Only adolescents worry about the existence of God: the yes or no of it. Most of us have decided one way or the other long before we owned our first car. The subject grows boring, the arguments worn thin either way. There is real life to be attended to, and the God question grows stale. We do what is expected of us. We get married by the clergy who invoke His presence and bury our loved ones with prayers and pleas to an all-powerful being, even if we are skeptics or agnostics or atheists or scoffers who playact our way through one ceremony after another. We no longer stay up until dawn considering the matter. And yet the question remains at the edges of our minds, in sleepless hours, in moments of crisis.
We Jews are not particularly concerned about Hell. Perhaps that’s because life on earth can be searing enough, sufficiently punishing to make the vision of Hell seem childish and Dante a moralist who forgives too little. Jews picked up visions of resurrection and the tortures of Gehenna from the neighborhood around us. The folk most of us came from did believe in Lilith’s power, the evil eye, the force of prayer to heal or avert disaster. All that depends on a belief in a loving or vengeful God. Hurry up, the gates of heaven are closing for another year.
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