Against Faith

Jay Michaelson

One writes as a Jew against faith with more than a little reluctance. The adversaries are fairly daunting: Abraham, supposedly, Daniel, Rav Soloveitchik. Most challenging, martyrs from Chelmiensky to Buchenwald: Ani maamin, be'emunah shleimah...

But one writes, so we today believe, from one's own condition as well. One writes, or I at least write, an essay such as this one not from the Augustinian bird's eye view of scholarly omnivision. The voices of tradition are stronger, in sum, than my own, but they are not stronger in me. Modernity has enough left in it that the existential priority of what seem to be immediate thoughts remains.

All this by way of introduction. So I can write against faith. Nu? This is a chidush? Heretics, kofrim, apikorsim, this is not an innovation for which we as Jews can be either thankful or indignant. One man's disinterest in faith--it doesn't change a whole lot, generally speaking.

But I write against faith not from the position of one who rejects religion, or even (to what extent my community lets me) Judaism in particular. Rather, I write as one of those latter- day disaffected postmoderns who is supposed to be more comfortable with the descriptive "spiritual" than "religious."

Or so I'm told. To me, I'm more comfortable with religious, with the weight of two or three thousand years of experience and value, than with "spiritual," with the weight of a crystal hanging, albatross-like from my neck. So religious.

By stereotype, my religiousness is of the "BT" variety -- Baal Tshuvah, one who chose to become more halachically observant -- in contrast to that of the "FFBs," the Frum From Births, who (at least the ones that I've met) always regard us neophytes with an amused mixture of uncertainty and surprise. "Why would you choose this?" is asked simultaneously with its silent partner: "Have you really chosen this?" The incredulity leads to suspicion: when the chips are down, you wonder about us BTs.

The chips have never been down for me in any real sense. As I'll describe, there have been and continue to be real moments of doubt, and times when being observant feels a heavy burden. But I'm no Survivor. I haven't been in wars, haven't had friends die, haven't had setbacks more than most people. So again, how can I write against faith? If you're not Job, do you have a right?

Job seems as good an entry point as any into my conflict with faith as an ingredient in Jewish belief. What does God say to Job, out of the whirlwind, after Job shows the hint of hesitation. He says, Where were you when I set the foundations of the Earth... who laid its measures, if you know...

What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry. The deck is stacked. God wins the argument by forcing humility on Job; ours is not to question that which we cannot fathom.

So two responses seem possible, unless Job and we remain arrogant enough to repudiate the Divine voice. First, and most apparent, we can assume a reverential piety: God works in mysterious ways, I have perfect faith. One recalls William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial: I don't ask questions about what I don't ask questions about.

But is this what the response to the whirlwind is? I want to articulate a second response, a knowing belief, a religiosity not premised on faith in one authority or another -- most of us, recall, do not have access to the whirlwind -- but on a strong embrace of the whirlwind's realities: the cosmos as we understand it, the human mind, the mechanism and anti-mechanism of the relativistic universe. Nearly everything God presents to Job (the Babylonian Tiamat notwithstanding) is available to us as well. It's not supernatural miracles that God gives Job; it's the natural, actual world.

Let me retreat from synecdoche and state my case. There seems to be in much prevailing Jewish religiosity a kind of bland fideism, that we believe in something not apparent. To be fully spiritual, there has to be some element of faith, some existential and psychological surrender to the Absolute unknowable. For many, this is an easy task; many are weak people, or, more respectfully, too busy feeding their children and trying to live a meaningful life to wonder about what it is that's being worshipped.

For many others, faith is agony. Kierkegaard describes in volume after volume the tortuous paradox of his necessary Christian faith. (Although, Kierkegaard does so in such a continually funny way that I think his Christianity never was free of Judaism. And he was a BT as well.) Soloveitchik speaks beautifully, tragically of it as loneliness, almost despair. And this is without the tests of Job and of Auschwitz. Auschwitz, of course, is always there for us, either in presence or absence, always some sort of check on our speculation. Fackenheim has it right, I think; whatever it is you're saying, fine, would it prevent another Holocaust?

For me, faith is impossible. Not because of genocide's having happened; that was an evil of man, not of God. We are geniuses at finding new prices to pay for freedom of spirit. But faith is impossible for me because of genocide's having been committed. I'm not willing, in a time half a century (only!) after Hitler, to take something on say-so, as philosopher of religion Nicholas Wolterstorff puts it. But I'm also not willing, as Wolterstorff and his circle would suggest, to induce all of God and theism from my suspicion that there is something there.

