When I was a child my parents told me I was a Jew and they raised me in an environment that personified a Jewish-oriented life experience. This can be said of each Jew raised in that particular faith, whether Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or with no particular synagogue or linguistic experience in the faith of Judaism. The same example can be made regarding the teachings of other faiths which have a particular or secular outlook on life that influence children as they begin their spiritual lives according to their parents’ wishes.
It is true that the experience of dynamic religious living will transform one into a person of idealistic power and that religion is the minister of that progress. It is also true that the soil of some religious experience can foster a life of self- realization, but is it wise to give a child the chance to grow his/her own religious experience?
Religion cannot be bestowed, received, loaned, learned or lost. It is a personal experience which grows proportionately to the growing quest for personal values. Perhaps people who insist their children take on and mimic the parents’ religious role do not realize that a spiritual life is not the result of a religious upbringing.They wish for spiritual growth but do not realize that growth is not truly indicated by mere repetition and product but rather by progress of an individual spirit. True spiritual and religious growth is assured when a soul is dedicated to doing the will of the Father in Heaven, not through a blind, formulaic following of a parent who has ignored and pushed aside all other options for the child to follow.
Spiritual growth is of an unconscious nature and particular to each individual. This is readily observable. It depends upon the achievement and maintenance of a living spiritual connection with spiritual forces and on the continuous bearing of spiritual fruit. We must have a need – realized or not – and then some discernment in how to match it with what holds meaning for us before we can discover the values of the religion we choose. Children will find and assimilate these things as or when they become adults and that is easily seen through the common practice in this country of church-changing, conversion from home-taught to foreign religious experiences and the giving up of any religious experience altogether.
So as a Jew who was told that other religions were wrong, told to worship as my parents throughout time have worshipped, I was handicapped and culturally tied to something that I eventually found to be only partly correct. If I had been free from Judaic tradition altogether, would I have chosen to be a Jew? Or a Mormon or atheist? I don’t know. I’ll never know. As it is, my choosing to become a Latter-day Saint is a small phenomenon which has brought me approval along with notoriety, disapproval, shock and not a little anger from Jews, Jewish relatives, from people I have not met, and from people I have known for years.
Today I am 72. I have been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for 24 years. Though I was born August 22, 1940, I was reborn on April 6, 1988 through baptism by one having authority. I have learned that spirituality is the indicator of one’s nearness to God and the measure of one’s usefulness to society. I have learned that the goal of human life should be spiritual and not material, that the only realities worth striving for are divine, spiritual and eternal.
And I believe also that if a child (such as myself) is raised in the Latter-day Saint environment from first light and taught the principles of our Savior, Jesus Christ from the get go, he/she will be in a perfect position to choose the best spiritual path and religious realization possible on this planet and elsewhere in the universes because in that church is taught the perfect plan of Christ, our Master. Unfortunately, the rabbis who teach that their Aaronic priesthood is sufficient for the shepherding of mankind have not yet realized the truism that “in order to know the Father, we must know the Son” (revealed knowledge).
True religion is not a system of philosophic belief which can be reasoned out and sustained by observable proofs. It is reasonable but not born of reason. It is eternal and represents experience with eternal realities in time, while here in the flesh. To be a Jew is to be exposed to a portion of that experience, but without the Father, His Son and the Holy Ghost (the true Trinity), no mortal can ever achieve the complete possibilities
of growth, true love of fellows or eternal relationships, let alone the invitation to sit on the right hand of God and dwell in His presence forever.
Shalom aleichem b’Shem Yeshua Ha Mashiach. (Peace be on you in the name of Jesus the Messiah).