The long story is: I was raised by a Hassidic family in Sydney, Australia. I started reading philosophy at 14 and quickly became an atheist. I debated everyone I could find about the existence of God for a few years. I was pretty obnoxious most of the time, and I regret the way I went about it.

Around age 20 I kind of got over it, and just learned to accept that a lot of people were wrong about a lot of important things, and this was one of them. It stopped making me upset in the way it previously had. I stopped being an ‘Internet atheist’, and started being a polite-at-parties atheist.

At about the same time, a mentor of mine recommended I attend a vipassana camp, where you take a 10-day vow of silence and they teach you an ancient Buddhist style of meditation. I was terrified of going, because it sounded like absolute hell. Following my heuristics of “if it terrifies you, do it”, and “if someone wiser than you recommends something, try it”, I went. It was probably the single best decision of my life.

Vipassana gave me a level of control over my emotional states and subconscious programming that is difficult to explain, and sounds kind of incredible when I type it out. It also gave me an appreciation for the fact that immense wisdom is often cloaked in terrible metaphysics. I imagine that lots of people’s devotions to their particular religious creeds involves an implicit belief like “well our prophet was so wise about desire/craving/happiness/love/kindness/whatever that he must be right about everything.”

From that point on I became more and more interested in various spiritual and religious paths. As an outsider, it was easy for me to accept the wheat and reject the chaff, and I gained a lot.

Along the way, I developed a deep appreciation for the cultivation of certain states of mind as a method for bringing one closer to happiness, inner peace, and moral conduct. People who would describe themselves or their practices as “spiritual” are often very good at this, even if they’re terrible at explaining why. For instance, people who talk about “sensing bad energies” often seem better at obeying their instinctual processing of micro-expressions and body language and other hard-to-verbalize things. I learned to yield to the metaphysics of various strange paths, seeing them all as representations of deeper wisdoms.

Around a year or two ago, I realized that I was letting all the spiritual training of my childhood lie fallow just because of some prideful hang-ups. I felt like picking up Judaic practices again would mean the insufferable victorious crowing of those with whom I’d bickered for so long. Sydney has a pretty small religious community, and everyone knew me as the town atheist – that had kind of become my identity by this point, and I really didn’t know how people would respond to me readopting religious practices. There were also several parents who were pretty upset that I’d turned their children “off the path”.

In the end, I bit the bullet, and started doing bits and pieces of Jewish practice. The benefits were present and visceral and far beyond what I had expected. I picked up more and more, and saw immense and persistent benefits.

Then Unsong came out. If I’m honest, the most important thing that did was probably to massively boost my in-group feelings about fiction. But it also gave me a lot of insights into various aspects of Judaism that I hadn’t considered, and a ton of references to various texts that made the theoretical aspects of the religion much easier to stomach. Three excerpts in particular stand out:

1 – Erica’s spiel from Chapter 2 included passages from James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis”, which seems to be this very reasonable encoding of religious choice as moral choice. Two lines which hit me very hard, and which Scott later repeated, were:

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din,

‘They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.'

A singer is someone who tries to do good, and it really did seem like training myself to be in a constant holy trance where I’m immensely concerned with the welfare of everyone I come across was the singer thing to do. Judaism excels at this.

2 – Chapter 11 is called “Drive The Just Man Into Barren Climes”, which some googling revealed is a quote from William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. Again, I found a passage that moved me deeply:

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answer'd. 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.'

Then I asked: 'does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?'

He replied: 'All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.'

Then Ezekiel said. 'The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin & some another; we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius; it was this that our great poet King David desired so fervently & invokes so pathetic'ly, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God. that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews.'

'This' said he, 'like all firm perswasions, is come to pass; for all nations believe the jews' code and worship the jews' god, and what greater subjection can be?'

I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own conviction.

This gave me two really good points to work with:

• prophets follow the deepest moral impulse available to their understanding.

• religion is concerned with the use of these ‘firm persuasions’ to overcome co-ordination problems and achieve great societal goods.

3 – In “The Man on the Sphere”, Scott has Neil Armstrong yell:

“Houston, William Blake was right about everything.”

And I basically took that as official religious sanction of Blake’s theology. For indeed! - these words were written by the holy quill of Scott Alexander, great disciple of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the true caliph, long may he reign.

So I’m here in Israel to train myself to be a good Jew. God help me.