The smartest Jewish thinkers would call today’s religion heresy.
At its best, Judaism never feared questions. It embraced complexity, speculation, the unknown. But in many religious communities today, innovation is suspect and questioning is a threat.
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This is a guest essay written under the pen name, “Lakewood From Afar.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
People ask if I believe in God.
But the question itself feels off. What does “God” even mean?
“If God is to explain the complexity of the world, He cannot Himself be complex. A complex God raises more questions than He solves.” — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
The God that Richard Dawkins rejects — a bearded old man in the sky, handing out commandments, smiting sinners — isn’t even the God of classical Jewish theology. The God of RaMCHaL1 isn’t a complex being in need of explaining. He’s the opposite. The very essence of simplicity itself. No multiplicity. No division.
“You must also know that the Blessed One is simple, without any equivocation or multiplicity at all, and all the perfection we say He has is in a form of complete simplicity.” — RaMCHaL, Derech Hashem
“The Ein Sof (“endless” in Hebrew) is unchanging, the way He always was and always will be, without any change at all.” — RaMCHaL, Sod HaYichud
And that’s the irony. Dawkins and RaMCHaL actually agree on one thing: Everything originates from something supremely simple and eternal. In fact, on this point, Dawkins has more in common with the RaMCHaL than with the average frum guy who imagines a cosmic grandfather watching his every move.
RaMCHaL would probably have more in common with Richard Dawkins than with Avigdor Miller (an American Haredi rabbi, author, and lecturer). On the foundational question of God, RaMCHaL and Dawkins align: The ultimate source of reality is something profoundly simple and indivisible. It’s what comes next that divides them. To Dawkins, that simplicity is the starting point of an unguided cosmos. To RaMCHaL, it’s the foundation of a divine system.
But the yeshiva2 guy who believes in a super-being with a personality, emotions, and a cosmic rewards program? RaMCHaL wouldn’t just disagree; he’d call it heresy. He’d probably take one look at the all-powerful sky-man who gets angry if you don’t daven West and say, “That’s not God. That’s Kefirah3.” He’d likely agree with Dawkins that such a God is childish.
Yet somewhere along the way, this kind of theological inquiry faded. The grand, intellectual struggle to map existence itself was traded for something easier. Instead of wrestling with the metaphysics of reality, most of the frum4 world settled for an invisible man in the sky who grants wishes. A religion that once fostered fierce intellectual debate now runs on spiritual platitudes and cultural habits.
But it wasn’t always like this. Jewish theology once thrived. Before the kabbalistic false messiah Shabbetai Zevi (an Ottoman Jewish mystic and ordained rabbi), Kabbalah wasn’t fringe mysticism; it was an intricate, systematic attempt to understand the structure of existence itself.
Today, people dismiss Kabbalah as Jewish magic, but in its golden age, it had more in common with theoretical physics than with sorcery. The great mekubalim (practitioners of Kabbalah) weren’t conjuring spells; they were mapping reality. They were tracing the emergence of complexity from absolute simplicity. They looked at the universe, recognized its patterns, and wove them into a unified system of thought.
If Jewish thought had stayed on its original path — wrestling with the mysteries of existence instead of locking them behind dogma — we might live in a very different world. A world where Kabbalah and quantum physics weren’t strangers, but collaborators.
Imagine mekubalim with access to experimental science. Looking at DNA’s four nucleotides and 10 base pairs per helical turn, and recognizing something familiar. Seeing quantum mechanics not as a contradiction, but as a reflection. A world where physics and Kabbalah spoke to each other in the same breath.
But history had other plans. After the disaster of Shabbetai Zevi, kabbalistic speculation was buried — just as physics was taking off. The great mekubalim never got to grapple with quantum entanglement, dark matter, or the genetic code. They never had the chance to trace the structure of existence through both mysticism and experiment. And we’ll never know what Judaism might have become if it had embraced discovery rather than feared it.
This isn’t just an aesthetic tragedy. It distorts what Judaism was, and what it was meant to be.
In today’s frum world, religious thought is treated like a static rulebook — an inherited package of what to do and not do — rather than what it once was: a dynamic, evolving engagement with reality. Strip away the hardened cultural layers, and you’ll find that theology was never supposed to be about submission. It was supposed to be an intellectual pursuit. A conversation, not a commandment.
If religion wants to matter in the modern world, it can’t just claim to have all the answers. It has to be dynamic, creative, actually searching for truth, not just insisting it already has it.
At its best, Judaism never feared questions. It wasn’t afraid of paradox. It embraced complexity, speculation, the unknown. The Judaism of the mekubalim and the philosophers wasn’t a rigid monolith; it was a living, breathing tradition. An idea in motion.
But in many religious communities today, innovation is suspect. Questioning is a threat. The search for truth has been swapped out for the claim that truth is already settled — cataloged, codified, locked in place. And that’s why religion has lost credibility in so many circles.
Yet the greatest religious minds always knew the truth was bigger than the words we use to describe it. Language can only approximate. The names we give God, the concepts we try to define — they’re just placeholders for something too vast to pin down. In that, religion and modern physics share the same struggle.
“It is in fact the inevitable consequence of trying to explain quantum mechanical behavior in classical terms which inevitably leads to confusion. The notion of a particle being at ‘a point’ is not a meaningful statement, but we use the word ‘particle’ anyway because we have no better way to describe it.” — Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Feynman’s insight about quantum mechanics applies just as well to theology. When we say “God,” we’re not really talking about an old man in the sky. We’re grasping at something beyond human comprehension. Just like physicists call something a “particle” (even though they know it doesn’t fully describe quantum behavior), theologians use words like God and Ein Sof (Hebrew for “endless”) — knowing full well they’re just placeholders for something bigger.
The difference? Science admits it. Religion, for the most part, has stopped. Instead of acknowledging the limits of its language, it’s retreated into certainty. But certainty is the enemy of growth.
If theology wants to be taken seriously again, it has to reclaim what it once was: a rigorous, relentless pursuit of understanding. It needs to engage with the real questions of existence, not shut them down with easy answers. It needs to stop seeing itself as the enemy of science and philosophy, and start seeing itself as their partner in the search for truth.
Because in the end, both science and religion were meant to be after the same thing: not ownership of truth, but the endless pursuit of it.
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, also known by the Hebrew acronym RaMCHaL, was an Italian Jewish rabbi, kabbalist, and philosopher.
A Jewish school, often a rabbinical seminary, where students study religious texts, especially the Talmud and Torah
A Hebrew word referring to infidelity or disbelief, particularly within Islamic theology, encompassing a range of attitudes and actions rejecting fundamental tenets
A Yiddish word that describes religious Jews
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Where did you get this old man in the sky thing? I don’t know one intelligent Jew who thinks of G-d in that way. And yes, the Ramchal does acknowledge doing mitzvos for reward, he just emphasizes that this way of serving Hashem is not such a high level.