One of the central dilemmas challenging modern men and women is that we turn for comfort and purpose to faiths whose central tenants we often find too simplistic or downright unacceptable. Even as we affirm the importance of being Jewish, even as we struggle to support Jewish education and to transmit Jewish identity, we harbor our own doubts--not just about peripheral details of Jewish life, but about the very core of our ancestral faith. How can we believe in a Creation of the world when we have seen the overwhelming and meticulous evidence for a Big Bang and for evolution? How can we affirm a God who intervenes and saves after the six million murdered by the Nazis, or after the brutal destruction of Hurricane Andrew? How can we affirm a loving God in a world with SIDS, AIDS, cancer, and so much debilitating suffering?
In our suffering, we still seek solace. In our disappointment we still need hope. So we dance a mental two-step, hopping between the pious sentiments of our ancient books--the Torah and the Siddur, while living and thinking like every other contemporary American. Our Torah and Siddur remain hermetically sealed, incapable of withstanding the realities of skepticism, sophistication, and modernity. Or so we fear, so in an attempt to protect our heritage from the harsh blasts of reality, and to preserve our traditions at least as a lovely bauble to admire and to cherish, we keep them closed off from our daily lives.
Our tradition may remain sealed, but it remains nonetheless. Most of us are unwilling to turn over our lives to it entirely, but we are equally unwilling to jettison it forever. Unable to wholeheartedly embrace the central convictions of Judaism, and equally unwilling to walk away from them, we are chained to traditions that cannot hold us, and we risk the paralysis of indecision and emptiness; small wonder that so many Jews look elsewhere for spiritual nurture. Small wonder that so many associate Judaism with traditions and with festivals, rather than with spiritual depth and profound wisdom.
Is there a way out of this dilemma? Is there room for faith at the end of this bloody and disappointing century? Or must Judaism go the way of the horse-and-buggy, a charming relic of a simpler age? How can a sophisticated modern Jew believe?
While we like to imagine that our problems are unique to our own time, I am convinced that we are not the first generation to wrestle with the chasm that separates our hopes from our reality, our dreams from our daily lives. Perhaps it is the arrogance of each generation to consider itself unprecedented. Perhaps that is what the Rambam was referring to when he asserted that the purpose of the shofar is to "rouse those who sleep in the bonds of time", those of us trapped by the hutzpah of the present. The truth is that we are not the first to see an unbridgeable gap between what is and what ought to be, and we are not the first to confront experiences that test our essence and sear our faith.
In wrestling with the rift between reality and our ideals, our Jewish traditions can provide an essential tool for navigating these tumultuous times. It is the glory of our sacred literature: the Torah, the prophets, the Talmud, and the Midrash, to confront these challenges honestly and openly, without imposing superficial answers or rigid dogma to mask the pain of not knowing and the anguish of not being able to make it all right.
Perhaps that honesty is Judaism's greatest gift: its remarkable ability to assure its children that there are questions worth asking even when the answer eludes us, even when there may never be any final answer within human grasp. Surely, the questions of life and death, suffering and reward, our place in the cosmos, our obligations to our fellow human beings and to all living things, are among those questions that human beings have flung to heaven as much in accusation as out of a desire to hear an explanation. And those burning arrows disguised as theology still torment the hearts of parents who suffer over a child's illness, spouses who helplessly watch their soul mate eaten away by disease, and all caring people who suffer the callousness and brutality of some of their fellow human beings.
In the light of these unanswerable questions, queries that cannot be solved but must be articulated anew in each new age, Judaism shines ever brighter because of its wisdom in framing essential issues without imposing a smug, self-satisfied, and ultimately shallow answer.
Judaism, through story, deed, and law, teaches us that what really matters in such questions aren't the questions at all, and certainly not the formulated answers. What matters in such things is the attitude of the one who is asking the question. What matters is an orientation of faithfulness, of emunah.
There is no better biblical example of emunah, of faith, than the Patriarch Abraham. And there is no more terrible and frightening biblical story than the akedah, the command to Abraham to bind his son, Isaac, to a sacrificial altar and to offer him up to God. Perhaps because the rabbis of the Talmud recognized the difficulty of maintaining emunah even in their own day, they selected this Torah portion for the second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah. Perhaps they recognized that we could all learn from Abraham, from considering how his faith did help him in his trial, and by recognizing what his faith could not do.
