I’m warning you now. I’m going to begin tonight with a dirty word. It may shock you. It may upset you. It’s upset many a person throughout time. But I’m going to say it anyway. You ready? You sure? Okay. Here goes:
God.
There, I said it. God. You all thought I was going to utter some nasty four-letter word, didn’t you. I may not be the brightest bulb. But I’m not that stupid.
And yet, for some of us—perhaps many of us—that three-letter word, “God,” is actually quite a bit more disturbing than any of those curse words. And what I want to know is: why? Why is it that we can talk about anything we want in today’s society—anything: money, sex, drugs, violence, people’s private lives and innermost secrets and intimate details that somehow appear daily on the front page of every newspaper we see—why is everything fair game for discussion except God?
And why am I thinking about God so much this week? I could answer the question glibly, saying that, well, it’s my job to think about God. And while that is definitely true for myself to the point of being obvious, even as I say that aloud, I know that I have many, many colleagues who feel the same way about that dirty G-word, men and women in this holy work who wouldn’t broach the topic, publicly or privately, with a ten-foot pole.
Beyond that, however, there are a couple of reasons that God is especially in the front of my mind this week. One is that a few of you over the past couple of weeks have shared with me the January 6th op-ed from the Times entitled “The Blessings of Atheism,” with the tagline reading something to the effect of, “We atheists need to stand up for what we believe.”
Now, I must confess. The idea of atheists standing up for what they believe made me laugh at first. It smacked of self-contradiction, like the scene from Stranger Than Fiction, where Will Ferrell’s IRS agent is questioning Maggie Gyllenhaal. After explaining to him the detailed rationale for paying most, but not all of her taxes, the following conversation takes place:
“Miss Pascal, what you're describing is anarchy. Are you an anarchist?”
“You mean, am I a member of...”
“An anarchist group, yes.”
“Anarchists have a group?”
“I believe so, sure.”
“They assemble?”
“I don't know.”
At which point she leans in close to him and says:
“Wouldn't that completely defeat the purpose?”
So you’ll forgive me if that’s what came to mind when seeing the topic of atheists standing for what they believe. But I am very glad I read the piece. For one thing, I found myself in surprise agreement at the frustration felt upon hearing the phrase, “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” of which author Susan Jacoby says, “[when] translated from psychobabble, can mean just about anything.” True that, as they say. I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure as to what that means.
But I was greatly agitated by her central thesis, which was, essentially, this: that atheism is the best way for people to focus on and emphasize the here-and-now, because affiliating with a faith group and, particularly, believing in God, somehow precludes us from doing so. Her assumption is that those who believe in a higher power also necessarily believe in an afterlife, and as such, are not adequately attentive to what’s going on in front of our eyes, specifically in response to the grieving, the bereft in our community. And while that may be true for many of our Christian brothers and sisters, my friends, it is not true for us. While it may deeply upset her, as it does me, to endure such hollow, ultimately meaningless and useless explanations as their loved one “being in a better place,” or how “God must have His reasons” or “somehow needed him or her in Heaven” to those who have suffered through tragic loss, her logic is flawed. It’s flawed because hers is a blanket statement, a generalization that does not apply equally across the board. The truth is everything she espouses in this piece—to be here, to be now, to focus on the only life we know for sure, especially in comforting the mourners in our midst—is completely, 100% consistent with Judaism and Jewish teaching. The Sages of our tradition, detailed as they were, almost to a flaw, were incredibly vague on notions of Olam Ha-ba, the World to Come. And, in my opinion, this is no accident. Even these men, certain as they were in their convictions on virtually everything, were okay with their uncertainty here. There is no dogma about life after death, about heaven or hell or purgatory, no tenets to which every Jew must subscribe, no company line or stock answer to recite. They’re vague because, at the end of the day, who really knows? They didn’t. And at least they knew they didn’t.
This week we read Parashat Yitro, famous, of course, for Aseret Ha-Dibrot, the Ten Commandments, the first of which is simply this: “I the Eternal am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”
Doesn’t seem like much of a commandment, does it? Okay, fine. So it could be helpful to realize that a better translation of Aseret Ha-Dibrot would be “The Ten Utterances,” as this first one seems more a statement than a commandment. Or maybe it is a commandment. Maybe it’s a statement of the given, tacitly understood as what we are all to believe.
Or maybe it’s this, one of my favorite phrases, taken from a not-so-G-rated scene in the 2000 film Boiler Room:
Act as if.
It’s true, no one knows for sure either way. I know that with my experiences, the way I’ve come to see my life and the world over time, that it might come a bit easier for me than for others, and that I’m as convinced as I think a person can be that there is, in fact, a God. But I don’t know. No one does. And that statement is just as true for both sides of the timeless debate, and everything in between. We just don’t know. And who would dare to be so arrogant as to say that they did? That’s why the word “atheist” bothers me, in all honesty. How can anyone truly know, with perfect infallibility, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there is no God, that God for sure does not exist?
The truth is, whether we consider ourselves believers or not, we’re all agnostic. We may, at best, think we have it figured out for ourselves in a way that makes sense to us, in whatever direction that may be. But we all have doubts. And as my teacher Dr. Kravitz used to say, “Out of certainty comes doubt, but out of doubt only comes certainty.”
Act as if.
And for us, that means act as if there’s a God. Act as if there’s a Being who created the universe and everything, everyone in it. Act as if there is a spark of that God in every living thing, in every human being. Act as if there may be some kind of World to Come, some heavenly reward for our good deeds here, but know in your heart that you don’t know for sure, and that, ultimately, it’s irrelevant. Because to be a Jew who believes in God means that we are all the more focused on this life, this world, the only one we know for sure, and the people that make this one life something special, something sacred.
Act as if there’s a God. And maybe, just maybe, our lives will be that much more meaningful in the end.
AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment