“Rabbi, I’m not sure I believe in God… but I still feel very Jewish.” I’ve heard this line more times than I can count. Sometimes it’s whispered with a tinge of embarrassment. Other times, it’s spoken defiantly, even proudly. But beneath it, there is often an honest, aching confusion. How can one claim Jewish identity—and even Jewish integrity—when the core theological claim of Judaism seems elusive, rejected, or simply irrelevant? Can you still be a good Jew if you don’t believe in God?
For generations, Jewish belonging was defined less by belief and more by birth, practice, or persecution. You were Jewish because your mother was Jewish. Because you kept kosher. Because the Cossacks didn’t ask about your theology before they burned your shtetl. But in the modern era—especially in the open societies of the West—Jews have more agency than ever before in deciding what kind of Judaism, if any, to inhabit. Many have walked away from the God of their childhoods. They no longer believe in a God who intervenes in history, who parts seas or punishes sin, who listens to prayer or watches over them. And yet they keep lighting Shabbat candles. They still fast on Yom Kippur, attend seders, join Jewish causes, send their kids to Hebrew school. They are deeply engaged with Jewish life—not despite their disbelief, but alongside it. What are we to make of that?
To begin answering the question, we have to clarify what Judaism is—and what it isn’t. Judaism is often framed as a religion, but that definition is misleading. Most religions, particularly in the Western sense, are grounded in theology: the belief in a deity or set of doctrines. Christianity, for example, centers on belief in Jesus as the Messiah and son of God. Islam rests on affirming the oneness of Allah and the prophecy of Muhammad. By contrast, Judaism has always been less concerned with belief and more concerned with behavior. The Torah contains very few theological imperatives and almost no systematic doctrine. What it does contain—what it is overflowing with—is law. Mitzvot. Ritual obligations. Ethical demands. Communal norms.
This is why Judaism has traditionally focused less on what you believe and more on what you do. As the Talmudic adage goes, “Na’aseh v’nishma”—we will do, and we will understand. The covenantal model of Judaism does not hinge on internal faith as a prerequisite for external action. One can live a life of halakhic observance—lighting candles, keeping Shabbat, studying Torah—without ever articulating a traditional theological belief. Judaism is best understood not simply as a religion, but as what Mordecai Kaplan called a “civilization.” It is a people, a language, a memory, a land, a culture, a code of law, and yes, a set of theological assumptions—but none of these categories alone can contain it. You can disbelieve and still be part of the people. You can doubt and still be in the covenant. And you can stop praying, but still mourn on Tisha B’Av, still tell your children they are part of an ancient, stubborn, luminous people.
But we must be honest: not all disbelief is the same. When someone says, “I don’t believe in God,” the question must be asked: which God don’t you believe in? The God who micromanages your parking spots? The God who blesses sports teams or punishes bad thoughts? The bearded man in the sky who pulls strings from heaven? Because if that’s the God being rejected, then so did many of our greatest sages. Rambam denied any anthropomorphic conception of God. Heschel rejected the mechanistic God of reward and punishment. Buber replaced the God-above with the I-Thou encounter. The God that many modern Jews no longer believe in may not be the God Judaism ever affirmed.
In truth, much of what contemporary Jews reject is not divinity, but the infantilized theology of childhood religion—a theology based on rewards, punishments, and magical thinking. What remains is not atheism, but a kind of post-theism: a longing for transcendence without certainty, a commitment to meaning without metaphysics, a fidelity to covenant without a commanding voice. Many Jews today still feel the pull of Jewish life. They still feel summoned—by memory, by peoplehood, by history, by moral intuition. They still feel the covenant, even if they can no longer name the Commander.
This is why I believe the answer to the original question—can you be a good Jew without believing in God—is yes, but with qualifications. You can be a good Jew if you live a Jewish life, uphold Jewish obligations, maintain Jewish commitments, and transmit Jewish memory. You can be a good Jew if you participate in the project of Jewish continuity and the pursuit of Jewish ethics—even if your theology is unsettled or agnostic. But it must be a life of engagement. Judaism is not an ethnicity alone. It is not just gefilte fish and guilt. It is not just standing up against injustice or feeling solidarity in tragedy. To be a good Jew requires covenantal responsibility. It requires doing Jewish—even when belief falters. Even when God is silent.
This notion of action over belief is not new. In classical halakhic Judaism, heretics were often those who acted outside the community, not just those who questioned faith. In the Hasidic tradition, doubt itself could be a sacred path—if it led to deeper humility and honest striving. In fact, one of the most subversive truths of Jewish history is that some of our most enduring contributors to Jewish thought and literature were skeptics or secularists. Spinoza was excommunicated for denying divine providence—and yet, his philosophy is still studied in Jewish thought courses. Bialik, Ahad Ha’am, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, and even Theodor Herzl—all wrestled with God, with Jewishness, and with belonging. Their doubts did not disqualify them from shaping the Jewish future.
And yet, we cannot pretend this is a simple open door. There are limits. Judaism without God cannot be only a boutique cultural experience. It cannot be hollowed of its ritual and obligation. A Judaism of doubt must still be a Judaism of doing. Lighting candles, studying Torah, giving tzedakah, attending minyan, building community, teaching children—these are the acts that keep the covenant alive. Even if God’s voice is distant or obscured, the call to Jewish living still echoes through us. In that sense, the covenant may be less about supernatural belief and more about sacred responsibility.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg has written powerfully about a “voluntary covenant” in the wake of the Holocaust—a Judaism not rooted in fear of divine punishment or promise of divine reward, but in shared memory and moral mission. For Greenberg, the Jewish future is not about who believes what, but about who shows up, who carries the tradition forward, who binds themselves to the people and its destiny. Similarly, Heschel insisted that God is not an abstract concept but a presence encountered in time, in mitzvot, in the cry of the oppressed. God is not something to be proven, but something to be responded to.
And that, perhaps, is the answer. You don’t have to believe in a personal, intervening God to live a Jewish life of depth, discipline, and holiness. But you do have to respond. You have to take your place in the chain of generations. You have to add your verse to the song. You have to take Judaism seriously—not as a buffet of values, but as a sacred inheritance, demanding loyalty and creativity in equal measure.
Judaism can survive disbelief. What it cannot survive is apathy. It cannot survive endless deferral. It cannot survive when Jews turn their inheritance into a lifestyle accessory. A Jewishness that requires nothing will ultimately mean nothing.
So yes, you can be a good Jew without believing in God. You can doubt, you can question, you can wrestle like Jacob and still be called Israel. But only if you stay in the struggle. Only if you remain in the covenant—even if you’re not sure who wrote it. Because the most Jewish thing of all is not belief. It is belonging. It is showing up. It is saying, again and again, hineni—I am here.
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