Why Judaism? - by Antonio García Martínez Why Judaism?

You will watch your parents die and be buried. You will watch your newborn child emerge in a messy circus of heaving grunts and high-pitched wailing. You will watch your dreams and projects dashed, only to wake the next day and greet the fruits of your failure anew and cobble a life out of them all the same. You will punctuate the cavalcade of events with moments of transcendent meaning that will linger in memory like fading signposts during that final moment: your death. Navigating that journey without a religious tradition is like trying to cross open country without a path: you can do so, but you’ll do lots of stumbling and very likely lose your way. Trying to get through dense woods—a serious depression, the death of a loved one—without a marked trail requires the most arduous labor for the merest progress. Furthermore, if you tackle these wilds in their raw and uncleared state, you will almost certainly do so alone. Going off-trail means a hard solitary journey, while the marked trail involves communal groups headed in your same direction. What some might describe as a cultural rut—some timeworn lane that limits movement—might just be the only thing that guides you through this daunting wilderness of life whose many paths all end in the same destination. (View Highlight)

To DIY your own world of life signifiers, you have to think you can improve on a bar mitzvah as a coming-of-age ritual, on shabbat as a form of digital detox, and as teshuvah as a way to grapple with your guilt (or analogs in other religious traditions (View Highlight)

Note: Yes we will try to improve

Many do of course, and every trendy San Franciscan has their personal regimen of special diets, meditation schedules, intermittent fasts, escapes to nature, a canon of mimetic culture usually drawn from their online feeds, a smattering of trendy texts that inform their values, and some slew of Netflix shows that serve as cultural touchpoints with others in their cohort (View Highlight)

Note: Well said And this memetic bubble will only fracture more with AI

Every society needs a metaphysics that allows it to have moral and political conversations with itself (View Highlight)

Toward what common good should we all be striving (View Highlight)

and revivalist fervor around some utopian project or another (View Highlight)

We have arrived at a unique point in history where many Americans love nothing more than themselves, and the only functioning organization that touches their lives is a corporation. That’s all good and well as a single striver sprinting along our treadmill of an economic system; the above realization takes on a more somber tone when confronted with the only form of immortality available to most of us: our children (View Highlight)