We have created a false binary in the contemporary Jewish conversation between “believers” and “non-believers.” The reality is that any “religious” life is imbued with doubt. It is actually a blessing to never be fully certain of our convictions, because such doubt also allows for humility and the ability to connect with others who think and believe differently than we do. A life of striving for faith is a noble enterprise, for at its best it attempts to confront mortality and the meaning of our time on earth. But perhaps the real enemy in modernity is neither religion nor anti-religion, but our inability to “stay with things.” We seek out distractions of all shapes and sizes with a desperate urgency, the better not to have to think about why we do what we do and where it will all end up. But if we can let go just a little of this penchant for distracting ourselves, we may be able to feel alive in a more intense and satisfying fashion. Read on…

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.” Sylvia Plath [American poet; 1932-1963]. Draft of a Letter to Richard Sassoon

“I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Blaise Pascal [French mathematician and theologian; 1623-1662] Pensees. #136.

One of the greatest spiritual writers of the current age is the Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor. The author of over a dozen books with no flagging of his energies or skill, Batchelor has laid out a vision of how to live in the midst of all the uncertainties that the daily grind can bring. I was first introduced to his thought in 1983, when a friend got me a book called Alone with Others, followed a few years later by the wonderfully titled The Faith to Doubt.

The paradoxical nature of this title, the intertwining of faith and doubt, matched my own inner conflicts, and aided in liberating me to engage Jewishly in the midst of a raft of confusions about how I could undertake a consistent religious practice with so many unanswered questions. Batchelor made doubt not only viable, but in fact, inevitable, allowing one to live without trying to steamroller one’s deepest perplexities with static religious platitudes.

Batchelor’s understanding of doubt outlines the enormous virtue of questioning, even if the questions are uncomfortable and antithetical to easy faith. Batchelor notes “To ask a question entails that you do not know something. To ask `What is this?’ means that you do not know what this is. To cultivate doubt, therefore, is to value unknowing. To say `I don’t know’ is not an admission of weakness or ignorance, but an act of truthfulness: an honest acceptance of the limits of the human condition…”

As the Buddhist aphorism would have it: “Great doubt—great awakening; Little doubt—little awakening; No doubt—no awakening.”

The Jewish value of this idea is inestimable. I have met many Jews who have read themselves out of the Jewish project from the beginning because they believe there is a minimum requirement of faith or conviction – about belief in God or Jewish destiny or the binding nature of Jewish law. Having defined themselves as far too unsure or skeptical to take on any Jewish commitments without feeling like a hypocrite, they thereby elide the whole business of living Jewishly. Whether it is a self-imposed exile, or somehow they have been made to feel that way by Jewish authority figures, the end result is disastrous for Jewish communities, as large swaths of Jews head for the exits under the notion that they have failed some kind of unwritten loyalty test.

Both as a student and, for the past thirty plus years, as a teacher, I have been far more interested in questions than in answers, but only if I thought they were genuine inquiries and not phony way stations to a predetermined end. My memories of my own high school years are admittedly blurry at this point, but I do recall many questions being asked by teachers that were rhetorical, as though I was a trained seal, and “teacher had a secret” I had to guess. If I got the answer, I’d get flipped some fish. I was never sure what the point of that was, but I don’t think I learned very much from the whole exercise. If it was a game, I didn’t want to play.

In David Attenborough’s film Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) is portrayed as a towering intellectual who has deliberately constructed a life where he is safely removed from the messy and jagged world of emotional pain, and hence romantic love. Now almost sixty, after many years of being a “confirmed bachelor”, Lewis suddenly falls head over heels with a woman who challenges his rather imperious way of interacting with others. There is a crucial and quietly gripping moment where Lewis, now aware at the edge of his consciousness that others may actually have expectations of him to be emotionally real, expresses frustration to a student of his and blurts out “I wonder what it is that everybody wants from me?” To which the student remarks, “You know that is the first question I have ever heard you ask that sounds like you don’t know the answer.”

I believe that should be a guiding principle of education—and most certainly Jewish education–that is, to transform the classroom from a gently patronizing forum for extracting “right answers” into a landscape of mutual interactions where there is a shared quest for knowledge. Such a quest need not be politically correct or intellectually flaccid. The rules of what constitute a good argument do not have to be discarded in the name of making everyone happy or comfortable.

But just because students don’t always or even often “get it right” in terms of finding the exact words or thoughts or intellectually mature formulations, does not mean that the conversation stops. Indeed, that is probably the point where it begins. In a dynamic classroom, learning does not come at the expense of dialogue, nor does conversation come at the expense of learning. All of education should be geared around finding the right questions and working them through as long and as far as possible. Answers are common, but good questions are worth a great deal.

In Alone With Others, Batchelor asserts that woven into the fabric of living is the necessity of the perpetual encounter with potential meaninglessness: “We have to constantly confront our deepest anxieties, our emptiness, our despair, our doubts; and there is nowhere for us to escape and hide from them. It is impossible to ever turn back, and at times it seems impossible to ever make any further progress.”

But although Batchelor concludes we have nowhere to hide, many of us in the modern West certainly give hiding our very best shot by distracting ourselves as long and as deeply as possible. One of our greatest contemporary challenges is this devotion to distraction and all that it entails. From what do we all feel the need to be distracted? At the bottom of this inquiry are two inevitable conclusions. One of course is the spectre of our own deaths, but the twin answer is that of meaninglessness, the feeling that our lives will have played out to no good end.

Distraction is not a new topic. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche described his peers, you know, the ones with regular jobs: “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market”. But for Nietzsche it is not really about the watch or the market; these things are just detours from the deeper picture: “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Much of the modern capitalist project is organized around the encouragement of distractions, as commercial interests seek to sway our attention to the endless panoply of products. No one has articulated this better than the writer Matthew Crawford who, in reviewing and ruminating over the cellular onslaught on every last inch of the world, comments that this claim on our attention is not just a private choice but a major cultural problem.

He offers many examples of the bombardment, from the annoying to the tragicomic: Dunkin’ Donuts interrupts people’s morning commutes by releasing donut scents from the ventilation systems of public buses in Seoul, South Korea, to alert passengers when they approach one of the chain’s locations. And although Crawford asserts that “just as clean air makes respiration possible, silence, in this broader sense, is what makes it possible to think,” he also concludes ruefully that “silence is now offered as a luxury good.”

There is nowhere left to hide.

Despite what we would like to think, distraction is zero sum. If you are staring at a screen, then you are not with me, not really present, no matter how much you’d like to pretend. 

Judaism presents an alternative to the lifestyle of distraction. One brief example of Judaism’s ability not to flinch is the mourning ritual of shiva, a kind of forced confinement after a loved one has died. According to Jewish law, the mourner does not leave the house for seven days, does not listen to music or have sexual relations–men don’t shave, women do not apply makeup– or promote merriment in any way. Visitors are enjoined to sit with the mourner and wait in non-distracting silence until the mourner chooses to speak. In prescribing these actions or inactions for the mourner, the law creates a space for beginning to process the reality of the bereavement, with all of its associated emotions. It is a call, a beckoning to grieve. You have suffered a loss, dammit, and you are going to face that fact.

Distraction is understandable in the face of so much pain and anxiety that often comes in the course of a life. But facing up to our fears and creating a Jewish path to enhance the best in ourselves, may be an even better prescription for what ails us.

Please feel free to write me at elliott@livingjewishly.org with your thoughts and ideas and experiences, and your questions

Further Reading

Stephen Batchelor, Alone With Others, 1983.

Anne Brener, Mourning and Mitzvah, 1993. 

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 2014.