‘To stake everything on… moments of faith is to inject into our blood stream zeal, ardor, joy, and hope.’

March 8, 1970

Rabbi Olan begins with the observation that ‘God’ means different things to different people, so they are seeking different experiences when they want to ‘find God’.  He goes on to quote Isaiah, who said, ‘Call ye upon [God] when He is near.’  One way of understanding that is that we feel that God is near when we are in a state of receptivity, of hope, rather than in a state of doubt and despair.

However, Rabbi Olan teaches that spiritual doubt is not only normal but ‘desirable’!  ‘It is probably true that honest doubt must precede any living faith if it is to be real.  Faith is something [one] wins after a serious struggle with all in life that would deny it.’  True faith is stronger for having been tested; otherwise, professing belief in God is mere lip-service or habit.

Rabbi Olan ends by asserting that acting precedes and leads to believing: ‘From the doing comes the believing.’  ‘A person should begin to live and act as if God is real, despite his serious doubts, to bet his life on it.’  Since Rabbi Olan was a lifelong activist for social justice, he may even be telling us here about his own path through action to what he called the ‘God faith’.

*Written by Lionel S. Joseph and Frances M. Olan*