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Faith Matters, But... What Do You Do When G-d Disappears?

by Ron Friedman, a Messianic Jew living in the Chicago area

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Five years ago, on a bright fall morning, I looked out the seventh floor classroom window of the Bronx high school where I taught and saw a huge plume of black smoke. I saw it but I couldn’t understand it. Especially that it had been three hours since the World Trade Center “was no more,” as my colleague Rafael had put it minutes before.

As I sat in the basement cafeteria, oblivious to what had occurred several miles south of us, he asked, “Ron, did you hear?” And I answered, “Hear what?” I had noticed pockets of teachers talking, but thought it was the usual academic congeniality teachers displayed. As I gulped my burger it must have seemed odd to my friends that I had no idea what they were talking about. But with teaching three consecutive morning classes and a west room facing the courtyard, it was clear to me why I hadn’t known.

Before later reports lowered the initial claims of missing and victims, many of us who saw the aftermath believed that the planes that leveled the buildings also brought down 20,000 people or more. What had stood as towering gems over a city known for its quirky and indomitable style had been reduced to monstrous smokestacks. Another place, another time, but the same evil that put Jews into smokestacks of Auschwitz crematoria had chosen to make chimneys out of the Twin Towers.

Stumbling through the rest of the day (students were kept in classes without so much as a whisper of the destruction going out over the intercom) shards of my bitterest memories snipped at my collective consciousness from years earlier. I remembered screaming into a nebulous void of Why. Bright buckets of sun poured through my porch windows; but there I was crying my eyes out and spewing my query to the G-d of my fathers regarding the Holocaust: WHY? Three years before accepting Messiah, early 80s. I say messiah and not Christ as a way to preserve my cultural/theological identity. I am a Jew by birth (both parents) and a Jew by cultural distinctives.

I will always be a Jew. Whether my own people consider me Jewish is another story. Theologically, the way I read the text of Scripture (both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Testament) my Jewish brethren consider me trayfe or unkosher. Those ideas are buried deep in this immortal embrace I have made on my wobbly path toward redemption.

The Way. This was originally the term applied to followers of Y’shua, also spelled Yeshua. Most new followers of Y’shua the Lord were Jews who weren’t necessarily looking to have their worldviews shorn and transformed by a carpenter’s son. But this Way has proven to be an enduring way for millions since and for me now. Not easy. No, a person will endure much pain for much love in return. And so did my forebears, some of who sacrificed their lives at the hands of brutal mobs, to pull to safety a dilapidated Torah from a torched synagogue. Where your treasure is, there is your heart also the Bible reminds us. Do I know how many Jews have put their hearts into Messiah Yeshua’s hands? No, I don’t. And to think of how G-d miraculously balances the sensibilities of love and justice, of eternal Life and unending Death...

And so I cried out to this seemingly ambivalent G-d that morning of my Holocaust howl. I cried and I wanted to hate but I could not. I could only accept. It wasn’t and it isn’t now my duty to know why or how utter depravity can visit and revisit and trample us down. Only that G-d’s way is the right way and beyond question the Way to follow. And if we choose to hate with a vengeance worthy of their atrocities, we become like our enemies and lose the sanctity preserved by the hand of a loving G-d.

I couldn’t decipher the horror that served as impetus behind 9/11. I could link my emotions to it with a furious hatred. I could tie my grief to my hatred for the desecration of lives that fell by others’ murderous hands. And I got to stand on that burial mound the next day, along with hundreds of others. We pitched in like small town U.S.A., helping a neighbor raise his barn. Only here we shoveled through slabs of flooring and wire and cement dust and papers, hoping to raise the dead. With each toxic breath, I felt like screaming again into the void. The void of where G-d had disappeared that morning that allowed the despicable to happen yet again.

Being a Jew keeps me tied to my people, but my being a messianic believer keeps me bound to Messiah’s mandate to love those who persecute us, for what credit is it to the person who loves those who love him? Do I, therefore, “love” the radical Islamic terrorists, the new Nazis? No, I can’t say I’m that “good” of a Christian, but neither do I ask G-d to withhold His love from them as if I have any right to dictate to Him who should live and who should die. I stand before the Holy One, blessed be He, like Job, trusting that G-d alone will not fail to hold this world together—and preserve His people Israel—until the cataclysmic end. Once the smoke clears, my tears will roll again...this time with unspeakable joy, knowing I am His. Even this I cannot understand. But life teaches us that we must all make peace with the way things are and not insist on the way we want things to be.