It’s been a year since last Passover, when I sat across from a 14-year-old boy—a friend of my son’s from Jewish day school—who had quietly stopped keeping kosher, stopped observing Shabbat, and decided, without telling his father, that his newfound atheism made Judaism irrelevant. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t performing rebellion for an audience. He had simply concluded, with the calm rationality of a teenager who has discovered science and respects it, that the whole thing no longer made sense. He was walking away.

My own childhood in the suburbs of Maryland orbited around being Jewish. It was never a question, never a debate. It was the thing I knew in my bones to be essential, even before I could say why. So listening to this boy explain his indifference—politely, intelligently, without hostility—was disorienting. I recognized the honesty of it even as I felt its sting.

In the year that has passed between that Passover and this one, his words stayed with me in a way I hadn’t expected. They reawakened something I’d tried to work out a quarter century ago—a set of ideas about the connection between physical reality and the value of Jewish identity that I’d once tried to commit to paper. That earlier attempt came out reading like a long equation. Dry, inaccessible, lifeless. I put it away and moved on with my life. But this boy’s quiet indifference pulled the whole thing back to the surface, and this time I couldn’t let it go.

Not because his arguments were especially original—I’d heard versions of them all my life—but because I realized that nobody in his world had given him a reason to stay that he could actually respect. The adults around him had offered faith, which he’d lost. They’d offered guilt, which he resented. They’d offered nostalgia, which bored him. What nobody had offered was an argument that started from the ground he was actually standing on: the empirical, the observable, the real.

So I rewrote this idea from scratch. The result—a work I call The OR Axiom—is what I’ve spent this past year building.

This article is not that work. It is the question that made the work necessary.

He is not in the Haggadah, this boy. Every year at the seder we retell the Exodus story through the framework of Four Sons—the Wise, the Wicked, the Simple, and the One Who Does Not Know How to Ask. Each gets addressed in his own language. It is one of our tradition’s most elegant teaching devices: the story changes depending on who is at the table.

But there is a fifth son now,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)