Bart Simpson in Sunday School, where the day's topic is Hell: “All right! I've sat through Mercy and I’ve sat through Forgiveness; finally we get to the good stuff!” When Bart plagues his Sunday School teacher with a string of questions about Heaven and Hell (“Wouldn’t you get used to Hell, like in a hot-tub? Will an amputated leg be reattached in Heaven?”), the teacher pleads: "I don’t know! All these questions! Is a little blind faith too much to ask?!"
– The Simpsons Archive by Gerry Bowler,
Canadian Nazarene College Contrary to the implication that blind faith is the most perfect sort, it strikes me during this High Holiday period that a religious faith which allows room for nagging questions and contradictions is a far more authentic faith for thinking beings struggling to make sense of a messy world.Whatever posture we may adopt, unless we close ourselves off from the world entirely, we see gaps between divine declaration, as expressed in Jewish liturgy, and reality. Questions arise in our minds, so we might as well face them, along the lines of “What doesn’t break you, will strengthen you.”WE stood aghast at the November 2008 deaths of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg, murdered along with others in Mumbai during one of the worst terrorist attacks to strike India in recent memory. We were plunged into grief by the slaughter of five members of the Fogel family, including a baby, in Itamar in March this year. We continue to hear about young children sexually abused, their innocence destroyed; about babies forgotten in parked vehicles, left to suffocate in the summer heat.I pick these examples from the endless list of tragedies we cannot avoid knowing about because there are those (I once called them “God’s policemen”) who loudly proclaim their certainty that untimely death and disaster come as divine retribution for the victims’ perceived sinful lifestyle.But the Holtzbergs were pious Chabad Jews beloved by everyone for their kindness and hospitality; their mission in India was to spread love of God and of yiddishkeit; and they had surely observed the preceding High Holidays with all the reverence and soul-searching due. Similarly the Fogels, whose murdered son Yoav, 11, was already showing signs of being an outstanding Torah scholar.As for the babies who died in those car-ovens, and the children whose innocence was forever destroyed, surely they were too young to have committed any sins at all?It is thus hard – in terms of reward and punishment in this world, the only one we really know; of which it is said (in Mishna Avot) that one moment in it is worth the whole of the world to come – to explain why they had to die.My only answer is that faith in God must coexist with these wrenching questions. Faith has little to do with explanation or proof. It’s the paradoxical and ennobling attempt to reach out and up to the ultimately unreachable.OUR liturgy declares that “Repentance, prayer and charity” exercised during the 10 Days of Repentance will “avert the stern decree” inscribed on Rosh Hashana and sealed on Yom Kippur. God is the Heavenly Judge weighing our actions over the past year, and however much we may have fallen short, our sincere repentance and moral behavior henceforth will be rewarded.For some, that has seemed to be the case. For others, it hasn’t.An Orthodox friend of mine in his 60s who lives in Tel Aviv was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer and is currently undergoing treatment. His doctors feel the disease was discovered early and that my friend has a good chance of living many more years.But these High Holidays, he feels angry and betrayed.“God let me down,” he says. “He has allowed me to get cancer, which I didn’t feel was my due. I feel I’ve lived a good life as far as my relationship with God and religion is concerned. We had a bargain: I would do my part, and He would do His.“The balance of the relationship has been upset.”Therefore – my friend is quite candid about this – these High Holidays, he is doing the judging, and he is punishing God.