The notion of doubt as a key element of faith is hinted at in this week’s parashah and in the rhythm of the Jewish calendar. In this week’s portion, Moses and the people of Israel are paralyzed by uncertainty. The parashah opens with God promising Moses that the people will be redeemed. Moses speaks to the Israelites, but they pay no heed. Why can’t they believe? What bars them from faith in God? The Torah explains that “their spirits [were] crushed by cruel bondage”(Exodus 6:9).

Rabbi Irwin A. Zeplowitz explains: ” Jewish tradition has never shied from the expression of doubt. The Psalmist often laments the absence of God, but always with the reassuring hope that God’s comforting presence will return. Job rails against the capriciousness of life, yet is grounded in a belief that God is just. Even the methodology of the rationalist philosophers of the medieval period, which sought to explain God through reason, hints that faith alone may not be enough to ensure belief. Nachman of Bratzlav was a Chasidic master wracked by self-doubt, cynicism, and bouts of depression, yet he told powerful stories that used these emotions as a way to reach toward meaning. There is something strange about the way Jewish months begin. Rather than emerging in something we can see, a Hebrew month begins with what is unseen—the new moon. While, in ancient days, the new month was affirmed by the sighting of the sliver of the moon in the western sky at sunset, a new month actually begins when the moon is, from our perspective, absent. Perhaps the rationale is to teach us that even in what seems to be the end is there also a beginning.

As a new month begins, therefore, we offer a blessing—seeing the Holy One in the darkness of the heavens as in their light. Just as each new month brings something different, a cycle of darkness and light, so do we move through different seasons of faith and uncertainty. The power of faith is in seeing the joy in each stage—and accepting that our doubts are as natural to us as the waxing and waning of the moon in the sky…How, then, do we move from a despair brought about by doubt to a mature faith rooted in uncertainty? Perhaps the way our ancestors observed the moon can guide us. In ancient days the Sages did not declare a Rosh Chodesh until two witnesses came to say they saw the sliver of the moon. There are two important aspects of this teaching: first, that something new only occurs when the hint of light is seen; and second, that no single witness alone is sufficient.

So it is in our lives. We all have doubts. It is the willingness to hope—even against all odds—that light will come that opens for us the possibility of something new. And we cannot ever really do it alone. Only by relying on others do we find our way toward the light.

In the Torah portion, when Moses says no one will listen to him, God answers that his brother, Aaron, will go with him to Pharaoh (Rashi to Exodus 6:13). Aaron has never been mentioned before. Why now? It is to teach Moses that he cannot be strong and of certain faith alone. Faith is not, for the Jew, the lonely search for meaning. It is fostered, instead, in the connections we make and in the support we receive from others.If God responded to Moses’s doubts, can God not respond to ours? Let us not, therefore, stifle our doubts or those in others.  Let us not feel we must defend God against the slings and arrows unleashed by those in pain. May we, to the contrary, open ourselves to our doubts and the questions of others; and let us use those doubts to nurture a different kind of faith—a mature, steadfast assurance that life has meaning only when we use the dark emptiness of uncertainty to open us to the light of belief.”

Prepared by Devorah Abenhaim

 

 

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