Keeping the Faith - Kol Nidrei Sermon 5785/2024
10/13/2024 10:59:45 AM
How do we keep our faith in a troubled world? Let me do the Jewish thing, and answer with a question: what is faith, anyway?
Did anyone read the recent story in the Cape Gazette on August 16 of this year about a message in a bottle was returned after 17 years? In 2007, some cousins thought it would be fun to put a message and a dollar bill in a bottle and throw in the Delaware Bay. They wrote their first names and ages on the note but left out identifying information. Amazingly, the bottle washed up in Ocean City in 2012! The finder tucked it unopened in a cupboard for the rest of her life, and in 2024 a family member was cleaning out her house and decided to do some detective work on social media. The now grown cousins were reunited with their bottle after 17 years!
Similarly, a few years ago I read a similar story about 12 year old boy who put a message in a bottle. Half a century later, after Hurricane Sandy, the bottle washed up and the finders contacted the now 62-year old man and returned the bottle. It was as if he had sent the message to himself a half-century later.
But what if we could send a message in a bottle backwards to ourselves from the future? Sometimes I imagine myself sending message of encouragement back to myself when I was going through difficult times: you will get through this. You will learn and grow from this. Try it if you want. Picture a time in your life that was difficult—not the worst time ever—but a challenging time. Imagine sending a message of encouragement to yourself at that moment. What would you tell yourself?
What if I could send that message in a bottle back generations, to my great grandmother and great-great-grandmother for whom I am named? Could they have conceived of me as a woman rabbi, living in a democracy, having a family and getting an academic education, traveling over the ocean in a magic bird, driving around in my horseless carriage? My life is unimaginable to my ancestors just as future generations’ lives are probably, certainly unimaginable to me. As the Holiday prayer Unetaneh Tokef emphasizes, we are all only mortal and see just a little of the big picture.
My great-grandmother on the other side of the family was born in a Polish shtetl where the big news was a neighbor who went to Warsaw and saw a wonder: a flush toilet. But grandma lived to cross the vast ocean to a free life in America and eventually one day to turn on a magic box and see a man setting foot onto the moon. Who knows where future generations will journey? You have to have faith.
Biblical faith was not a set of beliefs for the pious. When our father Avraham had faith in the Lord; and He counted it to him for righteousness" [Genesis 15: 1‑6], when the children of Israel at the sea, “had faith in the Lord and His servant Moses” [Exodus 14:31], it was not a doctrine or belief that was meant, but rather an expression of trust, of faithfulness. Rabbi Louis Jacobs wrote, “When the Bible and rabbinic literature use the word emunah (faith) for man’s relationship to God, it always denotes not belief but trust in God. It never signifies belief that God exists. It is an emotional and responsive term rather than a cognitive one.” The Hebrew word for faith, emunah, has connotations of “to affirm,” to be faithful, to be loyal and committed. The word Amen is related and suggests, “I uphold it, I affirm it.” When someone says a blessing or prayer and we want to sign on, we reply, Amen.
In the Medieval period, as Jews had to explain and justify our tradition in contrast with powerful majority religions, the word “faith” began to have that secondary meaning of “a belief, a creed.” Maimonides wrote his famous Credo, the Ani Ma’amin, “I believe with a perfect faith,” in which he outlined what he saw as the proper Jewish beliefs. Even then, not everyone agreed with him that Jews must hold a certain set of beliefs, but they all affirmed that we need to have faith.
We may all have different beliefs about God and Torah, but we can be equally faithful to our heritage and our people. Faith is also not identical with hope. I hope that things will go well and go my way, but I have faith in a divinely given purpose and meaning to life, in creation’s essential goodness, even when they aren’t going my way.
Faith is not the absence of doubt. One of my favorite commentators is the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Lowe ben Bezalel of 16th Century Prague. The Maharal challenged me when he wrote that faith is not knowledge or certainty [Gevurot Hashem, Perek 10]. In fact, for the Maharal, the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty, and acting from faith is on a higher, more transcendent level than acting from certain knowledge. The first time I read this, I thought it was irrational and somehow un-Jewish, as if it minimized the importance of using our minds. But over time, I came to see it differently. Rational thinking is crucial, but faith is for the most important things in life, about which we can never be certain.
So my personal definition of Jewish faith is: “affirmation in the face of uncertainty.” It is saying “Amen” to life, despite our doubts.
