I Have no faith. But I Have a TIcket.

“Our rabbis taught: When Adam, on the day of his creation, saw the setting of the sun, he said, ‘Alas, it is because I have sinned that the world around me is becoming dark; the universe will now become again void and without form — this then is the death to which I have been sentenced from Heaven!’ So he sat up all night fasting and weeping and Eve was weeping opposite him. When, however, dawn broke, he said: ‘This is the way of the world!’ He then arose and offered up a bullock . . . ” —Avodah Zarah 8a

Back in my working days, when dusk came and the world outside my window became a silhouette, and I knew that it was time to stop being safely absorbed in my work and to join the what-shall-we-do here-and-now, I usually had to pass through a zone of dread. I may have drowned out the feeling with news on the radio, or sidled away from it with a glass of wine — but there was still a tug at my guts when I stopped working, stopped earning my right to exist, stopped worming my way into other people’s consciousness as a writer. It was as though I was uncertain that it’s okay for me simply to be; as though I needed permission to take the next breath; as though the sun were setting because of something I had neglected to do.

I suppose that had I said brokhe, a blessing, at each sunset, each moment of transition, each threshold of pleasure, it might have helped quell the anxiety. But it was not my way. Instead, I asked my wife, maybe ten birthdays ago, to try to get me a “take-a-ticket” machine, the kind they used to have at appetizing counters: You take a ticket, you know your turn will come, and you can enjoy standing in line. She couldn’t find one, though she tried, so the lovely woman instead manufactured one herself, a cardboard box with a slit for the tickets. It didn’t have the neat spring action of the old machines, but it dispensed tickets, and it said “Permission Granted” on its side. I kept my Permission Box near our front door, and I would get myself a ticket if I was actually going to take a whole afternoon or even a whole day off from work. Having the ticket in my wallet pacified me, and gave me faith that I was entitled to do what I was about to do. Just thinking about taking a ticket was usually sufficient. It was like saying a brokhe, and it was a lot easier than sacrificing a bullock.

To this day, happily retired, I still have no faith — yet I have many, many blessings. I am very healthy and don’t even yet suspect what my mortal disease will someday be. I live with a woman who is cheerful and smart and graceful, truly a wonderful soul. I live in the green countryside, with birds that come to my window and creatures that cross my lawn. I made a living doing what I liked, work that was creative and constructive and hurt no one. I have everything I need — without having too much. One would think, after experiencing so many sunrises, that I’d know by now that sunset is not a scary thing.

Why am I faithless? Partly the condition seems genetic: My mother was a nervous wreck, her mother was a farbrenter (on fire) leftist — that is, a nervous wreck with someone to blame for it — and my father liked to punish life for its disappointments by staying aloof from it all, usually with a book in front of his face.

There’s nurture as well as nature at work: My folks were often fiercely at war with each other, and there was keen uncertainty in the household about parental moods . . .

Partly it’s simple vanity: as though the whole world were watching, as though my actions and choices were really, really crucial. Is it a Jewish thing, too, this existential anxiety? Surely we’ve been trained and bred in the ways of fear, becoming “a people who can’t sleep themselves, and won’t let anybody else sleep,” as Isaac Bashevis Singer described us. It’s altogether ironic, then — and the joke is on me — that I mostly reject the tools that Judaism itself offers for processing anxiety and finding emunah, faith: those brokhes, those many daily rituals, those prayers, those Sabbath injunctions against work . . . Instead, I take my ticket.