A Leap of Faith

Faith is trusting without knowing for sure.  


Our scriptures exhort us to love God with all our heart, soul and mind.  We are commanded to love the deity with all our intellect.  We do not have faith by believing mindlessly, thoughtlessly and without questions.  I cannot believe that we have been given a brain in order to disregard its ability to analyze and question when it comes to God and religion. 


Whatever God is about and indeed if there is a God, he, she, it is invisible, complicated, mysterious, inscrutable, unpredictable and methodologically questionable.  It is not a violation of trust to have such thought or questions.  It is an inherent part of trusting without knowing for sure.

And any God worth the name would encourage such questions and doubts as an expression of our faith.


So, do not feel guilty about wondering if any of this religious stuff is true.  Count yourself as normal and alive.
  

A friend of mine who works with the poor in the inner city cautions me: There are those whose lives do not possess the privilege of sitting around, thinking and asking questions.  They are the poor whose questions have to do with whether they will have food or shelter or a bed for the coming night.  For them any small bit of good news is a blessing from God.  They do not have time to doubt or the inclination to ask God questions.


Some would say these people live a simple faith, a trust which says, “God is in control, everything happens because God wants it to happen for some mysterious plan or purpose, we are unable to decipher.  Questions and doubts are contrary to faith.   All we can do is trust that God knows best.”
  

But I wonder, is it possible, these people with the simple faith are not blind or stupid or leaping into the darkness.  Those who continue to trust despite what they see are implicitly by the nature of their faith and trust confronting and accusing God with their own implicit questions, doubts and hopes.  It takes courage and wisdom to have such a faith and to live such a life.  The simple fact is:  there are just different ways of questioning the justice of God.  Their expectations, theology and faith are their way.  And maybe that will have to be enough.  What do you think?


Have a restful rest of the summer.


P.S.  The blog will be on break for the month of August.  Thank you for reading and thinking with me.

Respectful Stubbornness

We live in a world where there are different ways of being religious.  People can decide to practice their religion or have no religion as they each see fit.


But we know, it does not mean everybody therefore gets along.  Religion has to do with truth.  It explains why we bother to get out of bed in the morning.  Our religions tell us how we got here, the meaning of our lives and deaths, the truth about God and how God has or has not been revealed to us.  Religion is not just something made up long ago; some would say it is the truth as revealed by God to each respective tradition.  So, while it sounds harmonic to say we are all part of the human family and we should agree to disagree, it’s not that easy.
  

I propose we admit that multiple religions mean multiple conflicting revelations.  The world’s major religions have been around a long time and their believers trumpet the revelation they possess and that possesses them.  So, what are we to do?   I suggest respectful stubbornness.
  

We each confess our religious beliefs, articulate them as clearly as possible, learn from each other where we can but feel free to dispute where we disagree.  This includes those who are atheist or agnostic.  The freedom to respectfully disagree comes from our necessary and inherent religious humility, the sense that we can be self-serving and could be wrong.  Absolutizing our religious beliefs is an act of idolatry. We are, after all, human beings and human beings make mistakes, believe all sorts of crazy things and are sometimes just plain wrong.


 I am a Jew.  I cannot understand myself apart from the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition.  But I have studied and am willing to listen to other religious truths because I know my religious beliefs are tentative and only a glimpse of what could be the ultimate truth.  I hope you will admit the same is true for your beliefs.


We have so much to learn from each other if we can put aside our instinct to guard and protect the purity of our beliefs.  So, I say, maintain your beliefs stubbornly but be open to learn where you could be wrong.  Respectful stubbornness can work.  By the way, this is true for politics as much as religion. 

Writing a Book about Elie Wiesel

I have decided to write a book about Elie Wiesel.  Elie Wiesel is arguably the most important theological writer in the past fifty years.  Wiesel wrote fifty-three books as a witness to what happened during the Holocaust.  In many of these books he grappled with his understanding of God.  I am planning to write a book dealing with Wiesel’s understanding of God during those days.


In his first and most celebrated book, Night, Wiesel declares his problem with the justice of God.  As he says, “I was no longer the accused.  I was the accuser.”  Wiesel wrote his many books in the name of those millions of Jews murdered during the Holocaust.  Their voices had been stilled but their questions could not be silenced.  Wiesel wrote on their behalf and asked questions about the character and methodology of God.  The strange part about Wiesel’s work is he did not see his questions as a sign of unbelief but as part of a commitment to God and God’s promises.


Whenever a writer writes, the blank page or screen stares back and makes him or her wonder if they have anything worthwhile to say.  But this book has been cooking inside me for many years.  So here it goes.

Vacation is Fine, But . . .

