The Torah of Rochelle Zell nothing else outside of that. There was only fact. There was no faith.
Olivia Schachtman, RZJHS 2022
How Doubt is a Complement to Faith Lucy Rowe, RZJHS 2020 While growing up and attending a public school, I really didn’t know what to think. Everyone had a different philosophy, everyone believed in a different faith, and I was stuck in this muddy middle ground where I was being pulled in a bunch of different directions. I was told, in Sunday School, that God created the world but I was told in science class that the Big Bang was what really caused the world’s formation. My upbringing was a constant struggle of not only trying to land on an idea, but trying to stick with that idea, and forming a philosophy around it. The problem was, whatever I would come up with would always be proved wrong, I was always left with his feeling that I just wasn’t smart enough to figure it out, that there was an answer, but I wasn’t worthy enough to hear it just yet. My peers were always confident in their beliefs, most of them anyway, and my parents were firm believers in God and that God existed, but as I grew up, I began to realize how much their explanation of everything just didn’t make sense to me. This epiphany — that I’d been naive practically my entire life — led me to want to know the answer, led me to search for a reason for everything, and so, I turned to science, not God. I based everything on what I knew for certain was true, and there was 22
Come middle school, I really thought that I had everything figured out. I was aware of what I knew and what I didn’t, but come my transfer to Rochelle Zell, that same feeling overcame me again. The discomfort of being around people who believed in something that I couldn’t see, couldn’t find proof for enveloped me, and I was content with this discomfort until this year in Modern Jewish Thought. We’ve read many articles, but the one that stood out to me the most was Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s statement about faith being a journey, not a destination. I began to look at my faith, or rather lack thereof it, in a new way. I realized that this is only the beginning in a very long journey of mind, but it won’t come without its challenges.
Cosgrove also suggests that faith and doubt are intertwined with one another, that in order to have a healthy version of faith, one must be able to reconcile both faith and doubt and put it into one. For someone who has looked at the two as binaries for so long this has been, and will be difficult. My thoughts and beliefs have been challenged in these first few weeks alone, which I’m glad for. Ann LaMott said that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt; it’s a certainty, and I couldn’t have agreed more. In my experience, the certainty I’ve had, or tried to find within the world, has completely nullified any notion of faith I’ve had. I’ve always been searching for a reason and forgetting that God, as Cosgrove puts it, is ineffable, an unknowable being that cannot be deciphered the way scientific data can. Even trusted adults in my life, like my mom, don’t really know where their belief stands, and if they even believe in God or not. They are all on their own journey to find their answer, just as I am, but I’m no longer looking for an answer. It is the wrestling with my doubt and attempting to find my faith that will bring me meaning in the end, it is the journey I am on, and no longer looking for a destination.
