The Faith Between Us

Two young men, Peter Bebergal and Scott Korb, become friends and slowly discover they share faith. While Peter is Jewish and Scott is Catholic, their frank discussions, compiled in their new book, "The Faith Between Us," explore belief and meaning with both earnestness and irreverence.

Peter Bebergal

While it was somewhat different when we first met, I learned of Scott’s faith in an exchange over e-mail. I had only actually met him once before in person—both of us were attending a reading in Boston. And for the next year we corresponded daily. Slowly, details began to emerge. We’d both studied theology in graduate school. One Sunday Scott wrote that he had just returned from Mass. He taught religious education. In another note I wrote that I was going to temple on Yom Kippur. Our references and allusions were curious: the Bible, Flannery O’Connor, Martin Buber, and Dietrich Bonheoffer. Our religious lives seemed more than tradition, more than just familial habits. There seemed to be something at stake. Then one day, while my son played on the floor at my feet, I asked Scott if he believed in God. Not only did he answer yes, but he also seemed to know exactly what I meant by the question.

The few other times I had openly admitted to someone that my faith was more than agnosticism, conversation usually turned to the meaning of the words I used. Do I believe God is a person? Do I think God has a body? Is there a heaven? A hell? I tried to avoid having to answer these kinds of questions because I was afraid anything I said about God would be taken literally, no matter how much I tried to argue that I didn’t mean any of it that way. In certain company I might not talk about religion at all. A number of close friends are openly hostile to any idea of not only organized religion, but any kind of spiritual worldview at all. Sometimes, when I am staying over at a friend’s house, or even my in-laws’, I find it impossible to say, “Excuse me for a while, I have to say my prayers.” I can think of nothing more embarrassing. So I find a time, often when everyone else has gone to bed, and I sit on the floor in the dark and pray.

Scott knew when I asked if he believed that I was asking if he had doubt also. I was not asking if he was in perfect communion with a higher power, not asking if he was “born again,” not even asking if he believed God appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai. I was asking if he looked for the sacred in his life, if he had encountered holiness. And then when I confirmed that I believed too, we didn’t speak explicitly about faith for a long time after. It was as if believing in God was simply a state of being, like our age, where we were born, the names of our parents. Our faith wasn’t something to talk about. For perhaps the first time in either of our lives, it became simply a way to talk to each other. It was colloquial. It was slang.

Many of my friends might still peg me as agnostic. More comfortable than ever admitting a belief in God, I still rarely let on that I am deeply theistic, that I pray, or that when I fast on Yom Kippur I am seeking real atonement. There is no risk in saying,” Well, there might be something, but I’m not sure what it is.” No one faults anyone’s agnosticism. And for those people I know whose belief does lean toward some kind of theism, they have no religious life to speak of. It’s easy to stand in between worlds, with no challenge, with no religious practice. As a Jew, this is made all the more effortless. If, say, at a party someone wants to know about my religion, I might simply say that I’m Jewish, but that says nothing about my conception of God, or if I even have one. Luckily, Jews get a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card in regards to public religiousness. There is a certain presumption that Jewish practice is merely tradition, that reading out of the Haggadah on Passover is like hunting for Easter eggs on Easter. If I tell someone I am going to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, there is no hidden wonderment about my belief. Of course Jews go to synagogue on holidays. Religious practice doesn’t imply a belief in God. Belief in God is irrelevant.

Ironically, the irrelevance of belief is a very Jewish idea. The first commandment reads, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” There is nothing here about belief. Belief is either presupposed or else the reality of God is so certain that having “faith” in something you cannot have a direct sensory experience with is redundant. In this sense, Judaism is not concerned with faith.

Continued on page 2: 'We started to explore faith together. . .' »