“It works.”

“I’m sorry?” I said. “What works?”

“Torah.”

“In what way?”

“Imagine you had a car,” he said.

Rabbi Marcus was always talking about cars. Life was like a car, a person was like a car, relationships were like cars, everything was like a car. The rumor was he had worked as a car mechanic as a teenager all the way on until his investiture at the yeshiva to support himself and his widowed mother, that he retained a passion for tinkering with cars, and, most scandalously, that the garage in his old house on East Fifty-Third had a lift and he worked on his own cars at night purely for pleasure. Fireside legend only, but I glanced surreptitiously at his fingernails, not for the first time, for a telltale hint of engine grease. I did not see any. If he was a clandestine midnight mechanic, he washed his hands very well.

“This car,” he continued, “you borrowed from a friend for a trip through a very big and dangerous and barren desert. Maybe it has four-wheel drive. You load the car with extra gas tanks and food and water to make the journey. Nu? So you head out and somewhere in the middle of the desert the car breaks down. You cannot walk. You must fix the car, but you don’t know how. You open the hood and you see something is clearly wrong, maybe a belt has snapped, something looks bent, the engine is smoking. Is it the camshaft? The manifold? You have no idea. There’s nothing around for hundreds of miles in every direction, there is no cell service, no one is going to drive by to help you, and your food will run out. If you can’t get the car back on the road you will die of starvation and heat exposure. Luckily, the friend you borrowed the car from just so happens to have prepared for this eventuality and in the trunk you find a jack, a hoist, torque wrenches, a mallet, pliers, and all the spare parts you might need. So, you set to trying to fix the car; it is your only chance to survive. Now, you don’t know very much about cars, but you can look at the pieces that have come off, you can match the broken ones to replacement parts from the trunk. You do some work, this here, that there, remove this, connect that. When you feel your work is done, how can you know if you’ve put the engine back together correctly?”

He turned over his callused hands, which had been resting on the table, so his palms were facing up. His fingers were curled slightly, almost like he was himself reaching for the tools of his story so he could help the unfortunate stranded unmechanical traveler fix the car.

“I have no idea,” I shrugged. “If the guy in the story really doesn’t know anything about fixing cars, I guess it would be hard for him to know if he did it right. No?”

“No. It would be very easy. If he did it right, the car will work. All he has to do is turn the key and put his foot on the gas pedal. If the engine doesn’t start, or the car doesn’t drive, or breaks down after a short distance, he will know he did not fix it correctly. If the engine turns over smoothly and the car runs down the road, then he can be sure he put things in the right place. Or else he has built an entirely new kind of car engine, which would be very unlikely.”

“Okay. What does that have to do with emunah?”

“Believing in God in general, and the Torah in particular, works. It is the only system in the world that has been proven to work through history on a large and small scale to organize human life, public and private. Take this example—the pasuk in the torah that governs relationships between people says: ‘And you should Love your neighbor like yourself; I am God’. Why ‘I am God’ at the end of this commandment? God does not remind us that He is God after the telling us not to light fires on Shabbos. Is the endnote random? No. The verse about the brotherhood of man ends with ‘I am God’ because only in the context of subservience to God can man harmoniously coexist with his neighbor. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise, loving your neighbor will only last until your neighbor does something nasty, thus the bloody misery of all of human history. But if everything comes from God, we can look at a fender bender with divine acquiescence and tell even a total stranger not to worry about it, or our neighboring country we will be happy to divide Alsace-Lorraine in the way they think is fair.”

“There are a lot of people who love without religion and a lot of people with a lot of religion who are not too loving.”

“It’s not about love in an anecdotal sense. It’s about a system that guides your life. A system of devotion to the Creator of the world and His commandments as opposed to, what can only otherwise be, fundamentally, some variant of self-gratification. That’s what works. That’s the only path toward both joy and peace in this life.”

I particularly despised the “we’re so much happier than everyone else” argument for religion. Growing up around so many religious people, I was not so sure we were so happy and looking at the goyim I grew up beside with their Saturday afternoon barbeques and high school football, I wasn’t so sure how happy they weren’t.

“That’s not Torah. That’s just, kind of general spirituality.”

