3 min read
The coverage of Mother Teresa's canonisation has been extraordinary.
Almost every objection ever levelled against the Albanian nun has been dredged up. She, allegedly, offered sub-standard care to the sick; was more interested in fame than in caring for the poor; had unpalatable views on abortion, contraception and divorce; cosied up to unsavoury dictators; and - most importantly - did not perform the miracle attributed to her and which allowed her to become a saint.
It's a substantial list. But the real shock is that the accusation one would have thought would carry most weight with the Catholic Church has gone almost completely unmentioned.
For almost 40 years, Mother Teresa felt abandoned by God and sometimes doubted him.
She made this startling confession herself, in a series of letters published posthumously.
How would we react if a revered rabbi was agnostic?
While publicly she declared that her heart belonged "entirely to the Heart of Jesus", in private, she accused God of having "thrown [her] away as unwanted - unloved… I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer, no, no one… Where is my faith? Even deep down right in there is nothing. I have no faith.
"I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul," she wrote on another occasion, wondering whether she had done the right thing by devoting her life to Christianity.
The smile that she wore as she served the poor was "a mask or a cloak that covers everything. I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God, a tender personal love. If you were there you would have said, 'What hypocrisy'."
Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk, who led the campaign for her sainthood, begged to differ. He compiled the collection of letters because he believed that Mother Teresa's devotion to her work despite a decades-long "dark night of the soul" made her more eligible for sainthood, not less. The Church either agreed, or didn't care about her lack of faith at all.
But I can't help asking myself what our community's reaction would be if we discovered that one of our revered rabbis was in fact agnostic. What if a similar confessional cache was uncovered, authored by former Sephardi chief rabbi Ovadiah Yosef or the Lubavitcher Rebbe? Or what if we discovered one of our own chief rabbis had wrestled their entire life with a crisis of faith?
It seems hard to believe that these revelations would be greeted with equal equanimity.
The myth is that Christianity is a religion in which belief counts for everything, and actions very little, while in Judaism the opposite is true: it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you practise.
That may be true in a legalistic sense. It's also true that compared to Christianity, we tend to talk very little about God, belief and spirituality. We're more focused on the practical aspects of religion, such as our festivals, the synagogue service and passing down our traditions to our children.
But perhaps that's easier, because in contemporary Orthodoxy, it has become taboo to express serious theological doubts.
Several years ago, the Internet was awash with blogs by anonymous Charedi renegades from Stamford Hill to Brooklyn, who could for the first time express their philosophical reservations – and in many cases outright atheism, without threat of immediate ostracism. Even in more modern settings, real exploration of belief is rarely encouraged.
Just as our community has become more mindlessly conformist around issues of dress, ritual and lifestyle, so dogmatism seems to have replaced faith.
What are we so afraid of? Believing in God - the supernatural creator of the universe - is a big ask. It is only natural that we experience moments of doubt, and do not always feel God's presence in our lives. This does not make you a bad Jew. Indeed, anyone who claims to have always had perfect belief has either never thought about the issues seriously, or is a fool.
By quashing theological exploration, we risk needlessly alienating some of our best and brightest. We should have more confidence in our own belief system, and show more faith in those whose faith wobbles. As Mother Teresa has shown, they may be our very greatest religious role models – if we let them.