My Father’s Relationship with God
My father, Mendek Rubin, grew up in a devout Hassidic community in a small town in Poland where strict adherence to ancient Jewish laws and customs defined virtually every aspect of life. As soon as he was old enough to walk, he went to synagogue with his father twice every day to pray at both dawn and sunset. My father was inculcated with a firm belief in an almighty, omniscient God—a male figure whom he respected, but perpetually feared.
Mendek in his early 20’s
Living in America after the Holocaust, my father moved away from the religious strictures of his youth and was no longer observant, but felt guilty about it, especially when he ate non-kosher food. “Living in my mind were the old images of a vindictive God bent on punishment and retribution,” my father wrote. “I couldn’t get it out of my head that there was a God in heaven who had nothing better to do than to spy on me and monitor my every thought and action.”
Everything suddenly changed for my father when he was in his early twenties, during a biology class at the night school he was attending to earn his high school equivalency. The teacher showed the class human and chicken embryos that had been preserved in bottles and told them that the embryos looked almost identical because they could both be traced back to the early stages of our common evolutionary beginning. Examining the two embryos side-by-side, my father was shocked that he could barely tell them apart. “The concept of evolution caught me off guard,” he wrote. “Even though I saw the evidence right in front of me, it was so strange that I could hardly believe it. Back in my hometown, we’d heard rumors that people were descended from monkeys, but no one had believed such heresy.”
This new revelation led my father to conclude that humans were not the children of God after all, but rather, simply part of nature. If monkeys were not subjected to Judgment Day after death, why should humans be? In a flash, my father stopped believing in God altogether, and his persistent fears of eternal retribution vanished. Initially, this made him feel happy and liberated, but as time went on he began to feel “much like a branch that had been severed from a tree, its source of life.” He ached for a relationship with something greater than himself and developed a deep need to discover the meaning inherent in the human struggle.
Mendek in the Swiss Alps in the 1980’s during a summer trip to hear the spiritual teacher, Krishna Murti, speak in Gstaad, Switzerland
More than two decades later, a few years into his healing journey—when my father was in his late forties—he and my mother vacationed in the mountains of Arosa, Switzerland. This was where he learned to ski, a sport he didn’t even know existed when he was growing up. Spellbound by the dramatic beauty of the snow-covered Swiss alps and the exhilarating freedom of swiftly gliding down the glistening slopes, my father had one of the most transformative mystical experiences of his life. “I felt like everything was in harmony with the One who created it—a God of pure love and serenity.” It was a religious awakening, one in which my father suddenly heard himself reciting a Jewish prayer from his childhood that he thought he’d long forgotten.
“Arosa awakened my spiritual sensitivity to the sublime and the profound. Never before had I perceived God to be an all-encompassing energy of pure love and beauty—not the judgmental, omnipotent dictator of my childhood. For the first time in my life, I believed that the world was a kind and magnificent place.”
My father’s experience in Arosa led him to embrace a new concept of God. He later described it like this: “Call it God, call it Love, call it Intelligence, call it Nature, call it Beauty. A state of being exists where barriers of thought melt away. Time stands still, silence fills all space, and space becomes endless. An inner peace engulfs you, and you know that heaven is within you, not outside of you. You know that you were present before time was born, that God exists, and that you are immortal.”
I will close by leaving you with three of my favorite “Mendek quotes” about God.
“True worship is not a petition to God; it’s being kind to yourself and to others.”
“God is not an idea. To be free of ideas is to know God.”
“When you know yourself as you really are, you know what God is.”
A Prayer to Welcome in the New Year
Today’s blog was inspired by an essay I recently wrote for Spirituality & Health magazine in collaboration with Hilary Nicholls. I had a strong urge to say a prayer to welcome in 2021, which got me contemplating whom exactly I would be praying to. It’s a quick read that I hope you will enjoy.