“Yes, but what is spirituality without God? A vague, inexplicable concept you don’t really believe exists? Now, for Jews, we have a little extra that we must do in order to achieve our purpose. But for everyone else, God is equally indispensable.”

“The Buddhists and the Hindus seem to have spirituality without God.”

He sighed and looked up at the ceiling like he was beseeching the Almighty. I did not know if he was seeking heaven for the answer to my question or for the patience to deal with me. Maybe both.

“How old are you Meachael? Twenty-three? Twenty-four?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two.” He sighed. “I am sixty-seven. I remember being twenty-two. I know that you feel the world is your oyster, that every possibility is available to you, that you will live forever. You question the Riboinoi Shel Oilam and you weigh your options—this kind of life, that kind of life, what should you do? There is a lot out there that looks very attractive. You can do anything. At your age you cannot appreciate the passing shadow that is going to be your life. In a moment only it will be over. You don’t have as many choices as you think. Living for this world, essentially for pleasure of some kind or other, is the greatest illusion. There is nothing there. Only the things you pick up and take with you have any true value. We are very impressed by a nice car. Why does no one talk about cars at funerals? No son ever stood beside the casket holding the cold body of his father and said, ‘You know, he had the nicest car in town.’ It’s worthless. And yet young men repeatedly set out to dedicate their lives to getting that car.”

“It’s not about the car,” I said. “It’s about truth. What is true? The rest only follows.”

“You know what is true? The worst tomorrow is better than the best yesterday. Do you know why?”

“What does that even mean?”

“Think about what you’d rather have. The memory of the most famous movie star’s best day of private jets and parties and exotic foods and places, or to go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow and live another ordinary good and bad day. Which would you take right now, if you could have either?

“I would take tomorrow.”

“Yes. Because deep down we all understand that the opportunity to do something of spiritual value is the only thing that is worth anything in all of this world. The movie star’s yesterday, all the best things this world has to offer, are gone to dust the moment they are passed. The very moment. That’s all they’re worth. One second later you don’t even want them. You’d rather spend a day at the DMV. And that’s why we only talk about people’s kind acts at their funerals. Think about a baby. We feel an instant sense of deep tragedy when we hear about the death of a baby. Why? Because we regret all the mindless intercourse he or she might have had? The world is a great distraction that tries to confuse us of this ultimate truth, but we know it deep down. And the converse is equally true. You are about to step into the best party. Drugs, music, a night filled with every pleasure the world has to offer. Or you can have a past of kind deeds, of people helped, of good things done in the world. Which would you rather have if you could choose?”

“What’s the second thing?”

“What?”

“You said you had two ideas.”

He sighed. I hadn’t gotten the point. “Us. The yidden.”

“Because we’re so awesome?”

Finally consternation; thick eyebrows marching up the furrowed tracks of a frustrated forehead. I had finally broken through his pious patience. “Think Meachael, you’re a smart boy. Everyone else in your world is not so foolish. If there were many peoples throughout history who had, in the same general fashion, created many false religions, what would you expect? A lot of different versions of the same basic story and similar historical trajectories. You would have a purported prophet, some supposed miracles, a group of ardent followers who went out and spread the religion, and then a belief cult that grows over time. The dynamics of every man-made religion should all be roughly the same, and in fact they are. But what if, among all these made-up religions, one of them was actually true? What if one of the peoples of the world were actually chosen by God, received His actual revelation? What would you expect then?”

I looked at him blankly. This argument seemed like it was going in the wrong direction. The fact that other religions had stories similar to ours was not a point in our favor.

“I’ll tell you,” he continued. “You would expect that one religious group, the true one, to be different than the others. You would expect their story to be different. You would expect them to have unusual providence. You would expect their story to be completely unlike the other religions of the world, both in their formation and in their march through history. You might even expect this one special group to be central to the course of human history. This is what you have with the Jews. It cannot be denied. An atheist can shrug his shoulders at creation and say it happened by itself, but what can he say to us? What other explanation can there be for our singularity? And the Torah? If different clever men invented different clever documents, the same would be true of the Torah as I said before. You would see the same history play out with regard to all holy texts. You would not have one single book that defines and guides the course of civilization.”

