Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Benjamin Kerstein, an Israeli-American writer based in Tel Aviv and Recipient of the 2024 Louis Rapaport Award for Excellence in Commentary from the American Jewish Press Association.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Belief, I have long felt, is not nearly as important in Judaism as in other Abrahamic religions.
Christianity, I am told, is more or less all about faith, which is seen as the key to redemption, grace, and the reception of God’s love. One becomes a Muslim by reciting the shahada, the statement of faith.
Judaism, by contrast, requires strikingly little in this regard.
Certainly, there have been attempts to formulate a kind of Jewish creed. The most famous of them is probably the “13 Principles of Faith” by Rambam1, which exercise some influence but have never become truly canonical. If the Rambam could not formulate a universally adopted authoritative statement of Jewish belief, then it is safe to say that no one ever will.
One can attempt to distill Judaism to its essence, to some eternal principle that defines it as a faith or at least a way of being in the world.
Traditional Judaism never really made such an attempt. It is a modern endeavor. Reform Judaism tried to do it, and chose the rejection of idolatry and “ethical monotheism” as the most likely candidates. But this hardly seems sufficient to encapsulate a tradition of such titanic size.
So, one could say that Judaism remains, even to its adherents, somewhat inscrutable.
Moreover, Judaism is a very particularist thing. It is not a universal or imperial religion like Christianity or Islam, and does not seek out converts. As a result, there is no real need for a statement of belief.
A Jew is a Jew because he is a Jew. He is born a member of the Jewish nation or chooses to become a member. The religion of the Jewish nation is Judaism, and that is all you need to know. You’re in or you’re out. Whether you believe or not does not particularly matter.
This has led some to assert that the essential aspect of Judaism is not faith but law; Judaism is defined by the Torah and adherence to its commandments as interpreted and set down in the rabbinical tradition.
In this context, belief is indeed largely irrelevant. Believe or don’t believe, but do the mitzvot (commandments). Indeed, the Rambam himself insisted that, even if you don’t know or understand the reasons behind the mitzvot, you should do them anyway. After all, we are bound to remain largely ignorant of the logic of Creation.
I am not sure if this is fully sufficient, however. While it may or may not regard law as a higher principle than faith, Judaism still asserts a great many things that seem to demand belief: There is only one God, omnipotent and omniscient; he created the world from nothing; he spoke to Abraham; he spoke to Moses; he took the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage and gave them the Torah; he exhorted and admonished Israel via the prophets; and so on.
Without accepting all of this, the authority of the law is, at the very least, badly undermined.
Moreover, there are hints, and perhaps more than hints, that there is something beyond the law. I have long felt that the most striking and extraordinary moment in the entire Torah is when Abraham urges God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, because there may still be a handful of righteous men among the sinners:
Abraham still stood before the Lord. And Abraham came forward and said, “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Perhaps there are 50 righteous ones in the city. Will you sweep it away and not forgive the place for the sake of the 50 righteous ones who are within it? Far be it from you to do a thing like this, to kill the righteous with the wicked, as if the righteous were like the wicked! Far be it from you! Will not the judge of all the earth do right?”
This suggests something quite remarkable: that some kind of eternal principle exists, created by God but in some way beyond God. This principle is absolute and immutable, and man may appeal to it even before God himself. In other words, it is beyond God’s will and commandments.
This implies that the law is not enough, even in as legalistic a religion as Judaism. God has created something in addition to the law, and perhaps it requires some sort of belief.
For me, especially over the past year, this has prompted the question: Do I believe in the God of Israel?
To explain the extent of this dilemma requires a certain amount of autobiography. Put simply, I have never been much of a believer. As a child, I considered the entire concept of God a bit strange. He presented no evidence to my senses and what I knew of science seemed to be a perfectly serviceable explanation for things.
I would sometimes stay up nights worrying about the concept of infinity. The thought of a universe that simply never ended terrified me with its immensity. For some, this would be a bit like fear and trembling before God. But I did not feel what many believers assert as self-evident: that the majesty of Creation is, by definition, proof of God’s existence.
As a result, I’ve tended to swing between agnosticism and atheism for most of my life.
When I first arrived in Israel, I decided to do the “religious thing” on Yom Kippur, went to a religious hostel in the Old City of Jerusalem, and lived surrounded by Halacha (Jewish law) for a few days. I did have a remarkable encounter with what in the old days was called a “Wonder Rabbi” — an American-born Hasidic madman who could spin glorious tales while drunk on homemade vodka.
