by Pnuel Peri

Pnuel Peri, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a writer and translator living in Jerusalem. His and Rabbi Aharon Naftali (Ari) Maryles’ adaptation of Ayalah Shluchah, by Rabbi Naftali Maryles, the Rebbe of Litovisk, is soon to be published by Targum Press. His most recent work to appear in JO was a translation of Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe’s “A Woman of Valor: Master Builder of the Jewish Home” (June, 2001).

Declaring Faith in Boston

Growing up in a Boston suburb, I was friendly with a boy who lived in a palatial home amongst other palaces on the outskirts of town, and I loved playing there for the swimming pool, exercise machines, table tennis and Nintendo video games.

One afternoon, as my friend, his older brother and I played the video game PacMan, we spoke, for the first time, of religion.

“What do you believe in?” they wanted to know, their faces fixed to the large video display as my friend guided PacMan through an intricate maze of treasure troves, energy pills and deadly spiders.

I had no idea what they were talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know. Your religion. What do you believe in?”

“Nothing, I guess,” I said.

They frowned at PacMan and shook their heads. “But you have to believe,” the brother said. “Because you never know….”

“Yes!!” he screamed suddenly as PacMan cleared the maze.

“I never know what?” I asked, a little annoyed.

“You never know when you’re going to die,” he said.

“That’s right,” my friend added. “And if you don’t believe, well, it could be too late.”

I watched them watch PacMan embark through a fresh, more intricate maze of treasure, pills and spiders, and wondered what it meant to believe. They were of the Methodist Church, an offshoot of Protestantism, so their “belief” was rooted in Christianity, which was utterly foreign to me. Death’s mystery and cruel inevitability, however, were closer to home, and fear rippled through me as my friend and his brother played, each apparently safe from being “too late” at the unforeseeable end. I envied them their salvation.

I will not now boast that in their broaching such an issue while immersed in video games, I perceived a spiritual shallowness that underscored our core theological differences. I doubt that my own passion for PacMan was eclipsed for more than thirty seconds. I simply envied them while knowing that for me, alas, life and death could not be as neat and easy as “believing” and not being “too late,” which was, of course, true for them as well, as I am sure life’s lessons eventually taught them.

Maturing, Lesson-Filled Years Later

Many maturing, lesson-filled years have passed since that afternoon in suburban Boston. Thankfully, there is now a religious context to my life. Assuredly, my friend and his brother have shed the childish impulse to reduce the spiritual challenges of our mortal lives to a game with clear objectives and measures of success and failure, robbing those challenges, in effect, of moral substance. However, an irony remains before us all. For their part, their spiritual maturity not withstanding, the personal imperative to declare one’s belief before dying would still be central to their religious outlook, at least to the degree that it has always been so to Christian theology. And for my part, my religion not withstanding, I would still have no idea what they were talking about were they to again ask me to declare what I believed.

I would not be the only religious Jew to be thus dumbfounded. A friend of my wife’s recently recounted being approached in the center of Jerusalem by tourists who needed directions. Wanting to connect more meaningfully, one of them asked, “Are you of the Jewish faith?”

“Why, yes,” my wife’s friend cordially replied, but as they walked away from one another, she was struck by how alien seemed the notion of being “of the Jewish faith.” She was a Jew, which was a matter of soul, but also of blood or, more poignantly, of soul as inexorable and indelible as blood. To be sure, being Jewish was also a matter of faith and, for that matter, of belief, but she was not definitively “of” that faith, any more than she, an heir to Avraham’s, Yitzchak’s and Yaakov’s spiritual dynasty, could have summed up her belief in mere declaration. She was of a people, one as distinct among the nations through the millennia as she sensed herself now, walking away from an innocent, somewhat quaint encounter in Jerusalem.

One reason why the Jew has trouble relating to gentile standards of belief and faith is because his Hebrew equivalent, emuna, is actually quite far from the English it is assumed to parallel. Two Hebrew words that share the same root as emuna are aman, an artist or craftsman, and umanut, art. Is the artist’s laboring at his art, therefore, an act of faith? If he is yet unable to support himself and his family with it, perhaps so. Essentially, however, the craftsman produces art from an intimate place of knowing, not of believing, and he strives in his discipline because his skill is real, his vision relevant, his passion tempered and lent expression through the cool, steady science that is his craft.

