A few years ago, one Shabbat morning in Jerusalem, I was part of a very popular community called Shirah Chadashah and I found myself sitting behind two of the greatest contemporary Jewish thinkers, philosophers of the generation. Rabbi David Hartman, the influential, liberal Orthodox founder of the enlightened Hartman Center, who died earlier this year, and his son-in-law, philosophy professor, Moshe Halbertal. At one point during the service, I heard David Hartman turn to Moshe Halbertal and ask a question that has stuck with me ever since. “Moish,” he said, “which do you think is more dangerous, certainty or doubt?” I did not hear the answer, nor the conversation prompted by the question, but what a question!
As a rabbi, I sometimes have the sense that people want or expect me to know the answers to their questions with certainty, with a depth of conviction that somehow reveals a greater access to the truth. Life feels messy and uncertain with too many grey areas and often much fear about what might happen next. As a result, many want their religious communities to be the place where they get clear answers. A safe structure that makes clear distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, black and white to help us navigate the confusing, frightening waters of our lives. I understand this desire and need, but am not convinced that it is the true role of religious and spiritual communities to provide it. I try to say “I don’t know” to some questions. Even a question that seems it might have a straightforward answer never really does. There is always the question behind the question. I see an authentic spiritual path as one that creates the framework for exploring all of the questions without necessarily getting the answers, as well as giving us some really helpful tools from the tradition to help us connect and stay afloat. In fact, I would say that when religion becomes about certainty and right thinking and right practice, it has the capacity to be a form of fundamentalism and we all know how dangerous that can be whatever religion it comes from, including our own.
So, we think of doubt as antithetical to religious life, but it is not. In fact, embracing doubt, uncertainty, vulnerability and facing our fears is really important. I tell you with certainty that we need more doubt! Of course, doubt can be terribly disempowering and even destructive, but it can also be a really authentic part of spiritual and emotional life. The Torah does seem in many places to guarantee certainty in the form of rewards for following its ways and punishment for not, but the radical 19th century Hassidic commentator, the Ishbitzer Rebbe, also known as the Mei HaShiloach has an important and radical comment related to this on Parshat Behukkotai in the Book of Numbers. The parsha opens with the verse “im behukkotai taleychu…if you walk in my statutes.” i.e. if you keep all of the laws then all will be good. The Ishbitzter, however, says that the word im in Hebrew, meaning if, is “lashon safek, the language of doubt,” for, he continues, “who can really know the will of God?” My friend and teacher Reb Mimi Feigelson, who first taught me this text, calls this “holy doubt.” Doubt that keeps us humble and able to walk tall in the mystery of not knowing. So, how can doubt be holy and what’s it got to do with Rosh HaShanah?
One of the best books I’ve read this year is called The Antidote: Happiness for People who can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. It’s not just the great title that appeals, but the book has some really important wisdom on this subject. As a culture, on personal, corporate and societal levels, we have tended to become somewhat obsessed with self-help books, with positive thinking and with focusing on clear and certain goals. Research suggests that “the person most likely to purchase any given self-help book is someone who, within the previous eighteen months, purchased a self-help book – one that evidently didn’t solve all their problems …” Burkeman actually suggests that these philosophies can be counter-productive, as he says:
“The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”
It’s just possible that some of us set ourselves some positive goals last Rosh HaShanah and find ourselves sitting here this Rosh HaShanah feeling miserable about the fact that we failed ourselves and others. Anyone relate? I do.
So what’s the alternative? According to Burkeman, it involves “learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death.” This is what he calls “the negative path to happiness” and is based on teachings from the ancient Stoics and Buddhists as well as contemporary teachers like Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, and some sharp observations of the cultures of the law of attraction, positive thinking and self- help. I would argue that there is something profoundly Jewish about these ideas. The Stoics path was based on:
“cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances. One way to do this, the Stoics argued, was by turning towards negative emotions and experiences; not shunning them, but examining them closely instead..”
This philosophy, to me, is connected to the powerful heart of our liturgy in these services, the un’taneh tokef, which demands us to confront our worst nightmares and even face the possibility of our death and it poignantly reminds us that we cannot change the circumstances of our broken lives, but only how we respond, or as Burkeman puts it: “the only thing we can truly control, the Stoics argue, are our judgments – what we believe about our circumstances.” How we do this can lead to serenity or to suffering, regardless of what we are experiencing. Some teachers, ancient and modern, from this tradition actually instruct us to put ourselves deliberately and consciously into very uncomfortable and humiliating situations in order to experience the reality that what we most fear doesn’t kill us! In my mens’ group, this is the core of the work we do together; cultivating the ability to stand up and show up with all our shame and pain without shutting down or avoiding the feelings. Not easy. I wonder if there is an element of this in some of our liturgical traditions and in the Jewish calendar that take us into emotional darkness, through reliving the destruction and horror of the past, as well as to the heights of joy, but the intent might be to live with equanimity. The Buddhist version of this is about total non-attachment and cultivating the ability to stay present with and observe whatever there is, negative or positive.
The opposite of this is the obsession of setting goals and sticking to them. Burkeman quotes a 2011 research study that states that a large number of people said that the more goals they set for themselves, the more stressed they felt – even though more than half said that one of their goals was to reduce the amount of stress in their lives.
An extreme example of the danger of rigidly sticking to a goal, according to Burkeman’s book, is the death of 15 climbers in the 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest. No one really knows what happened, but a former stockbroker, now consultant on organizational behavior, was one of the climbers that year who survived, and he claims that what happened there is same pattern that happens in the corporate world. The climbers “had been lured into destruction by their passion for goals.” Every indication was that it was not at all safe to continue to the summit with the conditions and the timing and yet, many of these climbers would not let go of the ultimate goal to reach the top. “The goal, it seemed, had become part of their identity, and so their uncertainty about the goal no longer merely threatened the plan; it threatened them as individuals…They were firmly in the grip of goalodicy.”
