I grew up in a home where there wasn’t much in the way of Jewish religious practice, and I made it through Hebrew school at two Conservative synagogues without learning very much about Judaism. Arriving at college with only a rudimentary understanding of my own religion, I left it in the same condition. After graduating, however, I spent several months in Israel. Like so many others in the 1970s, I was lured from the Western Wall to a nearby baal teshuvah yeshiva and spent several weeks in an environment that was both inspiring and disturbing. What I learned whetted my appetite for more, but I was troubled by my new teachers’ absolute sense of certainty about all things Jewish, involving both practice and belief.
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