Donald Hopkins - August 17th, 2009 in Sandbox 1 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

My personal history with faith is quite different from many of the non-believers I have met. Since this is my first post and I’ve been having trouble coming up with something to write, I’m going to try to draw upon that, to write about why I became involved with secular activism and why i think its important to make the case for a rational world.

When i was fifteen i decided to make a leap of faith and became an orthodox Jew. It was a long journey. 3 years later, I woke up in the summer of 06′ somewhere in the heart of Brooklyn, i had a beard that touched the ground, my tefillin (Jewish phylacteries) next to my bed, and my siddur on the cabinet next to me. I was in a Hasidic Yeshiva waking up at 6:00 am on a Saturday to go downstairs and pray. My parents were deeply distressed that I had ended up here (the rabbis had insisted I separate myself from them, especially my father who is not Jewish), my health (mentally and psychologically) had been damaged by the advice of Rabbis who did not even have a bachelor’s degree (Hasidim are not supposed to go to college). I can’t tell you exactly why i fled that day , all I know is I looked around at all these Yeshiva students sleeping in the bunk beds near me, and forced myself to get on a bus back to Philadelphia and never looked back.

I was a member of the very well known Jewish Hasidic movement, Chabad-Lubavitch. Chabad is not only the second largest group of Hasidim (A populist Jewish religious movement that was born in eastern Europe) it is also an international organization that runs educational institutions, has its own publishing house, and sends out its most charismatic students around the world to proselytize to unobservant Jews. It also has its own political lobbying group, with a decent amount of pull in Washington.

I think Chabad’s existence illustrates the need for secular activism, for a demand that religion and state remain separate, a defense of secular humanism, and a sharp critique of arguments based on any sort of divine mandate.

Chabad gains a massive amounts of its funds via charity from non-orthodox Jews (Mainly Jewish people who identify with the reform movement) who are uneducated about many of the things that Chabad promotes: an uncompromising view of Israel’s right to every piece of the Biblical kingdom; a mystical ideology that draws deeply on racism towards Non-Jews; a deeply misogynistic attitude towards women; and finally although the official organization would never admit it, the majority of them firmly believe that their last Rebbe (Grand Rabbi and Leader) Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the messiah and is coming back to save the Jews and punish the gentiles.

So what we have is a religious movement that gains its wealth primarily from the moderates or even those who are only “culturally Jewish.” The money pours into a whole network of institutions that promote ideals that these very charitable people deeply dislike and don’t know they are supporting, convinced by a massive PR campaign that they are promoting Judaism. This is an organization whose ideology is actively promoting hard-line policies in Israel and values  that are deeply unhealthy and destructive. That’s why there needs to be a Secular, Free-thought movement. To make people realize what a leap of faith really is. We need to go to the moderates and the liberal defenders of faith and make them realize what they are defending. We need to show there is an alternative to taking ethics by divine mandate, to  show religion is not making the world a better place, an demonstrate how people are suffering because they are not making the effort to really look and see what the faithful are saying.  We need to show people what faith really is or someone you love might be tricked into a leap of faith and not have a bus to come back home on.

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