“If you take that argument, I think the New Testament and the Quran have a little bit of a wider readership than the Torah.”

“Yes, but neither of those books would exist without the Torah. Read them. They are just poor copies. Whatever value they have is only borrowed. Why the Aybishter chose to disseminate the values of the Torah to the umois haoilam in this way I cannot tell you. But that is certainly what has occurred.”

He’d never shared his thoughts like this before. It prompted me to ask a question I’d thought of many times but not had the courage to ask. “Do you ever struggle with emunah, Rebbe?”

Without hesitation, he said, “Of course I do. Not like you do Meachael. Not in the way that the foundations of my life tremble. But you know the mussar seforim say emunah is a middah like any other. Like kaas or ahnivus. You can be arrogant and then you work on yourself and you become a little less arrogant, a little more humble. You can be stingy, and then work at it and become a little more generous. Emunah is not yes or no. Either yes you believe or no you do not. We have madreigos, we have levels, and there are infinite levels. Chazal tell us the sin our teacher Moses committed when he hit the rock was that he did not have enough emunah, he did not have enough faith in God to merely speak to the rock and expect water to flow. How could Moses lack faith? He got finished speaking to God Himself five minutes before. And he was in the process of drawing water from a rock in the desert. His sin was that he had a little less faith than he should have had. Like everything else that matters, there are infinite levels, there is growth, there are tests, we strive. In that way my own emunah has stronger times and weaker times and, baruch Hashem, over the course of my life I feel I have generally grown in this area. You know what the midrash says about our father Abraham?”

“That he had so much faith in God he jumped into a fire?”

“That too. But also that when he was on the way to circumcise Isaac, the satan tried to convince him not to do it. The pasuk says, ‘And it was on the third day and he saw the place far away.’ We know The Place is one of the names of God as He is in every place. The midrash tells us the satan said to Abraham, ‘Old man, you think God would ever tell you to murder your own child? You’re getting senile. It was not a prophetic vision, it was just a bad dream.’ Abraham was an old man. He was a hundred and thirty-seven years old at the time. Can you imagine how he must have trembled in that moment with self-doubt? God did not walk beside Abraham as he went to sacrifice Isaac. He appeared to him in a moment of revelation, an incomprehensible revelation, and then He was gone. On the third day of the journey, three long days after receiving the prophecy, Abraham looked about himself and God was very far away. And he doubted. And the satan almost had him. Even Abraham himself struggled with emunah. Doubt is a part of the life of a true servant of Hashem and it is nothing to be ashamed of.”

We were both still. It was like he was trying to will faith into my heart. His gaze was gentle, sympathetic, grandfatherly. I thought of Hamas. Hezbollah. Iran. The mobs screaming for our deaths across the world. Or at least for us to just stand still while the terrorists killed us. Lily. The professor. I thought of Eva. Of her modest beauty and quiet strength. Her hopefulness and her humor. I didn’t want to lose her because I couldn’t believe. I wanted a life with her. I wanted to want the life I was supposed to want, the children and the Torah, the Shabbos table, the grandchildren and the passing on of the tradition. It felt beyond my reach. She felt beyond my reach. I felt paralyzed, like Stephen Dedalus in the rectory. I could not be false, and I could not tell the truth. I had a knot in my throat; my eyes began to water.

Voice cracking, I whispered to him in despair, “I want it to be true.”

He reached across the table and took my hand, a thing he had never done before. His hand was warm, strong, and rough.

He said, “Our greatest moment as a nation was when God asked us if we wanted His Torah. The people said ‘Na’aseh v’nishmah.’ We will do, and we will hear. It could have been no other way. Any other response would have ended our national history on the spot. We must ‘do,’ must commit first, then we can ‘hear’ the word of God. That is the only way it works. God does not prove himself to us, and only then we promise our allegiance. That would not be worth very much.”

“But how? How do you do that? How can you commit if you don’t know?”

“Be humble.”

“What??”

“Moses was closer to God than any other human being before or since, and the Bible says only one thing about his character: He was the humblest man who ever lived. The key to everything is humility.”