Recall that Abraham already has a reputation as a beloved and faithful servant of God. Years prior to the sacrifice of Isaac, God had already assured Abraham of security and wellbeing:
Fear not, Abram,
I am a shield to you;
Your reward shall be very great! (15:1)
With good reason, then, Abraham expected a life of relative ease and comfort. And in recognition of his noblesse oblige, the many blessings that fell his way, Abraham spent his life working for the betterment of humanity and for more adherents to the one true God. He and his wife, Sarah, indeed did grow wealthy, returning from their stay in Egypt as the prosperous heads of a booming household and a growing tribe of people. But for the lack of a child, their lives were complete.
Even with the expectation of progeny, Abraham has the comfort of divine assurance. After all, God has already told him:
Look toward the heaven and count the stars.... So shall your offspring be (15: 5).
Sure enough, that promise is fulfilled along with all the others. Prior to Isaac's birth, Abraham and Sarah are told, “You shall name him Isaac; and I will maintain My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant (17:19).”
Imagine their thrill at finally having a son, someone to love and to hold, and someone to continue the religious and moral traditions that the prominent father and the energetic mother had initiated so recently. Isaac was to be their greatest blessing.
Then came that fateful day. Out of the blue, we are told, “God put Abraham to the test (22:1).” And what was to be the nature of this test? Abraham was to stand by and see his son suddenly thrust into a life-threatening trauma. Not only was the poor father to endure his son bound to the altar, he was to be the one to give the go-ahead, to permit the sacrifice to take place.
Can you imagine a greater crisis, a greater test of character than what Abraham had to endure? Loving his son more than life itself, having devoted his life to the service of God, Abraham now was in precisely the position of so many moderns, having to choose, apparently, between his firmest dreams of how life ought to be and how it was unfolding, relentlessly, before him. How was Abraham to cope? How could his faith help him at all? Can it help us?
Several years ago, I found myself thinking of Abraham and of the akedah. After 26 weeks of a difficult pregnancy, Elana, my wife, had to rush to the hospital in a desperate attempt to stop premature contractions that could have lead to delivery. I don't need to tell many of you that babies at 26 weeks of delivery are in mortal danger due to their lack of development. Full term, for those who still think in terms of months, is 40 weeks. At 26 weeks, our babies, if they came out, would not have had a good chance to survive.
Elana and I drove to the hospital, accompanied by dear friends. The nurses put Elana in a hospital bed and injected her with terbutalline, a drug that relaxes the uterus. As we waited for her contractions to stop, Elana took a different course. She began to sweat heavily, her eyes rolled back, and she passed out before us. As the nurses jumped to bring her back to consciousness, they noticed that the heartbeat of one of the twins within her was fluctuating wildly, seriously endangering the baby.
That was when the crisis began in earnest. Nurses and doctors appeared, as if from out of the air. Shouts of "prep the O.R." were my only clue that we were about to be rushed into the operating room, that life and death hung in the balance. I recall that a nurse pushed me out the door and told me to wait, and when I next saw Elana, she was strapped to a portable bed, while nurses were running her into the operating room. I realized that they were going to do an emergency C-section. At 26 weeks!
I ran after my beloved wife, thinking all the while "It's not supposed to be this way! It's not supposed to be this way!" As Elana disappeared behind the doors of the Operating Room, one kind nurse gave me surgical scrubs to dress in and then told me to wait. I sat on a plastic chair in the hallway, alone in the world, as nurses and doctors ran in and out of the surgical room. I didn't know whether or not the operation had begun, and no one had any spare time to keep me informed. Elana and I had not had a chance to speak to each other since we entered the hospital a few hours earlier.
I rocked back and forth on that chair, or I paced up and down the hallway. All the while, I was talking to God and crying. I pleaded with God on behalf of our babies, "Dear God, they are so little, so innocent. Please let them live." Even as I spoke, I knew somewhere that God doesn't pull strings in the universe, doesn't cause cancer for some and assure health for favored others. Such a God would be a monster, and such a God is certainly not in evidence in the world. Despite my conviction that God doesn't act in that way, I still had the need to pray. So I prayed.
And I prayed for Elana, my life. Lying on that table were all my ideals, my dreams, my future, and my identity. I would sooner have had them cut me than touch her.
Yet I also knew that, in some sense, we had chosen this path together. We had both decided that we wanted to raise children of our own, and we both knew the risks involved in having twins. We had made a choice to walk down this path, however excruciating our present condition was.
Finally they allowed me into the O.R. Elana, looking pale and shaking both from terror and from cold, was strapped onto the operating table. Doctors had her on the table. And they picked up the scalpels to cut my wife. Then their eyes fell on the screen of the monitor, and behold, the boy's heart rate had stabilized. As they saw this salvation from the side, they realized that they didn't have to raise a hand against Elana, or do anything to her except to watch her for the night. As tensions eased, we realized that we had been spared our own personal akedah.
