Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
Rosh Hashanah 5768/2007

Some people swear by It.  Others reject It outright.

My parents think I take It too seriously, though if I have It, it is because of them.

Michigan fans need a lot of It lately. Cubs fans may know It best.

Wars continue to rage over It, but I am not sure world peace will come without It.

Michael Vick found It on his way to jail.  Mother Teresa, it turns out, wasn’t quite as sure about It as we all thought she was.  

You may not be here because of It, but very little of today makes much sense without at least considering It.

What is It?  It is Belief in God.

Do you believe in God?  Does faith in God Matter?  Today is Rosh Hashanah, we stand in judgment before the King of Kings, the Book of Life sits open with our fate in the balance. We are here to connect to our tradition, to connect to our Jewish community, but today, of all days, to connect to God.  And yet I wonder, how many of us really believe It.  How many of us really believe in God?

If the polls are correct, the Jewish community’s statistics are less than inspiring.  A recent Harris poll found that of Evangelical Protestants, 93% are absolutely certain there is a God. Of Mainline Protestants, 76%. Catholics - 64%, Jews, a measly 30%.  When it comes to the existence of God, we are, it would seem, not exactly all-star material.

In a recent article, Vanessa Ochs, professor of religion at the University of Virginia, offered the following image to prove the point:

Picture a pair of American Jewish parents who, after being out of touch with their child, now a young adult, get this phone call: “Mom, Dad, I don’t observe Jewish holidays. I don’t keep kosher. I have not married a Jew. I have no relationship to Israel.” But the child does offer some consolation: “But I do believe in God! I pray to God all the time!  Mom, Dad, I love God, and God loves me!”

Now picture these American - Jewish parents again, this time receiving a very different call:  “Mom, Dad, I observe the Jewish holidays both at home and in synagogue. I have a Jewish spouse, my kids are being raised as Jews, I give tzedakah to Jewish causes both here and in Israel.  But this child offers one more bit of information, a confession: “Mom, Dad, I no longer believe in God and maybe I never did.”

So…which parents would you rather be?  Who gets bragging rights to the neighbors?  Most likely the second set.  They have been successful in transmitting Jewish practices and feelings of Jewish solidarity. Jews, Professor Ochs explains, operate on an assumption of commitment without faith, deed over creed, culture before dogma.

You remember the old story about the first day of Hebrew school. Billy comes home and his mother asks him what he learned in Hebrew school that day. "Well, Mom, our teacher told us how God sent Moses behind enemy lines on a rescue mission to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. When he got to the Red Sea, he had a team of engineers build a pontoon bridge and all the people walked across safely. Then he used his walkie-talkie to radio headquarters for reinforcements. They sent bombers to blow up the bridge with the Egyptians on it, and all the Israelites were saved."   

The mother is shocked: "Billy, is that what your teacher really taught you?" his mother asked.

"Well, Mom, actually, no. But if I told it to you the way the teacher did, you'd never believe it!"

On matters of faith, on God, Jews are at best undeclared or undecided.  More likely, if pushed, not so much, in fact, probably not at all.

Every year, I try to focus my Rosh Hashanah remarks on the most pressing theme facing the Jewish people.   The Jewish call to social justice, commitment to Israel, the need for Jewish literacy.  I am blessed to be a clergyman for a faith that has no shortage of themes to encourage and admonish my community. But this year, with only a little hyperbole, I want to raise what is, in my mind, the lynchpin of it all, belief in God.  Because ultimately, while nearly every aspect of Judaism may be practiced, celebrated or observed in its particulars without belief in God, a generation that does not invest energy into the question of Jewish belief is a generation that will find itself without the life-sustaining aquifers necessary to keep it vital.

