Every year, by now, I can count on at least three people coming to me to talk about their discomfort with being “a bad Jew”. Or maybe they’ll soften their self-judgment, and say “you know rabbi, I’m not a good Jew”. Or maybe “not as good as the other Jews”. And then a list of “I know I should’s” will follow, usually dealing with mitzvot or with faith in God. Or both – because rabbi, how can I do anything if I don’t believe in God?
So this morning I want to remind us – myself included – that hsving faith is not the same as having certainty.
We live in a world that features preachers selling that being faithful is being certain. You just have to believe! they say. We receive messages that faith is like a possession, either we have it or not, like a coin in our pocket or a diploma on our wall. Belief becomes a set of convictions – and many think that having or not these beliefs makes the “good Jew”.
But what if this idea fundamentally misses the mark? What if faith is not about having the right answers? What if faith is about embracing the mystery, living with questions?
Our very name as a people points to this different idea of faith. Israel means “one who wrestles with God.” This is not “one who submits to God” or “one who never questions God,” but one who wrestles. When our patriarch Jacob encounters the angel at the Yabbok River and gets this new name, Israel, Jacob wrestles with the angel until he is blessed. Jacob does not sit there, in passive acceptance and expectation of blessing. Jacob struggles, fights, engages.
The Talmud preserves for us the great debates between our sages and their many students. These weren’t academic exercises — they were acts of faith. The sages understood that wrestling with difficult questions, finding ever more gray areas between what looks like black and white, even about fundamental matters, was itself a form of worship. Why are we here? What happens after we die? Why were human beings created? Was God right in even creating humans? The Talmud is not a book of answers, but 5,422 pages of mostly questions and debates, proofs, disproofs and new questions.
And this is not new to Jews – it is not from Talmudic times. It figures in the Bible itself. Let’s take the Book of Job for instance. It is a difficult book to read, in part because it is the most honest exploration of faith in the Bible. God in that book is portrayed as an impossible mystery – but Job, who suffers and questions, doesn’t lose his faith when he asks where is God’s justice – his faith deepens through the wrestling.
It is Job’s friends, the ones who offer him neat, easy, simple and simplistic explanations, they are the ones who miss the point. Job’s friends become, in the Rabbis’ reading, the example of what not to do when someone you know is suffering. Do not ever, say the rabbis, imitate Job’s friends with their simple answers and self-aggrandizing judgment. Those among us who, like Job, lost sons, daughters, grandchildren, or have seen them become seriously sick, or have gone or are going through serious illnesses or losses yourselves – we all know that silence is better than platitudes, a visit, a hug, a nice conversation are all better than unsatisfying and even insulting answers.
Faith, Job teaches us, is not about having God figured out, but about remaining in relationship even when God seems absent or incomprehensible. And – spoil alert – all that God offers to Job at the end of the book is relationship. Not answers.
The Hebrew word emunah, usually translated as faith, comes from the root meaning “to be strong, enduring, offer support” – it has the same root as amen, a word we sing quite a lot during the High Holy Days. This is not an intellectual assent to a philosophical idea. It is a type of relationship, a way of standing in the world. When we say amen, we’re not saying “I believe this statement is factually correct.” We’re saying “I align myself with this, I make myself steady with this truth.”
Abraham and Sarah, our spiritual ancestors, are called to leave everything familiar — lech lecha, go forth — toward a destination they cannot see, for a promise they cannot fully understand. This faith is not in a creed but a response to a calling. It’s not certainty about the future, but trust enough to take the next step. In that sense, everyone who has fallen in love and has seen it through years of marriage knows: marriage, to continue through thick and thin, requires faith, some days just enough faith in the relationship to take the next day as it comes. Because when life throws you lemons, any lemonade tastes sweeter when it is made together. Faith in one another means we take the next step together, and the next one and so forth – even if I cannot understand you all the time.
Moses, too, does not encounter God through a set of ideas but through a calling for a relationship — Moses stops to see a burning bush and hears a call. And even Moses struggles with doubt: “What if the children of Israel don’t believe me?” he asks. “What if they don’t listen?” God doesn’t offer him better arguments, not certainty that they will listen. God only offers him the promise of presence: “I will be with you.”
