Josh VanArsdall: An Atheist's Conversion To Judaism

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our August 23rd Friday Night Shabbat service, where we celebrated our BluePrint graduates — those who have undergone Mishkan’s conversion program. We were honored to hear a drash by Josh VanArsdall, a new Jew who shared how, despite his atheism, nevertheless felt compelled little by little to join the Jewish people out of a love of learning.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Speaking of a tradition that every year on the Shabbat that we celebrate our latest cohort of blueprints, we invite one of the students who completed the conversion process to come and share a few words about their journey. So I'm really excited to invite up Josh VanArsdall, who definitely deserves applause, to share some words of Torah.

Thanks, that's good.

Hi everyone. I'm Josh van arsdall. I was in the cohort from blueprint, as Rabbi Steven just said. And yeah, a bit of a non traditional story here. So I wanted to talk to you about that here tonight, because as an atheist, I never thought I'd be here standing in front of you, talking to you about my choice to become a Jew today. I think that's part of why I was picked, right? So here we go. Just to give you some context, I was raised in Central Indiana, a few hours south of Chicago, by my wonderful mother, Kathy. She's a kind, supportive, empathetic person, and yet simultaneously, very no nonsense, Midwestern very practical religion just didn't have a big place in her life, in our life, right? We would occasionally attend churches that were invited by friends. So I experienced everything from Catholic masses, Methodist, evangelical, non denominational and even a couple Mormon services here and there. Despite this exposure, religion as a way of looking at the world really never made sense to me. How could so many people believe ideas that seem so objectively false to me or required such a large amount of blind faith I could never understand it? I guess my mother's realism had rubbed off on me. What did fascinate me as a kid were explanations. I've always loved learning about the world so that in my head, I could have an increasingly accurate view of how its parts fit together. I was the kid who would read the encyclopedia for fun and researched how my favorite fantasy and science fiction novels were influenced by real world real world mythologies and cutting edge science. Maybe I was a weird kid, but I really love the beauty of historical context, and like the power of science to explain and provide a satisfying explanation. So you can likely easily imagine that I always wanted to be a scientist growing up, and it's no surprise that I became a vocal supporter of secularism. Graduated with degrees in biology, psychology, and I'm now an associate professor at Elmhurst University in the suburbs, I continue to share my passion for explanations and concepts with students and my research community. Now, more specifically, I'm a cognitive psychologist who studies human information processing. What that means is I study how people take in, manipulate, remember, and ask an information in the world around them. For example, most people never give a second thought to how light from the sun or a Shabbat candle bounces off objects in the world, hits the retina at the back of the eye. That's translated into an electrical impulse that goes to the from the optical nerve to the thalamus to the occipital like I could go on, right, but it's translated into this conscious experience of vision that we all have that or many of us are having right similar invisible processes exist for how we store and recall our life experiences, how we coordinate movement and action from a baby crawling to an Olympic vault. In fact, the vast majority of our cognition happens below the level of conscious awareness, with our comparatively limited conscious resources used to direct and guide these things that we call ourselves. Over time, these invisible processes accumulate to create filters and scripts for how we automatically interpret and interact with the world and determine our perspectives. As children, we build the initial skeletons of these frameworks and with the help of our communities, as young adults, we stress test them, and as adults, we hopefully continue to fine tune and adjust them. For many people, these frameworks are built invisibly in the background, with very little self reflection on the process social constructions of things like gender and race are really good examples of that many of us have become much more familiar with and much more aware of in recent years, although some of us it might have been aware of them our whole lives. Like a fish rarely thinks about the water it swims in, unless one is forced to notice the ways in which societal definitions of things like gender or race don't neatly fit each and every person. One might assume that they were these simple, natural categories that are not just merely agreed upon understandings. So when I was in graduate school, my PhD advisor would always stress to me how important it was to not only have a perspective, but to also be able to name it and be aware of how it affects your judgments, and as a result, be consistently. Updating and editing it to be to have an ever more accurate view of the world. I bring all this up not to just talk about myself and to give you a little lecture on cognitive psychology of everyday life. Rabbi Stephen told me that I couldn't bring lecture slides. I did ask so. But I bring all of this up, right? To give you a sense of sort of where I'm coming from, some context for how I got here today. So how does all this lead to Judaism and my conversion? Well, as many of you may have put together right over the last few minutes of this lecture, I mean, sorry, sermon, right? The conversion process is a really excellent example of when someone intentionally and effortlessly questions and adjusts their existing framework for the world and begins to adopt a new one through a process called acculturation of unit, the fancy name for it. Over the last year, I've been on a sabbatical working on a book project, part of which is about how people develop these perspectives, these frameworks that they use to navigate their world and how it affects their behavior. I've known Rabbi Stephen for a few years now, and I've been talking to him about this project, and specifically about the idea of taking his blueprint glass as a way of immersing myself in another culture, to look at this process of acculturation, sort of from the inside, right? And what I didn't realize is how much I was going to enjoy the process. I chose Judaism for a few reasons, first, as a rationalist and as an atheist. I wanted to find a tradition and a practice that I felt like I could authentically go into with as little prejudice as possible. And Judaism has a long tradition of engaging with the question of God authentically and unapologetically, as Rabbi Deena said in his class, as some of you might remember, who were in the class, Jews believe in, at most, one God. I also have some family that is Jewish, although somewhat distantly, and also by also by conversion, I'm wearing my great grandmother's necklace and her bracelet today, who she converted for her husband, her second husband, her first husband had been my grandfather. So long story there, right? I also knew that I already appreciated a great many of the aspects of the tradition, from the concept of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, to the kinds of academic discussions that rabbis have about the Talmud and the Torah to the importance placed on community, as we've discussed throughout blueprint, and as I was reminded by Rabbi Lizzi Lizzi during my Deena, Judaism is both a religion and a culture. Most people come to the conversion process after they've already decided that conversion is an end goal for them, whether through meeting a partner who's Jewish by birth and deciding to convert or reconnecting to Jewish heritage. For many people, the decision point is before all of the coursework and the actual process of conversion. But for me, it was the opposite. I had signed up to take blueprint and the course with an open mind, of course, but largely was just interested in learning more about their tradition, about becoming more culturally competent with Judaism as a way of practicing this process of acculturation. And I'm a college professor, so maybe it's just because I like taking classes. But as I progressed through the class, I found it harder to think of myself as a separate, outside observer and more like an insider, like I finally sort of got it and grew to fall in love with tradition, with the tradition itself. There was no single aha moment I have to admit, but like a rising tide, I began to recognize that the perspective that I had already developed for myself, one that recognized the importance of things like debate and evidence, but also important personal values such as diversity, the value of human life and social justice that already existed for 1000s of years within the Jewish tradition. And while, to me, being a part of the people at Israel may not translate to God wrestlers in that literal sense of wrestling with the divine being, it does mean a duty to wrestle with what are, to me, even more important questions around recognizing the spark of the divine that exists within each of us. What kinds of basic respect do we owe to each other? How am I contributing to repairing the world into a more perfect place for everyone? How do I build a more inclusive community? And am I being critical of my own framework for understanding the world and able to notice and reduce any biases that I might have? So as a result of this slowly dawning realization that the Jewish perspective and ethical framework was remarkably similar to the one I had already built and was really enjoying, I've chosen to join the Jewish people looking back on it, one of my favorite moments of Jewish learning that reflects this evolution was also one of the first lessons of blueprint, our discussion of the crash theory by Rabbi, Rabbi Benet lap you might be familiar with, for those of you who may not be familiar, or those in the class who may have forgotten already, this was the theory of how change happens, whether that's societal religious organization. Or personal when met with new information, especially troubling information, we have three options. We can ignore it and double down on our previously held beliefs. We can abandon our previously held beliefs in favor of some entirely new framework that does account for the information. Or we can adapt our beliefs to fit into the new information into it.

