The Problem with Certainty

I am suspicious when I meet religious people who are sure they know the will of God.  And I wonder how these people seem to know, and are so quick to tell you, you do not know. 

After all, Religion is chocked full of mysteries, tentative assertions about the truth, paradoxical theological statements which cannot be proven, calls to faith despite experience, labored Biblical stories which tantalizingly reveal and conceal the truth about God.

Let’s face it, certainty is seductive.  It makes us feel we are in the know.  We get it and all the rest are clueless.  We understand; all the rest are lost.  We know what it means to be religious or theologically correct and everyone else is selling out the true faith. We know what God wants and all the rest are ignorant fools.  This kind of seduction can happen to the religious and the non-religious.  Atheists and agnostics are no exception.  No one is exempt from the intoxicating elixir of certainty.  Certainty, after all, is control. Certainty is arrogance disguised as piety and love of truth. Certainty can produce fanaticism, verbal or violent. Certainty can make you feel drunk with power.

Whitehead was right: “Seek simplicity but distrust it.”  Beware of anyone who is convinced he or she knows the will of God. 

Faith is trusting without knowing for sure.  Certainty is knowing and not needing to trust.  The philosopher, Leo Strauss teaches us: “The mysterious God is the last theme and highest theme of the Bible . . .The Bible reflects in its literary form the inscrutable mystery of the ways of God which would be impious even to attempt to comprehend.”

Great quote from Rabbi Rami Shapiro: “When you know you don’t know; when you know you can’t know, you can’t be manipulated by those who pretend to know.”

Elie Wiesel on Doubt and Faith

“How can we live without faith?  How can we live with it?”

Talking about the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel said, “We cannot understand that period with God or without God.” “Can one have too much faith?”  “I believe in a wounded faith. Only a wounded faith can exist after those days.” (For Wiesel, a wounded faith is faith as protest, loyalty as an act of rebellion.)  “No faith is as whole as a wounded faith.” 

Ariel Burger, a student of Wiesel, tells us, Wiesel had “an angry faith, an activist faith, a faith with teeth.”  Wiesel says, “It is possible to argue, to protest, to shout against God, for God. Indignation may be the most authentic expression of faith, for it is a testimony to our belief, in spite of what we see, that God is just.  And even if he is not, we shall still demand justice.”

“The Hebrew word for question “shelah,” contains the word for God, El.  God is in the question.”  “Does our faith cause us to fall asleep or does it wake us up?” “The messiah is a question, not an answer; a demand not an excuse, a beginning not an end.” “Even as I demand justice from God, I feel compassion for God.”

“Our questions are not impediments to faith, they are faith.”

“If we do not have faith in God, we will have faith in some other ultimate that can become fanaticism.  This is why the Bible does not give us God’s name, so we cannot be a fanatic in God’s name.”

“Why do I believe in God despite the Holocaust?”

“Faith can coexist with tragedy, can survive it, and we can carry it with us in spite of or perhaps because of our wounds.”

A Beautiful Midrash

A midrash is a story which makes explicit what is implicit within Jewish scripture or tradition.  Here is a story that goes to the very heart of what it means to be Jewish.  See if you can figure out what the story is all about.

There was Jewish man who lived in a small village or shtetl in Eastern Europe many years ago.  He owned a grocery store.  One Sabbath he violated the commandment to rest on the Sabbath day and keep it holy.  He opened his store for six hours in order to make more money.  Afterward, he felt terribly guilty.  He ran to his local Rabbi, fell on his knees and begged the Rabbi for forgiveness.  He was distraught.  He wondered if he was really a Jew. He wept.

The Rabbi calmed him down and said, “Your store you kept open for six hours, yes?  So, what did you do the other eighteen hours?”  The man replied, “For eighteen hours, I kept the Sabbath.”  The Rabbi responded, “What you did was sufficient. Maybe next week you will do better.”

Commentary:  In Jewish tradition, the secret resides in the doing.  What you do determines who you are.  Doing what you can do is not intended to earn God’s love.  Doing what you can do is an expression of your trust in God and God’s trust in you.  The man in the midrash did what he could do.  Maybe next week he will do better.

Another short midrash:

“Why are there 613 commandments in the Jewish Bible?”

“There are 613 commandments so that every Jew will find at least one commandment he or she can do. And that will have to be sufficient.”

Reflections on Teaching J Term

In a few days it will once again be time for J Term.  J Term is a one-month intensive course offered between the first and second semesters.

There was a time at our university when every course offered during J Term had to conform to a specific theme.  The courses had to be creative and approved.  No regularly offered courses were allowed.  Then, an exception was made for Capstone courses, creative classes taught by two or three faculty.  I remember and am proud of a course taught with Professors Sandra Looney and Peter Schotten called Light in the Darkness: Courage and Evil in the Twentieth Century.  We taught that course for over twenty years and it always seemed to go well.

As the core curriculum became larger, the Interim was opened to eventually allowing any course to be taught during J Term, some now online.

There was a time the Religion department would never have taught or allowed Religion 110 to be taught during January.  Religion 110, Exploring the Christian Faith, was and is a course which requires time to reflect and absorb all the information.  This January we are offering three sections of 110. 

The advantage of teaching in January is you have, in theory, the student’s complete attention on one course.  Such intensity allows for attention to be paid to the importance of the subject matter different from what happens during the normal semester. There, the student’s attention is divided between four or five courses.  When the January Interim was restricted to special theme or Capstone courses, such intensity was valuable and appreciated.

But when regular semester courses are taught during January, it means a professor is compelled to figure out how to communicate an entire semester’s worth of lectures and readings within one month.  For some courses, this proves impossible.  Part of teaching a course during a semester in increments is to give students a chance to think about what they are learning.  During the January Interim every day is a week, three hours of lecture and learning and students are compelled to digest all they hear.

For some students and professors, the January pace works well.  For others the academic push is too much.  For some professors J Term can be a grind.  Everyday you are meeting and moving or pushing students along.

 For me, the Interim is valuable and exhausting at the same time.  Having said all that, I am ready and excited to meet my Religion 110 students and begin again to think about these important questions.