Can You Be Jewish Without Believing in God?

Watch and Listen

I never get picked by the magician.

The hypnotist steers clear of me as well.

I've never encountered ghosts or spirits, and the one time I went

to a legit fortune teller, he was unable to tell me my future.

I also hated sleep no more, which somehow feels related.

What I'm trying to say is for whatever reason, I appear to be

closed off to the spiritual realm.

I also happen not to really believe in the spiritual realm though, which came first

me not believing or me not experiencing.

I know not.

I recognize this is not the case for everyone.

My wife, in fact, weekly shout out to Courtney, is highly attuned to

the spiritual, which is as real and true and experience for her as it

has been a non-experience for me.

I tell you all this as a preamble to what I really want to talk about,

which is that for the majority of my life I have been for all intents and

purposes and agnostic, which means I don't know if there's a God or not.

I have never been able to say, yes, I fully believe in God, nor would I

call myself an atheist, which is also too definitive a conclusion to draw.

I don't feel there's enough evidence to convince me either

way, and that's faith, right?

Believing in something that's impossible to know for certain.

I am just a person who has a really hard time doing that.

I am however aspirationally spiritual.

I wish I believed in God completely.

I recognize the great comfort believing in a divine presence provides Who wouldn't

want to feel guided by a sense of order In a chaotic universe, a higher power

in a world full of trials and dangers, our mortality can be terrifying to face.

So who wouldn't want to believe in a spiritual realm waiting

for us on the other side?

I wish I did, but at least today I don't.

I believe when the lights go out, that's it Show's over sad.

I know one more thing.

None of what I'm about to say is meant to convince you of anything.

I'm in no way invested in your personal connection to God that is between you

and God has no bearing on me or my connection to God or my Jewishness,

or frankly any of my business.

I'm just presenting you with my truth because I gotta write

one of these every week, and I like keeping it real with y'all.

One question I've had since childhood is, if God is infinite, how is it

possible that the universe was created?

Which suggests to me that either God popped into existence at the same time

the universe did, or alternatively was hanging around doing something

else until it randomly decided to create this plane of existence.

And yes, I just called God an it, because if God does in fact exist, it

surely surpasses any possible concept of human-centric gender classification.

Next, I find it difficult to believe in a God who hears and answers prayers

since in my experience, no prayer ever stopped anybody marked for death

from dying, and the explanation that God needed that person sooner, which

I readily admit, I have absolutely no way of disproving and hope is true.

Feels to me like a human invention to ease our grief and provide

some meaning to our sorrow.

I don't find God in the Bible, which most scholars assert, was written

by a number of different scribes in ancient times, putting the

words of the divine to parchment.

I find wisdom and morals and immense value, but not proof of God.

My very logical brain can't help but ask, well, why was God so vocal in those days?

Literally talking directly to prophets only to apparently go

silent for the rest of time.

And if someone today said God was speaking directly to them, most of

us would think they belong in an institution not inscribed their words

in a book to be read every year.

I obviously can't prove God didn't speak to Moses or Jeremiah or

Jonah, but I do wonder what God saw in the humans of that era that he

apparently never saw in us again.

Many people see God in the miracles we witness every day, the perfection of a

flower or a sky full of rainbows, how mothers bodies change to accommodate

and grow their children inside them.

Facts of nature that seem to be far too perfect and complex to be random.

And yet for me, I think of a quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who said, God is an ever

receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

Centuries ago, humans thought God moves celestial bodies in the sky around

earth, which was the center of all creation until science proved otherwise.

If there came a time one day in the future when we could explain every scientific

phenomenon in the known world, would that change the way we think about God?

And when I think about our place in the universe, yeah, I'm one of those people.

I understand us to be tiny specks, living on a tiny speck floating

silently in an ever expanding, all encompassing infinite ocean of blackness

dotted with stars and planets and other cosmic detritus stretching in

every direction forever at distances.

So uncomprehending far our minds literally cannot fathom them.

What does a hundred billion light years away look like?

Probability would suggest with the infinite opportunities presented

by an infinite universe, that there must be life out there somewhere.

I, of course, have absolutely no way of proving this, but our galaxy,

the Milky Way, has somewhere between a hundred, 400 billion stars,

likely half of which have planets.

There are trillions of such galaxies in the observable universe to

say nothing of the unobservable.

So even if life is incredibly rare, say one in 10 billion planets that would still

leave potentially millions of planets with life, and even if there was only one,

God would've created that life, right?

In which case either God has been withholding from us the existence

of our extra planetary brothers and sisters who should ostensibly

be as important to God as we are.

Or the specialness and singularity of humanity upon which belief in God

is based is not as it appears to be.

Mostly when I try to look for God, what I find are humans vulnerable, flawed,

lovable humans with limited time on this earth looking for meaning and

reassurance and safety in a world that inherently lacks all of these things.

Of course we turn to the divine.

Of course, we look for a beacon in the dark, a reason for it all.

And if this sounds like I'm trying to diminish your

worldview, I promise I'm not.

I'm just explaining mine.

I also realize that some of you may be thinking this man hosts a show

called Being Jewish and doesn't even believe in God charlatan imposter.

But for me, the freedom to question and doubt is part of what I love and

appreciate so much about being Jewish.

I can do all those things, even be encouraged to do them by our tradition

and still be a Jew, made in the image of God whether I believe in God or

not, and that's a beautiful thing.

I also hope I haven't made you feel a need to be defensive.

If you believe in God, I don't even disagree with you or question

your holding of that belief.

In fact, I feel inspired by those of you who do have the ability to put your

faith in something that by its very nature, can never be proven only believed.

I think there is a beauty and a power and a tapping into something

there that I simply have not found the ability to do, at least not yet.

Funny enough, my Bar mitzvah portion vala tells the story of Jacob wrestling

with the angel, literally struggling with an extension of the divine and

coming out a more complete, more elevated person on the other side,

no longer just Jacob, but Israel more himself and closer to God than ever.

Maybe that being my portion isn't just funny enough.

Maybe that's, God, maybe there's something I'm holding onto that I

need to find a way to let go of.

Or maybe my being this way is God working through me.

Because being the person I am enables me to do whatever

I do of value in this world.

Who knows?

Maybe one day with enough wrestling of my own,

I'll finally find the answer I'm looking for, God willing.