E-mail a friendDavid J. Wolpe
airdate October 24, 2008
Named by Newsweek as the #1 rabbi in the U.S., David J. Wolpe is rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He also teaches modern Jewish religious thought at UCLA and is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, including U.S. News & World Report, USA Today and The Washington Post, on subjects of Jewish and general religious interest. He's the author of seven books, including the national best seller Making Loss Matter and Why Faith Matters, a personal faith journey and response to the new atheists.
Rabbi explains how the intersection of politics and faith is a tricky issue and what consistencies lie in all faith traditions. (2:31)
Full interview. (13:54)
David J. Wolpe
Tavis: Rabbi David J. Wolpe is the Senior Rabbi at the Sinai Temple here in Los Angeles and was recently named by "Newsweek" as the number one Rabbi in the United States. He is also a noted author whose latest book is called "Why Faith Matters." Rabbi Wolpe, nice to have you on the program.
Rabbi David J. Wolpe: Thank you. A pleasure.
Tavis: So what does it mean and what does one get when one gets listed as the number one Rabbi? Do you get a prize for that?
Wolpe: (Laughter) You don't get a prize. You get to hear Tavis Smiley say that you're the number one Rabbi in America. How about that?
Tavis: (Laughter) I'm not sure there's any reward in that.
Wolpe: Oh, that's a reward.
Tavis: No, that's quite an honor, so congrats on that. You wrote this book in part because - and I don't want to put words in your mouth. I'll let you explain this - but you're not the only person. Admittedly, I've been interviewing some of these people, but I've been concerned by the spate of books that suggest that there is no God and, if He does exist, He ain't all that, He's not that powerful. So somebody had to write a book that faith does matter, so I'm glad to have you on the program.
Wolpe: Thank you, thank you.
Tavis: Let me start with that, then. What is this movement about that we see taking hold that gives rise to these books questioning faith and God and the like?
Wolpe: I think at least part of it is the progress of science and technology and, when we look at everything we can do, you know, we're very impressed with ourselves sometimes and we think, you know, we're the best things going.
Tavis: Right.
Wolpe: I really do think there's a certain lack of humility in some of the books. Now some of the arguments, they're old arguments. I mean, we all feel them. There's so much evil in the world, there's so much poverty, there's so much loss. You know, where is God? So part of it is old traditional argument. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people feel that we've made so much progress that God sort of gets crowded out of human life and I think that that's a terrible mistake.
Tavis: Is there - strange question - is there a new answer to the old traditional argument you referenced a moment ago? The same question comes up all the time, as you laid out. Where is God? Why would a good God allow this to happen? Is there a new answer to that old question?
Wolpe: There are new twists on old answers.
Tavis: Okay.
Wolpe: I'll give you two quick - you know, people come in to my office all the time and they say, "Why me?" Something terrible happens to them. "Look, I had a brain tumor." "I had lymphoma." I had chemotherapy." So I felt these questions too. And one of the things that you realize, though, is that almost nobody comes in to my office and says, "You know, I was born in the richest country in the world and I had parents who loved me. Why me?"
In other words, we take our blessings for granted. When something bad happens then, we automatically assume, you know, "God, where's what I'm due?" So one of the things is that, as life improves, people tend to believe that there's no room for God because they think of God as giving blessings that are due and they forget that really everything after all is a function of that great creative energy.
The other part of it is when you ask, why do bad things happen to good people, just imagine if only good things happen to good people and bad things to bad people. We'd all be good all the time, all right? If every time you stole, you got a disease, nobody would steal.
But the idea of being good isn't so you can get a reward. The idea of being good is you should be good no matter what happens to you. So part of it is that God gives us a world in which I think God wants to see us care and be good and enact our faith even when bad things happen. So their response is there's no perfect new answer to a very old question and sometimes a really painful one.
Tavis: You mentioned your own journey a moment ago and some of the things that you've had to endure and I'm glad you did because I wanted to go there. I want to know the relevance of those crises to your faith, whether it deepened your faith, whether it questioned your faith. Help me understand the correlation.
Wolpe: So I think that, for some people, when you go through a terrible crisis, it can make you feel distant from God. But what I believe really happens is it's not that you come closer to God because you're afraid and you need help. I think that that's not true for most people. It's that when you go through a crisis, it cracks open something inside you that allows greater intimacy.
You can draw closer. You draw closer to other people. I've seen this happen again and again with families, with wives and husbands, with parents and children. In times of crisis, all of a sudden they love each other more deeply, and it happened with me and God. That is, I didn't pray, "God heal me and, if you don't heal me, the deal's off." I wanted closeness. I wanted intimacy. I wanted not to be alone and I felt that. So for me, going through all of this deepened my faith.
Tavis: Let me get right to the heart of the title of the text, "Why Faith Matters." Why does it?
Wolpe: Faith matters because it enriches your life. It draws you closer to what is best inside yourself. It draws you in the best case closer to a community and other people and because it allows you to realize that your life should be about something greater than you. You know, the philosopher William James said, "The best use of life is to spend it on something that outlasts it" and that's what faith moves you to do.
Tavis: How does one develop faith? It's one thing to say that faith matters. I want to go in front of that to find out how one wrestles with coming into his or her faith.
Wolpe: Yeah. A lot of times, people will come and say, "Okay, I want to have faith, but it's hard to do." You know, one of the analogies that a famous Rabbi used is that when you teach a child to walk, you stand right next to the child, but gradually you move away. God does that sometimes in our lives. God moves away because we have to get there. We have to learn to walk.
