Kafka on Faith

Dear friends,

“A man cannot live without a steady faith in something indestructible within him, though both the faith and the indestructible thing may remain permanently concealed from him. One of the forms of this concealment is the belief in a personal god.” 

Kafka’s great aphorism deserves our attention. Let’s examine part I: 

“A man cannot live without a steady faith in something indestructible within him” 

Yesterday I asked three twelve-year-olds what their take on God was. Within seconds the conversation turned to the afterlife. “I can’t imagine everything just ending, turning black,” Arthur said.  

It seems to me that Kafka is making a psychological observation. Human beings live with the constancy of their ever-present selves. We are incapable of imagining our self - whatever that may be or not be - not being. So long as we are alive, we believe we will always live. 

אם אני כאן הכל כאן, said Hillel in the Talmud: “If I am here than everything is here.” ואם איני כאן אז מה כאן, he continues: “and if I’m not here, than what is here?” 

Even in our most broken moments, when we see nothing in ourselves that is strong and enduring, we cannot shake the notion that we are a part of what is. We imagine being dead and look for some other stage or state of being. Which isn’t to say we all believe in the afterlife in our logical brains.  

Part II: “though both the faith and the indestructible thing may remain permanently concealed from him.” 

Let’s first look at "the faith," and then at "the indestructible thing" itself. 

Would we all say that we believe there is something indestructible in us? That we will, in some fashion, continue to exist forever? Certainly not. Even those who do believe in a neshamah, or soul that transcends our physical existence, have their moments of doubt. We are all in some sense agnostics on this question, even if we claim to be believers or non-believers. This is the concealment that Kafka is revealing. We have all witnessed death, if not of human beings than of animals, bugs, plants. We know that life ends. So we go around thinking that we know we will end. But the Kafkaesque fact is that we believe we won’t. We have, according to Kafka, a type of Emunah Shlema, complete faith, in the existence of the eternal in us. 

Now let’s look at this “indestructible thing.” There are certain things that cannot be taken from any human being. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: 

"It is possible for prison walls 
To disappear, 
For the cell to become a distant land 
Without frontiers."

Darwish is describing the imagination. Freedom of the mind, a person’s way of thinking, cannot be taken away. Something about us is indestructible, is it not? Maimonides calls it the Tzelem Elohim, the image of God, our non-physical aspects, primarily our mind. Do we view it as indestructible? Not always. We walk around unaware of or underplaying our uniqueness and brilliance most of the time.  

“Both the faith and the indestructible thing may remain permanently concealed” from us. 

Part III: “One of the forms of this concealment is the belief in a personal god.” 

Maimonides laid what all 613 commandments in the Torah are. The Talmud taught that’s the number of commandments, but no one had ever defined which exactly they were because there are so many different ways to understand every line in the Torah. As soon as he begins, with what Maimonides calls the first commandment, there’s massive controversy: 

The commandment to believe in divinity. And that is that we believe that there is an Origin and Cause, that He is the power of all that exists. And [the source of the command] is His saying (Exodus 20:2), "I am the Lord your God." 

Not only does his biblical source: “I am the Lord your God,” not sound like a commandment, but to command anyone to believe in anything seems silly. Many wiser and more learned than me have written about it, so all I’ll say in our context is that perhaps what we are being commanded, if indeed we are commanded to do this, is to bring to mind that inescapable faith in the indestructible within, which we so easily live without in our conscious minds. In other words, this commandment seems the most impossible – to believe in some permanent truth – but it’s actually impossible not to follow, because it’s built into our humanness. Our job is to keep pulling it out of hiding. 

What’s tricky for me in Kafka’s phrase is the word “personal.” I’m not clear what exactly a personal God is, or what Kafka meant by it. One could certainly read Maimonides’ words as having nothing to do with a personal God. He speaks of “origin and cause” and of a “power of all that exists.” It’s the biblical quote that complicates this, when it uses the phrase “your God.” Now it sounds personal, even if it was used in the plural, God speaking to all the Hebrews.  
For Kafka, the notion of a personal God is one of the ways in which we conceal the faith we have in the indestructible in us. We think we are working on faith, when in fact we are concealing it further. We relinquish our indestructible and put it in the hands of God. We await salvation. We disempower ourselves by removing the indestructible from inside us to outside. Maimonides did believe strongly in separating the self from God. He thought we are commanded to believe that this origin, cause and power exist “שם,” over there. My instinct is different. In my translation of Psalm 30 I rendered the phrase “Adonai Elohay,” normally translated “Lord my God” like this: 

“You 
Who are my self and all at once” 

Tomorrow night I hope you can meet me for cocktails and some Zohar at Cowgirl, a bar on Hudson Street from 6-8pm. We’ll mark Tu Bishvat, the New Year for the Trees. Perhaps the trees can teach us about this question of faith: the indestructible and ever-lasting in the trees, which dies and is born, is both a part of the earth and a unique entity that keeps the world in balance.  
Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Misha