Judaism, as we know it today is a result of this third option. Again, if you paid attention in class, everyone with the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews were forced into diaspora, and Temple Judaism could no longer be practiced. They had the options of trying to hold on to something that was no longer possible, abandoning their beliefs and assimilating or adapting to their new reality. While, while some long ago, Jews certainly chose these first two options, the tradition, as it survives today is a result of the rabbi's and Jews who chose to adapt those who that worked to create the flexible debate centered form of rabbinical Judaism that could be practiced in the diaspora in the absence of the temple. For many converts, it may feel like you have chosen option two, to abandon the previously held framework in favor of the cultural traditions and ethical framework of Judaism. And to be clear, that's perfectly fine, right? Change can be messy. Change can be drastic, and choosing a very different path can be healing, but if you'll excuse the phrase, I never had this kind of abrupt come to Jesus moment myself during the process, and perhaps many of you felt the same way. For me, choosing Judaism has felt more like third option. It has felt like putting a name to the framework I'd already begun to build in response to a world that was hard to explain or constantly changing, or presenting new and startling information, and grounding myself in a tradition and ethical foundation which already felt surprisingly close to hope. Yet choosing Judaism is not a neutral option. We are choosing to join a tradition at a time in which many of its values and people are being pitted against each other. The horrific events of October 7 and the humanitarian crisis happening in Gaza has each of us wrestling with our own values and with others in the Jewish tradition as well. And yet the tradition allows for this, and is in fact, designed for such moments of crisis. By choosing to join the Jewish community, we have chosen to be in dialog with one another and with the past voices who have worked to develop the tradition itself. We have chosen a framework which is built to resist rigidity, is built to resist black and white thinking, and is built to push us toward empathy for each other and for all humanity. As we have learned in small groups in Harvard throughout this process, we are called to learn from perspectives that are not our own. So yet again, we have a choice to be empathetic and adapt, or be made more insular as we attempt to insist on the accuracy of a single perspective. In fact, I believe the Torah portion for this week is a very good example of this flexible nature of our tradition. From Deuteronomy, we read and if you do obey these rules, and by these rules, the Torah means all of them right, and observe them carefully. The eternal Your God will maintain faithfully for you, the covenant made an oath with your ancestors. God will favor you and bless you and multiply you. Now, as you may from remember from the beginning, I also identify as an atheist. So many of you who also wrestle with the concept of a personal God may feel a sense of tension when you read this passage like I do. Do we seriously believe that there's some kind of guarantee that if only we obey these rules, some kind of Santa sky god will magically reward us with blessings and good times? I, for one, do not but yet that's not where the discussion ends. Personally, I read this passage and think about the tools that our tradition gives us to relate to one another, to relate to the world, to relate to ourselves, to relate to our own conceptions of the Divine. Becoming Jewish is becoming part of the conversation, being given the tools to reread and to reinterpret this inherited tradition. I don't think the blessing of Judaism is that following the rules will make good things happen. The blessing is that we have chosen a tradition that calls us toward debate, questioning, adapting, and those things, while they can't guarantee a better future, do lead us to be, as the Torah says, favored and blessed and yes, also multiplied, as people like me and many of us in this room have realized This is where we belong all along. Thank you.

Applause.