One of the ways you do that is through reading and study and meditation, but for me, the most powerful way to discover faith is actually to help other people, to see in them images of God, to not separate yourself from the human community. It's like when someone comes to my office and tells me they're depressed, I send them to the soup kitchens because, when you come out of yourself, you connect to something greater.
Too often, especially in our world, the totality of concern swirls around me, so it's hard to believe in something that is not me or something that I don't see or something I don't feel directly. Part of the problem is that the visible world, the world we touch, we world we see, is so real that people have trouble believing in what's intangible, in what you can't see, what you can't touch. But all the great faiths teach that it's what you can't see that's the greatest reality.
Tavis: I'm glad you went there because I know this is scripture. This does not come courtesy of the Torah, but it does come courtesy of the book I read, the Bible, and you know this well.
Wolpe: Sure.
Tavis: The Bible says as a definition for faith in Hebrews that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
Wolpe: Exactly.
Tavis: To your brilliant point now, I wonder whether or not we live in a world where people have less faith because, if faith is things hoped for, that means you got to live in a world where people are hopeful. And if it's the evidence of things not seen in a world where people need to see, need to feel, need to touch, they need evidence, one could make the argument that faith is on the way out and not on the increase.
Wolpe: Right. I mean, it's beautifully put. First of all, there's a part of the world that doesn't have hope and that part finds it hard to have faith. And then there's another part of the world that has all these gadgets and things you can see and is filled with stuff and it doesn't believe in the reality of the unseen. And those two worlds both have trouble finding their way to God.
To the third point that you made was that really the intent of the book was in fact not to write a book about the Jewish faith. It's about faith in general because I agree with what you say, which is that this is a world in need of faith. Both those who are hopeless need something to hope for and those who are comfortable need to recognize that they have to come out of themselves, that really the only faith that I believe matters is enacted faith, faith that moves you to do something in the world. Otherwise, it's an indulgence and it's not faith.
Tavis: Are there consistencies? Are there inconsistencies based upon different faiths about the over-arching concept of faith? Does that make sense?
Wolpe: Yeah, it does make sense. Actually, I think we hit on the great consistencies, which are, one, that the greatest reality is what you can't see and, two, that your faith doesn't matter if it doesn't change your life to bring goodness into the world. Those two things, it seems to me, are consistent in every single faith.
And I would say, third, the realization that a certain humility and that seeking and questioning are good. They're not bad. It's not that faith means you can't ever question. It depends what your questions do. Your questions are designed to bring people out and to create a greater closeness and to allow their souls to flourish. That's the kind of questioning that I see as a questioning of faith.
Tavis: Is there a danger in the world we live now where people put their faith on display, particularly in the political realm?
Wolpe: Yeah. Politics and faith is a very tricky question because, on the one hand, you don't want somebody - if their life is really governed by faith, you don't want them to divorce it from everything they say. But when it comes to public policy, you have to be able to defend it in better terms than just, "I believe this." You have to be able to defend it in terms everyone can discuss.
Like you, sometimes I'm made uncomfortable by how much somebody ties public policy to their individual faith tradition and doesn't make it about the conversation that we can all have together.
So on the one hand, I always like to hear someone in public speak about their faith because I think that that's what's deep inside them and needs to be expressed. On the other hand, I want to hear what we all share that we can discuss because the decisions that you make aren't only gonna be faith decisions. They're decisions of policy that affect all of us.
Tavis: I'm gonna make an assumption that you've not always been a Rabbi and that you've not always been a person of faith, and that there was a time in your life where you had to find your way back to being a believer, if I can use that term. Tell me about that.
Wolpe: When I was a teenager and in college, I not only didn't believe, but I was ready at the drop of a hat to argue the atheistic case. When I read these books about atheism and, you know, I'm gonna have public debates with Hitchens and with some others, right - when I read these books, I felt like this is my earlier self talking to me because part of it was, I was 18 years old, so I knew everything, you know.
Tavis: Every 18 year old does (laughter).
Wolpe: Every 18 year old does, right. That's what it means to be 18.
Tavis: So did I, when I was 18.
Wolpe: (Laughter) Exactly. So if I knew everything, then I knew that faith was really for weak people and people, you know, who weren't strong like you and me and it wasn't until I got older and I realized that even the smartest people were sometimes foolish and the strongest people were sometimes weak that I allowed myself the internal space to take a chance that maybe there was something greater than me and the people that I knew.
It isn't until you have, I think, that internal space that lets God in that you can discover your way back to God. And as I got older and I saw struggle and sickness and slothfulness and I met people of faith who were strong and smart and weren't my caricature of "Oh, they need a crutch" that I found my way.
Tavis: Let me offer this, Rabbi, as the exit question now that we've had at least a few minutes here to talk about what faith is and why it matters. What is the great reward of being a person of faith?
Wolpe: There may be an ultimate reward beyond this world, but let me talk about the reward in this world. The reward in this world is the certainty that you are not alone and that every human being is a brother or a sister because we're all children of God, and that's a reward that is so inexpressibly beautiful and powerful that the only way to know it is to feel it.
Tavis: There are a lot of great Rabbis in this world. Abraham Joshua Heschel comes to mind and my dear friend, Rabbi Steven Leder comes to mind, but hard to find them better than David Wolpe these days. His new book is called "Why Faith Matters." He's based here in Los Angeles and, Rabbi, nice to have you on the program. Thanks for the book.
Wolpe: Thank you.
Tavis: Good to see you.
Wolpe: Pleasure.
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