I am, so far as I know, the highest level defector ever to break from the American Evangelical Anglo-Saxon elite, and certainly the first to become a Jew.

The world from which I emerged, the worldview I discarded, is not easily cast aside. My grandfather was not the first renowned member of my family. As far back as the American Civil War, and even before, my family has been prominent in the South. I share ancestry and connection with George Washington through multiple lines. And, since the turn of the 20^th century, when my great-uncle, Landrum Pinson Leavell I, began to preach, until the end of that same century, when his namesake, my grandfather, ended his long career, my family has served in virtually every leadership capacity within the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as the much larger Baptist World Alliance, a colossus of religion with tens of millions of members worldwide. People do not simply leave families like mine, and certainly not to become Jewish. But it was when I was a boy that the edifice my family built began to collapse.

The author, age 2

The world inside the red brick walls of my grandfather’s seminary was austere, starkly Protestant, rigid, and frighteningly apocalyptic. For they believed we lived just before the deluge, which is to say, the coming of the Antichrist. In that environment there was an absolute necessity for ideological uniformity and conviction in the face of what was seen as the collapse and disintegration of all normative values and morality, which undoubtedly was occurring, in the eyes of Evangelical Christianity, in the latter half of the American twentieth century – primarily derived from (though not widely understood to be a result of) the deterioration ofcertainty, due to Descartes and Darwin, and those later philosophers and scientists who further developed their epistemological and scientific questioning, and also to the whittling away of the belief, in the bosoms of Christian laymen, of time in saecula saeculorum, in whose inexhaustibility, particularly in the Deep South, there had previously existed an unshakeable faith.

The rapid erosion of that formerly ever-existent state of affairs – one based on hierarchy, patriarchy, Christianity, and race, created a situation in which an eschatological war was required to counteract the criticisms of those that suddenly arose, in the latter half of the twentieth century, from within the Evangelical world itself. And while any moderate of suspect theology could simply be placed in exile, declared unfit, or removed from authority, there was the rather delicate problem of how to deal with such poison when found in a child, particularly when that child was a scion of the most influential clan in the entirety of the Evangelical world.

A Different Child

I was only a child, yet I was a very different child. But this is best explicated through a snippet of conversation I once shared with my mother.

“When you were a boy you could solve puzzles,” my mother mouthed.

I was in my mid-twenties and had just asked her if she believed that there was something unusual about me as a boy that was not related to spirituality.

“What? What does that mean? Everyone solves puzzles.”

“Yes, but you were very young.”

“How young?”

“Eighteen months.”

“There are puzzles made for babies. Why is that unusual?”

“Well you did them all. We had to get you puzzles for the three-year-olds.”

“I was a year or two ahead of myself. So what?”

“Well you did those too. I got you the puzzles for the five-year-olds. You only needed to look at them one time to solve them. I had to keep buying them. It wasn’t the same with your younger siblings. They had to look at the pieces one at a time and try them in different ways over and over to put the puzzles together. You would see the puzzle complete in your head and put it together on the first attempt.”

“So you got me puzzles for seven-year-olds, for adults?”

“No, no.”

“Why not?”

“It was just too strange.”

Yet if it was in puzzles that I excelled then that was no more than a danger in my parents’ eyes, for soon after I was able to think, I learned to speak. And shortly after having arrived at the glorious conjunction of both thought and speech I was able to question. And questioning soon proved a great talent of mine. My inquiries were primarily directed at my parents, and concerned life, and humanity, and the nature of existence and God, for after all, it was a theologian’s home. But frequently the answers provoked more questions, and in many cases one or more of the answers produced confusion, or, as I saw it, a puzzle.

My mother really meant those beatings to save me from sin and a possible eternity in Hell.

 However there were times when my parents did not see their answers as confusing or puzzling, or as riddles requiring solutions. So there were occasions when the solutions at which I arrived, to satisfy the curiosities acquired when padding about as a child, did not meet with the approval of my parents. Further, there were many times when the answers provided me were not merely puzzling, but were completely unpalatable. And so without compunctions, I felt free to let my parents, particularly my stay-at-home mother, know what I felt about their thoughts and opinions concerning my behavior or beliefs. And all of this questioning and back-talk existed alongside the usual misbehaviors of any normally inquisitive and energetic young boy. And that presented a problem, for I was an extremely willful child.

