How Doubt is a Complement to Faith Lucy Rowe

public school, I really didn’t know really caused the world’s formation. My upbringing was to figure it out, that there was an answer, but I wasn’t

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 Olivia Schachtman, RZJHS 2022 journey, not a destination. I began to How Doubt is a Complement to Faith look at my faith, or rather lack thereof it, in a new way. I realized that this is Lucy Rowe, RZJHS 2020 only the beginning in a very long jourWhile growing up and attending a its challenges. what to think. Everyone had a differCosgrove also suggests that faith and doubt are interent philosophy, everyone believed in twined with one another, that in order to have a healthy a different faith, and I was stuck in version of faith, one must be able to reconcile both faith this muddy middle ground where I was being pulled in and doubt and put it into one. For someone who has a bunch of different directions. I was told, in Sunday looked at the two as binaries for so long this has been, School, that God created the world but and will be difficult. My thoughts and beliefs have been I was told in science class that the Big Bang was what glad for. a constant struggle of not only trying to land on an idea, Ann LaMott said that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt; but trying to stick with that idea, and forming a phiit’s a certainty, and I couldn’t have agreed more. In my losophy around it. The problem was, whatever I would experience, the certainty I’ve had, or tried to find within come up with would always be proved wrong, I was althe world, has completely nullified any notion of faith ways left with his feeling that I just wasn’t smart enough I’ve had. ney of mind, but it won’t come without challenged in these first few weeks alone, which I’m worthy enough to hear it just yet. I’ve always been searching for a reason and forgetting that God, as Cosgrove puts it, is ineffable, an unknowMy peers were always confident in their beliefs, most able being that cannot be deciphered the way scientific of them anyway, and my parents were firm believers in data can. Even trusted adults in my life, like my mom, God and that God existed, but as I grew up, I began to don’t really know where their belief stands, and if they realize how much their explanation of everything just even believe in God or not. They are all on their own didn’t make sense to me. This epiphany — that I’d been journey to find their answer, just as I am, but I’m no naive practically my entire life — led me to want to know longer looking for an answer. It is the wrestling with my the answer, led me to search for a reason for everything, doubt and attempting to find my faith that will bring me and so, I turned to science, not God. I based everything meaning in the end, it is the journey I am on, and no on what I knew for certain was true, and there was longer looking for a destination.