Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Rabbi David J. Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and a teacher of modern Jewish religious thought at UCLA. He has been named the #1 Pulpit Rabbi in America (as reported in Newsweek). Rabbi Wolpe writes for many publications, including The Jewish Week, Jerusalem Post, and Beliefnet.com. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN and CBS This Morning and has been featured on the History Channel's Mysteries of the Bible. He is the author of the national bestseller Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times. His new book is Why Faith Matters.
FP: Rabbi David J. Wolpe, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Wolpe: Thank you. I’m delighted to be with you.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Wolpe: There was really a dual inspiration, one personal and one more general. Personally I had just gone through both a brain tumor/neurosurgery and a few years later, chemotherapy for lymphoma. Through both experiences I realized anew that faith was not a set of abstract propositions, but rather a community, an orientation of soul, a way of seeing. I wanted to share the power of those realizations – not the idea itself which is hardly new but the force with which it struck me – with the reader.
That dovetailed with my exasperation with the claims of the new atheists – Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. Their mockery was sometimes misguided, and often directed at a faith that was not what I understood as faith.
In fact, over the next couple of months I have debates scheduled with Hitchens and Steven Pinker, who make many of the same arguments. They are both very intelligent and learned men, but they seem to me to misconceive both religions origins and its purpose.
FP: You must have been through a lot. I wish you the best of health.
How do people like Hitchens and Pinker misconceive both religion's origins and its purpose?
Wolpe: Thanks for the good wishes.
I believe that Pinker and Hitchens make the mistake of seeing religion as a series of abstract propositions that can be contradicted. Religion is an orientation of soul, a way of seeing, of appreciating, of understanding blessing. That cannot be chased away with a smirk or a syllogism. Moreover, reason is always in service of ends; those who believe themselves purely reasonable are self-deluding.
Finally I think they do not understand the depth and complexity of religious thought and experience. Just as 2+2 is math and Einstein’s equations are math, so religious thought can be simple (even simple minded) or complex and profound.
FP: Why were you an atheist in your teenage years? Tell us a bit about your fascination with Bertrand Russell. How did you come to eventually understand faith?
Wolpe: Russell, whose arguments anticipate many of the current crop of atheists (and for my money, Russell does it better) was a lucid, persuasive writer. His words sound as if thrown down from the Olympian heights of rationalism. As a high school student I had lost my faith after seeing a documentary of the holocaust called “Night and Fog.” The evil was so overwhelming I could not imagine believing in God. Reading Russell was a confirmation of what my shocked spirit already concluded.
However then I read something of Russell’s life. I realized that an argument does not make a good person any more than a cookbook makes a good meal. I had to rethink the possibility that one could be strong and have faith, rational and have faith – that faith was more flexible, sturdy, deep, than I had imagined.
FP: The evil of, let’s say, the Holocaust doesn’t necessarily disprove God, it just proves the existence of evil and of free will. God may very well cry with us through our suffering. Yes?
Wolpe: I have a section about the question of evil; recapitulating it would probably do violence to a discussion that is already so short as to do violence. But I will say that if we believe this world to be, as in Keats’ phrase, a “vale of soul-making” then it requires good and evil, free will and bad choices, random suffering and goodness, to shape a soul. To ascribe pathos to god is not to diminish God, I believe; surely the Divine pathos is on a scale we cannot understand, but I am a devotee of Buber who taught that while one can speak to God, one cannot really speak about God.
FP: Why is it important to make a case for faith?
Wolpe: The principle reason it matters is not only to resurrect the idea of faith as a serious endeavor – something known to our predecessors, but for two social/political reasons. One is that there will be people of faith, and they need to understand themselves and each other. Part of the book talks about beliefs that the major faiths share. The foreword is written by Rick Warren, the renowned Pastor of Saddleback church. People of faith should understand a sense of common endeavor. (By the way, some have already been upset that I would have a “right wing evangelical” write a foreword to my book. I was and am enormously proud that he agreed to do so.)
Second, I have a brief chapter that talks about how study after study shows that people of faith are more charitable, volunteer more, have stronger families, and so forth. Faith is not only good for the individual; it is good for the society.
FP: If God shows Himself, then there would be no need for faith, right? He may be leaving Himself out of sight because He gave us freedom and wants faith to be our own choice and something that is up to us to fertilize and nurture. Your thoughts?
Wolpe: The Hebrew word for world is “olam” which has a link with the Hebrew word “ne’elam” meaning hidden. So there is an ancient tradition that God exists hidden in the world. Our task is one of seeking; and yes, the very virtue of faith is to understand that the greatest reality is the intangible.
FP: Religion and war?
Wolpe: Yes, that is the usual counterargument. How can religion be good for society when it causes war? This I find the argument of those who have not taken the time to consider history. What was the world like before monotheism? A peaceful garden? Were the Assyrians, Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, and all the many savage tribes now lost to history – were they all irenic? Hardly. The two most bloodthirsty times in human history were before monotheism, and after – that is, after the French revolution enabled regimes to be officially atheistic. Then you get the Napoleonic wars, World War I and II, the unimaginable depredations of Nazism and communism.
