By Emily Dana
In my family, discussions of theodicy, the conflict between the existence of God and the existence of evil in the world, come up quite often around the dinner table, and every time that they do, my grandfather brings up this quote by Marianne Moore: "Would to God that I, too, might have that fierce faith whose touch makes temporal the most enduring grief." This quote, in itself, explores one of the main themes that Rabbi Leon Morris addressed in his shiur to the cohort, “The Whole Truth? Balancing Personal Integrity with the Claims of Tradition.”
We call God "great and mighty" over and over again from the words that we say every day in the Amidah to the chants of God’s attributes during the High Holidays. But at the same time, throughout our history, we have suffered. Not one, but two temples have been destroyed; a numerous different nations throughout our history have tried to drive us out or exterminate us. How can we believe in a mighty and supposedly omnipotent God in a world where so many innocent people are killed? Should hardship cause you to lose your faith or to strengthen it? This is a personal question, and I can only answer it for myself, but every time I think about it, I always come back to that quote that my grandfather loves, and especially the second half of it, “...Whose touch makes temporal the most enduring grief.” The question, for me, at least, is less of how do I believe in God in a world with so much hardship and with the presence of hardship in my own life, but how do I keep my faith? Now, you may think that those two things are the same, but I believe that while God is a part of faith, God is not all that faith is. Faith is also a shared history, a set of shared traditions, and a shared community. And that, I would argue (and I think Rabbi Morris, from this shiur would agree with me,) is what we should be addressing.
Is the faith that we want to keep the “old school faith” that our forefathers supposedly had?
Is that the kind of faith “good faith” whatever that means? And what impact should the changing of our religious communities have upon our faith? Rabbi Morris, on his source sheet for this shiur, included a passage from the Mishkan HaNefesh, the new Reform High Holiday machzor that discusses that our faith has become “partial and frayed,” and that we “allow hard questions to consign religion to irrelevance.” These things may be true, but there are both positive and negative aspects to them.
Yes, I may “keep” less of the mitzvoth than many of my ancestors did, but how does that tie into faith? Yes, it’s a problem that we are allowing our religious differences to divide us, but isn’t that as much of a problem with those who are very observant, and sometimes even fundamentally so as with those young people who are throwing out religion?
Rabbi Morris ended his shiur with the playing of a song by Kobi Oz that combines Oz’s new words with an old Sephardic piyut that his grandfather put to music. As I was reading the lyrics, I realized two things: First, perhaps the point of faith is to help us engage the past with our present and future, whether that means praising the past or discounting it. And second, maybe faith has had to change for the modern day world. Maybe the faith of today is a whole lot more “הכל יהיה בסדר” and resilience than the “old school faith.” And maybe, just maybe, change can be good.