This sort of childish willfulness did not go over very well in the Southern Evangelical world of that time, where children were to be seen and not heard, and physical pain was seen as appropriate, Biblically mandated, and pedagogically useful. I was just out of infancy when my mother began beating me, and those beatings, which she termed spankings, continued several times a day, every day, throughout my childhood and adolescence. And I do not believe, in the beginning, that those beatings were meant to be abusive. I believe my mother really meant those beatings to save me from sin and a possible eternity in Hell.

Possessed by the Devil

Christianity, unlike Judaism, prizes faith above action, and the acceptance of Christian faith requires obeisance to a convoluted, tangled reticulation of postulates – in essence, a puzzle. To be a good Christian in the world today is to accept a maze of doctrine which collapses at the lightest touch. Consider a simple example which occurred to me as a youth:

They believed that I required radical assistance. I was loaded in a car and driven to an exorcist for an exorcism.

Christians (and Jews) maintain that it is an absolute necessity that the Messiah be descended from King David through the patrilineal line. Christians also maintain that Jesus was born of a virgin (and therefore possessed neither father nor patrilineal line). So the choice is clear. Either Jesus was descended from David in the male line, making him eligible to be the Messiah, or he was born of a virgin. But it is absolutely impossible that both can be true – and therefore one of the two major doctrines of Christianity is necessarily false. This is no more than a simple truth of logic – a truth visible to anyone willing to probe the maze of Christian claims.

Pronouncements of this sort caused my parents to assume that there was something very wrong with me. Though only a small child when my parents began to beat me, it was as I grew older that they determined the multiple daily beatings were having no effect. They came to believe that the wit and intelligence and mischievousness that motivated me as a small boy were no confluence of natural factors, but a direct result of demonic activity in the physical realm. In their minds, ten-year-old boys should not be able to outsmart, outthink, and outmaneuver mature adults who are operating under divine guidance. My parents decided that I must be possessed by literal demons. They believed that I required radical assistance. I was therefore loaded in a car and driven to an exorcist for an exorcism.

And there is no intelligent ten-year-old who will not very quickly begin to experiment with alternative identities, particularly when he has never been exposed to anything other than the metaphysical claims of the inerrant and literal interpretation of the New Testament, with its repetitive passages concerning exorcisms – passages which I knew by heart. If the foundation and rock of one’s life, that is to say, one’s mother, believes that when speaking to you she may not in fact be speaking to you – even while looking directly into your eyes – but rather to one or more maleficent creatures from the netherworld, then you, the precocious, imaginative, ten-year-old, will begin a long process of self-dissociation in which you discover yourself increasingly plagued by the types of epistemological questions that should really not trouble anyone other than tweed-donned and bearded middle-aged professors.

“Am I me?”

“Are there evil beings living inside of me?”

“Did what just happened occur as a result of my actions, or was it the result of an uncontrollable impulse directed by one of the malignant spirits that seem to be hovering all around me?”

“Why did God allow me to become a prime target of these evil beings, simply due to the pedigree of my family, my spiritual potential, and the likelihood that someday I may become a leader of the Christian world? What did I do to deserve that?”

“If it is not me personally who is causing and responsible for these defiant and occasionally uproarious behaviors, then why am I being beaten so thoroughly for them every day?”

Rebel

To break free from the doctrines imposed by the use of a whip it was necessary for me to rebel, and to rebel thoroughly. I became a wild, dissipated teenager. I learned, through terrible pain, of the dark nihilism that exists when one lives as an agnostic, as a man with neither hope, nor purpose, nor God. In time, to battle the blackness of that abyss, I turned to philosophy.

In that first cerebral turn after Christianity I read the Existentialists, who seemed to understand my sudden drowning in the absurd meaninglessness of existence, the nausea that evoked. However, once that nihilism was fully conceptualized and accepted, then continued meditation on the writings exploring the psychological sensations inside that anarchic vacuum became morbid, the stuff of decay, and I recognized the need to turn to a very different type of philosopher. I moved to the major figures of early modern European philosophy, to the foundational questions of epistemology, of determining how one possesses certain knowledge. I quickly realized that I did not have knowledge that there was no deity – I merely possessed knowledge that Christianity was not true. This lengthy philosophical research led me to the belief that a deity exists, and that atheists, for all their bluster, make as heavy a use of faith as do traditional theists.

