By Yeshaia Blakeney
I want to share a story about this very difficult concept we call belief, or faith. These are tough concepts. I'm not going to get into them fully now, I just want to share a story to illuminate some of these ideas. So there's a game called stump the rabbi. It's when a bunch of people get together and try to get a rabbi to admit that he really doesn't believe in god. With my keen philosophical mind, I'm pretty adept at this game. So one day about a year ago, I cornered our Rabbi Mark Borovitz in front of a small crowd and said:
“Rabbi, do you BELIEVE in G-d?” “Yes,” he replied.
“Do you agree that inherent in belief is doubt?” “Yes,” he replied.
So, do you ever doubt the existence of God?
The room went silent, I felt I had done it, I was even afraid I might have pushed him too far, there was no way out. The Rabbi was finally going to have to admit the truth of his own faith, I wanted to run and hide; morph into a fly on the wall even though I was already there.
And then he said this amazing thing. “No.”
How can that be? He just admitted he had doubts! He then said, “I sometimes doubt G-d's intentions, but I never doubt the existence of G-d.”
It took a whole year since then to fully grasp that simple statement. That it was an elevated struggle, not struggling with belief in G-d but really wrestling with G-d's intentions inside of ourselves and in the world. It was about his relationship to G-d not G-ds existence.
So my hope this week is that we all can elevate what we struggle with, so that we can struggle with higher and higher things!
