As I've mentioned earlier in this blog I am Jewish. This is something I've been my whole life and I don't know anything else than being Jewish. This doesn't mean that I don't know how it is to live a normal life or that I can't understand people that don't live a religious life. I have after all grown up around people that don't believe or at least not the same way as I do. By growing up in a non-jewish environment I have had a chance to see both sides.
By seeing both sides there have been times when I've had my doubts about religion and if what I'm doing is normal. I've also got a lot of questions from my non-jewish and jewish friends why I do all these things. Why I keep all the weird traditions like fasting, only eating special food and sit in a hut for a week every year. The most common response I give is; that's how I grew up, that is all I know. But that is not the whole truth.
I have actually chosen to live my life the way I do and chosen a lifestyle similar to the one I grew up with but added some of my own things to it. Of course there were times when I doubted if God exists and times when it didn't make sense to me at all why I had to stay at home on friday night when my friends are out partying but I got over it and learned to see the beauty of it.
I realised that in every religion, ethnicity and nationality there are traditions. In Sweden we have midsummer where we dance around a pole symbolising fertility, Irish people (and nowadays everyone in England) dress in green and get drunk on Saint Patricks day and in India they look at cows as something holy. As I said, every group has their own traditions and so do Jews.
The difference is however that my traditions are based on the fact that I believe in God not that I come from a certain country but apart from that, there is really no difference.
My parents didn't force me to believe in God, I'm not really sure both my parents do, but they raised me telling me that I should keep the traditions because that is what we have left from our previous generations. I can't remember them telling me even once that we do these things because of God, I simply found the belief myself by doing these things. By keeping the traditions and wanting to understand why we do them I realised that there must be something more than just us for these traditions to stay alive. After all, the Jews have been through a lot and we still do all these things that other people call weird.
It's easy to say that we can't prove that God exists and therefore shouldn't believe in him but what I usually say, we can't prove he doesn't excist and therefore we CAN believe in him. The same way as people believe in keeping the traditions we do in our certain groups I believe in keeping the jewish faith. It has been in my family for generations and if I stopped keeping it, if I stopped believing, the tradition would sooner or later die out and I would be responsible to some extent.
I'm not trying to tell other people to believe in God, it has to come from within but I am trying to explain that what I am doing is not weirder than someone dressing up in green and drinking Guiness or thinking a cow is holy. It is my families and many other families tradition. Just because there is a God involved doesn't mean it's strange. After all, we all believe in something, what I believe in just happens to be difficult to see if you choose not to look.
By seeing both sides there have been times when I've had my doubts about religion and if what I'm doing is normal. I've also got a lot of questions from my non-jewish and jewish friends why I do all these things. Why I keep all the weird traditions like fasting, only eating special food and sit in a hut for a week every year. The most common response I give is; that's how I grew up, that is all I know. But that is not the whole truth.
I have actually chosen to live my life the way I do and chosen a lifestyle similar to the one I grew up with but added some of my own things to it. Of course there were times when I doubted if God exists and times when it didn't make sense to me at all why I had to stay at home on friday night when my friends are out partying but I got over it and learned to see the beauty of it.
I realised that in every religion, ethnicity and nationality there are traditions. In Sweden we have midsummer where we dance around a pole symbolising fertility, Irish people (and nowadays everyone in England) dress in green and get drunk on Saint Patricks day and in India they look at cows as something holy. As I said, every group has their own traditions and so do Jews.
The difference is however that my traditions are based on the fact that I believe in God not that I come from a certain country but apart from that, there is really no difference.
My parents didn't force me to believe in God, I'm not really sure both my parents do, but they raised me telling me that I should keep the traditions because that is what we have left from our previous generations. I can't remember them telling me even once that we do these things because of God, I simply found the belief myself by doing these things. By keeping the traditions and wanting to understand why we do them I realised that there must be something more than just us for these traditions to stay alive. After all, the Jews have been through a lot and we still do all these things that other people call weird.
It's easy to say that we can't prove that God exists and therefore shouldn't believe in him but what I usually say, we can't prove he doesn't excist and therefore we CAN believe in him. The same way as people believe in keeping the traditions we do in our certain groups I believe in keeping the jewish faith. It has been in my family for generations and if I stopped keeping it, if I stopped believing, the tradition would sooner or later die out and I would be responsible to some extent.
I'm not trying to tell other people to believe in God, it has to come from within but I am trying to explain that what I am doing is not weirder than someone dressing up in green and drinking Guiness or thinking a cow is holy. It is my families and many other families tradition. Just because there is a God involved doesn't mean it's strange. After all, we all believe in something, what I believe in just happens to be difficult to see if you choose not to look.
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