One of the things about a blog, has been how often am I supposed t update it. Am I supposed to tell people what I had for dinner? What color sox I chose to put on? Perhaps I should wait until some big deal worth reading shows up, but then, maybe Something wise won't show up for weeks or even months, and then who knows if I will remember to write it down? So I will take the middle path, I will try to post something every day, sometimes it will be more momentous than others. Perhaps I will spend a lot of time defending what I believe, or apologizing for it. Because this blog is really going to be about things that I believe to be true. The things that we believe, or know to be true re the things that makes us who we are. For better or worse, or just because. Sometimes I meet people who have spent time asking themselves what they believe, and why they believe it. Those are the more interesting people. Many of us go through life just sort of believe in what we believe, either because it is group think, or because it is what our parents told us to think that way, or sometimes, we just made a decision, and that decision is lost so far back in the mists of time, that we are not sure why we believe as we do.

One thing that I must break my train of thought is, I despise people who cannot write in the English language. I said "far back in the mists of time", and I know some person is going to decide that I meant "far back in the midst of time". There are certain things that I cannot deal with, they make me "loose" my mind.

Back to the subject at hand. What do I believe. Not what do I believe in, just simply what do I believe to be true, what I depend on in my daily life will become apparent as time goes on. I believe that there is a Creator that created the universe as an act of will and sustains it from moment to moment. Yeah, you know I was going there. The identity I have built for myself over the past 25 years is one of a Religious Orthodox Jew. I am going to be spending a lot of time on religious themes, when I speak of my beliefs. I am not cynical about my beliefs, to the contrary I try, every day, to look at the world in a fresh way. I do not always succeed, on the contrary, I fail almost every day, but every so often I do look at the day through a new pair of eyes, and boy, then I will have a blog post worth writing down!

I believe this entity that created the world, created it for a purpose, and he communicated that purpose and much much beyond that on mount Sinai, around 3,500 years ago. I believe we still have access to that purpose, and that the communique that we were given is called the torah.

I choose of my own free will and volition to believe these things. I do not believe them through overwhelming evidence, although there are those who can make that argument, but there are many who claim to disprove them. I simply choose to believe because I would rather live in a universe that has a purpose, and in a universe where I have a role in that purpose, rather than live in a place where all actions are simply reactions to random events. In a world where there is no rhyme or reason to actions and events. At the very beginning of Davening, before you even get into shul, a person is supposed to say "Reishis chochmah yiras Hashem. (Proverbs 1:7)The beginning of wisdom is the fear of god. Why is that? Why does wisdom begin with the fear of god? Maybe wisdom begins with a clean notebook and a sharpened pencil? Or maybe wisdom begins with a cup of coffee? Why with the fear of God?

What is Wisdom? To me wisdom is to get out of the rain when it is raining. There was a certain game that characterized intelligence as knowing that it was raining, and wisdom was the understanding to get out of the rain. If one wants to acquire wisdom, there is one fundamental piece of knowledge, and you get to build from there.

There are two models of the universe, a non godly one, based on observational science and scientific theory, that leads us to the conclusion that everything is random, stars form essentially randomly, Habitable planets formed randomly, and life itself happened by lucky accident. Wether a lion catches that specific gazelle, or the other one, depends on which gazelle tripped, nothing but  an accident. While we can use observation to tell us how things happen, science is not very good at why things happen. When pressed it will just give you another layer of how, all the way back to the big bang, but there is no why, and that I think is a failing in just the scientific method.

 The other model of the universe that has a creator, and a created universe, and a god who is interested in the outcome of each lion hunt, or of every, or especially of each human encounter, those are two very different universes, and it is up to each of us to choose which universe you would like to live in. In this universe we can at least theoretically begin to answer why something happened, not only the how of it.

Now if god did create the universe, and he contacted us about it, and the rules are not random, but they are knowable, then the beginning of wisdom, is the awareness of god's existence. the universe is not a crap shoot, there are rules, the way the universe is more knowable than mysterious, and then the beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is a god, and there are rules. which is a pretty good base. without it, one wonders how one can pursue wisdom at all?

We say that sentence every day in morning prayers, we know Judaism is full of mysterious wisdom, but this one sentence... We need to look at our daily lives, through fresh glasses, every day.

All comments are welcome. TL;DR would be nice to know now, rather than in 5 weeks.

I look forward to any and all comments I reserve the right to choose to engage you or not, but each comment shows interest in my writing, so I am looking forward to it.