Betting on Belief
When memory serves us well, it squeezes into the past to retrieve an instance of significance that instructs the present and transmits meaning into the future.
I was a child, 8 years old, or perhaps 9, when I heard my father say something that shook me deeply. Not many years after the Holocaust, as he sat with other survivors who had come to our house, he said, with no drama and no bitterness (and I’m translating from the Yiddish), “You know Hitler made me into an apikores,” a nonbeliever. Thinking back, I realize that the tone of so much of what those survivors said was matter-of-fact, at the edge of anger, melancholic, sometimes with a touch of dark whimsy, sometimes with a serving of gray irony. Their philosophical excursions were pithy and rarely evoked a spoken response. Instead, the room was filled with shakes of the head and sighs.
Why did my father’s remark upset me so much? I was attending an Orthodox day school. My days were filled with references to God’s omnipresence, the strength and outreach of God’s arm in history, and the way that God was hovering above us, ready to intercede when we were in need, if only we would do mitzvot and believe in Him with all our heart and soul. And at home, almost every sentence contained an exclamation of Gut in himmel (God in heaven) or Abeshter (the One above).
So how could my father say that God had made him a nonbeliever? How could he provoke God in that way? Wasn’t he putting his family in the way of God’s wrath? And, I asked myself, if he didn’t believe in God, why did he put on tefillin every weekday morning? And why on Yom Kippur, from Kol Nidrei through Neila, with tears streaming down his face, did he preface every prayer with Rebonish Haolam (Master of the Universe)?
For several years I did not question my father. Perhaps I didn’t want to hear a direct reaffirmation of his comment, but perhaps watching his actions betray his words provided me with some comfort. When I was about 12, conflating the need for certainty with belief, I asked him “Is there a God?” He shrugged his shoulders and answered quickly, with a response that I would learn a few years later reflected Pascal’s wager, “I don’t know for sure, but if you live a good life and at the end there is no God, then you’ve done right and it makes no other difference. And if there is a God, even better for you.”
That explanation allayed my childhood fears. As an adult, however, I realized that my father was not an apikores, despite his pronouncement. He was not saying that he did not believe in God. After what he had lived through, he was asking how he could believe. The hedged proposition on God’s existence provided my father with a levee against a tide of nihilism that may have swept over him after the war.
My father’s unstudied theological proposition has served me well through the years. While I was fortunate in that my journey of belief has not been assaulted by the savagery of a holocaust, still I was assailed by the usual postadolescent amalgam of doubt, anger, cynicism, and rebellion. College served the usual diet of Sartre and Nietzsche and the all-night discussions that concluded that in the second half of the 20th century, belief in God was impossible. I sampled that menu and stepped into adulthood.
I didn’t need philosophical excursions to make me wonder if I also might be an apikores. I couldn’t say without hesitation that there was a God. I just wasn’t sure. I never felt that God had spoken to me. I never experienced a life-altering experience in which God made the difference. I did not comprehend what people meant when they said they had experienced a “spiritual” moment. When I davened, I repeated the words, satisfied with their textual, cultural, and historical content. I envied those who appeared to separate themselves from the mundane to become electrifyingly bolted to God.
Yet with my father’s injunction darting in and out of my memory, I never wavered in my commitment to Judaism. I couldn’t really be an apikores if I believed in mitzvot and obligations that dictated how I should lead my life. Rather, I was a Jew with others in my community who came together not so much to find God but to be with other Jews looking for God.
Looking for God – the emphasis on seeking more than on finding – may very well be part of our heritage that goes back to Exodus. In the story of the burning bush, when Moses asks for certainty, when he wants to see God’s form and to understand God’s nature, God tells Moses that he cannot have what he thinks he needs. Besides fire and voice, God is enveloped in ambiguity and challenge. “I am who I am” is the best that God will provide for an identity. What God will emphasize is the connection to the past, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to the God of the future who will deliver the Israelites from slavery to the promised land. Moses is left with the directive to constantly hone his belief in the unending journey to find God. Believing in God appears to be the starting point, not the end of the journey.
The Israelites’ wanderings are very much emblematic of this directive. And what was their hedge against the disquiet, anxiety, and frustration of never being able to know their God fully? They are given the commandments, laws, and obligations for building a more perfect society that allows them to withstand their 40-year journey. The emphasis on community, pursuit of justice, fairness to all, and gemilut chesed (good deeds) allows the Israelites to behave in such a fashion that even if they are unable to come faceto- face with God, the march toward that goal is well worth the effort.
Though my father’s formal education ended at 16, he understood what it meant to be on this Jewish journey. I am grateful for the unadorned Jewish wisdom my father imparted to me and that I am an inheritor of that legacy from which his wisdom sprung.
Saul Golubcow is a program manager for a health insurance company and a member of Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, Maryland.
