This next post is not intended to be an exhaustive work; I’m actually pretty tired while I’m writing it, but I wanted to anyway.
The main question of this post is, “Doesn’t Judaism provide everything that Christianity (or Islam, for that matter), offers?" The question really is to Jews who have converted to either of those religions. You know, before I was observant, for some reason I had this personal commitment to the idea that a person can find whatever he is looking for in the religion that he is currently practicing, or which belongs to him. For that reason I was pretty staunchly against a person’s conversion to Judaism too, because I reasoned that every spiritual thing that person wanted was available in whatever religion they belonged to. Nowadays my views have changed a little bit; I do believe that different religions offer different things, and I maintain (for related reasons) that a non-Jew should stay not Jewish; the only reason I say that today is because non-Jews already have a religion set aside for them, the Noachide Laws.
That point aside, steering the question back to Judaism and Christianity, when a Jew leaves Judaism, of which it is often the case that he/she has never even tried practicing it, he/she often does not realize that whatever he was looking for in Christianity (or elsewhere) is actually more than present in Judaism.
This reminds me of two stories, one a parable and one real.
In the parable, a boy left his home and searched far and wide because he heard that there was a treasure buried somewhere (I don’t remember the details perfectly). The point is that, after searching for a long time and not finding it, he returned home and found that it was actually buried beneath his house. The point? We do not need to go far to find what we are looking for, especially if you’re a Jew.
Now for the story that a Rabbi I know told me. He knew this Jewish kid that was pretty disconnected from Judaism. One day this kid strolled into a church and kind of hung out for the service, and he just kind of hung out there and listened to what was going on. During the service he heard a particularly moving piece of Scriptural text that moved him to tears, at which point he said that he became a Christian. Upon telling this story to the Rabbi, it was discovered that the piece of text that was being read in the church was Psalms, which is from the Jewish Bible, the Torah! The kid went to Christianity after being moved from a Jewish text! The point here is very similar to the first; the thing that gave him that re-attachment to his love for G-d and spirituality was a series of verses from the Torah, and it was there all along, buried right underneath his nose. How sadly ironic, yet how great that a gift of such caliber lies right under our noses, and how imperative it is that we discover it!
It's underneath the house!
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