Ends and Odds; The Ravings of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Seven Part One.My Religious Odyssey.

       My Religious Odyssey. Part One.




       A few weeks ago one man asked me in a place of worship what my religious background was. When I explained it to him, he said, "You're still in transition." I agreed and told him that I still hadn't reached my final destination "either in my life or in religion." In my life I've moved from one religion to another to yet a third. And there's still another worship place I'm attracted to.
    Now as the American sociologist  Randall Collins points out either you believe in religion or you don't. "In one case," he says talking about religion, "it's a Supreme Reality that transcends everything sociology is concerned with. Or it's an irrational superstition about things that don't exist."
    Most social thinkers seem to support the second view:Religious belief is plainly irrational. I belong to the first camp. I believe in god and I'm not alone. In Canada close to one in five people still worship somewhere every week. So when Canada's latest governor general Julie Payette put down religious believers she faced a lot of flack.
     In any case back to my beginnings. I was born into a Jewish household in the early 1940's in war torn England. My father Monty Jaffe was a short intense believer in orthodox Judaism. He believed every word of the Old testament and kept most of the religious and dietary laws of Judaism. He went to synagogue every Saturday and often pressured his three growing children to go there also. He found solace in Judaism even though this religion had already scarred his life. When he was 11 and when he was 12, his father a stern Victorian-style of patriarch refused both times to let my dad write important exams on a Saturday. He applied the same rule to my father's younger brother Ted.
    "I never write a word on Shabbas," he told both his sons. "And you won't either." So both his sons who were quite clever didn't write exams that could have taken them further up the English educational ladder. As a result both boys left school at the age of 13. My grandfather's Judaism hurt both his sons.
    Growing up in my dad's households in Montreal was full of weird rules and restrictions. In my teens, I broke them all. I ate pork which was a supposed unclean or "unkosher" meat. The pork came in Chinese food which I adored. I rode on buses and smoked cigarettes on Saturday or what on Hebrew is called "Shabbas". My father thought this was breaking God's rules. I read books by the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell and told my dad that the Jewish religion was derived from other religions.
    My father would plunge into towering rages when I'd argue over religion with him. At the age of 18 or 19 I gave up clashing with him- at least  on religious issues . "Your father's crazy on religion," a friend of mine said at the time. Or did he say, "Your father's crazy"? Maybe he said both.