I love to travel but I do not travel well.  My circadian body and brain waves know when I have left the comforts of home and they insistently and anxiously enquire as to why I have vacated such a pleasant place.  I explain that it’s called summer vacation.  You travel to northern Minnesota to experience the shimmering beauty of Ten Mile Lake.  You relaxingly walk through the quaint shops and eating facilities of Walker and Hackensack, Minnesota.  In the house you rent, you sit on the deck and stare at the water, listen to the loons communicating with each other, get away from the everyday and come down a bit from the usual tensions of life.  All of this is true.


Vacations are fine but they take you away from the one place where you have some control and comfort.  That place is called home.  Yes, I have travelled throughout the world, from India to Israel to Poland to Slovakia to Montreal.  But, as I get older, I find myself increasingly becoming a homebody.


It is well said that the opposite of faith is control. At home, you feel mostly in control and relatively safe. On vacation, you are less in control and forced to trust without knowing for sure.  Along with all the wonders of the lake are its uncontrollable aspects: the weather cloudy and cool with chances of rain each day, the hungry voracious mosquitoes who inhabit your bedroom and seem to delight in waiting until you go to sleep before they attack,  the low seat uncomfortable toilets with which my becoming older body is less than pleased, and the indigestion and stomach aches which kick in whenever I indulge in a lot of junk food.


And, think about it, the word travel itself originates from the old French word travail meaning “work.”


Vacations are fine but . . .  they are a lot of work.  I give massive credit to my wife for getting everything ready for the trip and organizing the schedule of what to do and where to eat up there.  And, don’t get me wrong.  I love sitting in front of the lake and watching the sun touch the water creating a sparkling diamond effect.  Just plain spiritually beautiful!  But when I come home, I feel my whole limbic system take a sigh of relief and relax.  The work is done, now the true vacation begins.

Believing and Not Believing in God

Years ago, I was traveling to Salt Lake City to deliver a lecture at a conference dealing with “The Aftermath of the Holocaust.”  Sitting in the courtesy van after arriving in Utah, I was seated next to a gentleman from Israel, also attending the conference.  As we talked, he asked me what my presentation would be about.  I told him the title of my paper was: Speaking of God After Auschwitz?”  He gave me an odd paternalistic look and then in the kindest solicitous voice said, “My good sir, there is no god.”  It was as if he were telling me as a child, there is no Easter rabbit or Santa Claus. 


Such events make me wonder if indeed, as a religious affirming person, I am wrong.  Have I invested my life in nonsense? Am I just another human being distressed by the thought of being alone in the world, fearful of death, and controlled by fear, imagining myself being accompanied by a parental character called, God, when there is nothing there?


This, of course, is our contemporary dilemma.  We hear the voices of those who are convinced there is no God and no meaning to our existence.  We wonder if they are right and we are wrong.  Those of us who think about such things know we must ask the questions, though they may cause doubts and even unbelief, because they bring integrity to our faith.  Our scriptures are aware of our existential plight: “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”
    

My sense is this:  If you’re going to be a person of honest faith, trusting without knowing for sure, you are going to have to live in the tension between belief and unbelief.  Some days you will think all this talk of God is part of some religious mythology made up and imagined by the ancients, while other days you will wonder if something of purpose is going on in our lives.  Such is the life of trusting in an invisible, mysterious, inscrutable, puzzling force at the heart of the universe, who we hope is for us and not against us.  

We are either fools afraid of our own shadows or among the wise who believe what seems ludicrous to believe.  Of course, we may be both.  Don’t run away from this tension, embrace it!

Why I Keep Studying the Holocaust

For the past forty years I have been obsessed by the Holocaust. It may be because my parents were survivors.  Maybe because I am Jewish.  Maybe because so many of my relatives were murdered over there.  Whatever it is, I teach the Holocaust in my classes.  I read what I can on the subject.  I have visited Auschwitz and Buchenwald.  I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C.  I am presently thinking of writing a book on the works of Elie Wiesel.
  

Why do I care so much about an event that is almost eighty years in our past?  Isn’t it enough?  What more can possibly be said or discovered?  Let it go.  But I cannot and will not.  Why?


Eighty years ago, in the heart of Europe something happened which revealed to us the light and the darkness of the human soul.  The Nazi revelation teaches us the capacities of the human being to commit evil and to be rationally convinced that doing so is right.  Yes, there have been other horrific events which could also function as a revelation but none so well documented and unprecedented as the Holocaust.


There is book entitled: The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz.  She describes how Nazis woke up each day, went to their jobs, day after day after day, murdered Jews and others in massive numbers and were convinced they were right.  Their consciences were clear.  Many were lifelong Christians who did not see any contradiction between the mass killing and the Gospel of their faith.  For all their training in religious faith, their love of classical music, their education steeped in the liberal arts, none of it prevented the evil which occurred. Some of Hitler’s most prominent supporters were university professors in the Humanities and Natural Sciences not to mention prominent Christian pastors, theologians and philosophers. 
   

