Religion for adults means embracing complexity

By Micah Greenstein, Special to The Daily Memphian

When I was a rabbinical student living in California in the 1980s, before protective pool screens were ubiquitous, a young mother in the congregation I served had suffered the unthinkable.

She lost her only child when he wandered away from her and their friend group. I met Denise almost a year after her preschooler drowned, and she taught me the danger of what well-meaning religious people said.

The facile theology of their comments only enraged Denise and made matters worse.

Instead of saying, “I’m sorry,” one person remarked, “God only tests the strongest.” Denise’s response?

“Then make me weak.”

Another said, “He’s in a better place now.” “Really?” Denise thundered back, “Why isn’t being with a loving mom the best place for a 3-year-old?”

I just listened as this clear-eyed bereaved parent asked rightly: “Why would a loving and just Creator ever will such a thing?”

Another parent who lost his children and suffered horribly was the innocent man in the Bible named Job. Many are surprised to learn, if they read the whole story, Job rejected the reward-and-punishment theology we learned in our childhoods and still hear about today.

Those who invoke the phrase “the patience of Job” likely never read the second half of the book. Job lets his friends have it as they try to explain his suffering as some kind of punishment.

His patience definitely wore out. Job suggests we humans actually have no idea why bad things happen to good people.

As the eloquent Jewish author Sarah Hurwitz puts it: “Maybe things don’t always happen for a reason. Maybe sometimes life is just really unfair.”

Religion for adults is not about justifying cruelty. Religion for adults means embracing complexity.

Regardless of one’s faith tradition, Hurwitz wisely suggests, mature forms of religion do not “traffic in simplistic or implausible answers.”

Rather, they push us to ask the right questions instead of trying to answer questions with no satisfying answers. 

The fitting questions mature forms of religion ask are not about what good outcomes look like but, “What does it mean to lead a truly ethical life? To be part of a community? To serve something greater than one’s self?”

My rabbinic experience burying victims of horrific diseases and split-second tragedies has led me to different questions than “why?”

Inspired by Job, the more helpful religious questions include:

• “Now that this happened, how do I summon the strength to still choose life?”
• “How is God present even in my grief?”
• “Where will meaning come from when I can barely get out of bed?” 
• “How do I carry brokenness as part of me but not everything?”

Theological platitudes in response to life’s fragility is not the only domain where people miss the spiritual and intellectual depth of a mature faith. Presenting religion as anti-science is another prime example. 

For the record, the first book in the Torah, Genesis, was never intended to be a science lesson refuting evolution nor lead to a conflict between science and religion. Science and religion are friends, not enemies. 

Science is essential to understanding how things work, but science will never explain why things matter to the human heart.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it this way: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. We need both: explanation and interpretation.”

The early rabbis never intended a “day” in God’s eyes to be a human being’s understanding of time.

Instead, the Torah asks three questions science does not, namely: Who am I in relation to the universe? Why am I here? How then shall I live?

At the end of the book of Job, God gives Job, whose patience was exhausted from sorrow and useless platitudes from his dense friends, a tour of the universe and reminds Job that God was there all along.

Adds Rabbi Sacks: “If we want to heal the world, we have to understand the world,” hence the importance of science to religion.

In the words of Albert Einstein: “Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame.”

Science complements religion; it doesn’t destroy it.

Whether coping with illness and tragedy or marveling at the creation of the world, “I don’t know” is an appropriate religious response. 

Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young and peaceful 1965 Selma civil rights activist was suddenly shot and killed by Alabama state troopers. His death left his entire family bereft and grief-stricken.

At his funeral, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told Jimmie’s grandfather: “There are no words to soothe you. But I know one thing for certain: God was the first to cry.”

After I learned about the tragic death of her young son, among the first things I said to Denise was: “The God I believe in would never will such a thing.”

The God I believe in is waiting for us to use our minds and hearts to heal the hurt, save lives and be God’s partner in mending this broken world.