The word omna, a pillar or column, is also of the same root as emuna. For the artist, art is the pillar upon which he stands within himself as he etches his not insignificant mark upon the world.

Emuna – An Overarching Faith

To the degree that emuna, the Jew’s skill, discipline, vision and art of faith, linguistically misses, nay betrays, its conventional English counterpart, the way in which the Jew embodies and employs faith in the face of tragedy and human pain, is equally unparalleled in the world.

Recently, a friend celebrated the birth of a daughter by hosting a Shabbos morning Kiddush in shul. There were words of thanks and of Torah, standard fare and hungry people, and I marveled at how normal it all was, how neither he nor we seemed to bear any traces of the tragedy that had befallen him and his wife just over one year ago, when toward the end of her final month they lost a child.

How do people traverse the horror of such a loss, the blinding shock after so many expectant months, the wrestling with guilt, the going on with life, as a gaping void is slowly filled with other things, and then, with trepidation, try again?

More than faith or belief, introspection, contemplation and study helped pull my friend and his wife through. Initially, they passed many sleepless nights simply talking. They then met with couples who had similarly suffered. They also read texts revealing that the journey of a soul that enters this world, assumes human form, and then departs before emerging into life and drawing breath, is as mysterious and essential as the sometimes painful journeys of the two through whom it came. And so, with natural trepidation, they moved on, not blindly, mercifully numbed, their experience behind them, but resolvedly, shrewdly sensitized, their experience made a part of them; not with faith that everything would be alright, but with emuna that everything that had been had to have been, and everything that was thankfully was.

Soaring Above the Sirens’ Wail

Perhaps more than private, intimate pain that swirls in and about men, unseen, the murder of more than two hundred Jews this past year in Israel has tried the hearts of Jews the world over.

Recently, a journalist friend called me with questions as part of a survey on Americans’ resolve, or lack thereof, to remain in Israel in light of the escalating intifada.

While we spoke, I thought of the ambulance sirens that had filled the air that very afternoon as I was walking home for lunch, of how I and others, following their waning din, ran up Highway Number 1 along the edge of East Jerusalem, up past the Ma’alot Dafna and Ramat Eshkol neighborhoods, and then down a long highway entrance ramp into French Hill and a spreading sea of roped-back spectators. There we stood and stared at a crossroads in the distance, well beyond the cameramen and journalists, police and emergency personnel, army men and sniffing dogs, where a bus, its windows blown out, its frame slightly charred, stood ominously alone.

“How many have been killed?” we wanted to know, but people only shrugged and craned their necks.

I climbed atop a stone wall to watch the bomb specialists, helmeted and heavily padded, working in and around the bus, and my eyes fell upon men dressed in black with long beards and peyos, walking freely amongst the uniformed personnel. They were of the chevra kadisha, the burial society, ever present at catastrophes to retrieve remains from twisted, blackened wreckage for proper burial. They seemed apart from the drama unfolding about them. Soldiers rushed sternly past, barking orders, the latest weaponry, communication devices and protective gear strapped to their bodies. The bearded men had only tzitzis at their sides. People were angry, anxious and afraid. The men were poised, exuding the gravity of the task before them, yet essentially free of the affectations of alarm. The air was thick with a fighting resolve to better defend and secure Israeli lives, yet no one seemed more full of life than they who had come for the dead.

Gradually, it emerged that a suicide bomber had detonated himself on the curb outside of the bus, his poorly timed attack injuring few and killing no one. Yet a sense of helplessness before this particular brand of terrorism lingered within me, and I continued staring at the men in black to draw strength.

“This is hardly the time to leave Israel,” I told my friend, the image of the men still before me. “On the contrary, more people should come. But I’m not talking about having faith that we’ll survive the violence. I’m talking about…” I paused, searching for the words.

“You know what?” I said finally. “I think that we should all join the chevra kadisha,” and I described what I had seen that afternoon and explained that like the men in black, we have an essential, unavoidable mission before us, that means that, yes, we must stay, but not in the sense of hunkering down for war, confident that we’ll get through these trying times. Rather, as members of the chevra kadisha, we must bend toward our grim task and gather the pieces of our broken selves, confident that we cannot be confident, that we may not get through these trying times if getting through them to restore national security and the flow of tourist dollars is our only goal. And for this terrible act of interring ourselves, of facing fully what G-d is teaching us about ourselves, we must summon not faith to survive the impossible, but emuna to discern the impossibility of mere survival for its own sake.

