There are times in life when our faith is challenged, when the world doesn’t seem to make sense the way we thought it did.
- when a diagnosis from our doctor suddenly changes everything
- when someone we trusted betrays us
- when someone we love and assumed would always be there is now gone
Or the farther away losses that may not affect us personally, but nevertheless rattle our sense that the world is a good, safe place: In recent years, it’s been terrorism, war, a tsunami, a hurricane. Or those sudden events that shake up our trust that the ground will continue to be under our feet: a bridge suddenly collapsing into a river, a mass murder of college students.
A few weeks ago, an article appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward about our synagogue. The Forward is a national Jewish paper, but one of their reporters had read in the J about the challenges that Kol Shofar had recently faced and thought it would make a good story. “Star-Crossed Bay Area Synagogue Prays For a New Year Better Than the Last” was the headline. The reporter interviewed several of us and wanted to know how we as a community could maintain our faith with so much adversity: the embezzlement by an employee, the extended battle with the neighbors over the plans for the new building, and the tragic and sudden death of our newly elected president and beloved friend, Mike Jackman.
While we here at Kol Shofar certainly have experienced more than our share of misfortune, the question of faith is much bigger than how we in this community dealt with these particular losses. It’s a universal question and it’s a question for each one of us, and I believe this period of the High Holidays offers us a way to think about our faith.
First, I want to clarify for you what I mean by faith. Faith has gotten a lot of bad publicity lately. With best-selling books like The End of Faith, The God Delusion, and God is Not Great claiming that religion is dangerous and faith leads to violence, I realize that faith is not well understood by those who criticize it. Too often people think that being a religious person means having blind faith, not questioning, not doubting, turning off our rational minds, being obedient and accepting whatever we’re told. So, let me clarify: I’m not talking about fundamentalism or belief or adherence to any particular doctrine. I’m talking about faith, that is: a sense of trust and openness and hope, in God, in the universe, in other people, in the mystery of life, that can carry us through life’s greatest challenges.
Meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, in her book, Faith, says it beautifully. Most people think that the opposite of faith is doubt. However, doubt is an intrinsic part of genuine faith. What is truly the opposite of faith is despair. (p. 100)
Despair is the deadening within us that takes place when we are disappointed that the world is not all good, when we naively expected only the beneficence of God. Despair is like scar tissue. Scar tissue forms as a protective barrier when there is damage to a person, but it doesn’t function like healthy tissue. It’s thicker, it can’t feel sensation, and blood doesn’t flow well through it. Despair is spiritual scar tissue; it deadens us to experiencing the fullness of life. It also separates and isolates us.
The high holiday liturgy reminds us of the effects of despair. On Rosh Hashana, we read what is perhaps the most difficult story in the Torah, the Akeda, the binding of Isaac. After finally granting Abraham and Sarah a child in their old age, God tests Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son. Abraham prepares to kill Isaac, when God stops him just in the nick of time. Even though Isaac’s life is spared, the fact that God would test Abraham in such a way raises the same doubts in us that the horrors we face in our real lives do. What kind of world is this that God would do such a thing? That a person would do such a thing? Apparently it raised doubts for the rabbis, too. They created their own stories about what happened immediately after the Akeda. In the Torah, it just says that Sarah dies, but it doesn’t say how she died. The rabbis imagine in the midrash that it was the almost-sacrifice of her son that killed her. Even though he was spared, her sense of order and coherence in the world was so shaken up that she couldn’t go on living. According to the midrash, she cried three cries, corresponding to the three cries of the shofar that we sound on Rosh Hashana, tekiah, shevarim, truah, and then she died.
The rabbis were being deeply honest about the darkness of doubt that is part of the religious life. They created a story to express that profound sense of doubt that arises when life doesn’t seem to make sense. The sounding of the shofar expresses our crying out this radical doubt the way Sarah did; we don’t try to pretend that life is all blissful, and simple, and clean. But we can’t end there, or else we conclude that the response to doubt is despair and giving up on life. Faith, however, doesn’t mean skipping over this radical doubt, rather, we find faith in going through it.
Mother Theresa has been the subject of criticism lately because her private letters and journals, filled with doubt and painful questioning about God, have been made public. Those with a simplistic understanding of faith can point to this as another example of the hypocrisy of religion. But as was pointed out in a recent piece about her in the New York Times, her pain and doubt helped her identify with the abandonment felt by the poor, the sick, the orphaned, and the dying. It was Mother Theresa’s doubt that led to one of the greatest faith-based initiatives of our time and won her the Nobel Prize for her humanitarian work. See, if we think that religious faith requires certainty, then doubt leads us to cynicism and hopelessness. But a wider view of religious life includes experiencing great doubt and acting with great faith.
Faith is choosing hope, even with uncertainty. For over 50 days, from the beginning of the month of Elul, the month before Rosh Hashana, through the end of Sukkot, we recite Psalm 27 as part of our daily prayer services. This psalm was chosen because it expresses the spiritual work of the high holyday season, of seeking God and finding hope in God, even when we’ve been abandoned and our enemies pursue us. Just before the end of the psalm is a curious verse :
Lulei He’emanti lirot b’tuv Adonai B’eretz Chayim
Had I not had faith to see the goodness of God in the land of life.
You might notice that it’s an incomplete sentence.
Had I not had faith to see the goodness of God in the land of life....what?
