Wrestling with angels

This morning at Shabbat services, we read the Torah portion in which Jacob wrestles with an angel. The struggle lasts all night, and as dawn approaches, the angel, in a desperate move to escape, breaks Jacob's hip. But Jacob triumphs in the end, and the angel gives him a new name and a new identity: Israel, the father of a people.

This story has been interpreted in various ways over the years, with commentators speculating that the angel was an evil spirit sent by Jacob's estranged brother Esau, or a manifestation of Jacob's own guilty conscience, or the guardian of the river that Jacob had just crossed. But the interpretation that speaks to me the most today may also be the most straightforward one: Jacob, in a literal sense, wrestles with an angel. He wrestles with his faith. His struggle leaves him injured and weak and permanently changed.

I resonate to this part of the story because I, like so many, struggle with faith. Like Jacob, this wrestling match has left me scarred and exhausted and renewed. But unlike Jacob, the new identity I have wrung out of the struggle is not as the parent of a God-fearing tribe, but of a woman who has accepted a world without the presence of God.

This acceptance has been a long time in coming, prompted by many different experiences and teachings. In the end, I believe that the world that I live in doesn't have room for a God, at least not for the type of God who orders the universe and cares about the individual lives of humans. Evil is too pervasive, too random, too successful. The usual response about the existence of a divine plan is unconvincing. The rational mode of thinking in which I have been trained makes me cautious about any role that a God might have in creating life, or in perpetuating it, or in designing the laws that govern it. And lest you be tempted to conclude that this is a simple case of science killing the ability to appreciate the divine, I offer the observation that becoming a scientist has given me more opportunities to marvel at the wonders of the world than I ever thought possible. I am still moved by the beauty of the stars, by the rush of the seas, by the joy of loving my family and friends --- but because I am human, not because I believe.

Why, then, do I continue to be a practicing Jew? Why light candles on Chanukah or refrain from eating bread on Passover or fast on Yom Kippur? To please a God who doesn't exist? No. Then why? Why bother to go to Shabbat morning services, as I did today, or to continue to learn and teach Torah, or to put up a mezuzah on my door? All of these things, and more, are meaningful to me. But why should they be? Because this is what my family has always done? Because these are the ways in which I can keep in touch with my community? Because I just haven't come up with a good reason to stop?

These are the questions that form the basis of my struggle now. Having rejected the idea of a literal God, I now find myself searching for a way to bring meaning to the practices and rituals that are important to me. And even after several years of this search, I can offer no particular insight, only the vaguest sense that my religious practice matters to me because of my community, because of my family. I can't and don't want to stop feeling that connection. But I also can't explain why that leads me to do the things I do or to feel the things I feel.

Even today, when I was moved to tears by a fellow congregant's story of why he chose to convert to Judaism, I knew that his faith wasn't mine. After years of struggle with homelessness and heroin addiction, he'd found a family where he felt that he belonged. It's true that I belong to the same family and feel the same way, but for him the connection was divinely inspired, the answer to what he called "a God-shaped hole in my heart." I had such a hole once, and I did feel it filled by God, but I don't anymore. And as I stood there in the synagogue, unsuccessfully holding back my tears, I couldn't help but ask myself the same old questions: Why do I not believe as he does, even though I have the same capacity for it? Why is my soul still stirred by belonging to this community when I don't believe that I even have a soul? Why am I the way that I am?

The wrestling match goes on. Shabbat shalom.