Nonetheless, I found the entire atmosphere oppressive and was irreversibly alienated by a rabbi who spoke of murdering an old woman and dating a non-Jewish girl as if they were morally identical.
After that, I returned to my alternating mix of atheism and/or agnosticism. Eventually, I chose the latter, believing that the existence of God is unknowable and, if he does exist, he is also unknowable.
In recent months, however, I’ve found that position difficult to fully maintain. Since the October 7th massacre, not just Jews but Judaism itself — the entire continuum of Jewish existence and the Jewish ethos — has been under attack. Our being in the world has been rejected by monsters both high and low. Indeed, by some of the highest and the lowest. And they attack not only our bodies but also our souls. They want to destroy us not only physically but spiritually as well.
So, one is forced to ask, what is this spirit they wish to destroy? It is difficult not to conclude that it is, on some level, the God of Israel.
This God is a very mysterious figure. He is, on some level, unfathomable. Nonetheless, he is always absolutely there. He is willing not just to speak but to listen; as he listens to Abraham’s demanding question: “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?”
And while God rejects Abraham’s plea due to the universal immorality of the cities of the plain, he never rejects Abraham’s question in principle. This implies a God who is not fully aware of his own creation. He has to be reminded of it. He is omniscient, but he forgets things. He is a God who is remarkably human.
To the Orthodox, the notion of a human-like God is close to heresy. But one can easily turn that around: If God made man in his own image, then it is natural that we see aspects of ourselves in him. The heretics simply make the mistake of assuming that this is because God resembles us, when in fact we resemble him because he made us to resemble him.
This is not a God in which one must believe, but one must admit that it is a God who is plausible. If God exists, then he is more likely to be this God than any other. This points to something else, which is irrefutable, that must trouble the atheist and the agnostic.
The historian Tom Holland, who has taken up the cudgel for Christianity in recent years, has oft-remarked on the radical and bizarre nature of Christianity in the context of the ancient world. He does not present this as evidence of the truth of Christianity — though he seems to be headed in that direction — but uses it to point out that the ethos we take for granted today in a world saturated by monotheism was once very, very new.
If this is true of Christianity, it is true a thousand-fold of Judaism. Indeed, it is almost impossible to convey the extent to which Judaism was (in the world of its birth) almost impossibly strange.
When one reads the ancient pagans’ writings on Judaism, one sometimes sees hostility, but the overriding attitude is one of absolute bewilderment. Judaism simply makes no sense to them whatsoever. Who are these people who reject all gods but one? Who assert that those other gods are not just false but lies? Who claim that those other gods do not exist at all? Who are willing to die rather than worship them?
And what are the bizarre practices that emerge from such assertions? These people have no idols in their homes or their Temple. They “mutilate” their children’s genitals. They will not eat the foods that others eat. They marry only amongst themselves. They insist on remaining different and apart from other people. They will fight to the bitter end anyone who tries to change them. These people are deranged.
The more hostile among the ancients simply threw up their hands and declared the Jews “haters of mankind.” More circumspect observers admitted that the Jews tended toward highly ethical conduct, but took things a bit too far.
However, there appear to have been many who found something quite attractive about Judaism, though only a few converted. The phenomenon of the ancient “God-fearers,” who believed in the God of Israel and took part in some Jewish rituals without full conversion, is well known.
Ancient paganism’s struggle with the oddity of Judaism points to something that, in today’s world, we often forget: Judaism had no precedent.
Yes, there was the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten’s brief experiment with some kind of monotheism, but it was quickly suppressed after the pharaoh’s death and completely forgotten. Moreover, the Aten of Akhenaten’s theology is so completely different from the Jewish God that — despite perennial theories otherwise — it is all but impossible that the former was the origin of the latter.
Judaism was, in other words, sui generis. It came literally out of nowhere. It was a sudden eruption of something completely new into a world that was unready for it and found it utterly incomprehensible. Historical fact, in other words, indicates that the emergence and existence of Judaism appear to admit of no rational explanation.
It is difficult, then, for any atheist or agnostic (including myself) not to conclude that something very, very strange is working itself out through Jewish history.
Perhaps it is that higher ethos that Abraham asserts in the face of God. Today, that ethos (with some variation) is accepted as either sacred or self-evident by the billions of human beings who adhere to the Abrahamic religions and many who do not.
This, however, seems unduly reductionist to me. It smacks of Reform Judaism’s aforementioned attempt to whittle Judaism down to some vague universalist “ethical monotheism.” This effort was doomed to fail because it cannot possibly explain the unfathomable strangeness of Judaism and its emergence.