Obviously, having ambition and goals is important, but how many of us have allowed these goals to define who we are and done all we can to eliminate the frightening feelings of uncertainty that might creep in if we let go of them.
“Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.”
The German Jewish social psychologist Erich Fromm argued that “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning…Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.” Uncertainty demands being open to the vulnerability of entering the unknown, which can actually be the source of great depth and authenticity. Holy doubt you might say! In my personal and my professional life I have too often needed to see myself and have others see me in a way that does not necessarily allow me to be vulnerable, authentic and able to feel negative emotions. It can be so exhausting to pretend that everything is perfect, even when it is pretty good, which it is!
We live in a world where globally, nationally, communally and personally, we will do almost anything we can to avoid a sense of insecurity in a frightening world. Taking off our shoes and belts at the airport, locking and alarming every room in our houses, perhaps even having guns (more of that tomorrow) and, more personally, building up armor around our hearts. I am not suggesting that we should be naïve to real threats of danger, but it is a myth that we can ever be or feel totally secure, so we might as well accept our insecurity.
Alan Watts in a 1951 essay called The Wisdom of Insecurity says that “to be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I”, but it is just this feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid.” He seems to be suggesting that the more willing we are to feel vulnerable and insecure, the safer we might feel. Spiritual communities at their best are built on a feeling of safety that comes from being able to be vulnerable with each other.
There’s a totally brilliant TED Talk from 2010, which has been doing the rounds, by a wonderful storyteller/researcher called Brene Brown on “The Power of Vulnerability.” Very funny, very deep and very worth watching. Her research has shown that pretty much everyone has shame and everyone wants connection and that in order for connection to happen, we have to be willing to let ourselves be seen.
There is only one variable, she says, between people who have a sense of love and belonging and those who don’t believe that they are worthy of love and belonging. What she calls the “wholehearted” people had in common was the courage to be imperfect and they fully embraced vulnerability. She says, “They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn’t talk about vulnerability being comfortable or excruciating…they just talked about it being necessary.” The willingness to do something where there are no guarantees…Sitting it out. Investing in a relationship that may or may not work out.
She continues to say that we numb out vulnerability. “We are the most in debt, obese, addicted, medicated adult US cohort in history.” We numb out the feelings that are difficult. “When we numb those,” she says, “we also numb joy, gratitude and happiness.”
This fear of being vulnerable and insecure are related, ultimately, to the fear of failure and the fear of death. Anecdotally, many of the most successful people in business and science, claim that success would have been out of the question without many previous failures. The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker’s 1973 classic, which poses the challenge that almost everything we do in western society is an “immortality project,” designed to perpetuate a mighty myth that we are immortal. We numb out death too. Living life with awareness and even an embrace of our mortality leads, according to Becker, to a much deeper and richer life.
Rabbi Eliezer in The Talmud essentially tells us to live each day as if it were our last, as if we were going to die tomorrow. What would that look like? Yom Kippur is such a powerful day and its power comes in part from the fact that we confront our own deaths. A couple of years ago at Yom Kippur, I quoted from Steve Job’s 2005 Commencement address at Stamford in which he said:
“you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of
thinking you have something to lose … You are already naked. There is
no reason not to follow your heart …”
The Jewish tradition tells us again and again to choose life. B’chor chayim. Does this mean to choose a life where we avoid feeling uncertain, insecure, vulnerable and afraid of failure and death? A life where we obsess over unrealistic goals of an unknown future, too frightened to live in the present? Or are we to choose a life where we are able live with doubt and uncertainty, embracing them for what they are in the moment, in all life’s messiness? Living courageously and with open hearts in communities where our vulnerability is valued, rather than a source of shame and where emunah and bitachon, faith and trust, give us the strength to live fiercely, unattached to outcomes, but knowing that it will work out in the end, even if it wasn’t how I planned or imagined it, even to the point of accepting my own death and the death of those I love? This is a different kind of faith to what we might consider traditional emunah. Holy doubt gives me permission not to know and to be just fine with it, whereas a religious faith that depends on certainty can stumble when the hardest questions arise. “how could it be like this, I prayed so hard and I was so good and still this happened….”
As much as we feel drawn to certainty, to wanting to know the truth, perhaps it really is more dangerous than doubt as a spiritual path. Brene Brown in that TED Talk says “we make everything that is uncertain, certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I am right, you are wrong, shut up”. I watched a discussion a few days ago with two great rabbis in our movement, both teachers of mine, filmed last week in LA. Rabbis Brad Artson and David Wolpe. They both said that the older they get, the deeper and broader the mystery gets, and the things that they thought they would have figured out and the problems they thought they would solve, remain unsolved.
Reb Shlomo Carlebach always used to say, “you never know, you never know.” Mystical traditions remind us that the ultimate knowing is knowing that we do not know.
Brene Brown says that our job as parents and teachers with children is not to look at them and say “you are perfect and my job is to keep you perfect, but rather to say, “you know what, you are imperfect and you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” She charges us to let ourselves be seen, deeply. To love with our whole hearts even though there is no guarantee.
As we enter another year with all of our hopes and fears laid out before us, how willing are we to live fully, lovingly and wholly by embracing the uncertainty of the future of the coming year and beyond? I invite us all as we enter these ten days to look inside at any doubts that we have, any insecurity, uncertainty and above all, vulnerability, and to say to ourselves in our human humility, “I just don’t know and it’s OK.” Holy doubters on a journey together to an unknown destination. Shanah tovah!