How had my faith helped me through that terrible night, an evening that I hope will be the worst night of my entire life? Was Judaism a source of comfort to me? Was God there with us as we prepared to offer our most precious gifts to the knife?
I will tell you one thing that my Judaism didn't do, and that I didn't ask of it: the questions I hurled up to God were not meant as real questions. I was not operating in the mode of thought and analysis. That comes later, after the fact. My questions were really pleas, hopes, terror and rage, masquerading as dialogue. While the external clothing may have been words and discourse, the actual content--what I was seeking in my fear and my anguish--was beyond words. I was seeking belonging, rootedness, and connection.
Judaism provided that. In my deepest terror, I never felt alone. Even in my fear, I could sense the nurturing love of my community, the connection to the Jewish people, our rootedness in the Torah, and the love and concern of God. I didn't have answers, but I had emunah, the ability to trust in faithfulness.
How can I describe for you what eludes description? How can I point you to what emunah can mean? When we had a series of earthquakes several years ago, my instinctive response was to remain in bed and relax. Somehow I just float with it. As strange as it may sound, I trust myself to the earthquake, even though in my mind I know that I have no better guarantees than anybody else.
Once I was swimming in the ocean when a strong undertow started to pull me down. Again, my instinctual response was to go limp, to trust myself to the waves. As they dragged me down, slamming me against the sand at the bottom, I just let them pull me along, confident that those same waves would bring me to the surface again soon.
Faithfulness, emunah, felt exactly like going limp in the ocean or trusting myself to the earthquake. While we often mistake faith for mental assent to a list of verbal assertions ("I believe this, I believe that"), the Hebrew meaning of emunah isn't assent. It means "trust". To have faith is to be able to trust. To trust in something beyond ourselves, to trust that we have the strength and the commitment to get through whatever comes; to trust that we are never alone.
Faith doesn't mean expecting to get a better deal because of our piety. It certainly doesn't mean expecting God to favor some people over other people as part of a bargain between a person and God. In fact, one rabbinic understanding of the Akedat Yitzhak is precisely that Abraham was given that final trial in order to show that he wasn't trusting God as a quid pro quo for God taking care of him:
God said, "I have tried you with many trials and you have passed them all successfully. Now, I beg you, for My sake, withstand this trial also, so that people will not say that all the earlier ones were without worth (Sanhedrin 82b).
Just as faith does not mean expecting the universe to treat us better, so faith doesn't mean lacking in human fears, doubts, or feelings. Nowhere in Jewish tradition are we led to believe that Abraham wasn't in bitter torment throughout the akedah, that his feelings as a father were powerful and conscious, even while he gained some measure of comfort from his faith:
And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. He stretched forth his hand to take the knife, and tears fell from his eyes into the eyes of Isaac, because he felt the mercy of a father. But in spite of this he went joyfully to do the will of his Creator (Bereshit Rabbah 46).
Faith, then, is not a matter of intellectual content or acumen; it is an attribute of trust, a sense of embeddedness and of connection. Abraham was no philosopher, no logician. He didn't stand by the altar posing complicated inquiries or balancing divergent theologies. No, he is an ishemunah, a man of faith because he relied on his ability to trust even while beset by doubt, even when tortured by pain and loss.
We, too, face similar tests all the time. Rabbinic tradition wisely observes that "there is no creature whom the Holy Blessing One does not test (cited by Rabbi Sidney Greenberg)." The great skill of the faithful is not that they can escape life's hurts, disappointments and pains better than those who lack faith. The central gift of faith is simply the ability to view every encounter that comes to us as a test of our character and our integrity. When challenged by the suffering of those we love or of our own disappointments in life, emunah is the ability to retain the power of how we choose to respond, and how we determine to act.
To be able to retain a sense of belonging in something transcendent and eternal, to know that we are a people in covenant with God and linked across generations one to another is a great source of strength and of courage. It was with Abraham when he was tried by God, it was with Elana and me when our turn came to us. The ability to float, to turn over to God our need to control and to manipulate, even while doing all we can to assist God in bringing about a positive outcome, is the very core of Jewish faith.
In that regard, the prayer of Rabbi Eliezer from the second century is still very much our own: “Do Your will, O God, in heaven above, and bestow tranquility of spirit on those who revere You below. And what is good in your sight, do (Berakhot 29b).”
Shabbat Shalom.