Every day we say this phrase, but we fill in the blank -
Had I not had faith to see the goodness of God in the land of life,
I would have concluded that life is cruel, and random, and meaningless
Had I not had faith to see the goodness of God in the land of life,
I would have resigned myself to despair and cynicism
Had I not had faith to see the goodness of God in the land of life,
I might as well die like Sarah
But the psalm concluded: Hope in God, be strong and have courage, hope in God. The verse sets us on a trajectory of restoring our faith in “the land of life” that is reinforced throughout these holidays. Every single time we pray the Amidah, and there are many times during these days of awe, we say: Zochreinu L’Chayim, Melech Chafetz BaChayim, V’chotveinu b’sefer hachayim, lemaancha Elohim Chayim. You don’t have to know Hebrew very well to hear that the word Chayim, Life, is repeated four times in just that one phrase. Remember us for LIFE, God who desires LIFE, and write us in the Book of LIFE, for Your Sake, God of LIFE. And the theme is repeated over and over again throughout the services: life, life, life, life.
The prayer book is calling out to us: affirm life, choose life, live life!
The forces of darkness and despair are so great. The days throughout the year try to crush us, but we stand here together on these days of awe and assert our faith in life. We’re taking part in ritual that Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, noted takes place across societies. As human beings live, we experience that the world begins to crack, to shake, and we find that it’s not as solid as we thought it was. So, periodically we get together to try to make the world sit firmly again. The high holydays are the Jewish version of that universal need, of that spiritual impulse to reassert meaning and order in the chaos.
The faith in life that we assert on these days grows and deepens each year, but it’s not the naive, simple faith we once had. We learned long ago already that good people suffer, that tidy theologies of reward and punishment don’t hold up in real life, and that ultimately life is a great mystery. But the faith we do affirm today is the faith of choosing life rather than despair.
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen tells the story of being a young girl and learning from her grandfather how Jews say L’Chayim, to life, when raising a cup of wine. He told her that L’Chayim means that no matter what difficulty life brings, no matter how hard or painful or unfair life is, life is holy and worthy of celebration. ‘Even the wine is sweet to remind us that life itself is a blessing.’ 55 years later, Dr. Remen, who grew up to counsel those with cancer and terminal illness, comments: It has always seemed remarkable to me that such a toast could be offered for generations by a people for whom life has not been easy. But perhaps it can only be said by such a people, and only those who have lost and suffered can truly understand its power. L’Chayim is a way of living life. As I’ve grown older, she writes, it seems less and less about celebrating life and more about the wisdom of choosing life. In the many years that I have been counseling people with cancer, I have seen people choose life again and again, despite loss and pain and difficulty. The same immutable joy I saw in my grandfather’s eyes is there in them all.
Everyone knows L’Chayim; it’s so much a part of who we are. Non-Jews understand it, too, as long as they’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof. It’s such a deep expression of our people and our history, affirming and choosing life despite exile and persecution, fully inhabiting life, no matter what life brings. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach taught that when we raise a cup of wine and say L’Chayim, we recognize that in order to have wine, you had to have grapes, and they were in the lowest place; they were stomped on and crushed. But then we raise up all those broken and crushed grapes, we raise them up to our heart, and we make kiddush, we say L’Chayim. That’s what I mean by faith: not giving in to despair, and not denying the heartbreak either, but rather, raising up all the brokenness and sanctifying it and drinking in the fullness of life.
That’s what we’re doing this time of year when our prayers say: Remember us for life, God of life, we’re responding to the choice that was given to us two weeks ago in the Torah reading that always falls during this high holyday period: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Uvacharta BaChayim lemaan tichiyeh. Choose life that you might live”
This is what Jews do. When there is a death, we mourn. We don’t pretend that it isn’t terrible. We tear our clothes and weep and shovel the earth into the grave ourselves and go right into the grief. But we also say Kaddish: we go out into the world and gather with a minyan of people who can hold us up while we proclaim the name of God. The richness of declaring the greatness of God in the face of loss is that deeper kind of faith. The simple, immature faith that believes that God will protect us from suffering is lost as soon as we do suffer. But the mature, abiding faith says: we suffer, but we choose life anyway.
What does it really mean to choose life? When the Torah says: Choose Life that you might live, Ibn Ezra, one of the classic medieval Torah commentators, adds, ki hachayim hem l’ahava - life is for love. So, the expression of this faith that I’m talking about is loving: loving God, loving another person, loving life. Sarah seems to be all alone when the despair kills her, but we all stand here together and say Zochreinu L’Chayim, remember us for life. And it’s “us” in the plural, all of us together. Even the Hebrew word for life is plural, chayim, there’s no way to say it in the singular - we find faith in life through each other’s lives. It’s through relationships, family, friends, community, staying connected to each other that we choose life as the antidote to despair. Every time there is sorrow in this community, that life force within us that wants so desperately for us to choose life bubbles up through the many, many people who offer their love to those who are suffering, who visit the sick, who make shiva visits, who bring meals, who make a phone call or offer a hug. And those whose faith has been challenged hold on to another person’s faith for a while. It’s truly stunning to witness the display of faith that pours out in this community, that is, the faith that we won’t allow despair to prevail.
We, the Jewish people, have a lot of words. A lot of words in the Torah and in our prayerbooks to try to make sense of life, but the truth is, we don’t understand God or why life turns out the way it does sometimes, but we still need faith. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, faith is not the same as regarding something as true. Rather, faith is an act of the whole person, of mind, will, and heart. Faith is sensitivity, engagement, attachment. And faith includes faithfulness, the strength of waiting, accepting the concealment of God in the world. The Presence of God is hidden, in exile, he writes, but it is our task to bring God back into the world, into our lives. To have faith is to reveal what is concealed. (God in Search of Man, p. 154-157)
And at this time of year, when our prayers emphasize that God is Elohim Chayim, the God of Life, we remember that faith is found by fully engaging in life. And somehow through the love and connection and healing that comes when we re-affirm life, the hidden God becomes present again.
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