Bud and blossom

Despite the trials and tribulations of 2020, I’m approaching the new year with hope that we’ll see increasing evidence of concern for others in the same spirit of selfless giving we’ve seen reflected in many branches of the news media.

Unobtrusive acts of kindness are happening everywhere! People (including young schoolchildren) have gone out of their way to help stock food-banks, find openings for the jobless, and bring spiritual support to the sick and grieving—in the process, comforting thousands suffering from COVID-induced loneliness. 

Also, communities have come together to share and discuss their religious persuasions, and—Hallelujah!—found much to celebrate. Connection has actually become easier.

My wife and I have found ourselves growing closer to friends and neighbors we’ve not spent enough time with in the past. Unexpectedly, opportunities have opened up to chat about faith, food, family, and books.

  But it was loneliness that most often crept into our conversations, especially when faith was mentioned.

One of the many things that surprised us was the number of books available on the subject of loneliness, including a slim volume that goes back more than fifty years!

It takes the form of an essay by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik titled The Lonely Man of Faith. “The Rav,” as he was best known, was a leading authority on the meaning of Jewish law and a prominent source of wisdom in building bridges between traditional Orthodox Judaism and the modern world.

His text, by the way, is cast predominantly in universal terms.

Using as a springboard the two different and 

seemingly contradictory accounts in the Bible book of Genesis of the creation of Adam, the Rav discusses the loneliness of people of faith in what most of us now view as our narcissistic, materially oriented, utilitarian society.

As you might guess, the person of faith at the heart of his book is the Rav himself. Freely, he confides in us about actual situations and experiences with which he’s been confronted and which have weighed heavily on his mind for many years. He speaks plainly and modestly, skillfully avoiding philosophical dialectics and abstract speculation.

It may not surprise you that this paperback of just  one hundred pages was a gift to us from two Jewish neighbors who are now among our dearest, most respected friends. We could talk all night about prayerful solutions, especially in understanding the difference between loneliness and being alone.

In the book, the Rav admits that he wouldn’t feel hurt if his thoughts on the many issues he raises find no response in the hearts of his readers, because, he says, knowledge in general, and self-knowledge in particular, are gained not simply from discovering logical answers, but also from formulating logical, even though unanswerable, questions.

This blogpost is not the place to outline the Rav’s path of self-discovery and his cautious responses to those “unanswerable questions,” but he confirms that he will feel amply rewarded if his audience feels that his interpretations are also relevant to their own perceptions and emotions.

Where I felt most at one with him was in his bold approach to the issues of religion itself, and to prayer. The Rav believed that, by divine edict, religion is not a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a “raging, clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments.”

This confrontaton, suggests philosophy professor David Shatz in his foreword to the book, is so true of the Rav’s lonely man. Shatz points to the more tawdry commercialism in the selling of religion than when the Rav wrote his essay decades ago, along with the highly individualistic and idiosyncratic forms of belief practiced today.

Shatz observes that the man of faith’s alienation from contemporary society is not so much a function of society’s technological pursuits as of its morality.

In the Rav’s segments on prayer there are helpful insights into what it is to feel alone with God, or pressed into the service of God.

For him, prayer consists not only of an awareness of the presence of God, but of an act of committing oneself to God and accepting His ethico-moral authority. Prayer, he says, is always the harbinger of moral reformation.

And many of the the issues tackled by the Rav are brought up to date in The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne, 2020).

It’s been written by two Jewish scholars, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, who examine about a dozen biblical passages the New Testament cites from the Old, in an effort to enlighten both Jews and Christians (but primarily the latter) as to how adherents of the other tradition have both in good faith and within reasonable interpretive boundaries read the same texts in remarkably different ways.

Such differences, suggests Christian Century reviewer George Heider, should stimulate not polemics but “possibilities” of mutual respect and enlightenment.

Which brings us back to Joseph Soloveitchik’s challenges and the shared hope of so many of us that 2021 will spill over with so much mutual respect and enlightenment that loneliness everywhere will truly be overcome.

It’s also helpful to consider how Mary Baker Eddy, a deeply committed Bible student and spiritual pioneer in the late nineteenth century, spoke of the shuttlecock of religious intolerance.

She believed that “when the doctrinal barriers between the churches are broken, and the bonds of peace are cemented by spiritual understanding and Love, there will be unity of spirit, and the healing power of Christ will prevail.

“Then shall Zion have put on her most beautiful garments, and her waste places [including the loneliest, I would add] budded and blossomed as the rose” (Pulpit and Press).