If there was a God, and said God did not have a son, then who exactly was the true deity?

I knew that Christianity was not true, that the carpenter was neither God nor God’s son. However I had made the choice to believe that there was a God – to believe that Life held meaning and purpose independent of anything I might choose to make of it, beyond any purely mechanical explanation for reality and existence. But that presented an entirely new problem, one I had never before considered. If there was a God, and said God did not have a son, then who exactly was the true deity? There were so many competing claims for the title.

There are a finite number of paths one may choose. First, one must adjudicate between monotheism and polytheism. When one does so, and embarks on the path of monotheism, there are still myriad choices. Yet this seeming feast of ideologies is a complex mirage. The vast majority of monotheistic creeds are derivatives. Let us ask a very simple question: “If there is a God, and if said deity has, in any way, chosen to reveal Truth to mankind, then in what way did this occur, in what possible way could this occur?”

Though the process may seem complex, the logical chain is simple, and sound. There exists a deity. This deity chose to create man, and then to commune with man. The method by which this communication occurred was a document, for men do achieve reason, sentience, separation from primitive life, by means of the written word. This document was the Torah. It was given to the family which reached forward to take it, from among the families of men. At one time there existed a man, Abraham, who advocated monotheism over polytheism, and then reached forward to commune with God. This man’s descendents are the Jews. His descendent Moses received this document by which God communicates with Man. In this there is nothing stupendous, nothing which defies the simplest truism of logic or any psychological law of humanity.

I reached forward to this logical sequence in one hour, on a simple, quiet, weekend afternoon. I was sitting in a chair, relaxing, reading the Christian Bible in a rare effluence of nostalgia. I was submerged in the passage where David is chosen by Samuel, under divine inspiration, to become the anointed King of Israel. David would eventually receive a promise from God that his descendants would eternally inherit the monarchy of Israel, and it was from this promise that the messianic ideal, and later the cult of Jesus, took root.

Suddenly, sitting quietly, the afternoon sun streaming through the window and playing on my hair, I was struck by simple inspiration. I realized that just because Jesus wasn’t the Messiah didn’t mean that there couldn’t still be a Davidic Messiah. That because the New Testament was riddled with internal contradictions didn’t mean the Old Testament was as well. That the New Testament and Old Testament were mutually contradictory on numerous fronts didn’t mean the Old Testament couldn’t stand alone as its own Bible. Jesus and Paul and the other disciples may have been frauds or charlatans or simply ignorant fisherman caught up in a cult, but that didn’t mean that Samuel or Saul or Solomon were anything but men engaged in a divine storyline. Virtually all of the numerous logical problems that had so troubled me with Christianity were eliminated if the New Testament was abandoned. Suddenly I was possessed of a complete monotheism with no Devil, no Hell, no Trinity, no Virgin Birth, no god-man, nothing that I found impossible to believe.

Jews and Judaism

Almost as soon as I experienced this initial inspiration I came to a second realization. I remembered that there were other people who believed in nothing more than the Old Testament. They were called Jews. And then I recalled that the Jews did have a religion, and that it was called Judaism.

It may seem incredible that a young man who had plowed through everything from Sartre to Schopenhauer to Sikhism in a quest to get at some type of metaphysical truth after Christianity would have neglected to investigate Judaism or the Jews. In order to fully explicate this curiosity I must provide context.

I wondered if there were any Jews left who still believed their own Bible.

First, as a former Evangelical Christian, I had been indoctrinated since infancy with the notion that Judaism used to be a religion – but was no longer. Judaism was a Broken Covenant that had been firmly supplanted, or repaired, by Christ. I had never once read the Old Testament without seeing it through the lens of the New Testament. It would have been akin to reading the American Constitution without mentally interjecting the Bill of Rights at every stage. It was inconceivable to me that there could still be persons roaming the earth, two millennia after Christ, who believed in the Law of Moses, and nothing more.

