Steadfast or Merely Informed?

Parashat Yitro, Exodus 18:1–20:23
Chaim Dauermann, Simchat Yisrael, West Haven, CT
 

I remember the first time I saw a smartphone. Naively, I thought I was looking at an instrument of peace and enlightenment. With the Internet in everyone’s pocket, I thought that having more and better information would inspire us all to make better choices and to treat one another better.

Clearly, I was mistaken. Why didn’t we improve? What were we missing?

This week’s parasha, Yitro, contains one of the most seismic events in the entire Torah narrative: the giving of the Ten Commandments. Before Moses famously bore them down from Sinai on tablets of stone (the first time and the second time) God delivered the Ten Commandments orally, while all of Israel was assembled in attendance near the foot of the mountain. 

Exodus 20 recounts that the sound of God’s voice so terrified the people that they said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die” (Exod 20:19). The people moved away from the mountain, but Moses drew closer to hear more from God, who instructed him to tell the people, “You yourselves have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven” (Exod 20:22b). We see that the children of Israel had irrefutable experiences of God’s power, including, as God himself pointed out, hearing his voice from above, yet as the biblical narrative unfolds from there, we see Israel go through cycles of idolatry, disbelief, and rebellion, often doubting that Moses (and God) can lead them to the land that was promised. They had concrete information about God, but they were lacking in faith.

In modern discourse, the idea of “taking something on faith” is generally taken to mean believing something unreasonably, perhaps even despite what appears to be invalidating evidence. Ask a modern secular person to give you examples of “faith,” and they might point to “blind belief” in the Bible’s various truth claims as an example. You would be right to dispute their characterization of such beliefs as “blind.” But also disputable is the notion that belief in these claims constitutes “faith” in the biblical sense. It’s easy to find one’s self on the losing side of an argument when the other side’s misconceptions have been permitted to frame the debate. 

The author of Hebrews called faith “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1). While some might conclude that this means “believing without evidence,” a closer reading of the verse, and the rest of the chapter, shows that this is not so. One would be right to point out that one doesn’t typically experience “assurance” and “conviction” without compelling evidence, but such evidence is not the point. The point is the assurance and conviction themselves, and what they are oriented towards: things “hoped for” and “not seen.” It follows that faith is a conviction that has an orientation toward something in the future, something we cannot yet grasp. The author then soon puts a finer point on this faith definition: “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb 11:6 ESV). Here, we see faith understood as something that involves an action, in the form of “seeking” and “drawing near” to God, as well as an expectation in the form of believing that God rewards us for our seeking. Faith, in this sense, is an active form of trusting in God.

Mark’s Gospel recounts Yeshua’s encounter with a blind beggar named Bartimaeus (10:46–52). Being familiar with Yeshua’s reputation, Bartimaeus called out, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” and asked him to heal his blindness. Yeshua replied, “Go; your faith has made you well.” This faith to which Yeshua referred was not energized by Bartimaeus’s foreknowledge of Yeshua’s deeds, but by his belief that he could heal him.

The Greek word most frequently translated as “faith” in the New Testament (and in both of the above passages) is pistis. In the Septuagint, pistis usually corresponds with the Hebrew word emunah, a word that doesn't describe belief, so much as a quality of steadfastness, reliability, and sturdiness. (“Thus, his hands were emunah until the sun set,” Exod 17:12c.) In this sense, faith is not what we know intellectually, but is rather how this information informs what we do, and how it influences the orientation of our hearts.

So now we see, it is possible to simultaneously lack faith yet also believe that God exists and that he has acted in the past. In modern terminology, there is a word used to describe a belief in God that strips him of all agency in our world today: Deism. The deist movement proliferated chiefly among English writers and thinkers in the 16th through 18th centuries, later to become common in the American Colonies and helping form some of the philosophical underpinnings of the American Revolution. More broadly, however, deism describes a system of religious thought that limits knowledge of God to objectively observable data about the universe, while rejecting the idea that any such knowledge can be passed down through religious institutions or by direct revelation. In essence, it is a vision of the world which holds that God set the wheels in motion for everything, and then stepped back and ceased to be involved in his creation. Someone adhering to this way of viewing the world could, at times, very well sound like a person with a true faith, if judged on the basis of some of their statements. British-American deist philosopher Thomas Paine wrote in his work The Age of Reason, “I believe in one God, and no more: and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” At first glance, this would appear to be a statement of faith, affirming God’s oneness and, in him, a future hope. What follows on from there, however, is the remainder of Paine’s treatise, itself a polemic against religious institutions, the Bible, and the very notion of God exhibiting any agency in human affairs. 

Paine’s words call to mind the words of a much earlier man: Yeshua’s brother, James. In his epistle, James lends much time to discussing the nature of faith, and the integral role that action plays in expressing it. Writing in the first century, James could have just as easily have been writing to Thomas Paine when he stated, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (James 2:19 ESV).

When we say we have faith, to what sort of faith are we referring? Does our orientation towards God more resemble Thomas Paine’s, or that of Bartimaeus? If we were at Sinai and heard God’s voice, what would we do next?

One challenge before us is that our faith community today is one very much rooted in story, in tradition, in what we understand as our history. When immersing ourselves in all of this information, it’s sometimes easy to get bogged down in the details. In the wilderness, the children of Israel were tested regularly, and their faith—or lack thereof—was readily exposed by those challenges. In our lives and community today, how often are we similarly tested?

Do we simply have information, or do we have emunah?

Scripture references are from the NASB unless otherwise noted.