Heidegger, War, and The Enemy of Faith

After a long hiatus...

As the war continues for our family and friends overseas, I want to share what I think is an essential foundation of faith, both during times of peace, but especially during periods of challenge and disaster.

And no, I am not about to say: that God runs the world, or that justice will prevail or something like that. Those ideas are also foundational, but this idea, I think, is even more so.

Oliver Burkeman articulates it beautifully in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

Citing Heidegger’s magnus opus, Being and Time, Burkeman writes, “The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all – the fact that there is anything rather than nothing.”

He goes on to point out that while human beings tend to feel entitled to life, and deeply offended by the idea of having that life cut short or taken away, in reality, the fact that we have any life at all is the truly astonishing thing.

See, one of our greatest problems, and one of the greatest challenges to faith in general, is not doubt of God’s power and His existence. It is, quite simply, our sense of entitlement.

We feel entitled to be healthy, entitled to make ends meet, entitled to having our loved ones equally well cared for and free of difficulty.

Then we turn our sense of entitlement against God, accusing Him of failing to “do His job” of providing for everything we assume we are entitled to. What kind of God allows natural disasters to happen? What kind of God allows poverty and suffering? What kind of God allows war and innocent life to be extinguished? These questions can actually cause us to doubt His involvement in human affairs and even His very existence.

Our entitlement, likewise, deepens the sense of fear that we experience in response to a threat. What does it mean to experience loss if I am entitled to everything I currently have? It is an attack on my fundamental sense of security and belonging in life!

In reality, rather than being entitled to anything, we have to learn to appreciate that everything, including our basic comfort, our accommodations, our relationships, and our very lives – are gifts. We are entitled to none of them.

So while we tend to take life for granted, regarding it as something intrinsically and unbreakably attached to us, it would be more sensible to imagine life as a lavish gift that gets delivered to our doorsteps every morning. Each day that we wake up, we unwrap that most undeserved gift and either utilize and delight in it, or find in it reasons for complaint and dissatisfaction.

If, on a particular day, that gift does not arrive – for me, or for anyone else – though I may be saddened and disappointed, the loss of the gift does not entitle me to outrage. It was never really mine to begin with.

I have not written for this newsletter now for several months. I won’t regale you of the other things that occupied me (among them, working to finish a renovation and having a baby), but the war in Israel certainly threw me off, as I know it did many of us. Should I keep writing for this newsletter at all, I wondered? Is this topic still important?

But I wrote this piece early on, and now I am returning to send it to you. In fact, part of our choice in naming our son after the great sage Rabbi Chiya, was the way that this name – both reminiscent of life itself and our renewed appreciation for it, and of an individual who chose to see what was and not what was not – grew from this fundamental idea.

The more things heat up around the world, especially with the resurrection of blood libel-like accusations against Israel that must scare every Jew whose national memory is not lost, the more I come back to this again and again. I cannot bring myself to focus on the holes and the loss, but on the strength and on the future. It’s true that many hate us, but how many stand with us? It’s true that much has been destroyed, but what will be rebuilt? It’s true that many have died, but we know, with confidence, that many, many will live.

While I continue to care for my beautiful son, I hope to continue writing on business and faith, though perhaps not weekly just yet. Wishing everyone strength.

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