By "Shloime"
They see me at the shtender, swaying with just enough rhythm to look engaged. They see me at the kiddush discussing the parsha. But behind the beard and the black hat is a man who checked out years ago.
I am a ghost in my own community. I am an "Undercover Apikores."
The Breaking Point
Growing up, my experience with Yiddishkeit wasn't the "warm, fuzzy" version you see in the brochures. It was a suffocating grid of "no" and "don't." I felt the weight of every stringency like a physical stone. My father would force me to sit next to him and daven during those seemingly endless minyanim. My Rabbeim would punish me for not paying attention [as if they never heard of ADD]. Eventually, the thread snapped. I looked for the burning bush, for the absolute proof that every minute detail of this lifestyle was mandated by the Creator of the Universe—and I found silence.
People ask me, "Shloime, do you have proof it isn't true?"
Honestly? No. I don’t have a scientific paper or a signed confession from history proving it’s all a myth. But I also don't have proof that there isn't a teapot orbiting Jupiter. What I have is the crushing weight of a life I didn't choose, and that was enough to make me stop believing. I had enough. I just wanted FREEDOM.
My Secret Mission
I can’t leave. Not yet. My family, my kids, my social standing—it’s all tied to this performance. So, I live a double life. By day, I’m a "regular guy" in the neighborhood. By night, when the house is quiet and the blue light of my smartphone is the only glow in the room, I become someone else. Even my wife doesn't know.
I frequent the forums, the hidden chats, and the social media threads where the "doubters" congregate. My goal? To be the voice I needed when I was drowning.
I ask the "dangerous" questions: The ones that start with "How do we actually know...?"
I point out things that don't seem to make sense to me.
I use my background of yeshiva learning to try to disprove everything. Of course for every claim there is a rebuttal but it doesn't matter to me. What matters is that I can speak freely.
I offer an exit ramp: I want people to know that they can leave. They will stop keeping Shabbos and everything will be OK.
The Weight of the Mask
Is it hypocritical? Absolutely. I’m eating the cholent and singing the zemiros while actively trying to dismantle the system from the inside. There’s a certain thrill to it, but also a deep, soul-aching loneliness. I am surrounded by people, yet I am completely alone in my head.
I don't have all the answers. I don't have "The Truth" to replace "The Torah." All I have is the belief that living a lie is better than living a life you don't believe in—even if you have to lie to do it.
The hardest part isn't the lack of faith; it's the loneliness, the fear of being found out and losing everything. I really love my wife and children but if she finds out we're done. She a real frummy. I started out in Kollel and that is what she wanted for life. But when the doubts gnawed away I had to leave and go to work.
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The View from the Other Side:
A Response to "Shloime"
By Akiva G.
I read Shloime’s "confession" with a mix of sadness and, if I’m being honest, a bit of frustration. It’s a compelling story—the lonely hero fighting a "suffocating" system from the shadows. But if we pull back the curtain, the narrative starts to look less like a revolution and more like a tragedy of errors.
Shloime admits he has zero proof that Judaism is false. He isn't operating on logic; he’s operating on a grudge.
The Burden of Disproof
Shloime claims he’s "freeing" people. But notice his tactics: he doesn't offer a superior philosophy or a more coherent moral framework. He offers doubt for the sake of doubt. In any other field—science, law, or history—if you want to dismantle a 3,000-year-old tradition that has survived against all odds, the burden of proof is on you. To go online and tell people to throw away their heritage because "it felt heavy" isn't an intellectual rescue mission; it’s an emotional sabotage.
Pain vs. Truth
It’s clear Shloime had a rough time. He felt the "no" and the "don't" more than the "yes" and the "do." That is a failure of his upbringing, and as a community, we should own that. But bad experiences don't make a religion false.
If a math teacher is mean to you, does $2 + 2$ stop equaling $4$?
If a doctor has poor bedside manner, does the medicine stop working?
Shloime is conflating the people who hurt him with the Torah itself. By living as an undercover "heretic," he isn't finding truth; he’s just staying stuck in the very trauma he claims to be escaping.
The Irony of the "Digital Dissident"
There is a profound irony in Shloime’s mission. He hates the "hypocrisy" of the religious world, yet he spends his days pretending to be someone he’s not. He claims to value "freedom," yet he spends his nights trying to chain others to his own cynicism.
| Shloime’s Perspective | The Reality |
| "I'm an undercover hero." | He's a man living a lie, deceiving his own family. |
| "I'm asking hard questions." | He's sowing confusion without providing answers. |
| "The system is a cage." | The system is a bridge that has carried us for millennia. |
A Way Forward
To the people Shloime talks to online: Questioning is fine. Our greatest sages were questioners. But be careful of the man who tells you to burn down your house while he’s still living in it and eating the food from its kitchen.
Truth isn't found in a dark room behind a glowing screen. It’s found in the light, in honest study, and in the courage to face your pain without trying to take everyone else down with you.
It’s one thing to have a crisis of faith; it’s another to turn that crisis into a recruitment drive. Earlier, I touched on the emotional roots of Shloime’s "heresy." But we need to look closer at the intellectual void he is trying to sell. Shloime isn’t just a guy who stopped believing; he’s a guy trying to convince others to jump off a bridge without checking to see if there’s water below.
