Taking back control from God has not worked

That wasn’t the case in pre-modern times. Belief in God wasn’t something left up to each of us as individuals. It was a given. No one doubted it. No one even knew it could be doubted.

So when we stood in shul at this time of year, the notion that God was writing down and sealing our fate felt overwhelming. Terrifying even. We felt that our lives genuinely hung in the balance.

But modernity changed that. As the American sociologist Peter Berger pointed out several decades ago, modernity brought with it the “heretical imperative” — not simply the right to choose whether or not to believe, but the compulsion to choose either way.

So, today, even the third of British Jews who passionately believe in God still have that choice. Yes, they choose to believe. But unlike our pre-modern ancestors, they can revisit that choice any time they like.

The emergence of that choice — and the rejection of God that came with it — prompted human beings to search for new gods, or new “narratives”, to make sense of the world: Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Capitalism, Feminism, Zionism, and countless other “isms”.

These differ from each other in numerous, obvious ways, but they do have one essential common factor. They all believe in human beings. They all maintain that it is human beings who are in charge of our fate.

They all argue that we can transform our reality; we can build a better world. We don’t need God anymore because we’re in control.

We have all lived with that profound change — from a God-centred world in which human choice doesn’t exist, to a human-centred one in which God doesn’t exist — for our entire lives. And for much of the post-war era at least, it’s been ok. Not perfect — far from it — but ok.

But, recently, that modern reality in which human beings believe they are in control has taken a real pounding. We can’t seem to control anything.

We can’t control Brexit, we can’t control our Government or our Parliament, we can’t control the Labour Party, we can’t control what comes out of Trump’s mouth, or Netanyahu’s, or even our own mouths, judging by some of what I read on social media. And we certainly can’t control our climate. We are, it seems, totally out of control.

In short, we seem to have reached a point where that entire post-emancipatory, modern conception of the role and place of human beings in the world has been revealed to be fraudulent. I think that is why things feel so hopeless at the moment.

We stopped believing in God long ago. But now we’re struggling to believe in the one thing with which we replaced Him. Ourselves.

YouGov data back this up. They demonstrate that our levels of trust in more or less every authority figure — doctors, teachers, police officers, academics, journalists, politicians, trade union leaders— have fallen over time. Ironically, one of the few exceptions is senior officials in the European Union.

Hence God’s sadness. Modernity compelled us to throw Him out, and even those who clung to Him knew deep down that they could let go whenever they wanted with minimal consequences.

But now we find ourselves adrift, unable to rely on ourselves, unable to turn to God.

We need Yom Kippur this year. I don’t expect it to be any easier than usual for many of us to find faith in God. But I hope we can find a little more faith in ourselves. While that might not give us a reason to believe in God, it might just give God a reason to start to believe in us.

Jonathan Boyd is executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR)