Vika Krieger

Then he has this thing called the second naivete, which is like, okay, like...

yes, religion is invented by people.

Like, yes, there is like no old man in the sky.

And there's still value in a lot of this stuff, right?

And I'm going to like choose to believe a lot of this stuff in a way that like is more suited to a grown-up sensibility of like what exists and what doesn't exist.

But I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Like there's like a way that you can opt in to that world that sort of meets you post-crash.

Totally.

And like a lot of my 20s and 30s was about like updating my conception of God and then looking back on my life and the practices and the way I kind of live my life as an observant Jew and saying, okay, like which of these still resonate, which of these don't resonate and like what aligns with this conception.

And actually like a lot of it does align.

It's funny as you talk about this stuff, one of the things that makes me realize is that

Totally, yeah.

There's a famous rabbi who said, like, the people I socialize with, I can't pray with, and the people I pray with, I can't socialize with.

And you relate to that.

Yeah, and I think that—I definitely relate to that.

And I think that that's, like, to the extent that I quote-unquote left orthodoxy, though I like to pretend that I haven't really left.

But to the extent that I've left, it was actually more for, like, social reasons in that, like, the people in those communities tended to be more—

socially conservative and that's politically conservative and just like not into the kind of stuff that i was into intended not to be like particularly interested in the world particularly interested in things beyond their sort of parochial bubble that they lived in and then like i'd go hang out with like my cool friends who were like into all the things i was into but they're just like oh religion like that's weird like why are you keeping shabbat god you know

And so I'd say that like that tension in my 20s is what kind of led me down into this spiritual leadership route, because I was just like, I mean, there were still a long ways to go until I got there.

But it was a sense of like, well, I don't fit in here.