From the Cyber Torah Archives

Trusting in God is extremely difficult. I like to believe my own actions can affect the outcome, that I have some power over my own life. It becomes hard for me to let God have that power over me. Certain people have such a strong faith in God that when difficult situations arise they trust implicitly in God to make things work out well.

I spent some time as a hospital chaplain a few years ago. There were ten of us who split up an on call schedule so that the hospital was covered by at least one chaplain twenty four hours a day. One Sunday, I got called in to see a seventeen year old girl who had received a heart transplant at the age of ten. This family had been on a roller coaster ride for the last two days as doctors first pronounced that she had no chance and then that she might recover

By the time I was called in, it was clear that the girl was not going to make it much longer. The family wanted me to pray with them, and I talked to the girl a little bit. She was very scared that she had not been good enough during her life and that she would go to Hell. They were tired, weak, exhausted.

When I returned a few hours later, the girl had passed away. The family was grief stricken. What I remember most is the extent to which their faith in God helped them through those first few moments. They prayed, they tried to understand how it could have happened, they were even angry with God, but they trusted that God had done the right thing. I was and remain envious of faith like this.

Abraham is often cited as the paradigmatic man of faith. He left his home to start a new life all because of his belief in and love for God. He lived a difficult and tortuous life. He left home at 75 with nothing more than a promise that he and his children would start a new religious that one day would be strong and numerous. Yet he remained childless for 25 years. Even Abraham experienced doubt. In Chapter 15 of Genesis, God appears to Abraham and says to him, "Do not fear, Abraham." Abraham responds by saying that he does fear, and in particular is worried that he has no child. God then "takes him outside" which the Midrash says means that God takes him up into the sky to see the order in the universe. Based on that experience, Abraham "Believed in God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness (v.6)."

Why does seeing the Universe renew Abraham's faith? Rashi, an 11th century French commentator to the Bible, explains that Abraham's faith was renewed by this experience with God. Ramban, a 12th century Spanish scholar, disagrees. He says that Abraham realized his actions in the world were only one piece of the puzzle. Abraham had feared that he might have sinned too much to merit children. This experience taught him that God would act to fulfill His word anyway.

By having an experience with the immensity of the heavens, the wonder and terror of God's work, Abraham realized that our human conceptions of God's actions are inherently flawed. We finite beings cannot grasp the infinite nature of God. Our actions are relevant despite the difficulty we have in understanding why terrible things can happened to us. Faith in God includes a recognition that God's actions transcend human understanding. Faith in God is important to developing ourselves spiritually. It is a hard struggle to truly acknowledge God's complete power over our lives in a manner that goes beyond our ability to comprehend. Abraham's life was never about certainty or absolute faith, but rather a struggle between doubt and belief. It is much harder to live that way - we like certainty. Either believe or don't. Yet the in-between, the simultaneity of faith and doubt, is precisely the manner in much a true faith can be nurtured.