When people I meet find out that I’m a rabbi, they will sometimes say, “Sorry, rabbi, I’m not a believer,” thinking, I suppose, that the statement lets them off the hook for being involved in Jewish life.
But (like most things Jewish) it’s not so easy.
My Christian friends tell me that belief in the divinity of Jesus, his resurrection, and eternal life after death for those who believe, is crucial to their religious identity, and loss of such belief is a crisis of faith for them that can lead them away from their religion. I have heard Muslims say something similar about their beliefs.
But, in Judaism, this is much less the case. Unlike Christianity and Islam, we don’t tend to follow the notion that belief is at the centre of our religion.
The first question I’d ask of someone who says that they aren’t a believer is, “What don’t you believe in”? It may be that I don’t believe it either, and maybe most of us don’t!
Not only has our concept of God changed since the biblical era, the character of God changes throughout the Hebrew Bible. We are no longer comfortable investing our belief in a God who would harden Pharaoh’s heart and then punish him for hard-heartedness, nor a God who is pleased by nothing so much as the odour of roasting meat offered as a sacrifice in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Who wouldn’t be sceptical of that God? And as Rabbi Daniel Gordis says, Judaism does not look unkindly at the sceptic. Judaism does not require faith statements as a sign of legitimacy. Judaism does not ask Jews to give up their questions or to deny their doubts about what God might be, and why an all-powerful God who created the world would care whether someone turned on an electric oven on Friday evening instead of on Friday morning.
In Jewish spiritual life, faith is not the starting point of the journey. Uncertainty is not the enemy of religious and spiritual growth. Doubt is what fuels that journey. Fundamentalists of other religions may regard anything short of absolute faith as religiously insufficient; Jewish tradition does not share their reliance on certainty.
It’s true that Judaism’s great medieval philosopher, Maimonides, thought that Judaism should have a faith statement that would clearly define what Jews ought to believe, so he wrote the Thirteen Principles of Faith, which he thought every Jew ought to believe with perfect faith. But they weren’t accepted by the rabbis of his time. Nor since. (If you are interested in reading about them, along with objections from generations of rabbis as respected as Maimonides but who disagreed with him, see https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-thirteen-principles-of-faith.)
Although Maimonides insisted that anyone who didn’t believe these “principles” was a heretic, they aren’t particularly persuasive to modern people, whether they are rabbis or Jews of any description, nor do they address the inconsistencies of the characterisation of God in the Hebrew Bible. Because even though we are a monotheistic people who believe in one God, the God that is described in the Hebrew Bible appears to be a human creation that changes depending on human needs.
When we needed to be saved from slavery in Egypt, God was there (though a few hundred years late) and when we needed God to reject thousands of rams and rivers of oil offered as sacrifices and instead be concerned about social justice, the prophets found that God.
For many of us, the real Jewish story of our life is one of encounters, moments that seem like accidents. One of those encounters occurred for me when I was fourteen; a classmate found out that I liked to sing. He suggested that I join the High Holy Days Choir at one of the local synagogues. From that came years of singing in synagogues, becoming more engaged in Jewish life through Jewish music, eventually becoming a cantor in 1990. My undergraduate studies in philosophy had made me a sceptic; singing in the synagogue brought me into Judaism.
And then, my encounter with my late wife Deborah led to our marriage, which brought me to the United Kingdom, where my Jewish connection increasingly expressed itself as a rabbi, and my studies at Leo Baeck College were transforming. One encounter after another, leading to a life deeply invested in Judaism.
You may have a similar path, of unpredictable encounters leading you to the life you lead now; when you put enough encounters together, what develops is the life we actually live. What binds these encounters together for me is some kind of meaning and purpose that goes beyond synagogue attendance, and beyond any of the commonly held markers of religious life. It begins to suggest a connection with the divine that is beyond explanation.
For Rabbi Neil Gilman, it was the accidental encounter of taking a class with Will Herberg, a philosopher who in the 1950s began studying and teaching Jewish philosophy and reworking it in terms of Buber, Rosenzweig, and existential thought. Gilman’s book, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, is a very good starting point for anyone interested in modern Jewish theology.
And what if the sceptic remains a sceptic about matters of faith? There are many ways to be Jewish.
When they ask Shlomo why he goes to synagogue with his friend Moishe, given that Moishe is a believer but Shlomo is not, he says: “Moishe goes to synagogue to talk to God, and I go to the synagogue to talk to Moishe.” And that’s a very good, very Jewish reason to engage with Jewish life.
There are many religions, but for many of us, it is Judaism that provides the language we use for some kind of understanding of our life and our relationship to aspects of the world that we can sense but never truly know.
Throughout one’s life, there will be moments of connection to a force in the world we feel but can’t express, sacred fragments, as Gilman calls them.
Even for those who say, “I’m not a believer,” Judaism nonetheless provides a home for that inexpressible awareness of the divine, which is as good a sense of God’s presence as we can hope for in this world.