Even if I were to do so, that's not faith. If Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga are right, then they've created the Babel Fish. You might not remember the Babel Fish: it was a fictional creature in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" that, when placed in the ear, automatically translated every known language in the universe. It was inconceivable, Adams wrote, that such a creature existed as a result of evolutionary chance. Therefore, there must be a Creator, therefore God exists. And since we have proven that God exists, God cannot exist because God is that Whose Existence Cannot be Proven.

Something, we know, is wrong with the definition. Adams is playing a game with us. But how many of us hold a remarkably similar idea of God? Franz Rosenzweig once said of the Sambatyon, the mystical river that does not flow on Shabbat, that if it, not the Main, flowed through Frankfurt, everyone would be shomer shabbat; it would be a meaningless act. God appears only to want the free.

Very well, but free to do what? Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig may agree on faith being, ultimately, an act of freedom (though perhaps on little else). But this is only so if Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" is taken for no other reason than for itself. Such may have been Kierkegaard's, and even Rosenzweig's, impetus. Many of us, myself included, do not seem so fortunate. Louis Dupre has said that some people are just not sick enough for religion. Not sick enough; it's true, the great religious souls were in pain, struggling with existence and with themselves. But how easy it is for the Freud, the Hume, the atheist of any day to explain away religion as a useful, longed-for crutch to support our broken egos. It's just too easy: I'm in pain, therefore I believe. You just want to wonder if this belief is fair.

And yet, the Sambatyon does flow through Frankfurt. The Babel Fish does exist. It seems as though popular culture believes that the more you find out about the world, the less you need religious crutches to explain it. We know how the universe began (back up until the first millionth of a second), how life evolved, how babies are made. We don't need the stork any longer. But this, statistically, isn't true. Holmes Rolston, the environmental ethicist, has recently observed that hardly any of the world's leading physicists and biologists are not religious in some way. The more you find out about the world, the more you -- need? -- a religious explanation.

My argument is that you don't need the explanation: it appears. It is not a matter of faith. Nor is it a matter of piety or reverence. It is what I suggest is the appropriate response to the challenge in the whirlwind: an aesthetic, religious, understanding embrace. Let me develop the point somewhat further.

A religiosity premised upon what could be called an aesthetic response cannot be said to be based upon faith. To take a shallow example, someone visiting the Grand Canyon or Ayers Rock is not particularly courageous (in a Kierkegaardian sense) to "wonder at the marvel of Creation." It's when religious belief exceeds this "wonder" -- and includes the sentence 'There is a creator' -- that something approaching faith is necessary.

But why have a Creator? If Wittgenstein was right, that when we say the world is created we really are saying that we value the world, why, today, do we need a Creator? As I've suggested, I cannot accept the answer that the Bible or the tradition says that it is the case. I see that I must defend this proposition before continuing with my positive case.

A mode of living cannot be said to be deeply held unless it truly is so. One cannot create a deeply held belief without actually holding it deeply; it is not a matter of convincing onesself. Thus if religion to be authentic for the modern (or postmodern) Jew must be a matter involving the deepest part of the "self," whatever that is, there must be a real sense of connectedness between the self and the Other that is believed. Religion cannot be, in Holden Caulfield's terminology, "phony."

Try as I have done, it has always felt phony to me to believe -- and therefore believe in -- the various literal stories that make up large parts of the Jewish textual tradition. This is hardly a unique opinion; I doubt many Jews of my generation, or the one preceding it, really give much credence to propositions such as God created the world from nothing or, certainly, God chose the Jewish people in a particular way -- at least not if these statements are not qualified out of literal meaningfulness. It simply seems ridiculous to me, on an emotional and intellectual level, to suggest that the omnipresent, omnibenevolent, ineffable necessary condition of the universe pondered and executed an act of volition to select a group of 600,000 ex-slaves in the ancient Near East for a unique mission -- let alone that a detailed text was presented, grammatical errors and all, to achieve that end.

Obviously (for me), I'm prepared to hear retellings of the story. Mordechai Kaplan's interpretation of revelation as immanentist inspiration seems plausible to me. In fact it's what I believe. But that's not faith. If we've explained out all the "moving parts" of God's intervention in history, we don't have faith.

And that is how I like it. I cannot accept the literal authority of a text, which certainly seems to have been compiled from earlier texts no earlier than 2500 years ago, because to do so is to compromise other deeply held beliefs. I do not want to leave entirely the world of rationality, of connection with the world -- nor, after Auschwitz, do I think it is defensible to do so.

If not this authority, why not someone else's? What else must I prepared to believe? Kierkegaard would sympathize entirely with my discomfort: yes, he would say, you must become an entirely new person, with entirely new deep-seated beliefs; that is what the leap is.

But one good existentialist deserves another. Kierkegaard, I reply, wishes me to put myself in a state of self-deception. Of course I want to believe that there is a benevolent God hearing my prayers. Nothing, in times of extreme loneliness or despair, and I have felt both, would console me more than to "believe in" a God who hears me. It's too easy. This isn't freedom; this is self-deception. Wishing Sugarcandy Mountain exists is reason to doubt that it does.

So if the Good News is too good on the one hand, and too dangerous on the other, what is my alternative? I can at last return to stating the case positively. The alternative is to equate the marvellous with the miraculous, and to reject the notion that faith qua faith is a vital ingredient in contemporary religiosity.

For one thing, faith is unnecessary. From an explanatory standpoint, there is little that remains of the metaphysically unknown. (Physicists who point out that a majority of the universe's mass is still unaccounted for are duly noted.) We have plausible accounts of the proximate development of the universe, of life, of humankind, of nations and languages, and so on. And from the looks of history, what we haven't figured out yet, we probably will someday. So much for mythology as account.

Mythology as meaning is more interesting. We have explained the stars -- but is anyone brutish enough not to marvel at them on a clear night in the country? We have explained how life forms evolve -- but is anyone not amazed at the intricacies of DNA, cellular biology, the functioning of organisms, and the richness of our biodiversity? Further biological accounts are not required for these phenomena. Religious ones are.

Mysticism, wrote Wittgenstein, is not how the world is, but that it is.

What need of I for faith when the beauty of reality increases with our knowledge of it? I do not need angels for my religious life when there are mesons, leptons and gluons doing REAL fractal dances on actual pinheads. REAL dances: IT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Consider this an invitation to pause and reflect on this fact, that as you are reading, unfathomably complex processes are occurring all around you. I cannot even list them. The play of photons between the page and your eye. Your eye! The instantaneous infinitude of adjustments and perceptions registered there, carried instantly to the brain. The brain! Each sentence in this paragraph should have an exclamation mark after it. Each sentence is so full of miracles that its letters would, but for the tzimtzum of our own perception of reality, burst into flame, white fire on black fire, overflowing its containers... the rest, of course, is silence.

Now is not a dark time for religious intuition (to use Schleiermacher's term this time). If every sentence in a meandering essay is Kabbalah, the whole world truly is, as the Hasidim have said, the Torah. The answer to the whirlwind is still humility, and with every increase in our understanding -- so much greater now than in Job's time -- our humility and awe grow and grow anew.

This, then, is my affirmative case. Faith does not do anything anymore, if ever it did. It is inauthentic, and thus shallow, not worthy of religion. Yet the slightest Belief based on beliefs is something for which I can have more respect than for a thousand Beliefs based on ignorance, whether the ignorance is chosen or not.

One of the most delightful consequences for me of a life after faith is the revisited freedom brought upon my religious practices. It would be pompous and false to claim that all my doubts have vanished. But they have radically changed in form. When I struggled with faith, each doubt was something of a threat, something to be wrestled with -- as we Israelim, wrestlers with God, must do. Now, I still wrestle with doubt, but in a different way. My earlier wrestling was with the doubt as a black mass, something not to be penetrated but to be defeated. The true answer was in my possession if I had the faith and will to hold onto it; these doubts existed to be quashed, repressed.

Now I wrestle with my doubts as clear perspectives on the facts. Is it plausible, for example, to maintain an idea of a Metzaveh, a commander-god, mandating the mitzvot. So foundational is this belief to Judaism that the person of faith would have to say that it cannot legitimately be questioned within the tradition. So faith must overcome doubt. But I believe nothing that I do not believe. What, then, do we mean by the notion of 'command'? If Kant and Fichte answer the ethical questions for us, what of ritual commands? What can this tradition be said to be trying to express -- and what is thus in need of translation to terms I can comprehend? These are not necessarily the most nuanced of philosophical enquiries. Yet to take them seriously in a religious sense is something, for me, new.