In the Modern period, I think that this definition of faith as keeping the faith becomes even more potent. When the song Ani Ma’amin, I have complete faith in the coming of the Messiah, was on the lips of martyrs in the concentration camps, it wasn’t a theological statement. At the worst time in Jewish history it was an audacious affirmation of our people’s undying faith in a better future. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg points out that Jews in the post Holocaust world have kept our faith even after the greatest destruction. We have voluntarily renewed our covenant through the establishment of the state of Israel and the renewal of Jewish culture around the world. The late great Rabbi David Hartman of Jerusalem, said something similar: that I don’t know what God’s plan is, but I do know that the affirmation of the covenant by building Israel after the Holocaust is an important religious event. For Hartman as well, participating in the rebirth of Israel and the renaissance of Jewish life in the diaspora are acts of faith of the highest degree.
Reb Zalman tells a joke about two pious Jews who are discussing the coming of the Messiah, which the prophets say will involve the resurrection of the dead and the restoration of animal sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem. One of them shudders at the very thought of such a scene, and the other tells him not to worry. “God saved us from Pharoah. He saved us from Haman. Maybe he’ll save us from the Messiah as well.”
Few non-Orthodox Jews have such a literal idea of the Messiah, but we remain a Messianic people in our faith in future, our hope for a time of peace, sharing, and harmony on earth, a “Messianic Era.” That powerful faith, that affirmation of our trust in the future, has led Jews to the forefront of social justice movements throughout history. Some of those movements, like Socialism of its day, have let us down. Others, like Zionism, we argue amongst ourselves (especially right now). But we never give up on our faith in Tikkun Olam, the potential to mend and heal our world as a godly kingdom on earth.
Let’s learn a little Talmud: There is a controversy in the Talmud about when the Messiah will arrive. Rabbi Eliezer said that redemption will come to the Jews in the month of Tishrei, at Rosh Hashanah, while Rabbi Joshua contended that it would take place in the month of Nisan, at Passover [Babylonian Talmud Rosh Hashanah 10b, Sanhedrin 97b]. In other words, Rabbi Eliezer believed that our people must do Teshuvah to merit God’s redemption, while Rabbi Joshua felt that God would make it happen for us with grace, as he did at the Exodus. Centuries later, Maimonides declared that Rabbi Eliezer was right, that Israel will be redeemed through our own efforts, not by divine fiat. Centuries later still, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the leader of American Modern Orthodoxy, concluded that this means that in order to have faith in God’s redemption, we must also necessarily have faith in Am Yisrael. To believe in God we must believe in God’s people.
Taking this to the level of all humanity, Reb Zalman talks about the seminal images of the last century, including the atomic mushroom cloud on the one hand, the ultimate image of the human capacity for destruction, contrasted with the picture of the earth from space: Gaia, glowing blue, alive, and vital in a vast sea of blackness, the global vision of our mutual inter-dependence and responsibility to preserve our sacred home It is a dichotomy as stark as the words Moses conveyed from God in the Torah: life and death are set before you this day, blessing and curse, therefore choose life!
Reb Zalman also teaches we can no longer say, like Maimonides, “I believe with a perfect faith” but now we have say halavai (if only!) I can believe. We don’t know for certain that our own people will be a light unto the nations, or even survive. We don’t know if the human race will do the Teshuvah needed save our species on the planet.
To which I hope you can reply: Amen.
Discuss with someone: hat is one thing in which you have faith?
Notes & Acknowledgements
The life facts about my Great-Grandma Rose were described like this in an essay by my mother of blessed memory, Betty Hilton.
Thanks to Dr. Micha Goodman for his online Holiday lecture at the Hartman Institute, for speaking about the Talmudic debate and subsequent commentaries on the subject of when Redemption will come.
As I was preparing for this Devar Torah, I opened Reb Zalman’s wonderful book, Jewish With Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice. Of course, the book opened exactly to his chapter on faith, and more surprisingly, he wrote about the same idea that I had that day on the beach. If one believes that “the divine spark in each of us is not bound by restrictions of time and space,” then on some plane a more fully realized version of ourselves, is in fact calling to us, send us that message in a bottle.
He writes, “Every so often, in an especially she-hechiyanu moment—thank you so much, God, for sustaining me to see this day!—I have remembered a day when I was so despairing, so lost, and sent a care package back to the self I was then, saying ‘Take a glimpse of where I am right now, in your future. Don’t give up hope.’ I have visited myself at my bris. ‘Nu, Zalmaleh, someday you’re gonna be a rebbe. Relax, it’s all right, you will get over it.” And I believe that a future, even more fully realized Zalman [and by this he draws on kabbalah that teaches that we evolve through spiritual journeys and reincarnations that transcend this physical lifetime] is sending me care packages, too.”
If you are a mystical bent (like me), Reb Zalman’s vision may work well for you. But even if you are a humanist and a rationalist, you can picture a more fully realized humanity of the future, our future generations that are our physical reincarnation, sending us back a message of our communal future, the future that we are creating today.
Julie Hilton Danan
