Reverential Doubt

By Rabbi Genevieve Greinetz

A few days ago, I returned from leading an attempted meditation retreat at Brandeis Bardin in the northern LA area. Two days in, the Pacific Palisades fire broke out and within twelve hours, fires were blazing all around the area. The closest fire was burning 28 miles away, so we were relatively safe, but “safe” in a way that felt porous and impacted. Mulling over Parashat Vaera in the wind one day, as I walked on the smoke-free paths on campus, I thought about how hard it is to be in relationship with existential meaning, with the divine, with trust at all in times like the ones we are living in. I thought about the plagues in this week’s parasha, and how God hardens Pharaoh’s heart as Moshe demands that he free the people.

With the fires so near, the power outage that we were forty hours into, and the memory of a pastoral conversation I’d had with a retreatant who lost her home and neighborhood in the Pacific Palisades blaze, I found myself doubting the author of Parashat Vaera.

Exodus 7:3 reads:
“I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply my signs and marvels in the land of Egypt.”

The author of the parasha depicts the divine as having a hand in both freedom and in continued bondage; as having control over Pharaoh, a character who represents chaos itself. This year, I find myself doubting that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, or that God had any influence over Pharaoh. What if instead, Pharaoh was a free agent able to assert extraordinary power and remain unphased by God’s wonders? If this were so, his character would beg us to ask how we can have faith, how we can relate and connect with meaning when there are exceptionally strong forces in our world that cannot be controlled or affected by God. Instead of grappling with this, the author suggests that it was all a part of God’s grand Exodus plan.

With the background of fires blazing and wars booming, I am reading doubt into the text: what if God did not harden Pharaoh’s heart; what if God actually had no control over the situation? Perhaps the author found comfort in conceiving of a God who had total control over and insight into Pharaoh, but for me, there is freedom in doubting God’s omnipotence.

After the retreat, I saw that one of our retreatants had shared a post on social media about how HaShem had protected them in their time of retreat. I wondered, if God protected this retreatant, then how could they explain God not protecting hundreds of thousands of other peoples whose lives are uprooted, their houses ash, and their neighborhoods disappeared? Similarly in the parasha, what if God’s threats simply weren’t working on Pharaoh? What if God had no control over Pharaoh’s heart? Perhaps Pharaoh operated outside of God’s influence and burned, like the fires, on his own accord. In both the case of the fires and of Pharaoh’s actions, I have immense doubt about God’s influence.

In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown defines ‘reverence’ as “a deeper form of admiration or respect … often combined with a sense of meaningful connection with something greater than ourselves” (24). For the author of Parashat Vaera and the retreatant who posted on social media, reverence is expressed through attributing omnipotence to God. My reverence, on the other hand, takes the form of doubt.

In my life, doubt is never missing. There seems to be a little bit of it in every aspect of my being: self doubt, worldly doubt, divine doubt, doubt about the nature of reality, theological doubt, doubt about senses of certainty, political doubt, philosophical doubt. I feel doubt to the point where I know it as a part of my inner cosmology, a part of my faith, which mostly shows up as doubt. Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? I doubt it. Did God protect the retreatant in LA? I doubt it. Does this mean I don’t believe in God’s presence in the world? I doubt that, too.

In these days where safety is something we can only know moment-to-moment, I want to uplift doubt as an expression of faith, an imprint of an honest relationship with the Divine, something entirely reverential. For some, when facing chaos, constructing a narrative of certainty is stabilizing. For me, I doubt certainty in all respects. I don’t know where God’s influence truly is in the Exodus story; I don’t know where God is right now—wars booming, fires blazing. Certainty does not offer me stability or respite, but uplifting doubt as something sacred does.

When I feel doubt, I know that there is something greater than myself in the world, in language, in narrative. At the end of doubt is a vastness, an inlet to awe. Doubt gets a bad rap, it’s something we notice and want to change, but it doesn’t have to be. Undoubtedly, doubt is an uncomfortable feeling. It offers no certainty, no respite, no words of explanation or comfort. In this way, doubt is a lot like reverence: an opportunity to touch in with inexplicable vastness. This week, I’m inviting doubt in, I’m letting it carry weight, rather than shooing it away and attempting to bend it into a version of faith I cannot profess with integrity. Parashat Vaera invites us to know less, to try and let doubt be a part of faith’s story, a shade of reverence’s expression. I doubt the author of Vaera got the story right, and as I doubt I relate with a vastness I’ll never be certain of.

Ordained by Hebrew College in 2022, Genevieve Greinetz lives in the Bay Area where she serves as Assistant Rabbi and Director of Education at Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo, CA. She regularly teaches Jewish mindfulness meditation with several organizations, and serves on faculty with Or haLev. Genevieve is a current LABA Arts Fellow and published poet. Her first full length collection of poetry, Animals Are Shouting Down From the Sky, is forthcoming in Spring 2025.