Second, while it had never been explicitly taught, I had simply imbibed, perhaps in the very air of the South, that the Jews remaining on earth were not members of a religion, but were rather a distinct racial group – similar to Africans or Asians. Though I did not know it at the time, there was sound reason for the assumption that Jews were not properly defined solely as adherents of the religion of Judaism, for the majority of Jews alive today are irreligious, are members of other faiths, or are only marginally attached, and primarily for cultural reasons, to any form of Judaism.

I wondered if there were any Jews left who still believed their own Bible. I remembered vaguely having heard that there were still rabbis in the world, but I had assumed that they were fringe gurus involved in a cult. I realized that I had no idea what these rabbis might believe about the Bible. I knew nothing of the tenets of Judaism. I did not know what Yom Kippur was, or Rosh Hashanah. I did not know aleph or beis. The only thing I knew about Judaism, a rumor I heard as a boy, was that Jews didn’t eat pork.

I went to my local university library, and found myself in a quagmire. There were many shelves with hundreds of books on all things Jewish. I did not know where I should begin. I walked to the section that dealt with Judaism proper, and even that section contained more volumes than I would be able to read in a year. I looked up at the ceiling, and then lowered my head and closed my eyes. I prayed the first earnest prayer I had offered up in a very long time.

“God, if you exist… I mean if you really, truly exist, and if you’re the God of the Jews, then please show me which of these books I should read. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I pulled a book at random from the shelf before me and walked to the check out. I got home and took a closer look at the slim volume. I had arrived home with This is My God, an introduction to Judaism by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Herman Wouk. Wouk wrote shortly after World War II, when modernity and the Holocaust had all but destroyed Orthodox Judaism, that is to say, any rigorous devotion to the notion that the Torah is the divinely inspired word of God. At the time the work was published, most observers expected Orthodox Judaism would disappear within a generation.

Wouk wrote both to explicate the religion, as well as to serve as a type of lay-apologist – demonstrating how an intelligent sophisticate can, in the West today, maintain believe in a literal God, inspired Scripture, and absolute moral values. It was almost as an aside that he described the festivals, rituals, and obligations of Orthodox Judaism. His sketch of Jewish history after the time of Jesus was new to me. I knew little of the last two millennia of Jewish history beyond the slaughter of the Holocaust, and the establishment of Israel as a refuge. I had been taught that anything that happened to the Jews after their rejection of Jesus was meant to serve as both a punishment and a warning to those who rejected Christ.

Wouk’s urbane take on religion was radical to me. I had never read such a book. I was deeply affected. I remember turning the last page and sitting in silence for perhaps five minutes. I then decided that I would become an Orthodox Jew.

The path of conversion to Orthodox Judaism was terribly difficult. My poverty was acute. My father, also a pastor, had decided that I was unwelcome under his roof. I had been sent to live with an aunt and uncle. A refusal of my uncle’s firm demand that I attend church meant that I was also unwelcome in his home. I sat in my truck one day staring at the reality of homelessness. In time I found shelter in a friend’s uninsulated garage.’

Through difficult labor I saved the money to move to the Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis, Tennessee. There I was blessed to build a personal relationship with Rabbi Ephraim Greenblatt, z’tzl, a student of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein z’tzl, one of the great rabbinic leaders of the last generation. With his love and support I grew in Judaism, and was able to closely observe true greatness in Torah.

Rabbi Greenblatt served as the head of the rabbinical court which performed my conversion. He then blessed me to go to Israel to learn Torah full-time. From that day to this I have stumbled and risen repeatedly, working on behalf of the Jewish people, both through my years of learning, and later in public service on behalf of Jews in New York City.

May my story serve as a small token of thanks to those of you, all over the world, who have done so much to welcome me, a true stranger, into the Jewish world. You have fulfilled the eternal commandment to love the convert.

Finis relives his personal story in greater detail in his new memoir, The Terrible Beauty of the Evil Man. In the book he describes the beauty and travails of his intense journey out of Christianity, and towards Judaism. The book contains depictions that may not be suitable for all readers.  Click here to purchase the book.

Published: August 16, 2014

aish.com