, even when eating it I would think, “Hey. This is treife!” Those days, one could say I was doing it bemayzid, beda’as, and also maybe lechachis.

It’s been well past that decade point now, and I think I am finally without any thought, remorse, or even tinge of Yiddishe reaction to what happens. I’m still a Jew. I still speak Yiddish on occasion. I still sit and learn when I am researching a topic for an article or when others ask me questions from the Gemara or halacha. I find myself, though, forgetting Divrei Torah I used to know clearly, and I’m absolutely certain that I have forgotten how to put on tefillin or tie tzitzis. The streets of Crown Heights and Williamburg don’t seem the same or even real at times, and I’m hard pressed to recall the faces of my old chaverim and mishpocho. The memories around the Yid I used to be are fading. It looks now like it was someone else’s life. Even my father o’h is a stranger to me.

I’m beginning to understand what having no religious identity at all is supposed to feel like. It’s rather unsettling. All this time I have been saying what I intend to be, but now I really feel that I found it. I imagine I am sitting atop the story of my life in this world and Spinoza is looking over my shoulder at this huge pile of discarded life laying at my feet. He speaks in his usual cool and logical manner saying, “I warned you, Shlomo Leib.” I answer back in my own defense “But Reb Baruch! I just had to know! I couldn’t help it!” I turn back to him and nod, shrugging my shoulders in that typically Jewish manner and a bittersweet smile crosses my face. One might say that smile seems peaceful, and others may interpret it as melancholy. I don’t feel anything strong enough about it to care. It is what it is. I am who I am.

I no longer think only as a Yid. I am a ben-galus self-exiled into a new and improved sort of tiffe-galus. I have assimilated into something that a decade ago I would not recognize as myself. Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur passed without mention, and I spent those days as I would any other, almost forgetting their existence completely were it not for the goyim around me wishing me a ‘Happy Jewish New Year.’ I don’t have the heart to tell them those days aren’t mine anymore, so I offer them a soft “thank you” and move on to other things. There is no longer any intent not to behave as a Jew. I just don’t even think about it anymore.

Among the various labels or definitions one could choose for me, only one is truly accurate and lasting. I am a ‘Jew who changed his mind’ and subsequently his way of living. There isn’t much more left to alter in either regard. Perhaps it is the absence of such endeavors that induces numbness, where only boredom remains from lack of interest. Maybe there is finally the realization that I am nothing and nobody, except unto and for myself within the small, busy world that I function. It sounds sad, but it’s been my goal all along. I guess I will have to cope with getting exactly what I wanted. This milestone is a point of absolute ‘no return.’

Spinoza was right. On the first page of the very first chapter, before I even began reading in earnest, he warned me about what would happen. Spinoza will always be remembered as ‘the Jew who changed his mind.’ Now I share that lonely and abject moniker. It is, at best, nothing more than a psychosocial limbo and, at its worst, perhaps a peaceful sort of hell. I will feel nothing while still wanting to feel something, and then realize my original purpose was to feel nothing at all; reminded by the world of something I’ve already forgotten.

Kol Tuv