I wish to dedicate this column to the team of competent and dedicated educators and support staff I worked with at UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s Centre for Enhancement of Jewish Education over the past 10 years.

I’m impressed by all the attention given lately to God. There are those who are so convinced of God’s non-existence that they’re advertising the fact on subway cars, while others are so faithful of God’s existence that they, too, advertise it. As overjoyed as the ad companies must be, I’m taken by the fact that this is still an engaging issue in the 21st century. It brings me back to the Middle Ages!

In his latest book, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah, David Weiss Halivni argues that at Auschwitz, God was absent from history, in contradistinction to His presence in history at Sinai. Absent, but not non-existent. And, of course, this is the approach to God in Jewish religion. God’s existence is a given in our faith, but His presence has always been a concern, from the earliest biblical texts to our own days.

Indeed, one only has to look to Pascal’s wager to see the foolishness of searching for some proof of existence. Pascal’s “bet” on God is based purely on the idea that since neither side can be proven, it makes sense to opt for God’s existence. It’s the only side that can claim “nothing to lose, everything to gain.”

I was once on a March of the Living bus in Poland when a survivor was telling some of her stories to a group of Orthodox high school students from England. It became obvious that she was a secular Israeli who had lost her faith during the war years. Not wanting to offend the students and being sensitive to their faith, she ended by saying they shouldn’t assume that it was easier to be a non-believer. She told them how lonely she was without a God to console her.

My reading of that moving moment was that this woman believed in the existence of God, but couldn’t feel His presence at all, and sometimes even yearned for that feeling. Could God not be the force that made her so sensitive to the needs of those British kids? Taken as I was by Weiss Halivni’s book, I kept thinking of that Tel Aviv survivor throughout the entire read. Having a God and worrying about His presence or absence in history is a much greater existential problem than not having a belief at all.

I think the current debate between the Creationists and the Evolutionists is just as foolish as the subway signs for and against God. Our tradition holds that Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world as we know it – specifically, it’s the anniversary of the sixth day of creation, when we humans were brought into the order of the cosmos. It is, of course, significant that we don’t see ourselves at the very beginning of creation, something we have in common with Darwin’s theories. But even more telling is that on Rosh Hashanah, we don’t read the Creation story, but rather of the birth and near-sacrifice of Isaac, a story about our specific faith group, not a cosmic history.

There’s no doubt that over the ages, we saw in the Creation story the “science” of creation, and there still are fundamentalist believers who read the text with that in mind. But it’s just as true that from the very beginnings of biblical interpretation, we also saw the very true moral lessons and ethical teachings in every word of the first chapters of Genesis. Those of us who see contemporary science as an ongoing quest for truth by God’s creatures – using God-given powers of intelligence, memory, insight and articulation – see Darwin as a wondrous complement to the biblical account, not a threat.

Those who believe in a God who welcomes faith-struggle by calling us Yisrael (the one who strives with God) know that God’s presence or absence is the real issue, not His existence. As I heard my sister say years ago: “The God you don’t believe in is not the one I do believe in.”