I don’t believe anymore, and I miss it

Let’s start a conversation.

You’re driving home on a Friday night, and in a window across the street you see candles burning in their candlesticks. You’re at a cousin’s wedding, the band slips into an old melody, and your throat tightens. At a funeral, a prayer book finds its way into your hands, and the words come out of you on their own, in the rhythm of your cheder days, to a tune you had forgotten you knew, and it feels like a part of your soul, stale and heavy and aching, a part you worked hard to discard.

You don’t believe anymore. You are not confused. Your head and your heart are clear and calm; even the bitterness has dissolved. You are a nonbeliever, and you’ve accepted this fact. No guilt, no shame, no regret, no anger, no attempt to pretend, not even disappointment. It feels like a different lifetime.

And still, you miss it for no reason, like a phantom pain. You find yourself grieving, but you keep it to yourself. Because there is nowhere to bring it. To your religious friends, it proves you never really left and will soon be back. Your secular friends hear conditioning, childhood, a groove in the nervous system that will rewire with time. In truth, you may never be free of it. As one sharp wit once said of his own loss of faith, “I forfeited my world to come, but I never arrived at this world.”

Both sides got what they needed: confirmation of what they already believed. But neither is curious about what your feeling actually is, and you stand between two rooms, unable to enter either.

A little over a century ago, the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik stood in that same doorway. He had grown up inside the books, in the study houses of Zhitomir and the yeshiva of Volozhin, and he left. In 1910 he wrote a poem published only posthumously, addressed to the old books on the shelf:

Do you still remember? I have not forgotten:
in the attic room of a desolate house of study
I was the last of the last;
on my lips the fathers’ prayer writhed in agony, died,
and in a hidden corner, beside your ark,
the eternal lamp guttered out before my eyes.

For most people, the leaving itself was not an event. It was an erosion. First the feeling drained away. The prayers became just words. The Sabbath turned into a list of things you weren’t allowed to do. The questions you had always carried — why people suffer, what God is, whether the people who taught you really understood — stopped feeling like part of the journey and turned into a dead end. The departure, when it became reality, felt like a matter of emotional integrity, and in many ways it was: for the first time, your outside matched your inside.

In Bialik’s poem it comes in a single night, in that same study house:

And I, in dread of God, my flesh all bristled
and my teeth chattered with the terrors of death.
It was a night of horror, the most cursed of nights;
outside, behind a window blind of eye,
a storm of wrath ran wild and wailed;
the shutters broke, and on their iron bolts
all the demons of the pit battered at the walls.
I saw my fortress, and it was shattered,
and I saw the Presence of God — it was leaving its place.

Most losses are quieter than that, but the inside of them is often the same. Not an argument lost but a fortress coming down in slow motion, and the Presence slipping away, and the room your spirit lived in, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” echoing with absent presences.

On the hard nights, the temptation is to try to believe again. You go back to the synagogue on Saturday, you stand there, and the missing stands beside you, as unexplained as before. Nostalgia gnaws at your heart, but whatever is playing out in front of you is not it.

There is a layer beneath this. Many who leave were not failures. They were the brilliant ones: the ones who read everything, who asked the next question and then the one after it, whose whole inner world was built out of these words. The questioning that ended their belief came from the best thing in them, the very thing the cheder and the yeshiva had honed and sharpened. So when the meaning drains out of the words, it does not feel like changing your mind. It feels like watching your own inner life die by your own hand, your eternal lamp going out, leaving only what the Zohar calls botsina de-kardinuta, a lamp of darkness that measures out creation at its very inception, which I read as the highest level of consciousness, awareness of the abyss, of otherness.

Bialik saw this too. Near the end of the poem, he comes back out into the night:

And who knows
whether, when I go out again into the night
from digging in a people’s graves and in ruins of spirit,
with nothing in my hands, having saved nothing
but this spade that clings to my palm
and this dust of the ancients on my fingers —

He dug through the graves searching for some vestige of life and returned with nothing but the spade. The Talmud has a proverb for this, in Aramaic: the handle of an axe that fells the trees is cut out of their wood. The intellect that broke the meaning is the same one that can’t help walking back into the night to dig.

What is it, this thing that outlasts the belief?

The most useful answer I can think of comes from an unlikely line of reasoning, and I will try not to go full theological here. At the end of the eighteenth century, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi commented on the Jews of his time. People who had drifted from Jewish practice, who had stopped believing anything in particular, would, when forced to choose between denying God and losing their lives, refuse to deny and accept death instead. They could not explain why. They acted, he wrote, “without any knowledge or reflection at all.”

His explanation was that beneath understanding there is another layer, which he calls wisdom, though not in the sense of discursive intelligence. He reads the Hebrew word for it, chochmah, as two words, koach mah, “the power of what.” Wisdom as a capacity to stand before something unknown and ask. Because it was never constructed on arguments, the collapse of the arguments does not touch it.

He turned to a verse from Psalms, “I was ignorant and did not know; I was like a beast before You. And I am always with You.” The usual reading is a story of improvement: I was foolish, but now I am close. He read it as a single thought. It is because I don’t know that I am with You.

Rabbi Shneur Zalman knew the proverb of the axe; he quotes it in the Tanya: sadness can only be met by something of its own kind. The answer is carved from within, and to carve it, a person has to cut deep into himself, just as an axe cuts down the tree its handle was carved from, just as Bialik’s spade digs in the graves. The questioning that felled your belief was cut from the same wood as the belief itself. The intellect killed the meaning, but the handle is still the forest: wisdom laid the broken letters bare in order to seek past them.

Your missing may be the imprint of a childhood, a language, a community, a smell from the kitchen. The possibility that it is nostalgia traveling nowhere stays open. But Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s account changes the problem. You have been treating the missing as a leftover you failed to scrub out of your subconscious, and wondering whether to finish the job or go back and keep digging up dead words.

What if it was never a belief at all? What if it is the part of you that was born to ask the “what” question, and kept asking after the answers were gone? What if something in you is saying: I doubt whether what I left behind had the answers it purported to have, but the question is still here, and I still need to know what all this is about? Maybe all those who claim to have the answer don’t actually have it, but you still need to know, not for them — for you. You drive on Friday night because it’s just another night, but the candles in the window bring tears to your eyes. That is the question a human soul asks at her most raw.

If so, the missing is neither a relapse nor a debt to anyone who wants you back. It is the oldest question you have, the simplest and least sophisticated, still alive, thankfully, standing in front of what it doesn’t know.