The journey away from traditional thought

There seem to bequite a few bloggers out there who are 'orthoskeptics' and have not come out so to speak. I have semi come out but still experience fear that if i 'fully' come out, this will affect my business which is a services business to the jewish and religious world in the UK.

My journey away from belief that the Torah is the final word of God, began age 30. until then i had been only to Jewish schools and spent several years in yeshiva. I married a modern Orthodox girl and we had children. I was a committed modern orthodox jew with very few real questions about it all. Then i started going to therpay for various reasons and a year later enrolled in a weekend program that woudl change my life. One of the fundamental teachings of the weekend - which was experiential in an nature - was that what we experience (especially anger, resentment and suffering) are a result of our thoughts and beliefs. So the way to change our experience would be to change our beliefs. This set me on a path to examining my beliefs and realisisng that many of them were simply mistaken (not so much my religious beliefs but my beliefs about myself and others and the world) From then i started to wonder about my religious beliefs and assumptions.

I becamse quite involved with the organisation taht put on these weekends, when suddenly a new event was to move me on and challenge me again. I was in a hotel and someone thrust a leaflet into my hand - it said on it 'John Deruiter - Living embodiement of the truth' I simply couold not ignore this and thought i would just stay and listen to him for a few minutes. 3 hours later i was still mesmerised. It is difficult for me to explain exactly what happened as it was experiential more than intellectual. The only way i can describe it was that he was being acceptance. He was personifying and embodying that concept. The result for me was the first time i had no desire to defend my beliefs and the realisation through his words and being that what happens with beliefs is that at some stage(s) in life, we take on a belief or set of beliefs and then we invest our egos, money, time etc in those beliefs and become attached to them. We then feel threatened when people challenge them. I realised that this certainly applied to my Judaism and I started to wonder why it was that there are very few Bobov Chassidim in Utah !! Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that most Bobov chassidim were brought up with those beliefs and even Baalei Teshuva had a good reason to WANT to believe that Judasim is true !

The final nail in the coffin was discovering more and more spiritual teachers and writings which pointed towards universal teachings and understandings, in particular the teachings of Neal Donald Walsch in his series 'Conversations with God' In this series he claims he has had a conversation with God. It is the wildest most delightful conversation covering every quesiton i woudl ask God. Every time i pick up his books i feel touched to the core.

And given the above experience, there was absolutely no point talking to Rabbis because as i have discovered virtually without exeption, they are all invested inthe system. No matter how many amazing and difficult questions you have about the Torah or Judasim, they will HAVE to find answers or their whole life will fall apart (or the illusory sense of self anyway)

For me, the God of my understanding would not write or dictate some of the violent commands and requirements in the torah. I believe that all relilgions have lots of profound wisdom in them but they also have plenty of obnoxious stuff. Just like we would like Muslims to examine the Koran and root out the violence and racism, the sexism and masochism, so too do we need to do the same with our holy books.