The Secret of Jewish Survival

There is an ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

We live in interesting times.

This summer Israel came under massive missile attack from Hezbollah, a terrorist group armed by Iran and Syria, dedicated as a matter of religious principle to the destruction of Israel. Four weeks ago, a Parliamentary Inquiry delivered a report on the resurgence of antisemitism in Britain. These are testing times for Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

And for the world. We have seen Iraq and Afghanistan slide into chaos and internecine bloodshed. The people of Darfur and Somalia live in danger of mass murder. The threat of terror throughout the world remains. The recent furore over remarks made by the Pope have shown us, yet again, that ancient religious conflicts still have the power to provoke anger and violence. All too often the famous words of W. B. Yeats come to mind: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”

How should we respond? What should we be praying for on this day of days in the Jewish year? What thoughts should we be taking with us in the year to come?

In the modern world we have become used to certain kinds of crisis: economic, political, military, environmental. But there is another kind of crisis, deeper than all the others, to which we now need to turn our minds: spiritual crisis.

It is not unusual for individuals to face spiritual crisis. It can be induced by bereavement, the break-up of a marriage, the failure of an enterprise in which we have invested our energies, or any of the other “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” These are part of life, and few if any of us are spared them.

Much rarer are the moments in which entire civilisations face spiritual crisis, but that is where we are today. On one side are extremist religiously-motivated forces driven by rage, revenge and the will to conquer. On the other is the secular culture of the West that seems increasingly unable to tell right from wrong; that worships “celebrities” while mocking those who live by ideals; that reports the bad news but almost never the good; that epitomises Oscar Wilde’s definition of the cynic as one “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

At such times we need faith, yet we seem to have lost it. Religion is mocked by scientists like Richard Dawkins. It is marginalised by a culture that prefers to find salvation in shopping and “retail therapy.” It is desecrated by those who kill in the name of God.

What remains?

What remains is the kol demamah dakah, the “still, small voice,” that is often drowned out by the noise of events, but which remains humanity’s last best hope in a world driving full-speed towards the abyss.

What is faith? Here I can only speak personally. Perhaps each of us has our own answer, but this is what I have learned from a life of asking questions.

Faith is the belief that life has a purpose, that we are not here by accident, that history is not meaningless, that it is not mere wishful thinking that we live by ideals. The universe is not deaf to our prayers, blind to our hopes, indifferent to our existence.

My faith as a Jew tells me that our ancestors were not wrong to pledge themselves, in the Sinai desert thirty-three centuries ago, to a code of conduct, the Torah, that seeks to create communities based on justice, charity, compassion and the sanctity of life. They were not wrong to believe that every human being – not just those who think like us – is made in God’s image and thus entitled to dignity and respect.

My faith tells me that it is not wrong to question, argue, debate, to wrestle with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel. Indeed the very name Israel means “one who wrestles with God and man and prevails.” Judaism, which gave the world the Hebrew Bible with its great arguments between God and Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job; that produced the literature of Mishnah, Midrash, and Gemara, each an anthology of arguments (Rabbi X says this; Rabbi Y says that); in which our first request in the weekday Amidah is for “knowledge, understanding and wisdom” – this is not a faith that asks us to sacrifice our intellect.

Faith is not certainty. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty. Faith is the voice within us that says, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” Faith is the ability to live through catastrophe and yet not lose hope. Without faith, we would never take a risk.

Without faith, we would never have a child. Without faith we would never undertake anything great.

It was faith that led the Jewish people – a mere three years after standing eyeball to eyeball with the Angel of Death at Auschwitz – to proclaim the State of Israel, with its national anthem, Od lo avdah tikvateinu, “Our hope is still not lost.” It was faith that led Israel’s leaders to seek peace with those pledged to its destruction. It was faith that brought Jews back from 103 different countries to the land where our faith was born, to which Abraham and Sarah journeyed 4,000 years ago. It was faith that led a handful of scholars to believe that the language of the Bible could be revived and become once again a living tongue. It is faith that has given Israelis the spirit to survive some of the most sustained terrorist assaults in the history of nations and not give way to despair.

Israelis often describe themselves as secular. Actually, most of them are ma’aminim bnei ma’aminim, “believers, the children of believers.” Without faith, Israel could not survive. The Jewish people kept faith alive. Faith kept the Jewish people alive.

Faith tells us that the enemies of freedom – who are today and almost always were in the past, enemies of Jews and the State of Israel – will never win the ultimate battle for the human spirit. Faith teaches us to walk tall, unintimidated by the preachers of hate and the perpetrators of terror. As we say in Psalm 27 on these holy days, “God is my light and my salvation: whom then shall I fear? God is the stronghold of my life: of whom then shall I be afraid?”

Because faith defeats fear, it defeats terror. Because it sustains the morale of a nation, it will make the State of Israel outlive its enemies, as the Jewish people has always outlived its enemies. Far from being irrelevant to the twenty-first century CE, faith is our greatest asset, our deepest strength.

But it does not merely happen. Faith is to the spirit what health is to the body. Just as we can put our health at risk through stress, an unbalanced diet, and lack of exercise, so we can put our faith at risk by not renewing it through study, prayer and the performance of mitzvoth. All of these things energise the soul. They have been the secret of Jewish survival throughout the generations.

So let us take time in the coming year to renew our faith. And may God write you, your family, the Jewish people, the people of Israel, and humanity as a whole in the Book of Life – granting us a year of health and blessing and peace.