Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Korach, Numbers 16:1-18-32.
The story in the Five Books of Moses reminds us that the Israelites' journey through the desert was a time of great turmoil. In this parsha alone they face plague, natural disasters and political upheaval. To read these documents is to get a glimpse into the state of mind of a people lost in the desert, ignorant of the greater forces that drive them.
Consider the muse for the events in the Torah. Whenever we read stories of divine wrath, it takes the form of disease, fire, earthquakes and other torments of the natural world. Imagine what it must have been like to watch people grow ill without having any concept of micro-organisms, or to literally witness the ground below your feet tremble and crack open without having even the slightest understanding of plate tectonics. The Israelites, the nomadic Hebrew people, have none of the few elements of security available to humans at that time. The light and containment of a city is a far-off dream for them and they can't even stay in one place long enough to grow a steady supply of food.
These such themes beg us to reconsider the role of faith in our own time. For the ancient Israelites, religion was the only means at their disposal to reconcile feeling small, helpless and ultimately negligible in a very unforgiving world. They saw natural disasters as divine wrath because they had no means to conceive of the forces behind them. Human society has progressed significantly since then, rendering this purpose for faith obsolete. The question we must ask, then, is whether or not faith itself is obsolete.
If one were to simply define religion as magical thinking in the absence of fact, then of course faith is obsolete in the modern day. However, if we read the Torah as the great philosopher Nachmanides urges, with both our hearts and minds, we can see that the true purpose of faith was not to explain physical realities but to express the emotional content of the human experience.
Today we don't need to choose between rational thought and spirituality, so long as we understand what roles those two concepts play in our modern lives. It is the outmoded version of faith that calls a modern problem like HIV/AIDS a "punishment from God" like the plague visited on the rebelling Israelites in parsha Korach. It is the useful, mindful version of faith that calls us to comfort and heal the sick. Is religion absolutely necessary for humanitarianism? Of course not, but it is also inadvisable to tear down the humanitarian structures of faith when they still call so many people to action.
Just because we aren't wandering in the desert without science or reason today doesn't mean we don't still long for answers to the most difficult questions in our lives. This longing pushes people into religion, thanks in no small part to the promises of the proselytizers that every question can be answered in faith. But religion is not science. The purpose of religion is not to provide answers. This world is filled with people who are happy to provide comforting lies in exchange for money, power and obedience. The great lie is that faith provides wholesale truth. The reality is that faith, at its best, gives us the spiritual focus to pursue truth wherever we can find scraps of it.