If there is such an explanation, I think it may be something else entirely: the secret of the world, which is the secret of the beginning and the end. It is this, more than anything else, that Judaism seeks to discover and impart. We all wish to know the beginning and the end, and knowledge of either is largely inaccessible to us, even to the greatest of our cosmologists.
The Tanach (Hebrew Bible) itself gives us a brief narrative of the beginning, but only the vaguest picture of the end. Yet as Judaism developed, something else emerged that is as strange as Judaism itself.
I have recently been studying the early Kabbalistic2 text, the Sefer Yetzirah (a work of Jewish mysticism). In doing so, I have undergone several moments at which chills ran up my spine. I won’t discuss them here, but direct experience is always the greatest challenge to agnosticism.
For centuries, the power of the Sefer Yetzirah has been that it purports to impart secrets. They are the secrets of the beginning — the Ma’aseh Bereshit (the cosmogony of the Talmudic times). The book tries to tell you, in opaque and elusive language, the precise means and methods by which God created the world.
Nor does the later Kabbalah neglect the secrets of the end. In its concept of the messianic tikkun3, the Kabbalah presents a complete cosmology of the beginning and the end: The world was shattered upon Creation but, in the messianic age, it will be repaired and dissolve back into divine perfection. That is how it all started and how it’s all going to turn out.
However, this prompts the question of how to contend with these secrets when one is profoundly skeptical of them.
As a writer, I love the Sefer Yetzirah’s contention that God created the world through letters and words. I admire the later Kabbalists’ clear-eyed, fearless assessment of a shattered world and their belief in its ultimate transmigration into the divine — so different from the blabbering of those who have appropriated the concept of tikkun to serve political ends.
But is any of it true?
I can only answer instinctively: I do believe there is a secret of the world, I do believe it is contained in the knowledge of the beginning and the end.
The Kabbalah’s elusive revelations of this knowledge may or may not be accurate. But they are a valiant attempt to answer the only questions that matter. If these questions are ever to be answered, then they will be answered only by those who dare to ask them — someday and somehow. Judaism, at least, dares to ask them.
My belief that such secrets exist may mean that I have become something of a mystic. I have noticed, however, that even the most secular and materialistic of thinkers, when they reach the limits of their knowledge, become something like mystics.
The great theoretical physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking believed that science could reveal the ultimate secrets. They believed those secrets were those of the beginning and the end. But at the limits of their analysis, both Einstein and Hawking intimated mysticism. To know the secrets would be to know that God does not play dice with the universe.
There have been many who argued that when these scientists speak of God, they are simply using a metaphor. But a metaphor for what?
Perhaps for the workings of the universe itself and the immutable laws by which it seems to operate; in other words, what began at the beginning and will cease with the end. These scientists did not believe in anything like the Kabbalists’ God, but they asked the same questions as those ancient mystics.
I believe I ask these questions as well. To some extent, we all do, even if it is only at the moments when we witness birth or face our own death. But if I ask them, do I ask them as someone who must, by definition, on some level, believe in the God of Israel?
I am not sure. But I do know that here lies something of an explanation for our current struggle. I know that a God who knows the secrets of the beginning and the end is a very dangerous thing in the eyes of many people. They suspect that those secrets will discredit, debase, or indict them. They want to know the secrets but are terrified of what they might reveal and what those revelations could force them to become.
So, they fight the God who knows them. And, by definition, they must also fight his people.
Whether I believe in the God of Israel or not, I do believe in his people. And if I believe in his people, then I have a relationship with him, whether I believe in him or not. I struggle with his enemies because I struggle with those who fight his people and thus fight against him.
If I believe there is a secret of the world, then it may well be the secret known only to the God of Israel. If I believe this, then I am indeed a mystic, if only a mystic of the unknown and unknowable.
Moses ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides and also referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam, was a Sephardic rabbi and philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages.
Refers to anything relating to Kabbalah, a mystical Jewish tradition
Refers to the cosmic and societal rectification that is expected to occur in the Messianic Age — the era ushered in by the arrival of the Messiah
The rebirth of Israel is miraculous. I believe because I look for miracles. The out of season rain helped extinguish the fires around Jerusalem. I've had miracles occur in my own life. God is unknowable but is. The fact that we are still here is miraculous.
If I were an atheist and traced the history of the children of Israel (who was formerly Jacob) I think I would change my mind and know that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was, is and will be the Almighty God forever. Because of Him Israel exists today. Only He could have kept the Jewish people, restored their land and called them back from the ends of the earth. Oh that they will know Him is my prayer.