Q&A: As Part of Reflections on the First Book
As Part of Reflections on the First Book
Question
I read a Facebook post this week by Ilai Ofran that touches a bit on our discussion.
I’m curious what you would say about the core of his argument: that proving the existence or non-existence of God is not what causes people to leave religion.
And here is what he wrote:
The greatest question of faith in the previous generation was: "Where was God in the Holocaust?"—because if there is a God, then how could there be a Holocaust? And if there was a Holocaust, then how could there be a God?
This tremendous question dismantled the spiritual world of many people and caused quite a few Jews to stop observing Torah and commandments. I met quite a number of people who testified about themselves that their faith in God went up in the smoke of the crematoria of accursed Poland. Countless articles, sermons, and classes tried to offer a solution to this question, and like every question that has several answers, apparently no convincing answer was found.
A few decades passed. The question still stands, but among people of my generation, with its many formerly religious members, and also among my students, male and female, I do not know even one person for whom this question is what caused him to lose his faith or stop observing commandments. Not because everyone found a satisfactory answer, but because the question burns far less intensely for us. The Holocaust has gone from a bleeding wound to a memory of the past—from an existential upheaval to a theoretical intellectual discussion.
For me, this is an important educational insight: people generally do not lose their faith, or become heretics, because of a "pure" philosophical question, but because of a difficulty that touches the deepest strings of their soul and the burning point within them. In the previous generation that was the Holocaust. In our generation, much less so.
The question of faith of our generation, with a capital T and a capital Q, is: "How can it be that the Torah forbids a person from realizing his natural inclination?" If God detests male homosexual relations, then why did He create men who are attracted to their own sex? And if God created them that way, how can it be that He would forbid them to realize their love or build a family?
I have been involved in education for quite a few years, and I have not found any worldview-related question that agitates our generation and weakens its faith like this one.
Here too, similarly to the question of the previous generation, there are people on both sides who seek to "solve" the problem—either to conclude that no one was really created that way, or to conclude that the prohibition is no longer valid in our times. Others go further and from this arrive either at total denial of the truth of the Torah or at complete alienation from the LGBTQ sphere.
But as with every essential question of faith (with a thousand thousand distinctions between the two questions), these are not questions that one solves or answers away. They are too complex and too great to be untied with some flimsy excuse. The educational discussion became much deeper and far more relevant on the day educators stopped giving bad, hollow automatic answers, and dared to admit openly that they have no decisive answer to such a powerful question.
As with the question of the previous generation, all we can do is hold on to both ends. To understand that we do not understand. To give up the pathetic attempt to know the mind of the Most High. To cling to the Torah, which forbade forbidden sexual relations, and not let go of the belief that it is not good for a person—any person—to be alone. And just as Jewish faith survived its previous crises—not thanks to bland answers or strained excuses, but thanks to faithful Jews, deep-seeing and probing, with sound minds and understanding hearts, who know that there are questions we must learn to live with and in whose shadow we must live.
May God enlighten our eyes…
Answer
I agree and disagree. First, I do in fact know people who left because of this (naturally, they come to me and not to him). By the way, more Haredim than others.
Second, in my opinion, if people raise philosophical questions, that means those questions matter to them. Even if people latch onto questions in order to anchor a decision that came from somewhere else, the fact is that they make the effort to anchor it on the rational plane. Therefore, if responses are given, that may delay the departure. This is exactly the debate we had about questions that are really answers.
Whenever a person takes a step, it can always be explained on several levels, especially the psychological and the philosophical. We have a tendency to explain a step taken against our position on the psychological plane, and a step taken in favor of our position on the philosophical plane. Think about someone who becomes religious: secular people attribute it to crises he experienced—that is, they are psychologists—and religious people explain that he discovered the light—that is, they are philosophers. And then, to our great surprise, when a person leaves religion, the religious explain that he wanted to permit forbidden sexual relations to himself—that is, they are psychologists—and the secular explain that he finally understood the nonsense he had been living in—that is, they are philosophers. That only means that everyone latches onto the level that is convenient for him (after all, it is uncomfortable to say that someone who decided against my position did so on substantive philosophical grounds. It is preferable for me to portray it as a psychological crisis).
So beyond the biases, who is really right? Both sides, of course. Every step we take has psychological and philosophical explanations, and probably only the combination of all of them can offer a real explanation for the step that was taken. Clinging only to psychology, or only to one of the planes, is simplistic, and usually it is an evasion of dealing with the essential questions (because they threaten me myself). Therefore it is always important to confront the questions, even if you have a psychological or other explanation for the step taken by the one who leaves. No one wants to be an idiot and choose a path because of motives that have no substantive philosophical justification. And if you pull the ground out from under the substantive motives, it may be that psychology alone will not suffice.
I have to say that from personal experience this is really not true. I have no psychological problem at all with the commandments and the Torah, and even so I almost left religion once for completely pure philosophical reasons (I wasn’t using excuses to leave. On the contrary, I "wanted" the Torah to be true). It may be that the psychological problems are created—not merely accompany things—because of philosophical distrust.