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For each of us there are milestones on our spiritual journey that change the direction of our life and set us on a new path. For me one such moment came when I was a rabbinical student at Jews’ College and thus had the privilege of studying with one of the great rabbinic scholars of our time, Rabbi Dr. Nachum Rabinovitch, zt”l.
The occasion was not special. He was merely giving us one of his regular divrei Torah. The week was parshat Noach. But the Midrash he quoted to us was extraordinary.
The text is in two parts, and it is a commentary on God’s words to Noah: ‘Then God said to Noah, “Come out of the Ark”’ (Gen. 8:16). On this the Midrash says:
Noah said to himself, “Since I only entered the Ark with permission (from God), shall I leave without permission?” The Holy One blessed be He said to him: “Are you looking for permission? In that case I give you permission.” Then God said to Noah, “Come out of the Ark.”
The Midrash then adds:
Said Rabbi Judah bar Ilai, “If I had been there, I would have smashed down [the doors of] the Ark and taken myself out of it.”
The moral Rabbi Rabinovitch drew – indeed the only one possible - was that when it comes to rebuilding a shattered world, you do not wait for permission. God gives us permission. He expects us to go on ahead.
Noah, says the Torah, “walked with God” (6:9). But God said to Abraham, “Walk on ahead of Me” (Gen. 17:1).
Suddenly I understood that this is a significant part of what faith is in Judaism: to have the courage to pioneer, to do something new, to take the road less travelled, to venture out into the unknown. That is what Abraham and Sarah had done when they left their land, their home and their father’s house. It is what the Israelites did in the days of Moses when they journeyed forth into the wilderness, guided only by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.
Faith is precisely the courage to take a risk, knowing that “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me” (Ps. 23:4).
It took faith to challenge the religions of the ancient world, especially when they were embodied in the greatest empires of their time. It took faith to stay Jewish in the Hellenistic age, when Jews and Judaism must have seemed small and parochial when set against the cosmopolitan culture of Ancient Greece and the Alexandrian Empire.
It took the faith of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Gamla to build, as early as the first century, the world’s first ever system of universal, compulsory education (Baba Batra 21a), and the faith of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai to realise that Judaism could survive the loss of independence, land and Temple, on the basis of an academy of scholars and a culture of scholarship.
In the modern age, even though many of Jewry’s most distinguished minds either lost or abandoned their faith, nonetheless that ancient reflex survived.
That is not carte blanche to do whatever we like. Not all innovation is constructive. Some can be very destructive indeed. But this principle of “Walk on ahead”, the idea that the Creator wants us, His greatest creation, to be creative, is what makes Judaism unique in the high value it places on the human person and the human condition.
Faith is the courage to take a risk for the sake of God or the Jewish people; to begin a journey to a distant destination knowing that there will be hazards along the way, but knowing also that God is with us, giving us strength if we align our will with His.
Faith is not certainty, but the courage to live with uncertainty.
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