A few Friday nights ago the father of a close friend of mine was hit by a car and killed on his way home from Friday night services. Last night I got to speak to that friend for the first time since the tragedy. I was grateful that he was in the mood to talk about his thoughts and emotions; earlier he‘d told me that his moods have been very unpredictable, sometimes leaving him in the mood to talk and sometimes not. We talked about a number of different thoughts occupying his mind, regarding his experience of this tragedy and what the experience of the afterlife might be like for his father. There is one thing that we talked about that I’d like to mention because it can relate to the way in which we view the experience of the Jewish people in this week’s Parsha.
My friend shared with me that this experience has not made him lose faith in God, but it has increased his fear that maybe there is no meaning in this life, that what we do in this life doesn’t matter, and that there might not be an afterlife. While he hasn’t lost his faith, he is occupied by these doubts constantly.
I believe that his experience of simultaneously maintaining faith while harboring doubts is an important part of religious life. I don’t think that religious life should be easy or obvious at all times; it is hard to see God in our everyday lives and maintaining a meaningful spiritual life for ourselves should take some effort. To me, the idea of faith and doubt need to go hand in hand. To not have doubts about matters of belief is not what faith is about. Faith is about belief in matters that cannot be known absolutely. I believe that a religious experience based on knowing that something is true without a doubt misses the point of the religious experience. God has given us a choice when it comes to belief. By never revealing himself, he obviously leaves us with doubts. There may be times where we experience God without a doubt, but the overall religious perspective is not about a life without doubt.
In this week’s Parsha we read about one of the most obvious manifestations of God in this world, the miracles He performed when freeing the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, and the culmination of this event when God split the Red Sea, thus saving the Jewish people from the Egyptians. Right after the Jewish people safely arrive on the far bank of the Red Sea and the Egyptians are drowned, we read in chapter 14 verse 31, “Israel saw the great might which God had enacted on the Egyptians, and the people feared God. They believed in God and in Moses, his servant.” This verse seems to refute the point I had just made about God never revealing himself obviously, so as to give us no choice but to believe in his existence and involvement in our lives. But I don’t believe that this is the overall lesson in this week’s Parsha.
The splitting of the Red Sea and the song that the Jewish people sang in response to the experience of being saved are the main focus of the this week’s Parsha, but there is more in this week’s Parsha which can add some insight into how this relates to the point I was making about faith and doubt.
It is strange that immediately following the splitting of the Red Sea the Torah recounts to us a series of complaints that the Jewish people brought to Moses. When you read the text of the song that they sang after the splitting of the sea it seems that they had just experienced an obvious manifestation of God’s existence and involvement in taking care of them. How is it that the same people which could spontaneously sing about such an intense miraculous experience could begin doubting where their food and water would come from in the chapter immediately following that experience? You would think that having experienced God wage war for them (as the Torah describes in the text of the song that they sang) in such an obvious and miraculous manner, they would lose any doubts about God’s ability to sustain them in the desert.
By describing the Jewish people’s complaints and fears that they would die of thirst or starvation in the desert immediately after their miraculous salvation from the Egyptians, the Torah teaches us something important. No matter how obvious God is at the moment of our deepest religious experience it doesn’t preclude the possibility that we will have doubts at other points in our lives. If the Jewish people, who experienced the miracles that God performed for them while freeing them from Egypt, can doubt whether they would have food and water in the desert, then it makes sense that all of us will experience doubts with regard to God from time to time, no matter how deep our faith is.
These doubts are a necessary part of religious life. I believe that, by making our religious lives more challenging, these doubts also make it that much more rewarding. If faith were an easy black and white experience, it wouldn’t be such an intense and meaningful part of our lives. It is our ability to maintain our faith in the face of challenges that makes that faith a source of so much passion in our lives. It might be scary to embrace doubt as part of our inner spiritual lives, but doubt also has the potential to deepen our religious passions when viewed as a religious tool to be utilized, rather than a stumbling block to be avoided.
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