The Contradiction in Us All

The Contradiction in Us All:

A Religious Journey Through My Year at Ma'ale Gilboa

Rafi Bocarsly

When it came time to choose a yeshiva, I had a relatively defined image of what I was seeking: an open-minded Israeli yeshiva where I could engage in serious religious study of the Talmud and other texts in Hebrew. It wasn't much of a decision. There is really only one place that, at least on paper, fits those criteria. Add to the equation that I spent a week at Ma’ale Gilboa in 11^th grade and loved it, and that ended the discussion.

At least, that was the formatted answer I quickly developed when people asked me why I chose Ma’ale Gilboa. But there was another reason that I wanted to go to here: I wanted answers. Since the beginning of my teenage years, the inevitable questions almost all observant Jews must face at some point began to develop: Does God exist? What are the implications if not? Why is Judaism important to me? Is observant Judaism important to me? These are the questions that followed and haunted me throughout high school, the questions that I and most of my friends had discussed ad nauseum with each other and our parents and our teachers and had come out more confused and more frustrated than when we started.

I felt as if I was a caricature of what a Modern Orthodox teenager should be: thoughtful, questioning, committed to the ritual observance of Halakha, a good rational Maimonidian thinker, someone who viewed the world in the absolutist black and white light that I perceived Halakha to be. But I was just that: a caricature, exaggerated in an attempt to cover the inauthenticity and doubt. I wanted desperately to believe in the community that I had been raised in, but how could I when I felt that so much of the traditional Jewish law system went against my personal mores (i.e. treatment of women, attitude toward homosexuals, response to the non-observant, et cetera)? I wasn't foolish enough to assume that one year would fix all my problems, but I thought that Ma'ale Gilboa would be a place where I could at least start to get some satisfactory answers to my questions.

I was wrong. In fact, Ma’ale Gilboa has not answered any of my questions. When I came to Israel, I was in the throws of the ontological loneliness that Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik so eloquently describes in one of his most influential essays on Modern Orthodoxy, “The Lonely Man of Faith”. “I am lonely because I feel rejected and thrust away by everybody,” Soloveitchik writes. “The words of the Psalmist ‘My father and my mother have forsaken me’ ring quite often in my ears like the plaintive cooing of the turtledove. It is a strange, alas, absurd experience engendering sharp, enervating pain as well as a stimulating, cathartic feeling. I despair because I am lonely and, hence, feel frustrated.” I too felt forsaken by my community. I too felt frustrated. I was stuck in the trenches, fighting to find reason and value in the practice that had meant so much to me for so long. I kept looking for the capital-t-Truth in Judaism and was coming up short every time. Ma’ale Gilboa has done nothing to avail those woes.

Instead, my time here has done something far different. It began about a month into yeshiva when, still perturbed by my self perceived lack of religious growth, I turned to an essay written by Rav Bigman for the Jewish publication Conversations. In the essay, entitled “Expanding Our Religious Vocabulary”, Rav Bigman argues that, “The rationalist mode and the mystical mode tend to contradict biblical imagery in the mind—and even more so in the heart. Some students manage to live in a dichotomous world. As a brilliant student once told me: ‘Although I find Maimonides' approach in the Guide very convincing, I live my life with the distinct feeling that God is holding my hand.” When I came across this quote, I found it to be an intellectually appetizing nugget to chew on. I let it simmer and settle in.

A couple of weeks later during tefillah, something strange happened to me. I was having a difficult day. Usually when I have difficult days, I try and push through and hope tomorrow will be better. On this particular day, I was more than a little surprised to find that what I wanted to do more than anything was to pray. That morning in tefillah, I had a strong sense of focus, or kavanah, that had escaped me since I had been a curious and intrigued child, beginning to explore the nature of prayer in his earliest days of elementary school. But what shocked me even more was what happened after tefillah that morning: nothing. For the first time since I happened upon rationalism and Maimonedian thought - which pushed the spiritual fire out of my life as quickly as it had been ignited when I was young - I didn't ask myself why I had just had a meaningful experience. I wasn’t plagued by the usual thoughts that would float across my mind and entrench themselves so firmly that I could think of nothing else; no questions of ‘what just happened?’ or ‘was it real?’ or ‘was I speaking to anyone?’ I was void of the usual cynical sardonicisms that I would so cleverly think up to explain away the spirituality and meaning. 

