Don’t Ask Me if I Believe in God

A Guest Post from Sarah Einstein

So, this week, I’m featuring my first guest column, and I’ve asked Sarah Einstein, author of MOT: A Memoir, to contribute. Sarah has helped me (or tried to) figure out a few things over the years. She’s a wonderful writer, a terrific colleague, and a great friend, and so without further ado . . . .

It’s a question I don’t even ask myself, and I don’t think it’s a very Jewish question.

Tom wrote to me recently to ask if I’d be interested in writing a guest post. I said yes because I’m also a perplexed Jew, but also because he asked me to write about one of my favorite topics. Or he almost did. What he actually said was, “I’d be interested to see a post on your whole Judaism without God approach.” But the thing is, my approach isn’t actually “without” God. Rather, it’s Judaism without worrying about the question of whether or not God exists.

When I’m asked to explain what this means, my (maybe a little glib) answer is that I know there is this theory that is supposed to explain everything called string theory. I even have a really simplistic understanding of what string theory supposes and what some of its implications are. (Not all Einsteins are geniuses.)

I know a lot more about string theory, then, than I do about God. I don’t even know God’s name.

I have absolutely no idea if string theory is promising science or conjecture on the way to being discarded for a better model. I don’t understand the math used to postulate its theorems (or even for certain that I’m using the word theorems correctly here). I know what I know about it from people who do understand it, writing articles for dummies like me to read so we can have just the barest glimmer of insight into the questions they are asking and the answers they are proposing.

This is also how I know about our understanding of what we mean when we say “God” (though I prefer it when we say “Hashem” to distinguish it from all the other versions of God that people say are the same, but which I think are not). Much smarter people than I will ever be, who spent their entire lives wrestling with questions of Torah, also spent/spend their lives thinking (and sometimes writing) about it for dummies like me. Rambam and Rashi, Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, the scholars of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, Levinas and Buber… I have centuries of sages and scholars to read, who explain to me in ways I can (sometimes) understand the smallest sliver of things which are actually beyond my ken.

Who am I to decide on the existence, or non-existence, of something I can’t even name?

But there is another thing at work here, and that is my strong sense when we talk about “belief” and “faith,” we have let something not very Jewish creep into our way of thinking, and since I value Jewish habits of mind very much, I think we should draw that line clearly and distinctly.

I grew up in West Virginia. Christians I knew would say they’d “found God,” or “come to God.” They would be reborn. They were Christians because God was a question they answered in the affirmative.

For Jews, I’ve always understood, God is a given. We’re Jews from the start, no rebirthing required. Our question is not “Is there a God?” but “How do we follow God’s laws, particularly in the rabbinic era?” We don’t turn to God for inspiration to answer that question; we go to our rabbis, we commit to Daf Yomi, we think on the weekly parsha, we read Tom’s newsletter. And this, I think, is what gives us our strength. Faith is a thing that one can lose unwillingly. Being one of the people of Israel is not.

This may be why, when I’m asked this question, it is always “Do you believe in God?” and not “Do you believe in Hashem,” even when the interlocutor is Jewish and would, in normal conversation, use “Hashem” when speaking with another Jew.

So don’t ask me if I believe in God, because I only imagine the possibility that God does not exist when you ask that question. The rest of the time I just go about my business, living in this universe which may or may not be explainable through string theory, may or may not have been created by God in six days, maybe both, and my days are not changed by truth of either. I start my day with Daf Yomi, end it with the Shema, and on most days I stay out of trouble in between. That’s already a lot because I’m prone to getting in or causing trouble. So, who am I that you should ask me if God exists? That’s a question for more learned people than I will ever be. Go ask them. There are entire libraries filled with their answers.