When I was five my grandmother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales to me. As a child I liked this and I loved when she read both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to me, especially the stories of Esther and Daniel, over and over again.

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But there was a dark side to Grandma. Her religion. She really believed the world was going to end in nineteen eighty, and that the bulk of humankind was going to be cast into hell. At ten she began telling me about the fate of the damned, the Rapture, the False Christ and the False Prophet. And then, just when all the religions of the world were worshipping the false god, the devil, then the rapture would come. She told me, “Just before you’re about to die at the sword of the anti-Christ, God will intervene and those saved will go to heaven and the rest, all of the members of this false Church, will be cast into a lake of fire.” Sometimes she ended even more ominously, with a judgment about the fate of our family,“I don’t think all of us are going to make it to heaven,” she’d say.

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As a Christian, I never really knew what to do with the scary, sadistic God of my imagination after that time. I had nightmares about God. I felt as though my faith was strangled in the crib.

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Finally I left my faith when I was in college. Strangely enough, I was quite grief-stricken at my loss of faith. I felt desolate and found myself wondering things I never let myself think, “Was there a God? What kind of morality existed separate from religion? Did morality exist separate from it?”

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As a child I was interested in Judaism. I don’t mean the Talmud, which I didn’t know existed; I mean Anne Frank’s diary. I pored over her diary; I was even in love with Anne’s boyfriend Peter, or thought I was. But then I saw the pictures of the victims of the Holocaust along with the tragic fate of Anne and her sister Margot. I had never seen or imagined such suffering. It was one of the early hints - before Grandma’s eschatology - of the dissatisfaction I had with the religion of my upbringing. Why had this been done?

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At the same time, a good belief if unacted on, seemed meaningless. And yet I saw—or thought I saw—that you could believe in something fervently and yet do nothing. I struggled with this. I saw myself as evil. Finally I simply left. At the end of that semester I changed my religious affiliation to “Unitarian.” It would be a full year later when I decided to give Judaism a try.

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Then, by luck or design, I found a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. I started reading it and after classes were out I got my own copy of the work. His key insight to me was in understanding that human ethics benefit us in this life. I had never really thought of the practical nature of ethics. However, Spinoza occasionally came to weird conclusions in spots: he believed that cowardice was actually good because ‘bravery’ was liable to end in death. This was where I thought a Deistic way of understanding God made more sense: those who suffer unjustly in this life will have some sort of afterlife although I wasn’t always sure on this point.

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Years later in Judaism, I found that the simple acting out of mitzvoth was therapeutic. I also made one decision early on for my sanity’s sake: I was not going to try to be Orthodox. It couldn’t be like back when my grandmother used to read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales; that I had to believe everything that was in her bible. I study the Bible but I don’t believe in all of it. When I was Christian, I felt like it had to be all or nothing. I never want to have my religion that way again.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café,

Jennifer Alderson, Guest Blogger

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Jennifer Alderson was born in Topeka, KS in 1978. She moved at age eight to Wichita, finished high school at East High and went on to Friends University. In between starting and finishing school in 2001, Jenny started what would be an unusually long conversion process to Judaism from her original Protestant faith, converting eventually with a rabbi ordained both Orthodox and Conservative. Although she attends both Reform and Orthodox synagogues, she considers herself Conservative. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Poetica Magazine and Mim'amakim. She is presently working on her book, The Bible According to Eve. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor