V’chol ma’aminim “We all believe…”
If an award were ever given out for the most counterintuitive prayer in the entire Jewish liturgy, V’chol ma’aminim would win hands down. “We all believe G-d is a faithful G-d…We all believe G-d knows our innermost thoughts…We all believe G-d is good to all…We all believe G-d is the righteous Judge”…and so on through every letter in the alphabet.
Twice, no less.
We all believe this? In our secular and disenchanted age, we might ask, “Does anyone believe this?” In fact, I would suggest that even in earlier, more pious times, these beliefs were not universally shared.
So what do we make of this?
My teacher of blessed memory, Rabbi Neil Gillman, pointed out that religious people don’t invent G-d. They invent metaphors to describe their experience of G-d. Applying that idea to this prayer, we might read it like this: Some of us are believers, some of us are not. But of those who are truly believers, “We all believe G-d is good to all…”.
Now, a word about belief. You don’t believe something that is obvious. You don’t need to believe it, because you can know it rationally. Belief demands more of us, transcending our rational perceptions and rising to a level beyond. Putting it all together, believers believe in things that are hard to believe in. Consider “We all believe He is good to all.” After the Holocaust, how can we possibly say this? We don’t want to believe in this G-d, we want to argue with this G-d!
On the other hand, if you want to argue with G-d, the price of admission is believing in G-d. Unless you want to argue with someone you don’t believe in, which borders on madness.
So perhaps we could look at this prayer as a kind of map, pointing out the “scenic outlooks” we pass by on our trip toward faith, whenever we wish to take it.