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June 11, 1999/27 Sivan 5759, Vol. 51, No.37
How to believe? Find the sacred in the profane
JIM SOLLISCH
Special to Jewish News
For years, I was a member of one of America's smallest minorities: the 5 or 6 percent of people who don't believe in God. I did, however, believe in ghosts, sold completely by the golems of Cynthia Ozick's fiction and the spirits that inhabit the fictional world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I believed in the witches of Shakespeare and in Updike's witches of Eastwick. And I had no trouble buying the notion that a human being could wake up one day and find himself transformed into a giant cockroach, as happens to Gregor in Kafka's story, "The Metamorphosis."
I did not believe in the existence of God, but I believed in the existence of Holden Caulfield, who I'm sure is still wandering the streets of New York, wondering where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter. My problem with God wasn't scientific. I didn't need rational proof. Nor was my problem spiritual. I didn't have an alternative, less heirarchical world-view that would have caused me to reject the Jewish view of God. I simply had a suspension-of-disbelief problem. My suspension mechanism had short-circuited as a kid, and I'd never had it rewired. What came so easy to me as a reader of literature had never clicked for me when it came to God.
Then I met my wife. Actually, I re-met her. And through her, I re-met the Bible. I had known Rique in high school almost 20 years ago. I had seen her seven or eight times in the years since. There she was in my favorite coffee shop, reading the Torah. I was reading "The Magus" by John Fowles, a writer who doesn't believe in God but who had me believing in an omniscient being named Conchis.
After a while, Rique approached me. We started talking, and I asked her why she was reading the Torah. "Why?" she echoed back with equal parts sarcasm and wonder. "I read the Torah portion every week." About the only response I could manage was "Really?" I think she took it as a challenge, which, in retrospect, I realize is how I meant it.
In the next few months of our courtship, the Torah was our chaperone. We started to read the portion of the week together. Rique had to remind me that we divide the Torah into 52 portions, so that Jews all over the world read the same words each week. Rique had no problem accepting the miracles of the text. Serpents that talked. God appearing as a burning bush. The plagues in Exodus. The parting of the Red Sea. We read about them and then talked about them as if they had happened. As if they had meaning. Just like literature.
In the beginning, I had trouble. I couldn't suspend my disbelief. I couldn't enter the story because I didn't know or trust the writer. I believed in Holden Caulfield and knew him because he spoke to me in language I understood. My classmates and teachers and later the students I taught spoke of him in the present tense - as if he existed. And so he did. He existed between us. He became part of our relationship. As Martin Buber says, in the space between people, there is a relationship, and in that relationship is God.
It was an idea that kept gnawing at me as I struggled with the unreliable narrator of the Bible, whose miracles and improbable plot devices weren't set up carefully enough in the text for me. The voice was stiff and unclear. One minute omniscient, not God but God-like, the next limited to the point of view of a given character.
And boy did I have trouble with the main character, a guy named God who at times has the emotional maturity of an angry adolescent. God turns out not to be so God-like - he is limited, not always right, not always wiser than the humans he created in his image. Rique pointed this out, and I started to talk about God more like I might a person or a character. I started to know him. The wall came down. I was no longer reading a sacred text. I was reading a book about humans, a book suddenly filled with emotion, drama, conflict, and metaphor. But the book contained much more than those elevated elements of literature. There was incest, infidelity, adultery, eroticism, greed and enough sin and perversion to fuel an entire season of Jerry Springer shows.
I was transformed. Once I had been a cynic whose skepticism had stopped him from reading the Torah because I thought the price of admission was the unconditional acceptance that it was holy. Now I was a participant in a conversation that had started our modern world-view and had been going on for thousands of years. I started not to believe, but to not disbelieve. In that space between absolute belief and absolute disbelief, I began to find a relationship with faith.
Now for some Jews, it's either too bad or just plain unacceptable that I had to make the sacred profane before I could enter it. I envy them their absolute faith. But in my defense, I offer the idea that as humans this is often the way we operate. We are driven to love, if we are lucky enough to find it, through lust. We discover honor through duty. And Judaism, I was learning from Rique, is filled with connections that make the profane sacred. By keeping kosher, Jews sanctify the most basic of human needs - food - and in the process we remind ourselves that we can be holy.
That we need the profane to find the sacred should come as no revelation, even to those who accept the Torah as divinely given. Just read it. If all we needed was the holy, the Torah would be a book of prescriptions and guidelines, not of stories. It would be written as philosophy, not as narrative. It wouldn't be ambiguous or richly contradictory. And it wouldn't be so human. Or such a good read.
For years I have been a reader of stories. I took for granted the ease with which I have learned to suspend my disbelief and to enter other worlds and the lives, emotions and concerns of fictional characters. I don't really believe in Holden Caulfield. At least not literally and absolutely. But I do believe that the conversations I have had about him and about the conflicts that shaped his fictional life have shaped my life as well. I am learning to feel about God and the Torah the way I do about Holden. To some that may sound profane, but to a person who loves to read, it sounds pretty sacred.
Jim Sollisch is an essayist and commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition.
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