Why? As I wrote publicly this past year, when kashrut is practiced without a theology in place, it is a form of dietary cliquishness, not a distinguishing and distinctive expression of commandedness. When circumcision is practiced without an understanding of the covenant, it is not a sign of a sacrosanct relationship with God, but a primitive and objectionable rite. If commitment to Israel is framed solely in political terms, the argument for a modern state becomes less and less compelling for American Jews, Israelis and, for that matter, gentiles too.  I could go on with the list, and I certainly won’t make the claim that one can not be a good, ethical person without a belief in God. But I do believe, that the shelf life of a God-less Judaism is one generation maybe two.  After all, without God, what makes the Torah any better than Shakespeare or the self-help section at Barnes and Noble.  Without God, what makes Kashrut better than the Zone Diet? Without God, who are you praying to?

So again, I ask you, do you believe in God?

If the best seller list is to be believed, God has had a very difficult year. From Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion,” to Christopher Hitchen’s “God is not Great”, to Sam Harris’s “Letter to A Christian Nation,” to Daniel Dennet’s “Breaking the Spell” and many others, the business of “disbelief” has never been so lucrative.  In reading these books, what is interesting is not so much what they say, you heard most of their arguments in your freshman philosophy class.  What is interesting is the cultural moment they reflect. They can best be understood as polemical, examples of the maxim: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  In our age, during this week of 9/11 observances, when we have a steady offering of the evils of fundamentalism, it isn’t surprising to find there are many seeking to disprove God.  And on this issue I share common ground with the atheist authors, on this I agree with them. Because as sure as I am that a Judaism without a God is living on borrowed time, I am doubly sure that religious fundamentalism is, in any form, abhorrent. 

Which leaves us at a crossroads.   Given the unacceptable choice of atheism or fundamentalism, given our people’s skeptical disposition when it comes to faith, given the necessity of having faith for a viable and dynamic Judaism, what precisely are our options? What does belief in God look like?  Feel like?  What is a faith, that has transformative power, that brings me closer to God, closer to my fellow Jew and my common humanity?

I believe the answer, or at least the beginning of the answer, lies in the insight that when it comes to God, recognizing what we don’t know - doubt, is actually the first step towards a life of faith.  It seems to me only thing atheists and fundamentalists have in common is the absolute surety by which they hold their beliefs.   Me, I think there is theological weight to the statement “I don’t know.”  It was the medieval Jewish philosopher Joseph Albo who spoke to God’s unknowable nature when he said of God: “If I knew Him, I would be Him.”  Of course, Maimonides did have his principles of faith, one of which was perfect belief in God.  But it was also Maimonides who, in his Guide to the Perplexed, famously gave expression to the via negativa, a theology that, in a nutshell, states that the only thing we can say about God is that we cannot say anything about God. It was the Kabbalists who picked up on this with the concept of “Eyn Sof,” “that which is limitless.”  Last century, the first chief rabbi of Palestine, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, pointed out that in the Zohar, the Shechinah, a name for God, is called the "nahar ulai,” “the maybe river."  From the Bible to Freud, the history of the Jewish God is based on the paradox, that while there is a God, the limitations of our humanity preclude us from ever fully knowing God.

I had a teacher in Rabbinical school, Dr.Eliezer Slomovic z’l.  It was said of him that the Torah that he had forgotten in his later years was more than most people would ever learn in a lifetime.  Classically trained in the Yeshivot of pre-Holocaust Europe (he was from the same home town as Elie Wiesel), Dr. Slomovic’s encyclopedic memory could cite chapter and verse of Jewish sources like nobody else.   During one class, when my classmates and I were particularly amazed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge, he paused from his lecture, looked at us, sensed what we were thinking and with a crinkled smile said: “It is true that when you consider what I know and what you know – there is indeed a rather large difference.  But if you consider what I don’t know and what you don’t know, well – then there is hardly any difference at all.” 

And, if this is true, if God can never be known, if doubt is the most sincere religious feeling we have at our disposal, if as Emerson wrote “the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact,”  well, it means that our quest for certainty must, oddly, begin with the concession that our destination will never be reached.  It means that faith in God is actually a two-fold statement: First, I believe in God. And second, I will never fully know God.  And while there may be something contradictory about this turn of affairs, there is something very familiar and familial about it too.

