I’m a great lover of the English language, but I must confess that, lately, I’ve come to dread three words in particular. You hear them everywhere—at dinner, at the office coffee corner, in line to pick up the children from school. There’s always someone walking about half-dazed and griping, and the gripes always begin in the same sordid way: “Can you believe . . . ?”
What comes next varies, depending on the complainer’s passions and predilections. “Can you believe how fractious our political system has become?” “Can you believe how untruthful our media is?” “Can you believe that our entertainers, who once knew better words and better ways of being in the world, behave as crassly and crudely as they do now?” The specific nature of the question hardly matters; what matters is the sense, all too genuine, of grief and surprise. The “can you believe” folks are sensing, correctly, that the times they are a-changin’ in America, and they don’t like it one bit.
I can hardly blame them. The history lessons we were taught as schoolchildren told us all about the different epochs that divide the course of human events into distinct chapters—the Middle Ages, say, or the Renaissance. But they neglected to instruct us on what to think and do should we find ourselves, to our chagrin, living through a moment of transition from one era to the next. And yet here we are, observing the Enlightenment, a historical moment that began somewhere in the seventeenth century (and that, all things considered, had a pretty good run), coming to its feeble end. The demise of the Age of Reason may be why chaos looms everywhere we look, not only stateside but all across the West: Democracies teeter, markets quiver, mobs suddenly sweep the streets. And watching so much of what we assumed was solid melt into air, we find ourselves howling with dumb and impotent rage: “Can you believe . . . ?” It’s the battle cry of those who suddenly feel less safe, less secure, less certain of what the future may bring.
Which would’ve been music to the ears of Joseph Conrad. “Few men realize,” he once observed, “that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.” Coming into contact with “pure unmitigated savagery,” he concluded, “with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.”
Conrad passed away exactly a century ago, yet his premonition rings clear. The hearts of so many of us these days seem profoundly troubled. But some of us, miracle of miracles, appear to have been inoculated against can-you-believe-itis. We are neither shaken nor stirred in the face of crumbling institutions and rapidly declining norms and surroundings growing progressively less safe. Why? How? To answer the question, we need to go back in time. All the way back.
The Book of Genesis, having gone out of its way to heap praise on the very righteous Noah, gives us little by way of description for Abraham, whose family occupies most of the Bible’s first volume. Who was he? Why was he chosen by God and promised land and many progeny? To what purpose? We don’t know. The closest thing we get to an answer comes a little while later, when God commands Abraham to take his son, Isaac, and sacrifice him to the Lord.
That moment of the binding of Isaac remains so singularly terrifying—and instructive—that our finest minds still debate its import. Kierkegaard famously mused about the teleological suspension of the ethical, and praised Abraham, the Knight of Faith, for putting his trust in God and his mysterious purposes above human morality and its limits. And rabbis have soothed uneasy children for millennia by assuring them that the patriarch was merely showing his love of the heavenly Father, a love for which he—and we—have been richly rewarded.
But there’s another reading of the story, one that is more earthly. It asks us to look not at the stars but at ourselves. When the Creator told Abraham to “take now thy son, thine only son Isaac” and offer him upon the altar, he gave him, among other lessons, a crash course in things falling apart.
“You, Abraham, may think you perfectly understand what you call ‘the world’ and have fathomed its machinations,” God seems to be saying. “But the world is mine and mine alone. It operates by my rules, which are inherently incomprehensible, even to you, wise mortal. So prepare for departures you cannot understand. Trust in my will when it must override your own.”
Abraham, to his endless credit, gets it. He doesn’t slouch back home and say something to Sarah along the lines of, “Can you believe what God just asked me to do?” He obeys, because his faith is not only a deeper, truer adherence to the divine but also a deeper, truer understanding of what it means to be human. Unlike Conrad’s misfortunate fools, Abraham doesn’t try to root the essence of his character in the quicksand of his seemingly safe surroundings. Safety, he knows, isn’t guaranteed; God’s love is the only trustworthy rock.
Which might help explain why we Jews still read the story of the binding of Isaac every year on the holiday of Rosh Hashanah. It may seem strange to kick off the Jewish new year and the High Holidays with this wildly troubling tale of a near-miss filicide, but the frighteningly sharp knife, we know, isn’t the point. The story is instructive—particularly at a time when we’re commanded to take stock of our spirit and our soul. It reminds us that we mustn’t tether our belief in the Almighty to worldly expectations of safety, security, and stability. Great and terrible things will happen, and they will occur at times we don’t expect and for reasons we cannot fathom. Our response must be to emulate Abraham’s resolve.
This may sound grim. It’s anything but. Applied to our moment in American life, culture, and politics, Abraham’s steadfast faith means something far more hopeful and robust. Put bluntly, those who cleave to God are far better positioned to inherit whatever tomorrow brings.
The Jews, as per usual, are the canary in the coalmine. After the massacre of October 7, 2023, many American Jews watched, stunned and heartbroken, as institutions to which they’d devoted much of their lives and charitable largesse turned on them overnight. College campuses were seized by marauders cheering for rapists and murderers, while professors and administrators sided not with the Jews but with their would-be pogromists. Major newspapers were quick to print terrorist propaganda and very slow to believe the testimonies of Jewish victims. Beloved politicians mumbled muddled statements that gave little comfort and no moral clarity. Everywhere you turned this past year, American Jews shared some version of “Can you believe . . . ?”
But the shock didn’t last long. Instead of clinging to fear and loathing, many—including some who previously lived at a great distance from anything resembling worship—turned to faith. They showed up in synagogues and started their own Scripture-reading groups, downloaded podcasts about the Talmud, and sought each and any opportunity to engage with the faith. When the investor and philanthropist Daniel Loeb launched the Simchat Torah Challenge, an initiative to encourage Jews to read one portion of the Torah per week, he was hoping to get 10,000 people to commit by the end of the first year. That goal was attained in just under a month, and the number keeps growing.
The lesson here is as clear as it is cheerful: We may be living through a moment of jarring historical change, but we are not without a manual on how to proceed. If we hold tight to what we used to know and demand that nothing change lest we feel troubled or unsafe, we’ll perish. If we, as the much-battered saying goes, let go and let God, we will find that what we may perceive as a menacing period of upheaval is actually a radiant opportunity for goodness and growth. Can we believe everything that’s going on? Yes, we can, and that’s precisely the point.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and the cohost of its popular podcast, Unorthodox.
Image by Caravaggio, public domain. Image cropped.
