Hypothetical Quarks and Handy Religion

Kol Nidre Sermon, 5768

by Rabbi Alexandra Wright

One probably shouldn’t even mention the word ‘kiddush’ at a Yom Kippur service, especially at the very moment of the beginning of the fast, but it was at one Shabbat morning Kiddush quite recently, that I was approached by a tiny little girl who whispered into my ear: “What does God look like?”  What I answered probably isn’t worth the paper on which this sermon is written, caught on the hoof, as it were, without a properly thought out theological response.  Suffice to say, I think she went away from that Kiddush more satisfied by the fish balls and challah than any answer I might have given her.  Reflecting on her question afterwards, it seemed to me that this little girl was taking her first steps in a process which might lead her towards what we might call faith, or perhaps trust in God – a better translation of the Hebrew word - emunah, or could steer her towards a more questioning doubtful approach to the existence of God, or indeed scepticism and rejection of God.  All that will depend on the answers she receives or discovers for herself and how those questions are managed by her parents and teachers and others who come into contact with her.   At four or five, she wants to know that God is real, definable and certain.  By eleven or twelve, as she begins her study of physics she will begin to discover that even ultimate physical entities cannot be captured in any single portrayal or definitively conceptualised, and the question, what does God look like, perhaps now – how do I know that there is a God, an ultimate supernatural reality, is as bound and limited by language and definition as the hypothetical quark of her studies in science.

We live in an age of religious revival.  That surprising fact was borne home to me recently at an international Think Tank in Geneva at the headquarters of the Red Cross Red Crescent Societies, meeting to examine and learn about the diversity of faiths and to explore how religion might help humanitarian aid agencies perform their work.  In the rest of the world –Asia, South and North America, the Middle East, religion and faith are waxing, and, as it was forcibly pointed out to me, only Western Europe remains out on a limb of disbelief and scepticism.  What lies at the centre of European thought are the humanistic, liberal principles of individual choice, reason, human rights, freedom, democracy, egalitarianism, and their purpose in furthering the progress of humanity and creating a solid social ethic is not to create an empty rhetoric, but to form a sound reality of hope.   Such principles are rooted not in abstract, theological or ideological thought, but in ourselves.  They emerge from our human nature, our experience, our history and culture.   They may assert that we take responsibility for our own destiny, but at the same time they are driven by our individual human needs and interests.  Humanism places humanity, the unbreakable self at the very centre of the universe, as the source of faith and trust.

But what happens when the self breaks?  What happens when the cheerful confidence and even hubris that maintains our bubble of self-confidence bursts?  When someone close to us becomes seriously ill?  When our partner breaks down and is diagnosed with depression or endures a psychotic episode?  What happens when close relationships break down?  Or when we lose our parents or partners?  What becomes of us when we lose our jobs – when what we have invested in past years, comes to nothing?  Or when our children grow up and leave home, or our friends retire to warm southern climes, or we lose our savings and find ourselves struggling to make ends meet?  Isn’t it true that all the freedoms in the world, all the sensible reasoning and choice, and all those values that sat so well and easily when we were healthy, wealthy, confident, working individuals suddenly become elusive, often hard-won targets in an unequal, institutionally imperfect world.

Temperamentally, some of us cope well with such crises – we fall back on our own resources of strength and the desire to move on.  But most of us will struggle, our confidence will sag, self-doubt and self-criticism assert their supremacy, loneliness will take hold, and our health and emotional equilibrium will suffer as we survey the unbearable uncertainties of the future.

And here, you might expect me to argue that religion might just come in handy.  That there might be something more to life than a secular yardstick of values, the preservation of traditional ethnicity, building community, trusting in reason and putting faith in our friends and family, if they are around us. You might expect me to offer the antidote to uncertainty, namely the certainty of belief in a good God, who guides the universe and His creatures with love, who lifts us beyond the mundane into the realm of mystery, of trust in an unseen creator, guardian, deliverer, judge, arbiter, witness, father, mother, shepherd, sovereign God, source of all life, who one day will take us away into the life that knows no end.  Is that not, surely, what one expects to hear on Kol Nidre?  That these exhortations and reflections should flow seamlessly from the prayers which we have just recited, affirming our belief in a supreme being, gracious, merciful and just, who pardons our sins and sweeps away our transgressions, who calls us in love and draws us near to His presence, who commands us, blesses us, gives graciously to us, who redeems us and purifies us, makes atonement for us and inscribes us in the book of life?

There is a part of me that longs to affirm the honest truth of this language, to convince you that by this time tomorrow night our sins will be forgiven, that in the coming year all will be well, that God will make good, will console us in our loneliness and repair the breaches in our hearts.  But can I, in all honesty, present you with this panacea to life’s difficulties.  I do not believe in a ‘prozac’ God, who can suddenly medicate our depressions, or just as quickly heal the world’s disorders.  Prayer, like music is sometimes too painful to engage in.  To listen requires openness, stillness, the ability to respond, to be moved, to lay aside the fragments of our preoccupations, our disillusion and unhappiness.

