Thoughts after Yom Kippur

I knew a person once who was an atheist. He used to say: "People use G-d as a crutch. Whenever they can't decide or explain something they turn to G-d for help."

I was discussing some religious issues with my best friend yesterday, and amazingly, she almost said the same thing, even though she never met the above-mentioned guy. She said: "You use religion because you are facing a difficult decision, and you want someone else to make it for you. So you turn to a religious text and try to find a "message" there that applies to your situation."

And so it is - non-believers think that living a religious life is much easier than being a non-believer. Sure, whenever you want something, you pray to G-d. Whenever you face a difficult decision, you turn to a religious text and try to find an answer. You never have an ethical dilemma, because all the ethics comes from your religion, and whenever you blindly follow it, you feel fine. Being religious is easy. It's when you don't have a "higher authority" to guide you, everything kind of falls on your own shoulders. No crutches.

For me, it's the other way around. I can't count the times when I wished I could be a non-believer. There is nobody to answer to when you "miss the mark", as we say on Yom Kippur. It's like working with no boss. You miss the deadline - nobody cares. You turned in a sloppy report - no big deal, nobody will read it anyway. You are doing a bad job - it's a customer's problem, let him figure it out, and if he doesn't you fix it later. There is nobody to check on your work. It's easy. It's a presence of a boss that makes most people disciplined. Not all of them of course - some do not need a boss to be responsible. But many do need an authority to check on them.

So it is with religion. It would be so much easier to live your life without fear of judgement. Or punishment, whenever we "miss the mark". Every religion has its own ideas about punishment. Christians believe in hell. I don't believe in hell. I am more afraid of punishment in this life. Especially when you are not punished directly, but indirectly, through your loved ones. That's the worst kind of punishment. Especially when you can't even explain why you are being punished. It doesn't really matter - you know you are not perfect, you must've missed the mark at some point, but it would be easier if you could see the logic behind it somehow. Like when you eat too much, you get high cholesterol and all that comes with it. That's non-religious way. It's easy and logical. G-d doesn't work this way. That's why bad things happen to good people. G-d makes things happen and doesn't explain why. It makes sense to Him. It often doesn't make sense to us.

That's why, when making a difficult decision, I agonize about it - I am answerable to a "higher authority." I can't take it just because I want it so badly. I can't take it just because it's there. Am I allowed to have it? Do I deserve to have it? Will my decision ruin somebody's life? If I make the wrong decision, will I get punished, maybe not right away, but later, down the road? Will my loved ones get hurt? It would be much easier if I believed that bad things just happened randomly and I did nothing to bring them on whatsoever. Not so - I know that when bad things happen, I will spend all my time thinking that it was somehow, someway my fault.

And so it is, my friends the non-believers. G-d is not a crutch. It's a never-sleeping eye that follows you everywhere. It's a teacher that constantly gives you problems to think about. It's a judge that punishes you for the wrong moves you make. It's not easy to live with that kind of authority, so you my friends choose to ignore it, and your only moral authority is yourselves. When nobody is watching, "missing the mark" doesn't matter.