Opinion | The God I Believe in Now

Do any of you believe in God?” The first time I heard that question in a group setting was at a dinner party decades ago. Nine other people were at the table, all Jews. I was the only one who said “Yes.” Maybe our host had posed the question simply to jump-start a substantive conversation, or maybe she was Godwrestling herself and needed a little help from her friends. I’ll never know, but I’ll always remember how people responded to my answer.

“Wait! You don’t really mean that, do you?”

“You’re a rational woman, a Jewish feminist! How can you possibly believe in a deity who lets little girls get raped by their fathers in their own homes?”

“I think humans created God, not vice versa.”

“I think God died in the Holocaust.”

Since that night, I’ve been struck by how often Jews seem discomfited when the subject of God comes up in social, non-synagogue settings.

One might reply tentatively, another combatively. Others are uncharacteristically silent: I can almost see them interrogating themselves.

According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 72 percent of American Jews are believers in God (compared to 97 percent of Christians). By contrast, my own cohort of Jews—urban, educated, not necessarily observant or Orthodox, but culturally self-identified and communally committed—skews skeptical and cynical, if not atheist or agnostic.

The Pew survey also reports patterns that suggest fewer than half of all Jews attend synagogue on the High Holy Days. I was among those who spent the better part of Yom Kippur this year engaged in a serious cheshbon ha’nefesh (an accounting of one’s innermost soul) and who, along with my fellow congregants, willingly and repeatedly confessed to the long list of transgressions spelled out in the mahzor (prayer book). We beat our chests to each itemized sin in the Al Chet and Ashamnu prayers. We each took personal responsibility for society’s collective sins. We cried, “Forgive us. Pardon us. Grant us atonement.” My question is, to whom were we talking?

I felt the magnificent richness and urgency of hundreds of Jewish voices begging for mercy and forgiveness. Simultaneously, I felt unsure whether that compelling chorus of sound was fueled by us supplicants’ wishful yearning or by actual trust that an Almighty God is listening and has the power to grant our prayers.

Why are so many of us skittish about confiding our religious beliefs or lack thereof?

Why, I wondered, are so many of us comfortable sharing intimate details of our sex lives but skittish about confiding our religious beliefs or lack thereof? And why is it that, though I always say “Yes” when asked “the question,” I simultaneously hope to God (really) that no one will ask me to elaborate?

Maimonides, the preeminent 12th-century rabbi-philosopher, famously concluded that God is incomprehensible and therefore indescribable by human language. I’m not suggesting Jews should try to describe God, only to describe our relationship with God. How do we comprehend the incomprehensible?

Not that I’ve done it myself. In fact, never in more than five decades of writing and public speaking have I confided details of my personal theology or my attempts at theodicy, the project of reconciling an all-powerful God with the existence of worldly suffering and evil. We don’t have to go back to Epicurus or Spinoza to find public intellectuals (think Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) who’ve publicly disputed God’s three “O’s”—omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. Some, like a rabbi friend of mine, share their views more privately. He admits that the closest he’s come to “the divine spark” is when he’s engaged in a hevrutah—the study of Torah in deep communion with another person.

This fall, on the cusp of 5786, I sat in shul and revisited the God I prayed to in 5705 when I was old enough to sit with my parents in the main sanctuary. Incessantly described as Lord, Master, Father and King, that God lodged in my childhood imagination as a man with a long white beard perched on a “throne of glory” surrounded by clouds and cupids.

The God I believe in now is ayn sof—without form or end. Too vast to be fathomed by humans. Too expansive to be stunted by the limits of language, imagery or symbolism. And too great to be shrunken by gendered honorifics and sex-typed attributes. In essence, unknowable. Yet my relationship with God is personal, palpable, enduring, evanescent—in short, something I know well. I feel God as a presence in my life whose power I can attest to anecdotally and experientially.

For instance, I’ve been preternaturally moved to say the familiar Shehechiyanu blessing thanking God “for protecting and sustaining us and bringing us to this season,” not solely when Jewish law dictates—at the start of a Jewish holiday such as Passover or Sukkot, at a joyful simcha like a wedding, upon moving into a new house or eating the first peach of summer—but after ordinary or extraordinary moments in which I’ve truly felt God’s presence. When a daughter first confided she was in love. When my late husband Bert and I, hiking in France without snacks or raingear, got drenched to the skin by a slashing storm and at the end of the trail found an inn with a fire in every hearth and a menu that featured French onion soup and cheese fondue. (To paraphrase Einstein, “Happy synchronicities are God’s way of remaining anonymous.”) And when Bert told me, days before he slipped away, that he wanted me to live life fully after he was gone.

Why are we reluctant to discuss our encounters with transcendence, if we have them? For me, it basically boils down to fear of how others will view us. Fear of sounding rigid, retrograde or doctrinal; fear of being lumped with constituencies who are anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-choice, unsophisticated, fundamentalist, evangelical, delusional, or who believe in pixies. It’s hard to map one’s spiritual landscape without bumbling into woo-woo land or, worse, the quicksand of clichés.

Compared to, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Margaret Fuller, my written explorations of God are irredeemably lame. I’m more interested in talking tachlis (brass tacks) with other Jews about the divine sparks they may have experienced in everyday life. What exactly is your relationship with the God you ostensibly were praying to all day in shul? Or were you beseeching your inner ear and promising yourself to improve? If you imagined being judged by a higher power, did that power feel awesome and almighty or metaphoric and poetical? Was it a one-way monologue, a covenantal conversation, a metaphysical therapy session, or what?

Damn the clichés, full speed ahead.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the author of 12 books, most recently Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy.

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