I never would have joined

I became frum to take my life to a higher level. I was searching for God. When I heard about mitzvos, I thought, oh so I can bring God into my complete life.

So you join the thing, you take the plunge, and you go to baal teshuvah yeshiva and find that mitzvos aren't so important, what matters is Gemara lomdus. You must do this all day long, not miss a second. It's the greatest mitzvah, greater than all the others put together, even one word of it is greater than everything else put together. That's what they tell you.

What happens to your life now? You were going to "be better at anything you do now" as they tell you on the Machon Yaakov promotional video, as I was told by the kiruv organization that I had encountered. But no, everything you were doing is narishkite. All of life is narishkite. You lose your life. You were going to make your life better, but now you don't have a life. You lose everything, your family, your friends, your interests, your career. It's all replaced with Gemara study.

I once presented this conundrum to a famous Modern Orthodox scholar that I saw on the street. I said, when I was becoming frum mitzvos mattered, now it seems they don't. I sense a bait and switch, what happened to mitzvos? He said, "You gotta do, what you gotta do." In other words, yeah those crummy little mitzvos, we have to interrupt our precious study to do them. We don't really want to do them. It's the price we pay for getting to learn Torah. 

So there was a bait and switch. If I had known that Jewish life consisted of one activity, and one that nobody really teaches you how to do very well, I never would have joined.

Now, I learned over the course of decades that the attitude is perverse, that Tehillim 119 references mitzvos about 100 times and Torah 25 times with many of those references being that one should keep the Torah (And I shall keep Your Torah constantly,), that Shlomo the King said the sum of the man is to fear Hashem and keep His comments, that Pirkei Avos says, study is not the main thing, doing is. I learned that Rabbi Soloveitchik -- the rebbe of the man who said you gotta do what you gotta do -- said that just as Hashem acts, we must act. Hashem doesn't just study. I learned that Chabad has an entire philosophy of the importance of physical mitzvos, that they are the primary means to freeing the sparks of holiness from the world of Tikun and of bringing holiness into the animal soul.

Until I learned all that, I really had no life. I was a rag of man, just defeated, his whole life just pulled out from under him, walking the streets in a stupor. I was a person in a cult, the cult of Gemara study. And it is a cult.