So why don't you just leave if you're frustrated?
It's not like buying a new pair of shoes, it's not like you go out, eat a lobster for the first time and suddenlywhooooaaaaa you've stopped being Jewish.
Leaving a religion is literally a 100 or more year process by which, generation to generation, families unpinch their nerves from old superstitions, old patterns and pathologies, antiquated responsibilities. The only way you truly leave a religion behind is by modern entropy. There's no point in leaving religion behind if your morale goes to pieces from not knowing how to order your life anymore, or throw yourself into the first political ideology that scratches your itch. No, leaving a religion is something that just happens in modern life whether anybody does it consciously. Every time you don't wait the full six hours before putting a little cheese in your salad after a lunchtime hamburger, the entropy happens a little more.
Religion is neither a respite from modern life nor a holdover from the pre-modern, religion is an attitude toward modern life. Every new modern innovation is a new chance to prove one's faith, to find a 'Jewish' or 'Christian' way to respond to the latest development, and to demonstrate to yourself and others that no matter how bewilderingly different life becomes, life still has continuity with the way things used to be. So every time there's a new recent change, there's the question, do we go with the modern development which makes life easier, or do we use this development as a way to proclaim our faith again and make our lives harder?
And with every new development that makes life harder, there's more temptation to lessen the bonds of faith, and with every bond loosened, the more people wonder 'well, what's the point of keeping this faith at all?', and then they leave. So the more people leave the faith, the nuttier get the people get who stay in because they resent modernity all the more - not just out of jealousy or fear, but out of grief. They think of all those deserters whose presence might have enriched their lives, and they're as likely to become obsessed by what religion has lost them as what religion has gained them. And eventually, there is no option in their minds but to declare war on modernity itself, the modernity which now defines their religion as much or more than the traditions ever did - a war which they always win, because they believe in what they're doing more than we do. We just want justice now, they want justice in all eternity. They see a moral responsibility in having as many children as they can, we see only the difficulty in having kids. We believe in living and let live, they believe in conquering and converting. Which side has greater willpower, great manpower, greater desire to change the world?
But Jews.... well, Israel or not, our wars are pretty pathetic. We're a religion of 15 million people, possessing a strip of land the size of New Jersey. No historical epoch ever hinged on whether we win or lose a war, and yet... So much within other societies seems to hinge on Jews.
Nobody knows exactly when the Moses story took place or which Pharaoh Moses faced down, but it's generally thought that the chronology lines up with Ramses II - in other words, the exact end of the Pharaonic golden age, after which there were multiple droughts which caused economic collapses, which then caused foreign invasions. Furthermore, the notorious Pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled less than a century earlier than Ramses II - the Pharaoh who determined that there is only one god and all other gods do not exist; where'd he get the idea?... Did he get the idea from his slaves? Or were Jews enslaved by his successors to stop monotheism from spreading?
The moment Rome finally 'solved' its Judean problem by crucifying half a million Jews, Rome was at its territorial zenith during the period of 'The Five Good Emperors.' This happened in 135AD, and it was all downhill from there. Less than 200 years later, a Jewish splinter sect subsumed the entire Empire. No Roman Emperor's refulgence could command the awe of a single god on a cross who rules all the universe.
Spanish Unification happened in 1479. It was only thirteen years after that all its Jews were forced to convert or be expelled (not to mention killed...). The year of the Alhambra Decree was, in fact, 1492. So the same year that Jews left Spain was the exact year Spain became something other than Spain - not just an Iberian peninsula but a worldwide machine of death, theft and terror. We've all heard the rumor that Christopher Columbus was Jewish ('he captured the British and made them say Kiddish'), but how many of those conquistadors were, in fact, converso Jews fleeing Spain, repaying what was done to them and determined to create new life for themselves by any means necessary?
Karl Marx came from the very first generation of Jews born after the Napoleonic Code who could take political emancipation for granted....
....Y'know I could go on for a while.....
The point is not that Jews have survived all this time because we're strong, the point is that we've survived in spite of being weak. If a sizable movement of people decides to leave Christianity and form a new movement, Christian or otherwise, it's automatically world news. If yet another group of Jews decides to splinter themselves from Judaism, nobody cares but Jews. And yet, there are these unmistakable traces that forever makes some of us wonder if there is an invisible hand guiding things so that Jews are a direct influence in the rise and fall of... well... everything we know.
And the ultimate evidence that these traces are there are how people project onto Jews whatever it's convenient for them to think Jews are. You do not see yourselves in Jews. You do not see your surroundings or figments of your imagination in Jews, you see yourselves upside down, backwards; reciprocal versions of yourselves, and these reciprocal Jewish visions are also mirror images of the people in your country you most hate. Many poor see in Jews not only the rich but the greedy keeping them down, many rich see Jews as the liberal do-gooders trying to strip them of their money. Many powerless see in Jews the animating hand which keeps them impotent, many powerful see in Jews the hand which steals the power that's rightfully theirs. The stateless see in Jews the worst sort of imperial occupiers, yet there isn't a state on earth that can do without Israel's intelligence and innovations. In Jews, racists see color and antiracists see whiteness. In Jews, MAGA Trumpers see decadent liberal roadblocks to a Christian state, while Corbynite leftists see bloodthirsty zionists whose conspiratorial lobby stymies the worldwide socialist revolution. So many right wingers hate the liberal Jews of their own country but love Israel and everything associated with it; so many left wingers hate Israel and everything associated with it for but love the liberal Jews of their own country.
Part of the reason Jewish influence is so prolific in world history is that we have been defined as literally everything, and can therefore fit in literally everywhere, but only to a point. We are that friend you love but inevitably tire of halfway through the third hour and have a friendship ending fight by hour 6, because we are everything you are - good, bad, beautiful and ugly, and we're also everything you're not. We are white and of color, we are a race and a religion, we are among the greediest capitalists and most fanatical communists, we are creators and repudiators to both Christianity and Islam.
In nearly every other form of bigotry, the main response is disgust. It hits you at the gut level, but over time prolonged exposure to what disgusts you can be learned to be accepted, even loved. But in antisemitism, the main reaction is paranoia: you see the hand of Jews everywhere, and in everything. With paranoia, there is no guarantee that with more acclimation, you get less paranoid. Over time, over and over again, people seem to decide that they like Jews less, not more. So yeah...:
Being Jewish...
I don't like it.
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