TORONTO — These days, Rabbi David Wolpe – author of the recently published book Why Faith Matters – spends much of his time making a case for religious belief.
Rabbi David Wolpe [Frances Kraft photo]
But as a young adult, he didn’t believe in God, he said in an Oct. 30 speech at Beth Sholom Synagogue. He lost his faith at around age 12 after seeing the movie Night and learning about the Holocaust. In his early 20s, he started to “doubt my doubts,” he said.
The California-based Conservative rabbi, whose father is also a Conservative rabbi, is the spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He has written seven books, teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was named one of the 100 most influential Jews in America by the Forward newspaper in 2003. Newsweek magazine named him the number 1 pulpit rabbi in America earlier this year, and ranked him number 12 this year and number 18 last year among its Top 50 Influential Rabbis in America.
But on a personal level, he has faced challenges that would test anyone’s faith– his wife’s bout with cancer six months after the birth of their daughter, his own surgery for a benign brain tumour, and his subsequent battle with lymphoma, from which he is now in remission.
At a time when there has been “a [recent] spate of best-selling books that promote atheism,”Rabbi Wolpe said that the way some people conceive of faith is “not just less than what faith is. It’s in some ways in opposition to what faith is.”
Drawing on his own experience, the rabbi said that when he was going through chemotherapy, he didn’t pray for God to heal him, because he doesn’t believe that God works that way – curing those who pray and not curing those who don’t.
“You can pray for acceptance, strength and closeness, and that prayer, I believe, gets answered.”
The rabbi – who had debated Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, the previous night in New York – said it’s rare for him to get into a discussion about religion and not have people say that religion causes people to kill each other.
“I had to try to figure out for myself what it is that makes people kill each other,” Rabbi Wolpe said, recalling the process of writing his most recent book.
He concluded that “human nature has people killing each other in all sorts of settings. If you think human beings are basically good, you should visit a playground. What happens when a new child comes to the playground? Do children say, ‘Let us embrace that child and share our toys with him?’” No. It’s ‘Let’s get the new kid.’
“It takes a lot of work to make a child good. That’s not because we don’t have goodness in us. We have a lot of goodness. We have both. It takes a good deal of work to raise the quotient of goodness and to redirect the selfishness, pettiness and ego that’s inside us.”
If Judaism, Christianity and Islam were the cause of fighting, the world “must have been a garden” before religion developed, the rabbi posited. “But the world was a savage bloodbath before the rise of these monotheistic faiths,” he said, citing wars in Carthage as an example.
“Religion sometimes manages to overcome human nature and have people live in peace, but not always,” he said.
He added that even religious wars usually have other elements, including land, power, politics and money.
“Religion alone is not what is wrong with the world,” he asserted. It is the “only universal value” that can help, he believes.
