Faith Healing or Recovering from Religion

We all know that if a tragedy befalls a person or a group of people, the way to deal with this is to strengthen our beliefs and to do some great deal of introspection. In the old day you would either fast or flog yourself, nowadays your Rabbi will advise you to give tzedakah.

In other words, we ate taught to always see the fault within oneself and never in God. And if we didn't commit any sins, perhaps it was our lack of simcha in learning Torh and doing mitzvos.

A similar way of thinking is the survival strategy of little children that are abused or who have parents that fight a lot. "Perhaps it was my fault?" "Maybe I caused my parents to be upset?" "I must have deserved this punishment. Somehow."

This has crushed many children's souls and stripped them of their self-esteem. And it may take decades to recover from these guilt feelings.

Don't you think it is odd that if things are bad we are to blame ourselves, but if things are going well we suddenly turn the tables and thank Hashem for his abundant blessings and mercy?

When the Jews went down to Egypt, Abraham was supposedly to blame because of his lack of faith. And that must have been a heinous crime because hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were enslaved and tortured because of it. But as soon as we are released from bondage, we thank the same Deity that put us there in the first place. How is that for Stockholm syndrome!

The only way to mature is to hold those authorities accountable for their own deeds, expose their true nature and change our childish thinking.

And then, only then we may experience true faith healing: freedom from religion.