Should Belief Protect Us From Anxiety, Sadness, Anger?

On Emmunah in Deuteronomy

And in the wilderness, where you saw how your God the Lord carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you traveled until you came to this place. Yet for all that, you have no faith in your God the Lord. (Deuteronomy 1:32)

Rashi understands Moses’ words as a reference to God’s promise that the people would enter the land of Canaan. This does not appear acceptable. I believe the plain meaning of the verse is that Moses referred to the miracles God had demonstrated when He lifted the whole Jewish people out of Egypt…They did not even believe the miracles they themselves had experienced. (Or HaChaim)

The Jews did not believe in Moses, our teacher, because of the wonders that he performed. Whenever anyone’s belief is based on wonders, [the commitment of] his heart has shortcomings, because it is possible to perform a wonder through magic or sorcery. All the wonders performed by Moses in the desert were not intended to serve as proof [of the legitimacy] of Moses’s prophecy, but rather were performed for a purpose. It was necessary to drown the Egyptians, so he split the sea and sank them in it. We needed food, so he provided us with manna. We were thirsty, so he split the rock [providing us with water]. Korach’s band mutinied against him, so the earth swallowed them up. The same applies to the other wonders. What is the source of our belief in Moses’s prophecy? The [revelation] at Mount Sinai. Our eyes saw, and not a stranger’s. Our ears heard, and not another’s. There was fire, thunder, and lightning. God entered the thick clouds; the Voice spoke to him and we heard, “Moses, Moses, go tell them the following:....” (Mishna Torah 8:1)

COWEN: Why do religious people cry when their loved ones die? Assuming they believe in heaven, of course. Not all religions do.

BLOOM: Yes. I think the answer is more . . . Some people say — and I have atheist friends — “Well, they’re hypocrites. They don’t really believe in heaven. If they really believed in heaven, they wouldn’t cry. They would rejoice. The same thing with their own death.”

I think there’s belief and there’s belief. I could have a very confident belief in heaven. Maybe I’m even 100 percent sure that I’ll go to heaven when I die, but when faced with my own death, there are other systems that lead to tremendous fear. (Conversations with Tyler)

What is “belief?” At the beginning of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people that they lacked—and still lack—belief in God. Presumably, they have no excuse, they should know better. This is a people that has witnessed countless miracles. Plus, if Moses is excoriating them, it must mean they are responsible for their disbelief. How can you live to see so many supernatural events, and experience so many life-changing moments of grace and benevolence, and not feel grateful to God? How can you travel around accompanied by a pillar of cloud and not feel protected and safe? How can you stand at the foot of Mount Sinai and then carry on talking about it as if it was just another weekend of seeing Phish perform at the Sphere? “The special effects were really something. Recommend.”

Rashi explains: the people were not in doubt about the miracles they saw, but about the veracity of God’s promise which had yet to be fulfilled. Faith is faith in the future. No amount of wonder could take away the people’s anxiety about the future. This insight pairs powerfully with Heidegger’s description of human existence as fundamentally anxious. The open-endedness of the future, combined with an awareness of my own finitude and my responsibility for this one life that I can’t repeat, is weighty, indeed. Heidegger argues that our anxiety can become “unshakable joy” only if we face down our fundamental anxiety, and even then we never quite get there. Enlightenment is not for the living (which is why ascetics seek to approximate the dead). Doubt, dread, burden, are baked-in to the experience of temporality and vitality. Read through a phenomenological lens, the people have not sinned in their disbelief so much as they have demonstrated their stubborn humanity. God can be obvious, and even this would not make the future more secure for them.

Or HaChaim disagrees: the people doubted not just the future, but the past and the present. They went through the desert in a state of skepticism. Moses asks, “Did you not feel held by God as He carried you?” But the question answers itself: a child that is too small to walk on its own does not have the meta-consciousness to appreciate its dependence. Babies cry. It’s expected. You can’t reason with a baby and say “Why didn’t you believe in Me?” A baby wants to be held, needs to be held, but only knows this need when it is unfulfilled. The baby comes into a sense of self only by being deprived. The “I” emerges only with the “Not-I.”

The people lack belief because they lack maturity. Here’s an irony: the child that walks independently can believe, but the child that needs to be carried cannot. Said differently: Spiritual distance from God enables belief in God, while spiritual proximity to God may obstruct it. Being carried by God is a form of intimacy in one sense, but it’s also a form of distance in another: without a real separation from God, and space between themselves and God, the people don’t know what’s carrying them. The people can’t know God unless they know themselves. And how can they know themselves when they’ve spent hundreds of years in a state of bondage?

