Faith, family and unanswered prayer

My husband Ed and I, along with our family, will celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, with dinner Sunday night at our home. Ed and I will also light yahrzeit candles in memory of our loved ones. I will also recite one of the few Jewish prayers I remember.

And once again, I am compelled to reexamine my faith.

Brought up as an Orthodox Jew, I attended Hebrew school to prepare for my Bat Mitzvah. I rebelled at 12 with tortured complaints directed at my father.

He gave in. I quit. No Hebrew school. No Bat Mitzvah.

Still, I held a fixed belief in God: my father’s God, the God of the Bible stories that I read incessantly as a child, and the God who answered all my prayers — if my father or my older brother Stan didn’t answer them first.

My mothe had died at 40 when I was 9. I do not remember her. Her mother, my grandmother, lived in the apartment next door. Dad, Stan and Granny nurtured me throughout my growing years.

I was 21 when Stan, at 26, was critically injured in a car accident and remained unconscious until his death six hours later. Oh, how I prayed for his recovery. But he never awakened. That night I lost my best friend.

Belief-altering? Oh, yes. The believer within me vanished and I withdrew from anything based on faith. Instead, my secular values — based on a not-at-all-religious but deeply optimistic belief in the goodness of other people — rose to the surface.

As time passed, I came to trust in the best part of the individual. Multiplied by the vast numbers of humankind the essential quality of goodness, for me, affirmed our humanity. Reality sometimes denies this, I know, but I tend to ignore that.

In searching for further details to structure my earthly opinions, I came across the Hebrew concept of tzedakah, a charitable conviction that gives aid to those in need and requires respect for everyone. I liked that.

Then came another test, another awakening. My younger child fell ill. Anyone who has ever had a sick child will tell you how that shakes your world.

At the age of 3, Valerie was diagnosed with what turned out to be metastatic bone cancer, a fight that culminated in surgery to remove her right lung. The six-yearlong battle was an unspeakable ordeal for her and for the rest of the family, and I found myself calling for — praying to? — someone to deliver my daughter from her dreadful illness.

My father’s God? Fine, if that’s what it took. I simply needed it done.

Divine help, however, did not arrive.

We lost Valerie when she was 9. Our surviving child, Stacy, died at 37 after a 12-year battle with breast cancer.

If asked what I then believed, whether I believed, I would have replied that my position on religion had hardened. As it turned out, it had only altered. Times change, beliefs bend, thoughts modify.

I still cling to something in my faith. I still find in it some beauty and purpose.

I treasure the concept of tzedakah, of trying to heal the world. I treasure the mournful calm of lighting yahrzeit candles, the dinners with our family. My effort to ensure that all these things happen — a need I am somehow unable to resist — connects me to something deeper in my psyche.

I remain in doubt about an omnipotent being watching over us. No doubt, though, exists in my mind that my husband and I will be together someday with our daughters and all of our loved ones. Is that spiritual? Is it a simple expression of human hope? Does it matter?

Why I will celebrate the new year