From Amartya Sen's book, 'The Argumentative Indian':
Many of my childhood years were spent in my grandparents' home at Santiniketan, where I studied at the school that Rabindranath Tagore had established and where my grandfather, Kshiti Mohan Sen, taught. He was, among other things, a well known Sanskritist, and he was also a major expert on Hinduism, focusing both on its formidable classical heritage and on the medieval religious literature and other devotional poetry. We did not have any religious rituals at home, but my grandparents had fairly firm religious convictions, in line with a contemplative and rather non-ceremonial version of Hinduism...
Since my childhood thoughts - for what they were worth - did not attract me at all to religion, I asked my grandfather whether I should be concerned that religion did not appeal to me. He told me, 'No, in fact there is no case for having religious convictions until you are able to think seriously for yourself - it will come with time.' Since, in my case, it did not come at all (my scepticism seemed to mature with age), I told my grandfather, some years later, that he had been absolutely wrong. 'Not at all,' replied my grandfather, 'you have addressed the religious question, and you have placed yourself, I see, in the atheistic - the Lokayata - part of the Hindu spectrum!'
Obviously there are many differences between the Hindu and Jewish religious traditions. But the tension that Sen describes does resonate: On one hand, there are those (religious and secular) who view religion as a kind of creed to which one either subscribes or does not. On the other, there are those who recognise religious traditions as being broad and rich, containing within them multiple, irreconcilably conflicting, (sometimes) competing perspectives on even the most fundamental of religious questions.
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