Hitchens, for example, speaks in his book about how believing in God is like being in North Korea, where there are pictures of the dictator everywhere. Setting aside that God is not a petulant tyrant, it is a curious analogy. For North Korea is an atheistic state; when people manage to flee, they go to a flourishing democracy, South Korea, which has a vibrant Christian culture. I’ll take the real God over the ersatz gods that human beings concoct, and I suspect your readers would, too.
FP: Why do totalitarian ideologies like communism wage war on God and faith?
Wolpe: To acknowledge God is to acquiesce in one’s own limitations. The world is not ultimately the servant of the historical process or the tyrant’s whim, but under the dominion of its Creator.
Also, houses of worship are independent centers of power. Think the civil rights movement or the Catholic church in Poland. Things can brew in religious settings that puts them at odds with social policies of government. In America we call that the people speaking. Elsewhere in the world, it is treason.
FP: Tell us about the new atheists.
Wolpe: They make the mistake of deifying reason. All of them believe that science is the answer, that nothing is real that cannot be, in one way or another, measured, and the human mind – that accidental agglomeration of blind evolution – somehow knows the real truth about the nature of the universe. This contradiction, by the way, was identified by Darwin, who wrote: “Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”
As a result of this worship of the mind, they dismiss as an illusion the greatest teaching of religion. Emerson, as is often the case, says it best: “The first and last lesson of religion, the things that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen are eternal.” Not to believe in the unseen is a peculiar kind of modern blindness.
The new atheists cleverly recycle arguments which play on people’s fear of being thought credulous, unsophisticated or simply ignorant. Rather the strongest, subtlest people I have known have been people of faith.
FP: Can you tell us a bit about Emerson and what he means to you? What was his philosophy and faith? How has it influenced you?
Wolpe: Emerson speaks to me more eloquently than anyone outside my own faith tradition. There is something in the rhythm of his sentences that is strong, expansive and full of faith. When it came out I read Robert Richardson’s magnificent biography “Emerson: The Mind on Fire” and it confirmed and reinforced everything I felt. His was a solitary spirit in some ways but he shaped the American community’s sense of itself.
When Emerson tells us “I am defeated all the time, but to victory I am born” that could be the motto for every serious faith. When I am angry I remember Emerson’s comment on our natures: “My moods do not believe each other.” But most important, Emerson was a great believer not only in the American experiment, but in our ability to create a culture worthy of our political traditions. Sometimes we reach close to his vision; all too often we fall short. But the nobility of Emerson, his transcendentalism which affirmed the reality of the unseen and called us to be greater than we currently are – these themes speak deeply to me as to so many others. I feel when reading him, as I sit in this city (L.A.) of glitz and material rewards and fame, that what Henry James said is true: “We have the impression, somehow, that life never bribed him to look at anything but the soul.”
FP: Can you talk a bit about the compatibility of God and science?
Wolpe: I grew up in a family with both scientists and Rabbis. The incompatibility of science and religion never seemed to me persuasive. The two fields address rather different questions, although there is some natural overlap. Questions of ultimate value, how we should live, why we should live, these are not demonstrable by the tools of the scientist. The mechanisms by which God ushered this world into being is the domain of the natural researcher.
Even the historical clash of science and religion is overstated. In the field of evolutionary biology alone, perhaps the most contentious, Stephen Jay Gould memorably wrote that either half his colleagues are enormously stupid, or evolution is compatible with orthodox religious belief.
FP: How do you understand the Grand Inquisitor and the outlook of Ivan in Brother’s Karmazov?
Wolpe: The parable reminds me in part of a Yiddish saying, “If God lived on earth, people would break His windows.” That is, the true God is too powerful for us to realize so we diminish God. And the question of suffering, that great and terrible question, which is ultimately beyond our powers, is expressed here as bound up with our inability to stand up and be fully human.
FP: How can one move closer to God if one yearns to do so? What can one do if one yearns for faith but has difficulty believing?
Wolpe: Moving toward belief is often a result of associating with behaviors that lead to belief and with believers. Community, practice and study/meditation are the means that traditions have taught for centuries. I do believe that faith is in part a talent, almost like a musical talent. Some have a natural, unshakeable belief. Most of us will struggle, it will slip from grasp and then return; I think of that very practice, that living in questions, that reaching, as the practice of faith.
FP: Should we pray? Is it important to pray for one another? Why is prayer important?
Wolpe: May I quote something from the book? A 17th century Rabbi, Leona Medina, explained it this way: If you watch a man out on a boat grab a rope and pull his boat to shore you might think, if you were confused about weight and motion, that he was really pulling the shore to his boat. People have just such a confusion about spiritual weight and motion: In prayer some believe that you are pulling God closer to you. But in fact the heartfelt prayer pulls you closer to God.
I have prayed in fear and in joy, in crisis and in calm. Each time I understood that what I was asking for was not the object of my prayer. My prayer that I would be healed was a prayer, stripped of all its topmost layers, to be assured that whatever happened would be alright. Every prayer in this way is a prayer for peace; peace in the world and in one’s soul, the certainty that the pain is not empty, the world not a void, the soul is not alone.
FP: Rabbi David J. Wolpe, it was an honor to speak with you. Your book meant a lot to me and this interview has spoken something to me. Thank you.
Wolpe: Thank you for this chance to talk. God bless you.