I’m scared to write, but I
struggle to hold back. I’m sad and hurting and angry, but mostly just numb. I
keep thinking about what to tell my children who are here in Israel with me,
but that implies that I know what to tell myself.
At moments like this, the usual
answers of theology feel cheap. They are not enough. In some ways they feel
more like a defense mechanism to push off the pain than like answers. We live
in a society where, too often, the answer to sadness is an attempt to divert
ones attention, by joking, by giving “answers”, by changing the subject, and,
yes, by writing. It is as if we think that feelings are not to be felt.
Even worse, is the misguided
sense that we need to defend God. That somehow, He needs us to defend him. When
a child is hurting and angry, does a good father need his child to hold back
his feelings? Do we do God and the cause of religion any favor by pretending we
know why this happened? When our education leads us to think that we can give a
meaningful answer, or even worse, the
answer to a question that has plagued man since the beginning of time, we show
just how poor that education was. A good parent or teacher knows that
sometimes, the only answer is “I don’t know”. When it comes to God, how much
more so should we not pretend to have an answer?
Sometimes it is best to let
our children to see our tears flow down our cheeks, to feel that doubt and
struggle are not bad and wrong, to give them the comfort of seeing their role-models
struggle. If we learn texts that deal with this question, we must reinforce the
idea that it is just one approach, rather than a definitive answer. If we want
to turn to Torah, it should be to Tehillim or Iyov, and not some book which
claims to know the Jewish view of… well, anything. There are almost no cases
where there is a unified answer.
Our belief is most real if we
treat God as God, as being beyond the understanding of man, as big enough to
not be hurt by our anger or doubts, as One whose ways are not our ways. Let us
give our children and ourselves the education of being real with ourselves, of
dealing with our human emotions, of admitting the scary truth that we just
don’t know.
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