Maimonides focuses less on the people’s failure to believe and more on the insufficiency of miracles and wonders to drive sustainable belief. Sorcerers can do wonders, too. Thus, miracles are not a differentiator. Believing in God as a marginally better sorcerer misses the point. God needs to be different by orders of magnitude. What accounts for that? According to Maimonides, it’s the giving of the Torah and the revealing of Godself at Sinai. Maimonides also makes an astute observation that the people’s belief in God and their belief in Moses as a prophet are correlated. Low belief in God means low belief in Moses and vice versa. The experience of Sinai, therefore, encodes the authority of both—it is a Revelation of God, but also a Revelation of Moses as a teacher and custodian of God’s lineage. Thus any rebellion against Moses or doubt in Moses is fundamentally a doubt in God. Where other moments might have made Moses incidental, Sinai makes Moses essential. There is no Jewish people without Moses the Teacher, the Lawgiver, the Guide, the Prophet.

We can infer a corollary of Maimonides’s point: loss of authority in spiritual teachers leads to loss of divine authority. Often, we don’t stop believing in God, because God fails us, we stop believing in God, because his representatives do. This raises the stakes for teachers, turning every moment into an opportunity for a Kiddush Hashem or a Chillul Hashem (sanctification or desecration of the Name); but it’s also a recipe for failure. Teachers are human; they have biases and shortcomings. Inevitably, they’ll disappoint. Should we hang our belief in God on their ability to meet our unrealistic expectations? Our expectation that they not only represent God, but be as perfect as God? Wonders have a short shelf life, but so do teachers. And here is the point: we need a way to access God—we need peak events and experiences to wake us up—but the only belief that is sustainable is one that is not reliant or conditional upon externalities. Believing in God on condition that we enter the Promised Land (on our clock) is a recipe for failure. Believing in God on condition that all who speak in God’s name are inspirational and upstanding is a recipe for failure.

The death of Moses, which is the subject of Deuteronomy, reminds the people—just as it reminds Moses himself—that he is not God. Thus, the correlation of God and Moses is not perfectly 1:1. Rather, Moses himself becomes a stand-in for all the human teachers who must, in their own limited way, partner with God in cultivating belief in a world that is structurally set up to make belief difficult. The death of Moses, which corresponds to the entry of the people into the Promised Land, marks a new phase in the people’s development—instead of being carried, they will have to learn to walk.

It is a tenet of Maimonide’s principles of faith that “lo kam b’yisrael k’Moshe od”—there was never a prophet as great as Moses. And likewise, there was no event in Jewish history as profound as the splitting of the sea or the receiving of the Torah. But let’s not romanticize these singularities. Despite—or even because of—Moses’s greatness, the people lacked belief. Despite—or even because of—the powerful immediacy of Sinai, the people lacked belief.

Belief is not about intellectual ascent to a creed. Belief—Emmunah—is about existential trust. It’s a spiritual, not just intellectual, virtue. In fact, we often see that intellectuals lack trust, focusing on their own reason and critical thinking to offer them security. On the flip side, spiritualists who lack intellectual curiosity—perhaps out of fear that critical thinking will lead to disbelief, or perhaps simply out of fear of feeling inadequate—do not know what they believe in. Emmunah offers a middle way between the fundamentalist intuitions of the anti-rational and baby-out-with-the-bath-water rationalist skepticism. We can’t get it when we’re in the desert, being carried by God and Moses. We have to cultivate it as our self-reliance and sense of accomplishment and individuation enables a deeper sense of trust in God and dependence on God.

The Law requires and enables Emmunah. There is extrinsic value in observing the Torah, whether or not we have Emmunah. But without Emmunah, we will remain in a state of anxiety and neuroticism. We’ll remain in a state of psychological bondage and our culture and institutions will reflect that bondage. Emmunah, along with Bitachon, is the Jewish version of Mindfulness. It is not an empty mind, but a mind that trusts. This trust is subtle: It is a trust in God let enables us to trust in life, but also a trust in God that prevents us from placing too much trust in any one person, institution, or idea. One can believe God, and God’s world, is fundamentally good and nonetheless cry out in pain and protest. Why? Because crying and lamenting are also part of the goodness of the world God created. Trust doesn’t mean “Don’t be sad” or “Don’t be angry” it means trusting that by expressing our sadness and our discontent we’ll find a joy and a healing on the other side. Moses himself begins Deuteronomy in anguish. In so doing he readies himself for acceptance and models Emmunah.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh