Between Two Truths

What growing up with two lives taught me about the nature of reality.

I grew up living two different lives at once. I didn’t want to have two lives, but it wasn’t up to me. I got caught between the two diverging paths that my parents took following their divorce. If it were up to either of them individually, I would have only had one life. But they couldn’t agree on what my life should look like. They found it hard to compromise on what they wanted for my younger brother and me, so our lives became a turf war of sorts. We found ourselves stranded in a conflict over two truths, two ways of being. And this is how, beginning at about the age three, I ended up with two lives.

Although my parents were Jewish, neither one of them practiced religion before the divorce. They identified with Jewish culture in the most peripheral ways, but they found no substance in it. After they divorced, my mother had a religious awakening and began to live her life as an orthodox Jew. She started keeping kosher and observing sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. She celebrated Jewish holidays and followed the laws and customs of orthodox Jews. She wore a head-covering once she remarried, as many married orthodox Jewish women do. She moved into an orthodox community and joined an orthodox synagogue. My mom had primary custody of my younger brother and I, so as she became religious, so did we. We went to a Jewish school and studied the Torah and the Talmud and followed our mothers level of observance. This was life number one. 

Me while I still only had one life.

As my mom (and my brother and I) became religious, my dad went from being irreligious to anti-religious. He became a staunch atheist, espousing the tenets of Dawkins and Hitchens and other renowned disbelievers. He did not keep kosher or observe sabbath or go to synagogue. He viewed religious observance as a backwards vestige from primitive times. He did not want my brother and me to practice the regiments of religion under his roof.

We went to my dad’s house every-other weekend and Tuesday nights. We shed our religious garb upon arrival; removing our kippah and tzit tzit. We abandoned kosher and ate cheeseburgers and bacon and shellfish. We broke the laws of Sabbath, spending our Saturdays watching TV and driving to the mall and so on. In late Decembers we had a Christmas tree since my step-mom was Christian. We lived secular lives vacant of any of the religious practices we adhered to at our mom’s house. This was life number two. When our time with dad ended, he returned us to our mom's and we resumed our religious ways until the next visit. 

This was my childhood. One weekend on, one weekend off. Kosher here, bacon there. Religion. Secularism. Back and forth. Two opposing ideologies. Two ways of being. Two truths. Living two lives at once, each defined by the beliefs of different individuals. 

My mom believed in a certain God and a specific set of rules and traditions. Within them she found comfort and meaning. She believed in heaven and divine intervention. She sought to transmit the tradition and values to my brother and me. She wanted to raise her children with all of the beauty and structure she saw in orthodox Judaism, a system she did not have as a child. She believed she had the truth.

My dad didn’t believe in God. He believed that religion was destructive. All he saw was an ancient value system that could not live up to modern ideals; a relic that he wanted nothing to do with. He saw religion as an impediment to a humanistic utopia. He regarded science as the primary tool for progress and happiness. He wanted to raise his children with secular humanistic values absent of religious practice. He believed he had the truth.

A collage from my 8th grade yearbook

What my parents believed influenced the fabric of my relationship with each of them: how we spent our time, what topics we discussed, the places we went on vacation, the nature of our fights and disagreements. Sometimes the opposing nature of each parent’s views confused me. One parent might admonish what the other praised. One parent would question what the other asserted as fact. The search for understanding often left me with mental whiplash.

Having two lives also created complex social dynamics with friends and community members. Since everyone around me only had one life, they couldn’t understand the complex duality my brother and I lived within. I remember times when my dad brought us to our Little League baseball games with Subway sandwiches and my kosher-keeping friends could only muster awkward smiles or confused comments. Certain adults in the community viewed us as projects, hoping that they might one day get us to fully commit to their version of truth. There were times when my dad dropped us off at my mom’s after sabbath started as our religious neighbors gazed at my brother and I with pity at their perception of our predicament. When I had my Bar Mitzvah the Rabbi of our synagogue encouraged me to attend a religious boarding high school so I could stop living my double life and fully commit to the religious way. 

I somehow managed to compartmentalize each version of life. When at my mom’s, I never dreamt of eating non-kosher or turning on a light on sabbath. When at my dad's, I didn't think twice about abandoning all of it. I didn’t feel guilty for doing things that my religious life forbade. Each reality had its own set of independent rules to guide my thinking and beliefs. As long as I kept them separate, everything made sense. I segmented my lives based on the beliefs of those guiding each version of life.

As time passed and I grew older, I spent much of my life trying to understand what was actually true. When you grow up caught between two truths, you develop the false sense that something must be right. One of these has to be true. When I turned 14 I went off to religious high school and began to practice orthodox Judaism full-time. I spent much of the next 15 years struggling through various levels of religious observance. I eventually found that to be a losing game. Truth was elusive. Even within Orthodox Judaism I found a dozen ways to believe; a dozen ways to live. The singular truth I sought didn’t seem to exist. Even within seemingly confined religious practices, I saw a broad range of subjectivity. 

Dressed up for Friday Night services and dinner on Sabbath at a Yeshiva (Orthodox Jewish Boys School) in Chicago.

When I couldn’t land on a singular truth, I abandoned searching for it in religion. I disavowed my religious beliefs and ditched many of the practices that used to guide my life. I sought truth elsewhere. I turned to atheism for comfort and freedom. I wanted nothing to do with religious Judaism and began to see religion through the eyes of my dad. I did all this while my kids continued to attend Jewish school and my wife and I continued to live in our Jewish community. I once again found myself living two lives, one that I presented to my religious community and one that I lived behind closed doors. 

But as time continued to pass, truth once again seemed elusive. The absence of religion did not give me answers to the purpose of life that seemed to fade along with my religious beliefs. I turned to philosophy and ideas of great minds like Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre. I explored the precepts of other great schools of thought: Buddhism and Stoicism and many other “_isms” The ideas they offered to define purpose and meaning in an absurd world seemed endless. And after an exhausting search for a singular truth, only one truth seemed to emerge: That there is no singular, objective, universal Truth. 

What I’ve learned from my journey is that the distinct, singular reality we all seem to experience is nothing more than the product of our environment. Growing up with two lives showed me the subjectivity of truth. I saw that we do not develop our beliefs, passions, views, interests, feelings, aspirations, and dreams in a vacuum. We are the output of our circumstances; of our parents and friends and communities and education systems.

The problem with such a system is that people can rarely see past their own truths. Most of us grow up engulfed in singular ways of living that put our own truths on a pedestal. We learn to worship them. We fail to see how they blind us to the truths of others. They are not, as our experience might suggest, absolute, universal, or objective. This is true of our religious beliefs, political views, and all of our ideals. That doesn’t mean that our personal truths are not meaningful or valuable, it just means that they don’t exist outside of us. They are personal truths.

Most of the divisions and conflicts we experience today come from our inability to understand the distinction between objective truth and personal truth and from our desire to impose our truths on others. We must learn to see the other side; to respect, and appreciate the truths of others. We must fight the gravitational pull of certainty. And in a world of ever increasing polarization, conflict, and confrontation, we must understand that we can only escape our predicament by seeing the truths of others and letting go of the false belief in the absoluteness of our own truths.

Perhaps a basic thought experience might help illustrate this: simply imagine yourself as the product of a different reality. What might your perceptions of truth be like if you grew up as a poor farmer in rural China or the queen of England or as the child of a leader in the Church of Scientology. Or, perhaps, try imagining yourself as a child stuck in between parents with two opposing ways of living. Whatever scenario you picture, it will become clear that your reality comes from the specific set of circumstances your life path took. It is not absolute. It doesn’t exist outside of you. And that’s OK. That’s what makes your truth so powerful to you. When you can connect to your own truth and understand both its beauty and subjectivity, you can then appreciate the power of the many truths that exist alongside yours. 

Today I find truth in myself, with parts of my religious upbringing, with Judaism, with secularism, with spirituality, with skepticism, with family, with friends and community, with music and art, with silence, with conflict, and with uncertainty about everything. I find truth in letting go of the search for it. I find it in the understanding of the fluidity of life and that nothing stays the same. I find it in realization that this is simply my own truth and that yours may be different.

My wife and I celebrating our son’s Bar Mitzvah this past summer.

My childhood used to upset me. I wondered what it might be like to grow up in a house with two parents and one way of life. I imagined what having one set of consistent ideals and values might do for my psyche. I’ve outgrown that resentment and now I can appreciate the perspective this experience gave me. Growing up with two lives allowed me to see the world in a unique way. I have learned to see the fragments of truth, and the blind spots, presented by different belief systems. I have found, above all, that the only truth is in the vastness of human experience. I hope the world learns to see this as well.