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If you want a deeper, older connection to your creator, then you need to also junk

1. The Talmud
2. The Oral Torah as encapsulated in the Talmud.

What we called “Judaism” today is really the continuation of the Pharisee sect of 2nd temple Judaism led by Rabbis, with a changed concept of sacrifices etc.

This rabbinical Judaism was created by Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai when he ran from Jerusalem under siege in 70 AD and created a new religion that wasn’t dependent on the temple or sacrifices.

You want to have the “deeper, older connection” then junk all of what we call Judaism (i.e. Pharisee-Judaism) and Christianity (i.e. Jesus-movement-Judaism* ) and go with the Samaritans who stick to just the Torah and decry Jews who “added on” with the Prophets and the Oral Torah

* Christianity is a sect of 2nd temple Judaism and is a sister religion (strangely enough the 4 decades OLDER sister) to rabbinical Judaism.

Rabbinic Judaism (Hebrew: יהדות רבנית‎, romanized: Yahadut Rabanit) has its roots in Pharisaic Judaism and is based on the belief that Moses at Mount Sinai received two items from God; the "Written Torah" (Torah she-be-Khetav) and the "Oral Torah" (Torah she-be-al Peh). The Written Torah is the Torah itself (the Pentateuch) and the Oral Torah explanations of the Written Torah transmitted word-to-mouth. Often, these are known as the Written and Oral Law. At first, it was forbidden to write down the Oral Torah because the rabbis feared that it would become rigid and lose its flexibility, but after the destruction of the Second Temple they decided to write it down in the Talmud and other rabbinic texts.

The real, OLDER connection to your creator does not recognize the Oral Torah as a divine authority nor the rabbinic procedures used to interpret Jewish scripture.

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in fact the Mishnah and the Gemara are all YOUNGER than Christian (Jesus-movement-Judaism) texts

Net-net, the "Judaism" we see mainly today is the younger sister religion to Jesus-Movement-Judaism

the Samaritans rely on the Torah, and the Torah alone, as their sole religious text

the Samaritans abide by a literal version of Torah law. Eschewing Jewish practices that are rabbinic in origins, they believe only in the Five Books of Moses and observe only holidays found in the Pentateuch, such as Passover and Sukkot, as opposed to Jewish holidays like Purim or Hanukkah whose origins are found elsewhere in Jewish scriptures.

Their rituals mirror an ancient world that few religions still keep today. On Passover, for example, their high priest sacrifices a sheep in a community-wide ritual, where its blood is dabbed on foreheads and later eaten together with matzo and bitter herbs. On Shabbat, Samaritans abstain from cooking and kindling fires and pray barefoot in white, identical garments. And, echoing a routine taken straight from the text of Leviticus, Samaritan women move to their own private homes during menstruation for seven days of isolation.

Differences between the Rabbinical and Samaritan torah

In Exodus 12:40, for example, the Masoretic text reads: “The length of the time the Israelites lived in Egypt was 430 years,” a sentence that has created massive chronological problems for Jewish historians, since there is no way to make the genealogies last that long. In the Samaritan version, however, the text reads: “The length of time the Israelites lived in Canaan and in Egypt was 430 years.”

They are a group that consider themselves heirs to biblical Israel, just like the Rabbinical Jews. It’s important just to learn the remarkable tradition they’ve preserved for 2,700 years.