The Holocaust is a warning to us about what can happen.


As time goes by and the survivors continue to die, will the memory of the Holocaust also diminish, decline and fade away?  Today, the younger generations tell us they have not heard of it. 


So, I cannot and will not let go because I hope against hope if we keep studying, it may cumulatively have some effect.  Maybe, some of my students will eventually teach the Holocaust themselves.  Maybe a student who became a Pastor will remember, in his or her sermon, to caution the congregation to be aware of anti-Judaism in the New Testament.  Maybe some will teach their children to remember.  Maybe some will not forget. I hope so.


If I keep studying and teaching the Holocaust it is because I am puzzled and dismayed by the amazing power of fear in our brains.  That fear seems to resist taming by love, religion, the arts, the sciences, theology and philosophy, psychological therapy, and of course common sense.  There is something in our brains that resists taming the fear of the stranger.


To be honest, remembering and studying the Holocaust may not prevent other mass murders.  Since 1945 there have been many catastrophes, from the Cambodian Khmer Rouge murders to the Rwandan genocide and much more.  The killing has not stopped.  We feel helpless and it may be hopeless, but that is precisely why we must do what we can never to forget.  It is why I cannot stop studying the Holocaust.  The old Jewish saying is correct, “In memory lies redemption.”

Remembering My Father

My father, Bernard Haar emigrated to America in 1947.  Having survived the camps which were part of the Nazi madness, he never spoke about his experience.   He married my mother Pola whom he had met in a DP camp in Germany. In New York City, he worked long hours, six days a week, as a clothing operator in a sweat shop but he hated the work.  And he constantly exhorted and encouraged me saying, “Get an education so you won’t have to do this.”  He came home from work each day tired, worn out, falling asleep on the living room chair after supper.


He was Jewish but not very religious though he never ceased to exhort me not to forget I was Jewish.   He could be stern, and he had a temper, but he could also be kind and caring with a humorous twinkle in his eyes.  When I was ill, he had this most wonderfully concerned and caring look on his face.   But, when I had not behaved well during the day, he could, when he came home from work, and at my Mom’s instigation, go after me with his belt.  Such was parenting in those days.


Despite all that, many days I would go to the Moshulu train station on Jerome Avenue and wait for him to come home from work.  I loved him but did not know him and I am not sure he knew what to make of me.  I was rebellious and questioned his authority.  It was the 1960’s and I embraced that era and was embraced by it.  


 He liked to play pinochle on the weekends in the park with “the old men.”  On Friday and Saturday nights he was gone late into the night to play poker with other survivors from those days.
  

At home he and my Mom argued in Yiddish and Polish a lot, mostly about money, my Dad’s constant card playing and who knows what else?  They did not have much and lived from paycheck to paycheck.  They had come from Europe but had never really acclimated to the States.  All their lives they lived in one-bedroom apartments and slept on a hide-a-bed in the living room, so their kids could have a real bed in the lone bedroom.


My father and I did not talk much, but we played Stratego, Rummy, went swimming together, and walked to Crotona park to have a catch.  He would throw the Spalding ball high in the air and I would try to catch it.  What a grand memory!  One time we went to Yankee stadium, but he did not enjoy the experience.


After I joined the Air Force, he would write me many letters exhorting me not to forget I was Jewish.  When I was twenty-one and at the height of my adolescent wisdom, nothing my parents said could dissuade me from what I knew was right; I decided to become a Christian.   My Dad tried to talk me out of my great wisdom.  But I was stubborn, foolish and determined. Only with age did I discover how wrong I had been and how I had hurt my parents, especially my Dad unnecessarily.  I am sorry, Dad.


When my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1979, I went home to see him.  We talked and I confessed that I now realized my mistaken decisions.  We went for a long walk on a beautiful sunny Fall day in the Bronx, father and son just talking.  When it was time for me to leave, and as the taxi waited outside the apartment building on Gates Place, we hugged, I said, “I love you Dad”; we kissed on the lips and said good-by.   There is so much more I still wanted to say to him.  

Up until the day he died, my father had black hair.  He looked twenty years younger than he was.  But when I told him, “Dad, you look young.”  He would routinely answer, “Yes, but I feel old.”


I hope my own children realize the fragility of life.  I hope we will talk and say what we want and need to say.  Life is indeed short.  You’re here and then you’re not here.  Btw, I think my Dad did the best he could with what he had and what had happened to him. I forgave him his human flaws as he forgave me mine.  Here’s to Bernard Haar.  May his memory be for a blessing.  I miss him.