Dear Reader,
I have been looking through my old writings and research from my time at graduate school. This was such a vibrant time for me, of reading too much and writing too much and panicking too me (I know, sounds fun, right?). And during this time, I developed a theology. A theology of doubt. I have decided to share it with you here, in installments. To begin, we start at the beginning (as good as any place) with the introduction.
But before you read, please know the following – things I always tell my students.
The word “God” is not a Jewish word. We have many, many, many names for God in Hebrew that range from the feminine sacred dwelling to the unpronounceable tetragrammaton to “The Place.” But even as I use the word God in this writing, I admit that it itches.
It is my opinion that the primary orientation towards God in Torah is not one of belief but one of struggle. It is my learning that has led me to see this as one of the ways the word God has been Christianized in our American imaginations. More on that another time (maybe even another series…)
Well, enough stalling. Here you go.
Love, Meg
God wasn’t in the lesson plans. Maybe it was assumed that in discussing the Ten Commandments and other topics required for fourth grade Hebrew school, that we would inevitably get to God – at the very least with commandments one and two. But here I was, on my own journey of divine discovery, and I was going to bring God up. I went to tell the religious school director about my plans for several classes to truly delve into bottomless discussion of God. She advised caution.
She advised that I not teach God so much lest the children return home saying too much about God. Ironically, it was the children who were willing to debate and discuss God with conviction seemingly pre-planted in them. To ask a question about God was to awaken a classroom beast of energy. My job, as I saw it then, was to ask them to question their own answers. And yet, the more I did, the more they fought and stood out of their seats insisting they understood something I didn’t about the Divine.
To my great surprise, it was during these discussions of God that the students listened to each other’s dissenting opinions with the most respect and curiosity. It was as if they knew they were being told the secrets of the universe by their fellow fourth graders, right there, on these Sunday mornings. I listened with deep envy.
I don’t remember ever feeling so strongly about God. I remember feeling embarrassed, like God was a word that should be said quickly, under one’s breath, trailing off at the end of the sentence to make sure no one really heard you. God was, and maybe still is, a word too heavy to move from your heart to your tongue. Maybe I did feel strongly once, maybe I didn’t, and yet here I am – here we are – in a season of doubt.
I use the word “doubt” to mean a state of skepticism, anxiety, questioning, and uncertainty, among other things. How can I begin to say what I mean? As I try, I think of Emily Dickinson’s wisdom:
Could mortal lip divine
The undiscovered freight
Of a delivered syllable,
‘T would crumble with the weight.
The word doubt encompasses so much and more than it knows. To doubt is to challenge, criticize, protest, and maybe even to wonder. To doubt is to consider the depths of that which we do not know, or what we think we do know. For such an important term for this project, I fear I will never be able to define it perfectly. This is my lament: I cannot say to you precisely what I mean. But, I write with the hope that my inadequately articulated ideas and your understanding of what I have written will overlap enough that we, together, have said something and heard something here.
Doubt surfaces as a common theme in contemporary Jewish theology. In a collection of essays written by Rabbis and scholars from diverse denominations and positions, entitled Jewish Theology in Our Time, a number of contributors danced around or directly tackled the theme of doubt by hinting at an underlying anxiety of the lack of proof of God. To begin, Marc Shapiro, the Weinberg Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton writes the following:
It is true that Jewish philosophers have speculated at length about God, what God is (or what God is not). Many of these philosophers even felt that they could prove God’s existence. Yet proving the existence of a deity, even a creator, is so far removed from a Jewish belief in God, the God of our forefathers (and foremothers), that from a religious perspective it is largely an exercise in futility. For Judaism is not about a belief in “a” god, but in the God who revealed the divine presence to our ancestors and prophets, and this is certainly not something that can be proven.
There is an anxiety to Shapiro’s words. I don’t know if the anxiety belongs to Shapiro or if the anxiety is embedded in a question to which he is responding. The question is, can one prove God? Or, how do you know there is God? For Shapiro, the uncertainty of God, or the ability to “prove God’s existence,” is not the project of Judaism. For him, Torah and tradition, passed down from people to people, is the transmission of God – the transmission of “the God who revealed the divine presence” before us. In addressing this inability to prove such a God – and the futility of even trying – Shapiro highlights a central tension: we cannot prove the God of Judaism. In the same collection of writings, we hear from Rabbi Leon Morris who picks up on this theme of uncertainty:
Our times are marked by great uncertainty. For many of us, contemporary theology is less about what we know to be true and more about religious ways of organizing and conceiving the world. If medieval and modern Jewish theology were prose, ours is a theology of poetry. In our time, ‘doing theology’ is far more about meaning and elegance than a truth that ultimately lies beyond our capacity to understand.
For Morris, uncertainty is the flavor of contemporary theology. We are poets, engaged in the holy wandering of stringing words together, hoping some will vibrate with divinity. He is saying that Jewish theology today is the discourse itself, and not the “truth that ultimately lies beyond.” The theology is the words, however unfitting they always are. Here, the confines of language mirror our own “capacity to understand.” That is, we can’t understand whatever truth there might be. We live in a state of not understanding and therefore we must doubt everything we write and presume to comprehend. Or rather, those of us burdened with thinking and dissecting our thoughts do doubt as we constantly examine what we think we know.
Still, Morris desires a theology. He writes:
We seek a theology that allows for all the skepticism, critique, and analysis that modernity bequeathed to us while taking us a step beyond, to where the old language can speak to us again in new ways.
Doubt does not put an end to theology but feeds new poetry. And isn’t poetry precisely the attempt to say what cannot be said? Doubt gives us a new lens through which we can read Torah. It’s a question of proximity: how do we find doubt in our tradition, not opposed to it?
Finally, a third voice from the same contemporary collection of theology addresses uncertainty as honest and sufficient. Rabbi Daniel Nevins, the Dean of the Rabbinical School of The Jewish Theological Seminary writes,
Worshipping without truly understanding, and serving without certainty are frustrating religious postures, but they are honest and humble, and that should suffice.
Uncertainty and humility. Admitting our inability to comprehend the divine mysteries of eternity means admitting our smallness. It is humbling to say, I don’t know, and even more humbling to say, my particular not-knowing is not the final say in anything. Just because I will never understand does not mean I do not listen to the poets of our past. Just because I do not know doesn’t mean something isn’t out there, or rather, in here.
We ought not to presume that doubt in God is only of our time. I do not wish to say that doubt is a brand-new face of Jewish thought. Instead, I will attempt to write a theology of doubt as one of the many faces of Torah for this age. In his masterpiece, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem writes,
The scriptures were alleged to have seventy ‘faces,’ and to manifest a different face to each generation, with a different mode of address.
In the essays to follow, I will attempt to write a face of doubt and disbelief.
Please stay tuned and thank you for reading.
Sources:
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/113/. Accessed April 20, 2017.
Shapiro, Marc B. PhD, "Can Traditional Jewish Theology Still Speak to (Some Of) Us?" in Jewish Theology In Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief, ed. Elliot J. Cosgrove, PhD (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010), 115.
Morris, Leon A. “Longing to Hear Again” in Jewish Theology In Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief, ed. Elliot J. Cosgrove, PhD (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010), 135.
Nevins, Daniel. “Walking the Walk” in Jewish Theology In Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief, ed. Elliot J. Cosgrove, PhD (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010), 145.
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Schocken Publishing House, 1941), 248.