It's Shabbat afternoon as I write, a time that I hardly ever write at all, and NEVER anything that has to do with work -- in my lucky case, the joyful work of noodling our Jewish community along its path. But what I think will follow this sentence is a kind of a prayer, a little mincha offering on the very subject of path, which has been the subject of this Shabbat's contemplations for me.
I spent much of today reading a book (Turbulent Souls by Stephen J. Dubner) about two young people during World War II who convert from Judaism to Catholicism and their son, the author, who ultimately returns to the religion of his grandparents. In the end, of the book anyhow, it is a conversation with, of all people, John Cardinal O'Connor of New York which seals the author's decision. The Cardinal speaks of: "... the clearly articulated teaching of the Second Vatican Council about the primacy of an informed conscience, a conscience which has been informed by way of thinking, of discussion, of reading, of study, of prayer. Then the deliberate decision that, okay, I know Catholicism, or I know this faith or I know that faith. I know what the Church teaches, I have studied it respectfully, I know what the papal encyclicals say, I have prayed over it, and I am convinced in conscience that God wants me to be this or to be that, to be Jewish, to be Lutheran, whatever it is. So I think that [you should] tell your mother that you have tried to study this, that you have prayed about it, that it is not just a revolt or a rejection, this is not a dismissal of what you don't understand -- that it is where you think God wants you to be, an informed Jew." "It is where you think God wants you to be..." Right now as I write we are getting ready for Passover. By the time the April Megillah hits the stands, we will be into the period of the omer, the fifty-day period between Passover and Shavuot, between the Red Sea and Sinai. Clearly a season for spiritual travel, whether across the Sinai desert or seven times through the lower seven sefirot, as the kabbalists teach. And somehow today it strikes me that each of us has taken such a complicated, individual road to the beliefs and understandings, and areas of confidence and doubt,allegiances that we hold right now. It is such a profound -- one might even say "miraculous" -- process that leads each of us to whatever our own faith turns out to be. I've often thought that in truth every human being has his or her own religion, no two alike, as different, in fact, as our thumbprints or our personalities. And that this itself might be, as the medievalists would say, a bit of evidence of the existence of [a wise and humorous] God.
Sometime ago I had a thought which startled me: that people don't believe differently because some people see ghosts and some see extraterrestrials and some see angels and still others see geometrical patterns. No, we all live in the same world. All the data is held in common -- we all see everything that there is to see. But we ourselves are all different. And we each select, out of the impossibly vast field of data, to be moved by certain experiences, certain thoughts, certain possibilities. We each put it together in our own way, out of the vast interplay of inner and outer complexities.
More recently, just before this past Rosh Hodesh, in fact, I caught a glimpse of the many, many different people -- my parents and friends and teachers and people I find myself in community with, and even the occasional stranger on the proverbial train (not to even mention the wealth of Jewish teaching) -- who have at some crucial moment given me a piece of advice. "Don't be so hard on your boss -- he's doing the best he can," a friend said years ago. "This is how I tell the difference between a passion and an addiction," said a therapist once. "It's okay to let a good man go," said another friend. Each of those sentences changed my direction at some crucial moment -- helped me to make a decision, but also touched how I understood the world. Imagine a map, projected through the fourth dimension of time, which shows every place you've ever been, every word said to you. There have been thousands of turning points, thousands of moments which have formed us. We move, and are moved, through our lives in such a complex way. And out of it all we form, and continually reform and modify, a series of understandings that we might call faith -- whether faith in a God or in our own moxie -- understandings of what is and what will get us through the rest of the way.
In once sense each of us has chosen, in another each of us has been led, to whatever our faith is in the present. It is a remarkable -- one might even say "miraculous" -- fact that each of us puts it together somehow. No one is without understanding, no one without faith in something -- partly of our own creation, partly an accident, or a gift. This season of the omer is a time of preparation before the awakening at Sinai. Or that's how our tradition describes this time from 16 Nisan to 5 Sivan. A good time, perhaps, to reflect, as the Cardinal adjures us, on the informed conscience, on where God or life or our own soul wants us to be, on the path that has brought us this far into the desert and maybe even on what the next step may turn out to be.
Copyright 1999 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 04/10/99 (rge)