Faith and Imagination

“You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed…”

This passage is taken from fragment 252 of “Pensées” (French for “Thoughts”), written by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662).

Pascal, was a child prodigy who was raised by his father, a tax collector, after his mother passed away when he was 3 years old.

At 19, he had invented the first mechanical calculator to help his father with his burdensome tax calculations. Pascal, a math genius, is credited with many achievements in the field of math and physics and is even credited as the inventor of modern public transportation!

He also made tremendous contributions in the fields of philosophy and theology, with his most known ideas being “Pascal's Wager,” in which he attempted to prove that it was irrational to not believe in God, and his principles in the field of probability on getting positive expected values for one’s decision.

But this is not going to be a study of those ideas; instead I’d like to focus on one aspect of Pascal’s theology — the one which is brought up in the passage above: Pascal's Proposal to find one’s way into faith through “pretending to believe.”

Believe it or not, this proposal is actually very Jewish.

Our tradition encourages us on numerous occasions to use our imagination in order to succeed in our Jewish practice. This could be easily seen by searching our texts for one word, the word Keh-eelu, which translates to “as if.”  A quick search of this word in any of our texts (Tanach, Talmud or Thought) produces dozens of results.

Here are just a few examples:

שֶׁכָּל הַמְאַבֵּד נֶפֶשׁ אַחַת מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל, מַעֲלֶה עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ אִבֵּד עוֹלָם מָלֵא. וְכָל הַמְקַיֵּם נֶפֶשׁ אַחַת מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל, מַעֲלֶה עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ קִיֵּם עוֹלָם מָלֵא.

 “...with regard to anyone who destroys one soul from the Jewish people, the verse ascribes him blame as if he destroyed an entire world…. And conversely, anyone who sustains one soul from the Jewish people, the verse ascribes him credit as if he sustained an entire world.” - Mishnah, Sanhedrin

See how we are encouraged to use our imagination. If we imagine that one act of kindness can save the entire world, we will be more prone to do it.

Another example:

״תָּנֵי תַּנָּא קַמֵּיהּ דְּרַב נַחְמָן בַּר יִצְחָק: כׇּל הַמַּלְבִּין פְּנֵי חֲבֵירוֹ בָּרַבִּים, כְּאִילּוּ שׁוֹפֵךְ דָּמִים.״

“Anyone who humiliates another in public, it is as if he were spilling blood.” 
- Talmud, Bava Metzia

Here we are called to use our imagination to view humiliation of another as the very murdering of them. 

״תִּקְעוּ לְפָנַי בְּשׁוֹפָר שֶׁל אַיִל, כְּדֵי שֶׁאֶזְכּוֹר לָכֶם עֲקֵידַת יִצְחָק בֶּן אַבְרָהָם, וּמַעֲלֶה אֲנִי עֲלֵיכֶם כְּאִילּוּ עֲקַדְתֶּם עַצְמְכֶם לְפָנַי.״

“Sound a blast before Me with a shofar made from a ram’s horn, so that I will remember for you the binding of Isaac, son of Abraham, in whose stead a ram was sacrificed, and I will ascribe it to you as if you had bound yourselves before Me.”
-Talmud, Rosh Hashanah

And here no less, we are encouraged to use our imagination to put ourselves in the place of Isaac in the horrid moment of the Akedah.

Israeli scholar Moshe Meir goes as far as to stress that the entire act of prayer is theatre in the making - that it is imaginative. If you think about it, in our prayer service we pretend to communicate with an entity we have no proof of and all the words which we utter, those which imply a reciprocal relationship, are obviously false.

Our tradition encourages us to use our imaginations at each and every moment of our practice.

Pascal wrote and lived in a tremendous time in human history, a time of paradigmatic shift, the brink of the scientific revolution. Humans of his time were faced with a complete shuttering of everything they thought they knew about the universe and about their existence. The removal of the religious foundations from under their feet threw them into chaos.

Pascal strove for order. Before modern psychologists proved it, Pascal claimed that order, habit and routine assist with the mental health of the lost and shuttered human.

In fragment 125 of “Pensées” he writes:

“Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”

Here he means to say that the habit that we put on ourselves does become our nature eventually, and so we have to keep practicing them, even if in the beginning we need the assistance of…. Our imagination.

The Passover Seder is called Seder for a reason. Seder means Order. We are called to view a moment of our history, a moment which reflects on our present, with order and with ritual. 

Perhaps the most known use of the word “Keh-eelu” in our tradition is:

״בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם."

“GENERATION BY GENERATION, each person must see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt”
-Passover Haggadah

For the past two Passovers a lot of us felt shuttered. Let us follow our tradition’s call to use our imaginations to ease us into ritual, one which can bring Seder, order, to our fragmented souls.