I am not religious and yet...

I will talk here about the five years I spent at the Ecole Normale Hébraïque from September 1959 to May 1964, and what it did to me.
 
This boarding school was not a Yeshiva where all the studies are done in Hebrew. It was a school like any other, with the French government's education program, and in addition there was Hebrew and classical Arabic.
 
This program was very strict. While in Casablanca, the classes were 30 to 35 hours per week, in our school, they were 45 hours.
Our school was located in the suburbs, in the Oasis, about an hour from the city by bus.

These 45 hours were divided into 20 hours of French, 20 hours of Hebrew and 5 hours of Arabic.
By French, I mean literature and grammar, physics and chemistry, mathematics, history and geography, and music.
By Hebrew. mean Dikduk (grammar) Torah, Mishna, Talmud, Historia and of course the Hebrew language.
 
The school was normal in name only because some other criteria were not. In order to pass from one class to the next, an average of 50% was sufficient everywhere. Here it was 65%. That's why in the 9th grade there were 23 students, but in the BACCALAUREAT class there were 7. 7 in the BAC class. It seems that this school was looking for the best of the best.

 
It must also be said that the ENH had a good and great reputation. All the students were boys and Jews and years later, girls were accepted as well as Muslims. The latter, to this day, repeat how good this school was for their children.
 
I'm way off topic, aren't I?
Don't want to, the school was religious.  Morning, noon and night we said our prayers and wore a yarmulke on our heads at all times. We knew the Jewish laws and respected them. We learned a lot, except I must say Philosophy. I learned later that this one risked moving us away from our religion and that's why we had to wait until we were almost 20 years old to touch it.

Today, almost 60 years later, I still recognize the benefits of ENH and what it has done to me.
By the way, I forgot to mention that the purpose of this school was to prepare teachers for the Jewish schools of the time. So for five years I never thought of being an airplane pilot, plumber, lawyer or accountant. My ultimate goal was to be a teacher and nothing else.
 
So I was trained as an educator.

A few misfortunes occurred. In May 1964, we left Morocco for Canada, one month before the BAC exams. Immigration papers were facilitated when my father told the authorities that his son was a teacher.
The second misfortune, after the non-BAC, was that the Catholic School Commission of Montreal did not accept Jewish teachers. They considered me to be a Protestant and sent me to the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. The interviewer told me that he could not hire me because at 19 years old I had no experience. He suggested that I go to United Talmud Torah.

I did so the next day.
The director told me that if the Protestants accepted me, he would also accept me because my diploma might be good for Morocco but not for Canada.
A third refusal
 
I studied Philosophy without a teacher, on my own, by my own means and of course I discovered another world which little by little took me out of my religion. Before, I had many unanswered questions and here I could see some explanations. And this lasted for several years.
 
I have never been a teacher but rather a salesman and this job has made me earn a good living thanks to my training. On several occasions, the buyer asked me: would you be a teacher by any chance?

Let's get back to the subject.
 
As I write, tonight will be the first Seder of the holiday of Pesach. And as I have done for the past thousand years, I am fasting today because I am the oldest male in my family. Before the exit from Egypt, the last plague was the death of all the male children of the Egyptians. The angel of death jumped over (what Pesach means) the Jewish houses and thus saved my life. I respect this tradition like so many others
 
By the way, a month ago it was the feast of POURIM and I also fasted in memory of Queen Esther and what she did to save her people, thus saving our lives. I don't forget!
 
This is becoming a tradition and I don't intend to break this habit.
I thought I read that true progress is a tradition that continues and this is proven to us again and again. Whereas Paul Valéry said that tradition and progress are two great enemies of the human race. Go figure! For me, it seems that tradition has taken the place of religion.Could that be right?
 
We all realize today how much religions change and all bring novelties, even sometimes fanciful innovations to satisfy their clientele and Judaism has done the same. I confess that I am less and less practicing while being respectful towards those who believe more than I do. I am sometimes asked if I believe in God and I answer that, as Einstein says: "I believe in the God of Spinoza. Everyone is free to think and act as they wish".
 
I think I have answered a little bit the FOREWORD of the title. It remains that I know that around me, many will hardly agree with me. Good for them!