“Even faith requires faith” writes one Jewish commentator (Norman Lamm, The Shema; Spirituality and Law in Judaism as exemplified in the Shema).  Or as Graham Greene put it in an interview given shortly before his death on what he called the “authentic reportage” of the Gospels – it was this that “enabled me to doubt my doubt” about certain religious beliefs.  Such honesty betrays something provisional, in motion, changing, creating in us an endless struggle, as though our faith, our doubts, perhaps even our absence of faith, in some way mirrors the constant motion of the earth’s slow turning on its axis.  There are times when we are bathed in sunlight, and times in the shadow of darkness.

That is what I enjoyed and appreciated so much in Roger Crane’s play The Last Confession.   Not only the Schadenfreude of seeing the ugly, interior politics of the Vatican laid bare, but more subtly weaving its way through what was a thriller and inquisition, a study of the vacuum of faith, the presence of religious doubts that gave way to a tentative sense of purpose and belief.  There at the very beginning was Cardinal Benelli, confessing his guilt for the murder of Pope John Paul I, dead after 33 days in office; his guilt lying in having manoeuvred the gentle, pastoral Archbishop of Venice into the office of the papacy to avert the influence of the Vatican’s more aggressive and conservative reactionaries.  “I have many doubts,” avows Benelli to his Confessor before he dies, “Where do God’s plans end and man’s begin?  Where is the line between divine providence and human intervention?”  Beneath “the marbled dome of the Vatican, somewhere in the countless bureaucratic struggles” he says, “my faith has slipped away.”  It comes as an understated criticism of religious institutions that sometimes lose their way and their purpose, taking their clergy with them.  The Confessor will turn this statement on its head: “You abandoned God?” he asks.  “I think God abandoned me” replies Benelli.  It is when Benelli recalls seeing the new pope, full of humility and gentleness speaking to his people of charity, justice and love, and witnesses how much he is loved there, but feared by those in power, that he begins “to feel a sense…of purpose.”   “It reaffirmed your belief in God” says the Confessor.  “I began to believe in man” replies Benelli, inspired and moved by the simplicity and pastoral care of his pope who tells him that faith can be regained through others’ belief.

And perhaps it is at that point about the belief in others that our struggle and journey begins.  To believe in others – is a statement which flies in the face of the biblical teaching from the Psalms: “Do not rely on earthly rulers, on human beings who have no power to save.  Their breath departs, and they are dust; that very day their plans perish”; “It is better to take refuge in God than to rely on human beings.  It is better to take refuge in God than to rely on those in power” (Psalm 146.3 and 118).  I watched the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue, Jonathan Sacks sit on a roof-top overlooking the Houses of Parliament engaged in conversation with Tony Blair as part of his Rosh Hashanah message this year and heard him say: “After Auschwitz, I cannot believe in human beings.”  And I asked myself, where is the point from which our faith is nurtured if not from the trust we place in others?  As tiny children from the trust we place in our parents, in our teachers and friends, our family and professional colleagues?  If we believe that humanity is created in the image of God, should we not begin, at least, by placing our trust in those whose love and concern for us mirrors the love and graciousness God bestows on us.

Faith requires courage and openness.  It does not exist at a single point, does not remain unchanged, it is not a certitude, but rather a process, a conversation, an encounter.  We may fear being part of that encounter and turn away from it, avowing disbelief and scepticism, we may equally fear, as those who put their faith in God, turning aside from our faith to find…nothing.  We are Liberal Jews and in that respect we inherit a respectable tradition of questioning, doubting, challenging and accepting change.   Doubt is not “the most insupportable of all ends, worse than death itself” as de Tocqueville wrote, it is part of our existence.  It is what challenges our prejudices, prompts us to question, to move forward.

This coming day of Yom Kippur will engage each one of us in a profound encounter – with each other, with language, with the imagery and symbolism of our liturgy, with our music, with the beauty of this Sanctuary, with our bodies as we starve ourselves of food and drink, with an age-old tradition that stretches back to the days of the Temple when the High Priest stood in the Holy of Holies, dressed simply in white and confessed the sins of himself, his household and the House of Israel, and ultimately with that deepest part of our selves which some people call God.   What will be the nature of that conversation, that confession and encounter?  How will we open ourselves to the possibility of faith, or even the possibility of doubt?   And once we have opened the window to look for the ‘Other’, to feel the brush of something – a Presence, a voice; once we have listened hard, what then?  What will emerge for each one of us this time tomorrow night?  Who knows?  The door is open, all we can do tonight is to ask God to “hear our prayer and to have mercy upon us.”

A quark is a particle.  Quarks make up protons and neutrons, but they have never been detected.  The existence of quarks has only been deduced from the patterns seen in the properties of other particles.

Rabbi Alexandra Wright

The Liberal Jewish Synagogue