In God we don't trust: Five Israeli atheists bare their souls

[cbayer]

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/in-god-we-don-t-trust-five-israeli-atheists-bare-their-souls.premium-1.453846

Alongside a rise in the number of Jewish Israelis who say they believe in God, the country also has a well-established atheist community.
By Coby Ben-Simhon | Jul.26, 2012 | 6:15 PM |


1. Regression to infantalism

“Because of the snake,” the acclaimed playwright Joshua Sobol says, assuming an amused expression. Wearing a black shirt, he sits at a large wooden table at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv. He recalls the moment at which he lost his belief in a supreme power that brings order to the world.

“One day, when I was 5 or 6, an ultra-Orthodox relative came to our village to visit,” Sobol recalls. “He usually prayed but in our house he did not pray. I wondered why this was so. He explained to me that if one does not pray, God sends a snake and the snake will bite me. I grew up in Tel Mond, a town teeming with snakes, so I was scared. Out of fear I decided to pray with him. I didn’t really know what to do but I saw him mumbling incomprehensible words, so I started to mumble, too.”

A few days later, the Haredi relative packed his bags and left. “He went but I continued to pray,” Sobol says. “One day I didn’t pray and I waited for the snake to come. But no snake came. I understood, perhaps for the first time in my life, that there was something false about the story the man had told me. I suddenly viewed that relative as a stupid man who had tried to trick me. I saw that he believed in what he told me, but also that it was nonsense.”

Sobol is probably the highest and most illuminating atheistic beacon in Israel. When he was young he read Camus and Sartre, and was later a student in Paris. “At a certain point, while I was studying in Paris, I was torn between two approaches,” he notes. “One was secular existentialism; the other was the religious existentialism of Martin Buber. In the end, I made a very clear choice, which stemmed from a conviction that the world is random and that we are randomly in the world. Today, even though I identify completely with Jewish history, it is difficult for me to define myself as a Jew. What does my being a Jew mean if I have no connection to the Jewish religion?” he asks, running a large hand through his white beard.

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