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Back to Question of the Week Q: I am devoted to the Jewish people, but I am a literal agnostic. I just Don't know. What path is there for me toward greater light and rational conviction? Irwin |
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A: Congratulations, Irwin! I think you should be proud of yourself for the intellectual honesty of your "don't know." I think it's much more dangerous to pretend to know what you don't, than to honestly not know even that which is true. And I'm not the kind of rabbi to go around with some kind of faith-o-meter rating who's the better Jew. There are days when I have my doubts, too. Nonetheless, you ask for guidance in the direction of greater rational conviction and I'll do my best to provide some. Let's start by talking about the childhood picture of God as a benevolent old man with a beard who lives in the sky. (This may not apply to you, Irwin, but many adult Jews stopped their Jewish education at the age of 13 and still are working with a child's conception of God. It is very hard for an adult to believe in a child's conception of God.) I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and, like Maimonides, state my firm conviction that He -- the heavenly old man with a beard -- doesn't exist. I think it is very important to give up on Him, if one is seeking rational conviction, because, since He doesn't exist, He just gets in the way of discovering the One that does exist. Okay, without Him hanging around here, we're free to look for God. Where shall we look? I would like to suggest two places. The first is in the tremendous wisdom provided by 3000 years of Jewish searching for understanding of God. It shouldn't be surprising that although certain aspects of the Jewish conception of God, such as God's unity, have never changed, there have been many, many different Jewish understandings of the nature of the divine. After all, should God exist, God's full nature would certainly be beyond our human comprehension; Why, even the full nature of this little planet we live on in our little corner of the universe is more than one human mind can comprehend! So one good starting point in the search for rational conviction is in the diversity of Jewish understandings of God. And a good place to start discovering that diversity is in the book Finding God - Ten Jewish Responses by Rabbi Rifat Soncino and Daniel B. Syme. The second place I would suggest looking for God, Irwin, is in your own experience. I think that, since our experiences don't seem to have much to do with the Guy with the Beard, we don't understand them as having to do with God. What would happen if you took your own most important "spiritual," meaningful, or awe-inspiring experiences seriously as pointers toward God? As openings for understanding a bit more about God? I think, for example, of witnessing the birth of my daughter or of standing with rabbinic friends and colleagues in front of the White House and being arrested in our protest of the American policies that allowed the genocide in Bosnia to go on for too many horrible years. And I think of God as the Source of the awesome mystery of the appearance of a new life and as the One that commands me to act with goodness and love. And my experience is that the more I allow my experiences to point me in the direction of God, although I acknowledge that I can't truly know God, the more I find God present in my life and the more I feel that I live in a world of "light" and (rational?) "conviction." written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz |
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