Beyond Survival For Its Own Sake

If the Jew’s faith is born of introspection, contemplation, study and discernment even when he would seem most humanly apt to flee the rigors of thought and emotion in order to cling to something greater than and beyond himself, what does it mean for him to believe in G-d, which he must? What is he doing when he recites the Rambam’s Thirteen Principles of Faith: “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, may His name be blessed, is the Creator and Mover of all created things, that He alone has performed, performs and will perform every action…. I believe with perfect faith…”? Indeed, when asked in what he believes or of what faith he is, why does he not simply recite these principles?

In his voluminous work Nesivos Shalom, the previous Slonimer Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky l”xz, quotes the following teaching of Harav from Lecowitz: “A Jewish person is obligated to believe that he is a believer.” Do his words not constitute a theological impasse? Is not the believer defined by his choice to believe and become that which he was not, the suggestion of believing that he is already a believer being absurd? On both counts, yes. However, Harav from Lecowitz was not talking to a theologian, but to “a Jewish person,” who must know that, for him, faith is not something to be grabbed “before it is too late.” Faith or, more literally, knowledge of G-d is within him much like genius residing within the prodigy, and must, therefore, be nurtured, shaped and refined, but never superfluously acquired and declared.

Here, every Jew is as an artist, drawing upon his inner sense to impart expression to the blank canvas and unshaped clay that is himself. The Rambam’s Thirteen Principles and the whole of Torah from which they were distilled are a means in that process, but could not be said to occupy the theological core of a “Jewish faith” any more than the artist’s brush and chisel could be esteemed as his very source of inspiration. The Jew must believe that he believes, must know that he knows, a consciousness of G-d and an internalization of His Law that is too intimate and too encompassing for catechism.

“In what do you believe?” “Are you of the Jewish faith?” These are painful questions for us, not because we haven’t the answers, but because implicit in them is the assumption that we are as any other nation in the family of man with its vast pantheon of beliefs and faiths, and not the sublime masterpieces of our own believing, faithful hands, the vision of which should inspire man to want to simply know G-d, and instead ask: “In what do I believe? Of what faith am I?” And who is to blame for that false assumption and failed vision for all of these thousands of years if not us, the artists themselves?

The Jewish Reach… Beyond the Natural

Some years ago, portions of the Bostoner Rebbe’s Agudah Convention address were published in these pages, and a story then related deserves retelling here.

In the winter months, the Rebbe and Rebbetzin host Shabbatons and receive into their community scores of young people, most of whom are college students from the half-a-dozen or so universities in the Boston area. Typically, before joining the Rebbe for the first meal on Friday night, the young people would form a procession and, one by one, meet the Rebbe and Rebbetzin, each stating briefly who he is, where he is from and what he is studying or doing professionally.

Once, a young woman approached and proudly announced: “I am a sculptress,” to which the Rebbe immediately responded: “Better you should learn to sculpt yourself.”

Before the woman could absorb the encounter, the line moved on, and she found herself downstairs in the banquet hall, waiting with others for the seuda to begin. The Rebbe’s words, however, had shaken her, would remain with her and, incredibly, would mark the beginning of her return to Orthodoxy.

If the Rebbe’s words were uncharacteristically abrupt, perhaps even harsh, they needed to be, for he knew that only they could pierce an artist’s ego to reach the heart with another, more subtle message of Harav from Lecowitz, namely that “a Jewish person is obligated” and must serve G-d with his inner knowledge of G-d, and not, ironically, genius, canvas or clay.

We all harbor within us that artist’s ego, that natural, selfish drive to exploit our inner resources for their own sake, to engage art for art’s sake alone. Though regarded in the Western mind as the quintessence of selfless dedication, such focus of talents is antithetical to Judaism, for emuna is a call to artistry for the sake of G-d, a redirection of inner strengths from the natural, instinctive I to the Thou – which is primarily G-d, but also wife, child, fellow Jew, community of Jews, the peopled world. And redirection is all that Harav from Lecowitz and the Bostoner Rebbe are asking of us, not so that we might survive our current national catastrophe to paint, sculpt or write again, but to live and work again where our talents belong, beyond the natural, in the Jewish art of faith.

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