As i write this in late November, my sabbatical is not yet fully one month complete, yet I can feel it flying by. There are so many areas that I wish to explore. I have been reading and thinking a lot about the nature of faith. I have always recoiled from the question, "Do you believe in God?" it is a question that has never made any real sense to me. What does it mean to believe in something? What difference does the answer make? is there an assumption that one lives one's life differently depending on the answer? it is a question that our tradition never asks. Abraham is not asked about his belief, nor are his son or grandson. Moses is not asked. We are told that Job's faith never wavered. This is the whole idea behind God's test. The Talmud and rabbinic literature do not ask the question--nor does the ritual for conversion to Judaism.

Is this a mystery? What role does faith play in Judaism? Are we a community of believers? In what way? One might say that the Torah and, therefore, all of Judaism begins with an assumption of God's reality. "in the beginning, God..." The authors of those words take the reality of God for granted but seek an explanation for everything else. In that famous beginning, God then creates all that we see and know. To put it another way, I neither believe nor disbelieve in the sun, I simply know it exists. Unlike the authors of the Torah, we are a culture that accepts the reality of the sun, but some of us need or seek an explanation for God, proof of God's existence. Such proof is impossible.

I return to a rephrasing of my question above. What are we supposed to think? Would I live my life one way if God were real and another way if God were not real? Does one's morality depend on accepting God's reality? Perhaps it does. I accept the reality of God and my moral values flow from God's absoluteness. Human life, created in God's sacred image, is of infinite worth. All human life. When I face a moral choice, I follow the dictates of the Torah and choose life. The Jewish moral values that flow from God's reality would have us stop at nothing in order to save a human life. in Judaism, faith does not simply reside in the mind or heart, faith is found in the lived life.

Those who deny the reality of God no doubt have other means to ground their personal moral behavior. The Jewish way--placing life above all else--works fine for me.

Tragically, this simple moral equation, "choose life," has not caught hold in the world's consciousness. Witness Darfur. The ongoing genocide there is a blight on the conscience of humankind. The reality of God demands that we do God's work in the world. That is the moral vision passed down to us from Sinai.

As the tragedy in Darfur unfolds, we see conferences and coalitions and meetings to deliberate over a course of action just as conferences and coalitions deliberated the fate of Europe's Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. The urgency of the moment demands that the people of the world take a cue from Genesis and come to realize that the entire Torah exists simply to teach God's powerful and implicit answer to Cain's soul-shattering and haunting question, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Yes.

This is what it means to live with the knowledge of God's reality.