Stubborn Faith as Part of a Current

Eugene Mihaly, A Song to Creation: A Dialogue with a Text (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975) 63-66.

Mihaly’s book has a dialogue between a Gnostic and a rabbi, which is based on primary texts. The Gnostic asks how the Jews can believe that a good God created and governs the world when there is so much suffering. For the Gnostic, that shows the world must be held captive by an evil Demiurge, who created the cosmos. Here are two parts of the rabbi’s response:

“How frightfully difficult it is not to be overwhelmed, shattered by the hammer blows of immediate, raw experience? How inhuman, heartless, ‘As the infants and babes faint…in the streets of the city, as their life is poured out on their mothers’ bosom’ (Lam. 2:12), to urge encouragingly, ‘Focus on the could-be; perceive the shall-be!’ A hollow mockery! A colossal, cruel joke! How shall one with even a vestige of human compassion stifle the cry, ‘You are a monster, God! Either you are a fiend or you do not exist. If you ever were, you are now impotent, dead. It is all a meaningless hoax!’ And yet we persist. The anvil ‘tempered in the furnace of pain’ refuses to buckle. We adore ‘the God of life, the king who delights in life.’ Stubborn, stiffnecked–even Moses, our faithful shepherd, called us that—fanatic, foolhardy perhaps, but not naive.”

“The problems remain. They even become ever more complex. The original Adam was not the only one to spend the first night of his life in mourning for the sun—as tradition records—certain that it had set never to reappear. Most of us echo Adam’s lament with each threatening cloud. At dusk, as darkness descends—an increasingly intense darkness, it seems—endless generations bewail the parting day, convinced that night has fallen forever. And before sunrise, where shall we find the evidence to prove them wrong? In the face of the chaos of day-to-day experience, we stand perplexed, shaken, our dreams a shambles. We scream our bitter disillusion, our pain…We curse and blaspheme. But somehow, as a formal ritual at first, and then—after we grope toward perspective—as the profoundest residue of our experience, we sing the song of our history.”

Despair. Stubbornly clinging to faith. Believing without evidence that the sun will rise and things will get better. Yet, not doing so alone, since we stand with others in the past and the present who have leaned on God and experienced his goodness.