Finding Faith, Insight and Hope Amid Darkness

To live, it is said, is to be subject to death and rebirth each day. The problem for many is moving from death--the death of one’s spirit, energy, hopes, purposefulness, enthusiasm--to rebirth.

We get stuck in the nether world, seemingly unable to tap the spiritual resources within us that could lead to rebirth. The loss of a loved one or a job, living through a divorce, a serious illness, an addiction, debt, an angry word or isolation can make what St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul seem forever without a dawn.

The plethora of books offering advice and commentary on that darkness testify to the universality of the human predicament.

Naomi Levy, formerly rabbi to a congregation in Venice, draws deeply from her own life experiences, as well as those of her former congregants--and her faith in God--in her effort to offer light and succor.

While her stories and insights are many, each in their own way repeat the refrain of a Hasidic rabbi: “Let me not die while I am still alive.”

Levy’s stories and insights, richly grounded in her progressive Jewish faith, speak to readers of all religious backgrounds, or of no religious background. She writes with clarity and authenticity. The book is filled with “ah-ha” experiences, individual epiphanies in which we might see something of ourselves illuminated by its pages.

Who would not be moved by her story of how, as a girl of 15 after seeing John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever,” the words of one of the hits echoed in her mind: “Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.” Within hours of her adolescent giddiness would come a life changing tragedy: her father’s death in a holdup on the streets of Brooklyn, N.Y.

More than her father died in that murder, she writes. In a very real sense, her mother died, her family died, her faith in doctors and police officers, in humanity and holidays, even her faith in dinner conversations died.

“And one more thing died in June of 1978,” she wrote. “God died too.”

Had Levy remained in that place, she would not have written a book of such hope and light. But she confronted the darkness, remaining in it long enough to learn from it.

Why do bad things happen to good people? It is an age-old question that has taxed theologians, philosophers and schoolchildren alike. How could God allow something so terrible? Where was God in the Holocaust? Why was a pastor’s son killed in plane crash?

After her father’s murder, Levy was tormented by such questions. In seminary, she began to see, she writes, that her ideas about God were too narrow.

Over time, she came to see God not as a force that would intervene on her behalf, but as a power that repeatedly beckoned her to return to the holiness that resides within--a power made manifest in simple acts of love and kindness.

“I began to believe in a God who was just as outraged as I was, just as pained, and just as helpless to protect us from all harm,” she writes. “I was no longer looking to God to prevent ugliness, I was looking to God for the strength to carry on in the face of ugliness.”

She also began to search Scripture for overarching truths about God contained in its metaphors of miracles and tales of travail.

Her book is filled with stories of people who overcame difficulty and disappointments--a woman who was raped and learned to trust again, a man who successfully fought addictions to gambling and sex, a couple whose marriage was held together by shared pain but who rediscovered lost love.

“Throughout our lives we will, we should, feel the pain of our losses, the scars still present even after much time has passed,” she writes.

Levy doesn’t preach. She points the way but does not push. She offers prayers. She engages the reader with richly textured stories of everyday people. At times one may laugh out loud, and at other times be deeply moved.

There is no easy way through life’s pain--and no one else who can provide the answers. Congregants think of a good rabbi as one who has all the answers, she notes. But, she says, a good rabbi is one who has all the questions.

Answering life’s questions and meeting its challenges requires us, in the midst of confusion and disorientation, to stop and listen. We must, she says, confront the fears and thoughts that nag in the middle of the night.

“But we will also feel the strength of our spirit, the ability to persevere in the face of pain. . . . This is the power of God within us. This is our hope, our salvation. This is how we begin again.”