The "Proof" Fallacy
Shloime makes a calculated move: he frames his lack of belief as a default setting. He says, "I don't have proof it isn't true... but I don't have proof for a teapot orbiting Jupiter either."
This is a clever bit of rhetoric, but it's intellectually lazy. A teapot in space has no historical footprint, no national testimony, and no impact on the moral fiber of a people. Judaism isn't a random claim floating in a vacuum; it is a historical chain of custody.
The Transmission: For 3,000 years, parents have handed this down to children with a level of scrutiny that would make a modern historian's head spin.
The Survival: We are a people that, by all laws of sociology, shouldn't exist.
If Shloime wants to call it all a lie, he has to explain how millions of people "invented" a shared national revelation without anyone calling "foul" at the time. You can’t just say "I don't know" and then act as if "I don't know" is equivalent to "It’s definitely false."
The Sabotage of Community
What bothers me most isn't Shloime’s doubt—it’s his method. He uses the internet to find vulnerable people who are having a bad day, a bad year, or a bad experience with a Rabbi, and he whispers, "See? It’s all fake. Come join me in the nothingness. My life has no meaning - yours can too. I am drowning in existential despair - please join me!"
That isn't "helping." That's predatory. Studies show that people who believe are much happier than people who don't. There is also a very high rate of depression and even suicide among people like Shloime. So who is he helping??
"Shloime is like a man who was treated poorly at a hospital, so now he sneaks into the wards at night to tell the other patients that medicine is a hoax."
Even if he doesn't like the "doctor," the medicine—the community, the ethics, the Shabbos, the family structure—has proven value. He’s asking people to trade a structured, meaningful life for a digital echo chamber of cynicism.
The True Cost of "Undercover" Life
Shloime thinks he’s "winning" by staying undercover, but he’s actually paying the highest price. By pretending to be frum while hating it, he is:
Deceiving his wife and children: Building a home on a foundation of active lies.
Stunting his own growth: You can’t find a new "truth" if you’re busy wearing a costume of an "old truth" you despise.
Polluting the well: He makes it harder for people with sincere questions to get help, because now every questioner is suspected of being a "Shloime."
A Challenge to Shloime
If you are so sure there is "nothing," why are you so obsessed with the "something" you left behind? If Judaism is truly irrelevant, walk away. Build something new. Start a charity, study philosophy, find a new hobby.
But you can't, can you? You’re still defined by the Torah you claim to reject. You’re not a "secular Jew"; you’re a man shouting at a wall and calling it a conversation.
Shloime, I’ve been reading your "manifestos," and I see a man who claims to be a truth-seeker, but I suspect you’re actually a man who wants G-d and simply can’t find Him. Or perhaps, you’ve stopped looking.
You know the pasuk as well as I do: קרוב השם לכל קוראיו לכל אשר יקראוהו באמת—"Hashem is close to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth."
The key is that word: Truth. If you are sincere in your search—if you don’t rig the game by assuming from the outset that He doesn’t exist and explaining away every indicator of His presence—you will eventually find Him. But you have to stop stacking the deck.
The Mystery of the "Overdeveloped Ape"
You claim we are just biological accidents. If that’s true, why has man, in every corner of the globe and every era of recorded history, sought out G-d? Secularism is a historical blink of an eye, a term coined only in 1851. Before that, the world breathed spirituality.
Why would a bunch of "overdeveloped apes" be so obsessed with spiritual meaning? Some say we have a "G-d gene" because it helped our ancestors survive. Fine—but evolution didn't put it there.
Look at human consciousness. If we are purely materialistic beings, why do we have the ability to look at ourselves as outsiders? To ponder our own existence [and God's! We take the very mechanism He gave to to find Him to instead reject Him]? We take it for granted because we use it every second, but it is a staggering miracle. Where is memory stored? Can you take a surgical picture of a person’s first kiss or their childhood home inside the grey matter of the brain? No. But it is all there.
And what of our emotions? We have a vast range of deep feelings that have absolutely nothing to do with survival. Evolutionary psychology starts with a premise—"Evolution is true"—and then tries to fit our souls into that scheme even when it fits like a shoe on an elbow.
The Evidence of the Universe
If you want "proof," look at the math. The atheist scientist Stephen Hawking—hardly a man in a black hat—once wrote:
"The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers [the constants of physics] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life… Most sets of values would give rise to universes that... would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty. One can take this either as evidence of a divine purpose in Creation... or as support for the strong anthropic principle."
Even the most brilliant secular minds admit the universe looks "rigged" for us to be here. How did nothing create everything? How do you explain the survival of the Jewish people against every law of history? The world’s obsession with us? The prophecies in Tanach fulfilled against all odds?
The Choice
Before you use the internet to convince others to throw it all away, you owe it to yourself to do two things:
Actually study. Not just the "gotcha" questions, but the depth of the philosophy you’re dismissing.
Realize that belief is a choice.
At the end of the day, one chooses to believe or to disbelieve. You have chosen to disbelieve, perhaps out of pain, perhaps out of spite. But this choice does no favor for you, your family, or the people you are leading into the dark.
You aren't an "undercover hero," Shloime. You’re a man standing in the middle of a masterpiece, eyes squeezed shut, screaming that there is no Painter.
Open your eyes.