By confusing faith with certainty, we make faith fragile. If faith depends on never having doubts, then the first real question threatens everything.
When people embrace the idea that having faith is being certain, that does not encourage questions, growth or understanding. It does not let us see any value in the struggle. And then… life inevitably brings challenges. And challenges bring questions. And that simple, 100% certainty, is necessarily lost.
Another problem with certainty being passed off as faith is that this makes faith arrogant and cruel. Arrogant certainty closes us off from growth, from listening, from learning. An arrogant person does not learn, because they know it all. And this attitude closes us from the possibility that God might be larger than our understanding. The person who claims to be certain about God’s will in every situation has made themselves, not God, the final authority.
An arrogant faith is also cruel. History shows us repeatedly what happens when religious certainty becomes absolute. The Inquisition burned people at the stake with complete confidence that they were doing the will of God. The Crusaders slaughtered entire communities while singing hymns, certain they were doing what God wanted. In our own time, we’ve watched hijackers crash planes into buildings, suicide bombers target civilians, extremists commit massacres — all while claiming absolute certainty that God is approving their actions. This kind of faith is dangerous because when we confuse our human, limited understanding with God’s unlimited truth, when we mistake our anger for God’s justice, this certainty becomes a weapon rather than a path to holiness.
The common thread in religious violence is not faith but the arrogant certainty that wants to eliminate doubt, close off questions, force others into the behaviors and absolute readings that the proponents of this type of faith deem approppriate.
Piety becomes power – and then God Godself is out of the picture, God’s name is merely used for power moves. There is no relationship with God in this case.
The Shema, our most central prayer, does not begin with “Believe that…” but with “Hear, O Israel.” It calls us to attention, to listening, to presence. The commandment is not to have certain beliefs about God’s unity, but to listen to the call, to have a relationship with this unity, to live embeded in the unity of it all, to act consciously as a part of one interconnected whole, to treat every human as being created in the image of God, to respect nature as part of this unity.
This is the kind of belief that transforms us: not intellectual assent to doctrines, but existential trust that enables action aligned with life. This is the kind of belief that brings us to embrace questions, to embrace humility that maybe we don’t know everything – and maybe we will never will.
Our tradition has always understood this wisdom. We don’t have one systematic theology in Judaism the way other traditions do, because we’ve always been more interested in how to live than in what to think. Judaism, said Abraham Joshua Heschel, does not ask for a leap of faith. It asks for a leap of action.
Jewish practice has never demanded that we first achieve perfect belief before we begin doing. The word mitzvah is also our teacher in our understanding of faith.
Mitzvah is usually translated into English as commandment. That translation implies a vertical alignment with a commander. But the earliest translation of this word is actually to Aramaic, by the Targum Onkelos. And that translation is tzavta, which actually means connection.
Mitzvot then are not understood as orders, but as actions that make for connections, for relationships.
Those of us who come to morning minyan – a little shout out here to our beloved minyanaires, in person and on Zoom – those who come feel not only a relationship with God, but also with each other. Because those who struggle together with God cannot help but creating a meaningful community.
Does it mean each of us understands every single word? That does not happen even in English! No, it means that some truths can only be known through living them, not through thinking about them. It is very good to understand what you are saying, let me be clear. But davening every day is not a Hebrew Language crash course. It is walking together with a community.
Those of us who we keep Shabbat in some form, we don’t do so because we’ve figured out exactly how blessing candles and wine, eating challah, having deep conversations creates holiness. We keep Shabbat as an act of trust — trust that there’s wisdom in this ancient rhythm, trust that we need regular reminders of what truly matters, trust in the connection it brings with Jews who have lit Shabbat lights for thousands of years, trust that stepping back from our constant doing, our contant screens, our constant dispersion of attention actually helps us remember who we are beyond our opinions and our work.
Those of us who observe kashrut do not claim to understand the spiritual mechanics of dietary laws. We’re engaging in a practice that makes us mindful of our consumption, that connects us to generations of Jewish families, a daily group of reminders that we are part of a covenant community.
The mezuzah on our doorposts is also a daily reminder of connection, a physical prayer, a way of marking our threshold between the ordinary world and the sacred space of Jewish living. Each time we touch it, we’re performing an act of faith—not faith in our understanding, but faith in the practice itself.
