PURIM and What Comes After

It is a strange and exhilarating thing to have a secret identity. Scary, yes, but quite exciting. It is also deceitful, deceptive and, at times, duplicitous. I know all this, of course, so I decided to stop writing, hoping to put aside all the controversy that my writing begat–both personally and otherwise–and to focus on my Congregants and my family, all the while hoping, as I have all this time, that the doubts and convictions originating from my exposure to once-heretical thoughts would, if not disappear, then surely wane as I put my energies and efforts into a whole new set of endeavors. In this regard, as expected, I failed.
Fall became Winter and I continued apace, expecting that my ceasing to write and engaging with the Jewish Blogosphere would enable me to walk away, to put aside the critical questions that must be asked of an Orthodox Rabbi who is no longer Orthodox, of a Rabbi who is Orthoprax and who exhorts his Congregants—his family and friends—to behave and believe and follow a creed that has the ring of falsehood and the clear markings of an elaborate sham, one that I am perpetuating on a daily basis.
What drove me to write again, I think, was the advent of Purim. Purim is the time, maybe our only time as Observant Jews, to cut back, to completely and totally give ourselves over in celebration of something that is in a sense secular; that is, it is not a “miracle” or a completion of a ritual but a rescue from physical destruction, celebrated like the mere mortals we are: with food, drink and family. Indeed, even the donning of costumes,  our faces hidden while our actions depict our true natures, is uplifting, as we recognize the cognitive dissonance that is the backbone of our daily religious experience. And so I am writing again, chronicling my daily experiences as I try to navigate the uncertain currents of an agnostic in the space of true believers. But, if there is any lesson from Purim, however trite and cliche, maybe it is that we are all wearing masks, to some degree or another and, when it is incumbent upon us, we only need the courage of conviction to peak underneath.