It is not a life of faith. And in some ways, it is more difficult to sustain; I have ashamedly put off many questions for another day. The wrestling is, in some ways, harder than ever, when I cannot bludgeon my opponent with a millenium of authority behind the stance of faith. But when the morning arrives, the ground on which I slept was holier than it was before.

Obviously, there are more consequences of this belief than seem apparent to me. Rather than ponder my own heresy, in fact, everything I've said seems to just flow naturally from the way I live and the way I am. It's obvious, which seems to me to be a great thing: the obvious leads to the utterly inexplicable. If I were a mystic, I would Wonder even more.

To be sure, it is hard to "Wonder" when so much deliberately evil and so many random tragedies continue. For these moments, faith is a necessary splint for memory; to keep in place the recollection of wonder which sometimes is so distant as to be sickening to even contemplate. Radical Amazement (Heschel) is neither possible nor appropriate for the bedside of a terminally ill loved one. But we don't have trouble approaching God at these times, and rigorous, forced authenticity at such a time would be, in any case, utterly inauthentic. Indeed, tragedy does strike even some of the most beautiful, religious souls of this uncertain earth, but is it these times at which we grope for God?

I would not think so. Tragedy gives its own account, while explaining nothing. When we have the ability to recognize that tragedy is not something to be "explained" by some larger answer, that the world is just the world, and that's all, used to be explained as a bitter victory of cynicism. But suffering is suffering; it seems far more cynical to me to appeal to faith and simply believe that there is an explanation.

No, just as there is no Santa Claus, no magical Elijah, no Hell below us, there is also no larger context that you just don't have enough faith to believe in. No supernatural. This is the naked, beautiful world.

I would conclude with one of the more supernatural events in the Tanach, Moses at the burning bush. Very little actually depends on whether there was a bush, whether it was on fire, whether it was consumed or not, so I feel less hesitant about expressing my doubts that the myth intends to convey any more than allegorical significance. This is how myth functions; no one really intended us to believe, before myth became reified into history, that a shrub burned in the desert 2800 years ago and a shepherd noticed it was not destroyed.

But let us be untrue to the text. Let us take the burning bush as a locus of competition between two historical accounts. In one account, the bush is miraculously aflame yet not consumed. It is a sign of God's presence; Moses is humbled, and, in appropriate Near Eastern fashion, removes his shoes. In the second account, to which I would obviously be more sympathetic as history, there is no "real" fire. But the miraculous thing about the burning bush isn't the burning -- it's the bush. In this common (extremely common, as per Rashi) weed, literally billions of cells ferry photosynthetically produced energy back and forth, specialized cells conserve what little water is available, and best of all, every cell has the ingredients for making another shrub.

Imagine that, every acorn has an oak tree inside of it. Imagine it not as a bumper-sticker platitude, but as an actual description of reality as actual as whatever in your life-project is thought of as most real.

Our wonder is because of science, not in spite of it. Moses could only marvel at the plant's endurance -- at least as miraculous as a bush burning is a bush surviving at all in the Sinai desert, as you know if you've been there in the sun for a few hours. Moses could think of the intricacy of the plant, and of humankind, and wonder at the injustice of a nation condemned to slavery, crying out for help to what was most Ultimate to them. Moses could, Kaplan might say, access what is Divine within himself, and therein is revelation.

Moses had the Jewish gift of prophecy: seeing-in. Christianity has so thoroughly rewritten the "Old" Testament that many Jews, I suspect, have bought into the idea of prophecy as prediction. But as one of my teachers Yosef Leibowitz taught me, prophecy in the Jewish idiom isn't seeing the future; it's seeing the present. It's understanding the deeper ethical significance of personal and political life, having insight, not foresight. Believing foresight, correspondingly, is a matter of faith. I take someone's word for the fact that something will happen in the near or distant future. Believing insight, though, is a matter of having insight onesself, of trying to see-in like the prophet does, or Gautama Buddha does, or Moses does.

We have probably not grown in our capacity to ethically see- in since Moses, or Buddha. But we have grown in our ability to aesthetically see-in, to have more and more marvellous -- thus miraculous -- insight into the world's workings. There may not have been a creation; literally interpreted, I don't believe there was. But there was certainly a Genesis, whose products are all the more miraculous when their origins are known better. The world is one kind of place. Faith is a bad substitute for wonder.

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