That was the first time I experienced rather than questioned, and my goal has been to do the same ever since. When Rav Bigman explained to us his conception of “God,” he continued to reinforce the train of thought I was already on. “God,” he told us, is not a man with a white beard sitting on his throne in the sky (a conclusion most of us had already come to.) Rather, “God” is a term we use to give voice to an experienced reality that we feel but we cannot quite express. This idea hit me with force: that “God” is an experience rather than a being. This was one of my first encounters with a phenomenological approach to Judaism, an approach that champions the idea that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, we first exist and experience and then try to put ideas to the experiences we have had. It is possible that God is an absolute being; it is also possible that God is not. But a phenomenological approach is not concerned with that question. It engages life from the realm of the experiential rather than the ontological. 

What that means is that now, I don’t have any answers to the questions with which I started the year because those questions aren’t essential to me or my Judaism anymore. I’m now more concerned with the internal experience of being a Jew and what that means to me rather than the big Meaning-Of-Life type questions that had berated me constantly. I've now begun to enter a new phase of my religious life where I accept the inherent contradiction in my beliefs; I can enjoy Maimonides’ philosophy and the Kabbalists' spirituality.

This contrast is captured beautifully by the theologian James Fowler in his book Stages of Faith, wherein he outlines six stages of faith development:

Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. This stage develops a 'second naïveté' (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's 'deeper self.' Importantly, this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious-the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of one's nurture...Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience.

Here, Fowler is describing the “dichotomous world” that Rav Bigman spoke of in his essay, a world in which one can except and move past the contradiction inherent within one’s self and one’s beliefs. It is a stage I now find myself beginning, and I am more at peace with my Judaism than at any point prior in my life.

Despite Ma’ale Gilboa’s emphasis on being a place of intellectual honesty and open questioning, the most valuable thing I've received from my time and the Rabbanim here thus far – especially with so many shiurim (classes) on Chasidut and Jewish mysticism – isn't answers to my questions; it's knowing when to question. I'm still intellectually curious; I still question. But now, I also “live my life with the distinct feeling that God is holding my hand,” and I don't feel a contradiction in that. I still struggle with my Judaism as much as I ever have. Only now the struggle is practical rather than abstract or philosophical: 'It's hard to get out of bed in the morning for tefillah’ as opposed to ‘Why get out of bed for tefillah?’ ‘I’m having trouble concentrating in class’ instead of ‘Is learning Jewish texts even worth my time?’ ‘I’m not feeling connected to my Judaism today’ and not ‘Should I feel connected to my Judaism at all?’ I still struggle, only now I look internally for the answers instead of expecting the capital-t-Truth to come smack me in the face and feeling defeated and dejected when it doesn’t.

This past Wednesday it rained on Ma’ale Gilboa, as it had every day that week. During lunch, as I sat in the Beit Midrash reading, one of my friends came over to me smiling. “Rafi, look at that,” he said as he pointed behind me. I turned around to face the large wall of windows overlooking the surrounding mountains behind me. What I saw was astonishing; a breathtakingly beautiful, picturesque rainbow shown perfectly through the thick density of clouds several hundred meters off the end of the mountain. My friend was not the only person to notice the rainbow and one by one the people in the Beit Midrash began to file out onto the balcony to get a better view. Everyone was silent, in a trance from the indescribable, transcendent beauty before us.

Soon we were all on the balcony overlooking the rainbow, the length of which spread from one periphery of our vision to the next. Some people took pictures – first of the rainbow, then of themselves with the rainbow in the background. Everyone was smiling and laughing. There were awestruck whispers from friend to friend, questioning and affirming the singularity of the magnificence we were witnessing. Someone came out with a siddur and recited the prayer one says when one witnesses a rainbow. We all answered amen and everyone was silent. Then someone began singing. We all joined in and locked arms. Soon, we were all singing and dancing with vigor and spirit.

As I danced, I took another glance at the rainbow and I thought about the reaction it was eliciting in us all. I thought to myself, ‘why is this our response to nature’s beauty?’ ‘Does it really make sense?’ I meditated on the question for a moment when David Foster Wallace’s words from his short story “Good Old Neon” flashed across my mind: “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.” Sometimes, it's worthwhile for me to ask ‘Why,’  to question and to grapple with the big questions, the capital-t-Truth, of the complicated world we all live in. Other times, it's better to let “what goes on inside” happen and just enjoy the rainbow.

Photo courtesy of Ofir Brand