This is what the rabbis meant when they taught that mitzvot don’t require kavanah — we don’t need perfect intention or complete understanding to begin acting. We can start with the deed itself, trusting that meaning will emerge through practice. We light Shabbat candles even when we’re struggling with doubt, because bringing light to our homes in a conscious way can kindle something within us that mere thinking cannot reach.
This understanding of faith becomes especially crucial in times of suffering and confusion.
When tragedy strikes, when this broken world seems senseless, when God seems absent — these are times when faith is most purely itself.
After the Holocaust, theologian Emil Fackenheim spoke of a “commanding voice from Auschwitz” that created a new mitzvah, mitzvah number 614 – the prohibition to give Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning Judaism. This wasn’t based on certainty that he could explain how God allowed the Holocaust. It was based on faith as stubbornness, faith as loyalty, faith as the refusal to let evil have the final word.
Elie Wiesel, similarly, never claimed to have answers. But he continued to ask questions, to tell stories, to insist on the importance of memory and witness. His faith was not in easy explanations but in the obligation to remain human even after witnessing the depths of inhumanity.
So another way of understanding faith is that it is as a form of courage — the courage to live as if our lives have meaning even when we cannot prove it, the courage to act with kindness even when the world seems cruel, the courage to hope even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
This kind of faith doesn’t require us to pretend we have no doubts. Instead, it asks us to act faithfully despite our doubts. This is emunah. It doesn’t demand that we never question God; it invites us to question God from within relationship rather than from outside it.
The rabbis taught us something profound about this mystery when they said, “God is the place of the universe, but the universe is not the place of God”. I am going to say this again, because it is a difficult concept: God is the place of the universe, the universe is not the place of God.
This teaching captures something essential about the nature of divine reality that defies our usual categories.
We typically say that God is “up there” or “out there”, in heaven or some such. Some place, somewhere, contained within the universe like we are. With this idea, the rabbis are asking a profound question: How do you locate that which is the very possibility of location? How do you contain that which is the container of all things? The rabbis want to challenge us: God isn’t located within creation; rather, all of creation exists within God. God is the where everything else unfolds, the context that makes all existence possible. When you ask “where is God?” it is like asking, “Where is everywhere?” The question itself reveals the limitation of our thinking.
The Hasidic master Kotzker Rebbe said, “Where is God? Wherever you let God in.” Perhaps, building on the rabbinic insight, we might say: God is already the place where we are — the question is whether we’re awake to it. Faith is not about proving God’s existence but about recognizing the sacred context in which our lives unfold. It’s not about having God figured out but about letting ourselves be held by the mystery that is always already embracing us.
All these teachings invite us into a different kind of faith — not faith that we can pin God down to particular places or explanations, not a faith that defines God in absolute terms, not a faith that believes it can manipulate God, but rather a faith that embraces our being within the ultimate mystery.
What does this mean for how we live? It means we can embrace both rigorous intellectual honesty and deep spiritual commitment. We can ask hard questions about our tradition while remaining committed to its values and practices. We can acknowledge the mystery at the heart of existence while still choosing to live meaningful lives through mitzvot. It means we can be humble about our understanding while being passionate about our commitments. We can say “I don’t know” about many things while still saying “I choose” about how we live.
It means we can hold space for others’ questions without feeling threatened, because our faith isn’t built on having all the answers. We can welcome seekers and doubters, knowing that struggling with faith is often deeper than simply accepting it.
Faith, understood this way, is not a destination but a journey, not a possession but a relationship, not a certainty but a commitment. It’s the willingness to say, with Jacob, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”—to wrestle with the ultimate questions not because we expect easy answers, but because the wrestling itself transforms us.
In a world that often demands simple answers to complex questions, our tradition offers something different: the wisdom to live fully within the mystery, to act with purpose in the middle of uncertainty, to choose love even when we cannot fully explain why love matters. This is emunah — not certainty, but faithfulness. Not the end of the journey, but the strength to continue walking.
May we have a year in which we have the courage to live our questions, and the faith to continue wrestling with the divine until we are blessed.
Shanah tovah