“All you need is faith.” Easy to say. But faith in what?  Maybe, for me, just that there is some kind of great energy beyond myself that connects my soul to others and …

Okay, I kid you not. We just had a 5.2 earthquake. I dropped to the floor and went under my built-in desk, pulling Rafiki in with me. My vigilance cranked up high now as I anticipate aftershocks. (And it was really high with initial reports that the magnitude was 6.7!)

So yeah, how do we trust in the universe when the ground can shift under our feet? Every Jewish New year I choose a spiritual quality to dive into for the year. Two years ago it was faith. At the time I chose it (fall 2022), Jack was getting cancer treatment and responding well. So did I want to cultivate faith that he would heal, or that everything would work out for the best? Before the year ended, the cancer had returned, and he was gone. And my exploration of faith morphed into trust in my own strength and resourcefulness, plus leaning into others’ support.

I picked faith again—or it picked me—this year. Last time around, I’d looked for positive definitions of faith. Faith in something. This time, I heard a teaching on the opposite of faith being doubt—which doesn’t feel like a huge revelation, but in that moment it spoke to me. Doubt, especially self-doubt, often feels like my default operating mode. I thought about exploring faith in terms of that interplay between faith and doubt, calling on my yoga nidra practice of holding opposites. 

The stories of both Passover (through Sunday evening) and Easter involve miracles—which I guess you could think of as the ultimate corrective for doubt, having a direct experience of walking though a sea that has parted or seeing a man you’d thought was dead returned to life. We rarely, however, get to witness miracles, so we’re left with “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” For this Saturday and Sunday, I put together a playlist I’m calling “The Dance of Faith and Doubt.”