Because the truth of the matter is, that in any relationship of merit, there are inevitably limitations and constraints to what we can know.  It is always striking to me to meet young couples agonizing over the decision of whether to get married.  As if there is some magical moment, when all the pieces fall into place and you just know that person beyond the shadow of a doubt.  To all you young lovers out there, let me tell you, it will never happen!  The statements “I love you” and “You have got to be kidding me” are the bread and butter of any long term relationship.    There is not a week in my life, and not an hour in my wife’s life, that we are not struck by the profound…joy…of standing in a covenantal relationship with a person whose world view, inner logic and outward actions are totally beyond comprehension. And yet, she is my wife and I am her husband.  There is always an element of the other that eludes us.  We all intuitively know that covenantal relationships, relationships of substance are, by definition, never intellectually certain decisions.  They always involve leaps of faith, in establishing them, or repairing them.  And, what is true between two people, all the more so between humanity and God.

And it is this longing, this pursuit, this search, this quest for an unknowable God, which lies at the heart of a modern faith.  It was the playwright Lessing, who bequeathed to us the image that “If God held fast in his right hand the whole of truth and in his left hand the ever-active quest for truth…and told me to ‘Choose!’ I would pick the left hand and say: ‘Father, give! For pure truth is for yours alone!”  To say that you have doubts, to say that whole truth exceeds your grasp but continues to be your object of inquiry, to say that you believe in a God whose very nature and name is unknown to you, is not only very honest, not only refreshingly candid, but also, surprisingly, very Jewish.

Long before the publication of Mother Teresa’s diaries, Jews have known that a life of faith is filled with doubt.  More often than not, we are told that the Torah readings during the High Holidays are all about faith, but they are really about doubt.  It is Sarah who skeptically laughs at God’s prediction of a child in her old age.  It is Hannah, who sobs bitter tears at her barren condition, who doubts God, who doubts herself.  The plight of Hagar, who, rejected by Abraham at Sarah’s behest, enters the wilderness, physically and spiritually, in despair.  Perhaps most of all, it is Abraham who is tested by God to sacrifice his son.  You can read the Akedah, the binding of Isaac as a story of serene faith and you would be in good company, but I think a far more compelling read points to Abraham’s confused agony of wrestling to understand God’s will.   Why, the repetition in God’s initial command? “Your son, your favored son, Isaac, whom you love?”  The Rabbis explain that Abraham couldn’t believe God would ask for such a thing!  Why did it take Abraham three days for a one day journey?  Because with every step his inner turmoil increased and his progress grew more measured. Why, in staying Abraham’s hand from sacrificing his son, did the Angel have to call out “Abraham” not once, but twice?  Because by then Abraham’s faith was in tatters, he was dizzied by his disbelief and didn’t know what or who to believe anymore?

Our world desperately needs a searching faith driven not by certainty, but by doubt.  I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way our approach to God became stunted.  When our theology is as artless and simpleminded as a vending machine, as if mitzvoth and prayers are popped in and desired results are achieved; when faith is understood to be an either-or proposition, then it is inevitable that it should be abused, ignored or detested.  The only thing more shocking than our lack of faith is the fact that this should come as a surprise at all.  Faith is not about peace and tranquility; it is about uncertainty and learning to live with it. You can’t download faith, it’s not an after school activity, Peapod won’t deliver it to your door.  You have to work for it, think for it, strive for it, model it for your children. Faith is difficult and a struggle, and it takes unrelenting energy over the course of a life-time.    

A quest driven faith enables you to do that which is so hard and so necessary in this age, to affirm your own faith, but also respect the integrity of other people’s belief.  A quest driven faith is a deeply personal, humble and humbling experience.  A quest driven faith need not jingle like change in your pocket.   As my teacher, Rabbi Louis Jacobs once said to me, on matters of faith, it is better to be vaguely right than definitely wrong.  By acknowledging doubt, commitment can be maintained without feeling obliged to negate alternatives.  Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin, was once visited by disciples asking the Hasidic master to tell them the one path to God.  Horowitz exclaimed “What sort of God would it be, who has only one in which he can be served?!”  

Our faith, like our lives, takes on far more meaning when we view it as a quest.  The paradigm of our tradition from leaving the Garden of Eden, to Abraham’s journey, to the wilderness wanderings is the idea of a spiritual pilgrimage.  There is a reason the Torah ends without entering the Promised Land, because the frontier always stands before us.  Today isn’t a day about beginnings or endings, today is a day about crossings and passages, it is not about destination but about process and forward momentum.  When you view your life as a spiritual pilgrim, your focus is less on the elusive promised land, but on the potential of every moment being a transformative one.   Life becomes a series of opportunities for discovery, of the self, of others, and of God.

A quest driven faith means the argument for prayer isn’t contingent on proofs of God’s existence.  Prayer neither begins nor ends with belief, prayer is the means by which belief is cultivated.  Every bracha, every time you say “Baruch Atah Hashem” signals that you are initiating a relationship with God, no matter how unknowable that God may be.

A quest driven faith means that the Torah, our sacred library, isn’t something to be accepted or rejected. There are difficult passages in our tradition, many that clash with what we believe today. As another Abraham, Abraham Lincoln said:  “It is not that which I do not understand in the Bible that bothers me.  It is that which I understand only too well.”   But, if you are on a quest, then the Torah isn’t a yes or no document, it is a palimpsest, to be searched and probed, to discover again and again the voice of a living God.

Finally, a quest driven faith means that the mitzvoth stop becoming a list of do’s and don’ts, and start becoming a series of opportunities to realize God’s will.  There are Jews who do mitzvoth because they believe that is what God demands of them.  Then there are Jews who do mitzvoth because they are points of cultural identification, Shabbat candles, Hanukah latkes and Passover Seders.  I do mitzvoth, be it the daily act of putting on tefillin, giving tzedakah, observing a fast, or anything else, because the performance of a mitzvah is the most direct, consistent and all encompassing way that I know to search for and surround myself with God’s presence.

Prayer, Study, Mitzvoth.  This is our Jewish toolbox, required packing for our Jewish journeys ahead.  Through them, each of us can enthusiastically embrace our Jewish identities, today, tomorrow and in the year to come.  This year, I will be teaching a class on constructing your own theology, on how you can articulate your own beliefs, give voice to your own quest.  There are amazing opportunities for learning, for prayer, for doing mitzvoth, for celebrating the Jewish year.  Living in resource rich Chicago, if you are not doing something, frankly, it is not because it is not being offered; it is because you are not yet on a quest. Get on board!  Today, as the train of the New Year is pulling out.  This is the time to commit and recommit to your quest for God.

Every night, when I put my children to bed, before we say the Shema, we do “God Blesses.”  We God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy, we God bless our siblings, cousins and teachers.  We have God blessed Elmo, the Wiggles, and too many others, real and imaginary, to count. This summer, we were going through the list about to sing the shema, and my daughter said, “Daddy, you forgot to God bless God.”  And so that night and every night since, we have God blessed God.

Our age has not been kind to God.  God is used and abused, believed in and rejected in ways that say more about the shortcomings of humanity that they do about God.  We need to take ourselves and our God more seriously, we need to care for God - God needs to be blessed.  Together, this year, right now, we have the opportunity to begin our quest for God together.  We need to reclaim uncertainty as a spiritual value. And yet, for all our doubts, we can search for God, through prayer, through study and through mitzvoth and, we can believe. We can transform our lives, we can transform our relationship with God, and we can emerge from this year stronger, more complete, better understood and profoundly aware of the mysteries of God and a humanity created in God’s Image.

Do you believe in God?  This year, keep asking.

Shanah Tovah.