Faith Is Not an Escape: Why Belief Fulfills a Deep Human Need

People of faith are accustomed to hearing the claim that belief is a kind of refuge from life’s difficulties. “It must be wonderful to be a believer,” some say. “The world seems less threatening. There’s order in the chaos. Someone decides how things will go. Someone watches over you. It’s much harder when you have to take your fate into your own hands.”

A person doesn’t live a life of faith to make things easy or to find shelters from effort. Jews of faith have often sacrificed much — even life itself, for their beliefs. That’s hardly the profile of someone chasing comfort or fleeing hardship. Still, it’s worth examining the question on its own terms: even if faith is, in some sense, a refuge that helps a person face life’s challenges, what follows?

The pilot and the ejection seat

By the same logic, we could say that traffic lights are a refuge from darting through traffic; heaters a refuge from winter; shoes a refuge from rough sidewalks. We might add that schooling, literature, culture, and science are refuges from solitary thinking because they provide us with frameworks and discoveries others have already forged.

Indeed, all these things help and lighten the load, and there’s no shame in that. A human is human, allowed to acknowledge limits. Only the Divine needs nothing beyond itself; but people are fully entitled to use whatever aids help them live better, truer, richer lives.

A pilot who pulls the ejection handle when the jet is on fire isn’t weak; he’s rational and healthy. A patient who consults a doctor and takes medicine isn’t spineless. By contrast, those “heroes” whose pride won’t let them yield to real, objective constraints — even at the risk of their lives, invite questions about their mental steadiness.

A real human need

Faith is a human need. Just as we need food to live and clothing to shield us from the cold; just as we need love, encouragement, and friendship; just as many of us seek a partner, children, grandchildren, we also have an inner, authentic need for faith.

There is a soul in the human being, that can't be satisfied with a good dinner or a luxury car. The soul is a spark of the Creator and it naturally longs for its Source and for infinite light. In its search for the Divine, the soul stirs in us restlessness and a constant seeking. The soul needs faith.

Attempting to build a world without faith is like walking barefoot on broken glass. You simply cannot, in any real sense, live well without it. It may be a weakness, but it's real, and can't be plastered over with slogans of heroism. We’ve seen that the ambition to raise children without faith and to ground justice and honesty on rationality alone, has led to scholarly treatises on value crises, “shifting morals,” and more.

The world is more complex than human understanding can fully grasp. Life is hard enough that facing it entirely alone is unrealistic. Faith is a positive, legitimate tool handed to us so we can live rightly and fulfill our purpose. It answers a genuine need of the human spirit and there is no reason to hide or deny it.