I Wish I Learned This About Judaism Sooner...

So you didn't grow up religious. There's a kind of a meme or canard that people that become religious, it's because they're going through struggles and struggles in life and they want to, like, they need something to anchor them, you know, in this difficult and uncertain world, you know, was that your experience as well? Like, why did you, why did you feel that you needed, you know, religion?

You know, I didn't come through that portal in a lot of ways. A lot of my sense of Judaism came from a sense of like seeing optimization, seeing the opportunity to grow. When I look at really the totality of what has brought me closer to Judaism, it was really the sense of realizing like, this is a gold medalist guiding system towards personal actualization and soul actualization. And I realized it was something that, you know, I've been to, you know, undergraduate graduate school and I've spent a lot of time learning. And I realized, like, this is an educational system like nothing like you've ever seen before. And that's why after graduate school, after a year of working, I said, you know what, I really want to double click and deep dive in my religion and understand why has Judaism been around for 3,336 years? Like, what is it that's kept this thing going? And even though I was already, like trying to keep Shabbos and trying to keep kosher, I had my own things that I was still learning about. And it was a journey for me. And then at the age of 27 and a half, I enrolled in Yeshiva, which is a full time learning experience where you double down and understand what Judaism is about. And that was a transformational experience for me. And I'm like, wow, I didn't know this was Judaism.

I wish they would have told me this earlier.

And it really brought me to a new energy, a new mindset of how I really thought I want to contribute to the world.