The Enemy is Certainty

As the film Conclave demonstrates, doubt is the foundation of true faith.

Dec 19, 2024

I had a chance to catch the heavily-buzzed film Conclave last week, during the heart of this season of faith, a season that has also tested our faith. The film is about the choosing of a new pope, and the political shenanigans that ensue when all the cardinals get together and one of them is going to emerge as the most famous person in the world. It’s a theological thriller with a clear message about the nature of faith. One quote from the movie, taken right from Robert Harris’s novel, an introductory sermon by Thomas Cardinal Lawrence (played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes), stands at the core of the film’s message - as well as my own.

My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. 'Eli Eli, lama sabachtani?' He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith (italics mine).

Those final words of Jesus, drenched with doubt, were echoed in the reactions of Muhammad when he received Revelation, according to many scholars. The prophet’s biographer Lesley Hazleton stated in a TED Talk and subsequent interview that on that fateful and fraught-filled night, according to early accounts, Muhammad’s first reaction was doubt, awe, even suicidal fear. And yet this experience became the bedrock of his belief.

“I think the worst of us are those who never doubt, who are so sure that we possess the absolute truth, that we become less human,” Hazleton states. “What struck me about Muhammad, the deeper I went into his life, was how extraordinary human he was, and his ability to acknowledge his own fallibility.
“We see it there, by the way, in the very last words of Jesus,” she adds. “Father, why have you forsaken me? Wonderful, exquisite, agonizing moment of doubt. Muhammad is not the Pope of Islam. He's the prophet, and prophets, too, can doubt. This is what makes him human. Too human for some.”

Conclave shows us that popes and cardinals also can doubt, although Fiennes’ character felt that his doubts disqualified him from seeking the papacy.

Hazleton notes that conservative Muslim theologians maintain that an account of Muhammad wanting to kill himself shouldn't even be mentioned, despite the fact that it's in the earliest Islamic biographies. They insist that he never doubted for even a single moment, let alone despaired. Demanding perfection, she adds, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

Yet, she asks, what exactly is imperfect about doubt? Maybe that is in fact what perfects us - what makes us most human.

In Judaism, the Talmudic rabbis were wary of those whose faith faltered. The classic example is Elisha ben Abuya, the Talmudic sage whose forays into religious doubt, which were mistakenly considered heresy, turned him into the original Voldemort in his colleagues’ eyes, He-Who-Must-Not-be-Named. The Talmud simply calls Elisha “Aher,” the Other. Spinoza was treated with a similar scorn when he dared to doubt.

But Jews are not ones to defer long from questioning. One famous rabbi, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, directly challenged God to end Jewish suffering with a magnificent version of the Kaddish,1 and Elie Wiesel wrote of a time when, during the Holocaust, Jews in the camps even put God on trial.

Here in America, doubt has been embraced by Jews. In 2011, a major stir was created when the Orthodox Jewish musician Matisyahu shaved his beard and boldly told The Times of Israel why:

When you are raised in a religious family, you learn that there is no alternative. That there is one ultimate truth. And you can see it might come in various shades and colors. At the end of the day there is one truth and that one truth is this. I’ve had to talk to my kids and explain that maybe that’s not so. Basically what I tell them is that no one can ever be sure of anything — and in this life, your teachers, parents, yourself — you can have your own ideas, your own opinions, intuitions feelings, etc., whatever it is. But never to be too sure of yourself, and never to be too sure of anyone because, at the end of the day, we don’t know.”

His transformation communicated a passionate desire to continually grow and never fall into stale patterns. He become the Jewish Lady Gaga – never allowing his physical appearance to become him. He abandoned dogmatic certainty and halachic (Jewish legal) purity for a pinch of doubt and a dose of theological humility, and these brought him to a deeper, more spiritual and more authentic Jewish place.

Once he decided to shed the Brooklyn beard for the windblown blonde coif of a newly minted Californian, this new look rock star became instantly more approachable for legions of young Jewish followers. Ironically, his doubts fueled their faith and his hopeful anthem One Day has become a staple of progressive Jewish liturgy.

I know, as a Jew, that despite the suspicions cast toward doubters, it is doubt that has sustained us through inordinate challenges and tortuous travels.

A few years ago, I performed a wedding in Barbados. It was held at the oldest synagogue in the western hemisphere, called Nidhe Yisrael, which tellingly means “scattered of Israel.” It is a Jewish community with an amazing story. The name “Barbados” means “Bearded Ones,” referring to the plentiful fig trees, and so it was fitting that the bearded people came to the place of the bearded tree in 1654, to escape from the Portuguese Inquisition, which had made it to their prior refuge of Recife, Brazil.

I was surprised to read in the museum adjacent to the synagogue that all the Jews who arrived were conversos, also called Marranos and Crypto Jews. In other words, Jews of Barbados were descendants of those who had publicly professed Christianity but privately followed Jewish practice, only then to face the wrath of the Inquisition, first in Spain, then in Portugal, then in Brazil. I double-checked this with my friend, historian Jonathan Sarna, and he confirmed that it was likely that most if not all of the Jews of Barbados had "converso backgrounds." Expelled, tortured and ridiculed, they found freedom on this island, and only then, after a century of wandering, could they return to an open expression of their Jewish heritage.

The floors of most Caribbean synagogues are made of sand. Why? Not so they can come in right off the beach. They are made of sand to muffle the noise. Not to draw attention to themselves.

Ever the outsiders, conversos were the Jews’ Jews. They couldn’t even be insiders among the group of outcasts known as the Jewish people. Later, this group fled Barbados and moved up the Atlantic to found new synagogues in far off places like Newport, Rhode Island and New Amsterdam.

Yes, the first Jews to come to our American shores were not really Jews at all. They actually were, I believe… but not with certainty.

I found this quote from French writer and historian Jacques Attali, describing the Conversos, at the museum on Barbados.

The conversos often blended Christian and Jewish beliefs, growing increasingly ignorant of the essential elements of one or the other faith. Raised in a climate of doubt, torn between two religions, ever vigilant, seeking novelty in the empty shells left by others’ certainties…capable of appreciating, accepting, believing in contradictory things, they invented the scientific mind and become the most emancipated minds of our time (italics mine).

These secretive Jews, raised in a shadowy world where even their basic identity was cast into an unceasing doubt, that’s precisely the world where religion could thrive and sustain them through their centuries adrift.

And those Jews ended up here, on the shores of the country where religion is constantly being reinvented; where Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Jews and others meet ecumenicism, pluralism, democracy and feminism - and optimism - and emerge completely transformed. All these meetings take place in the public square, with no one faith being hoisted above the others. No one religion “wins” the Certainty Wars.

The world of American religion, at its best, is the world of Robert Harris’s Vatican, a totally American-style Vatican City that is far, far from realization. Harris is British, but his vision is very American, in a manner that you’ll just have to see the final scenes of the movie to understand. Suffice to say, the film lets us dream of a world where religion can bridge all divisions and become the solution rather than remaining the source of the problem.

Right now, despite all that is wrong with religion in this country, America still presents faith’s best face. Those are primarily good people wearing collars, frocks and those big red yarmulkes. There are good people in all religious garments. At least there can be.

But only when faith is fueled by doubt.

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