Have a Little Faith

March 16, 2024

Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,

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Parashat Pekude
Have a Little Faith
March 16, 2024 — 6 Adar II 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA

            I want to start with something lovely, a little bit of serendipity.  I meet from time to time with a good friend to catch up.  This friend has a tradition, after our conversations, of giving me a book to read.  He is a big reader, a person of ideas.  So often he gives me a new book, usually hard cover, that just came out, and that he had read right away.  But on this last occasion, for reasons I do not know, he gave me a book off his shelf, a used book, a paperback that he had read long ago.   The book is called Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom, who had achieved fame with Tuesdays With Morrie.  I love the title.  I would love to have a little faith.

            At first I wondered whether this book could possibly speak to our world today.  It came out in 2009. That is not only 15 years ago. That is a different universe ago.  All the places that I love: America, Israel, Harvard, the Jewish community in North America, were so different back then.  Could a book written before October 7, before Israel’s longest war, before the scary rise of anti-Semitism, before the toxic division in our own country, could such a book speak to us now?

            Mitch Albom grew up in a Conservative synagogue in New Jersey.  In his entire life he has had just one rabbi named Albert Lewis.  He celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at this synagogue of his childhood, and like so many teens, fell off the bimah after his Bar Mitzvah.  He lost touch with his Judaism and Jewish community.  His only residual connection to Judaism was every year, on Rosh Hashanah, he would fly from Detroit, where he lived, and where he was a sports journalist, to New Jersey, to be with his parents, and he would sit with his parents in shul, and listen to Rabbi Lewis’s High Holiday sermons. 

            One day, when Rabbi Lewis was 82, he asked Mitch Albom, already a writer of renown, will you give the eulogy at my funeral?  Mitch Albom did not know Rabbi Lewis as a human being, and only knew him as a rabbi on the High Holidays, but he agreed to give the eulogy if he could meet with Rabbi Lewis regularly to get to know him.  They started meeting regularly. Early on Mitch Albom got enough content to write a good eulogy. But he wanted to continue to meet because there was something powerful and alluring about the Rabbi in his last chapter.  He was struggling with the indignities of aging.  He was falling regularly and ending up in the hospital.  He was weak and not able to move.  And yet, he was somehow deeply at peace. Not jangled. Not angry. Not fearful. He knew his time was limited.  He knew he was dying.  And he was deeply anchored and serene.  How did that work?  Mitch Albom discovered the secret sauce: faith.  Rabbi Lewis was a man of faith.  But how does that work exactly, and could an ordinary person do that or be that?

            Meanwhile,  living in Detroit, Mitch Albom meets another man of faith, a Protestant minister named Henry Covington, who had had a very different journey.  Henry Covington had had a checkered past.  He had served time in jail. He had been a drug dealer who became a drug addict.  He committed robberies. Once he was so desperate for cocaine that he held up his supplier at gun point, which he understood endangered his own life and the life of his wife and young child.  In his abyss he promised God: if you save me now, I will devote my life to you. This faith allowed Henry Covington to turn his life around.  He got sober. He quit his life of crime. He became a minister who served the poorest citizens of Detroit. 

            Mitch Albom toggles between Rabbi Lewis in New Jersey, in his late 80s and dying, but whose faith centers him, strengthens him, gives him peace; and Henry Covington in Detroit, whose faith allowed him to emerge from his history of crime and self-destruction to help others struggling with the demons he used to have.

            That is the power of faith.  Faith can help us make peace with our mortality. Faith can help us transcend our own worst instincts.  Can faith help us figure out how to live and thrive in this scary new world?

            The book tells these two stories, black and white, Christian and Jewish, economically challenged and more affluent, and yet their stories of faith coalesce to make a single simple point.  Faith is not a noun.  Faith is a verb.  Faith is what you do.  It is what you do to bring about the world you want to live in. 

            For us to have a little faith in Israel, what are we going to do? We are so happy to celebrate our 20 synagogue missions to Israel through the decades.  But what about now?  How will we translate our faith in Israel into a verb?   For us to have a little faith in America, that the story of the golden age of American Jewry is not over, that we have agency to shape a better trajectory, what are we going to do?  How will we translate our faith in America into a verb?

            Faith is not a response to a perfect world, where everything is going swimmingly.  To the contrary, faith is a response to a hard world, to a broken world.  The soil out of which faith grows is pain.  The bad news is that the soil is rich now. The good news is that our faith can grow, and that is good news, because we will need it.  Think of something hard and painful in your life.  If you reconceived faith as a verb, some way to make this painful world a little bit better, what would you do?

            This week a story came back to me.  I was with my Mom in her last July, the July of her 90th year, when she still had energy.  She was living at Shalom Cares in Aurora, Colorado, a facility like Newbridge.  One morning she said that she would like to go back to see the West Side of Denver, where our family had lived, where she had spent her 40 years of marriage, where they went to shul and where they ran a kosher grocery store.  It had been many years since we had been back.  But I said OK, and I drove her to the West Side.  We went first to our old home, 1339 Stuart Street, and we knocked on the front door.  We wanted to tell the owner that we used to live here. But when the owner opened the door, we could see five, literally five, huge Doberman Pinchers barking ferociously in the home we used to live in, and we turned away, and realized that that house is not our home anymore.  Next we went to the grocery store my parents used to run.  But that building was gone, replaced by a newer building which was no longer a grocery store. The store was not ours anymore.  I said Mom, let’s go back to Shalom Cares, and we’ll have some lunch.  We got back into the car, and we started to drive away and she said wait.  There is one more place I want to go.  Where do you want to go Mom?  What’s left?  She said: I want to go to see Bernice Zussman. 

            Bernice and her late husband Ben were my parents’ best customers.  Bernice, widowed at that time, still lived in her home on 17th street, across from Sloane’s Lake.  Bernice and Ben Zussman are the great grandparents of Ben Zussman, the fallen 22-year-old Israeli soldier I spoke about last Shabbat.  We drove to the home of Bernice Zussman and knocked on her door, no notice, no email, no text, old fashioned just showed up.  Bernice comes to the door and opens up.  She and my mother are both 90.  They had not seen one another in a very long time.  Bernice’s face lights up. My Mom’s face lights up.  Rosyne! Bernice says.  Bernice! My Mom says.  Bernice opens the screen door, my Mom and I come in, and my Mom and Bernice give each other the most loving embrace.  We sat down in her kitchen, had tea and caught up without skipping a beat.  That reunion of old friends helped my Mom feel that she could leave the West Side in peace.  The last time that I was in the West Side of Denver, where I grew up, was when I was in the kitchen of the great grandparents of Ben Zussman, the young Israeli soldier who gave his life to defend the land and people of Israel.  The soil out of which faith grows is pain.

            Faith in mysteries that we do not understand. Faith in invisible lines of connection.  Faith in resilience, the resilience of the Jewish people and the resilience of the State of Israel.  Faith that despite the absurdity and pain there is meaning, and there is blessing to be had and savored.

            Have a little faith.  Shabbat shalom.