​THE WHOLE LOAF

There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.  Mahatma Gandhi

​Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.  Mahatma Gandhi
 
When I was a kid, I developed an aversion to fasting. For me, the worst hours of being Jewish were the concluding hours of Yom Kippur when the last recitations of a year’s-worth of sins crawled like rush hour traffic on the Edens Expressway, and my stomach was furious and took it out on me with a walloping headache. Fasting was neither spiritual nor devotional. If I was going to be redeemed, it was going to be with carbohydrates.
 
I am much more conscious of the world around me now, and so I understand that my voluntary fast was a matter of privilege and personal choice. Gandhi was talking about the people described by Isaiah in the prophetic reading from the morning of Yom Kippur: those who know hunger, nakedness, and homelessness intimately and constantly. But that lesson was easily forgotten for the price of a bagel.
 
Gandhi was not wrong, but he was incomplete. His formulation of this theological claim was designed to call attention to the plight of the poorest of his people. If he were an oncologist, he might have said that there are people so sick that God cannot appear except as a cure. If he were an educator, he might have said that there are people so desperate to learn that God cannot appear except as a teacher. For the desperate and despairing, before they can rise above their suffering and believe, they must be given hope – the lonely, a lover; the freezing, a blanket; the lost, a map.
 
Believing in God has always been hard for those who suffer. Faith traditions have diverse ways to deal with the hard part, and to my disappointment the solution seems to be most often to blame the victim. Either the skeptic is not trying hard enough or continues to put distance between themself and the Divine (by another name: sin). The person committed to non-belief argues that if God is good and loving, why does anyone have to prove fidelity before benefiting from that goodness and love.
 
I cannot make the case for belief in God in less than 750 words, especially since I have already used more than half of them. But I will say this much: though it took me a long time, I eventually gave up on asking the question “what’s in it for me?” It doesn’t matter what kind of hunger overwhelms me, momentarily or continuously. If my belief is dependent on benefiting from a higher being, natural or supernatural, my faith is doomed to dissolve. And if I found comfort and meaning in the way my personal distress was assuaged, then I have a peculiar (I’d even say pathological) interest in maintaining that distress so as not to lose my connection to the divine.
 
It seems to me that faith is a decision influenced by many factors. It is choice that is no more dependent on logic than on illogic, no more on benefit than on need. When the question of God’s existence and presence is answered before it is asked, then the answer is unreliable.
 
Maybe you consider these things to be peculiar coming from a rabbi, especially one who professes belief.  It raises all sorts of issues about revelation, scripture, and, most of all, religion. Our collective and individual attachment to those expressions of the divine are extremely important, but, in the end, not definitive. My desperation for a loaf of bread is no more relevant than my need for love, wisdom, or justice. Or, for that matter, reassurance about the eternal disposition of my soul.
 
I know a guy whose story of faith begins with something remarkably insignificant. Let’s say it involved a terrifying noise during severe weather (not the truth, but it will do). Unaccustomed to prayer, this person nonetheless petitioned the God in whom they claimed not to believe to be a protection from whatever was causing that noise. The sound stopped. That person became immediately devout.
 
I am skeptical of that experience. But over the years, I have seen how that decision to believe has influenced the individual. They have lived into their faith in the best conceivable way. (It is not my way, as it happens, but to stretch the analogy, that’s like arguing that if the hungry person got a loaf of bread, if it wasn’t pumpernickel it didn’t count.)
 
I seek no gain in converting non-believers. The choice of faith informs the way I live that stands in contrast to what kind of person I would be if I did not believe. It tells me that if Gandhi is correct, if I am true to my faith, then somehow I must be that loaf, not to persuade the hungry person to a place of belief, rather to affirm my own.