Living Through the Crashes

I didn’t set out to have a theology.

When I was growing up, I believed that God flicked two atoms together to ignite the Big Bang, watched the universe assemble itself, and then settled back in a recliner with some popcorn to watch humanity like a chaotic reality show. That version of God was distant but ultimately harmless. It didn’t ask much of me. It didn’t comfort me either—but it also didn’t interfere with my life.

I didn’t feel the need to question it... until it stopped working.

That’s what I now call a theological crash.

A theological crash happens when the version of God you’ve been carrying no longer supports you. Something causes a break—a loss, a question, an injustice, an experience of exclusion—and your theology can’t absorb the impact.

In college, everything cracked open. I was battling anxiety and depression, struggling with identity and purpose. In the middle of that instability, I found steadiness in a Chabad community. I studied with the rebbetzin. I helped prepare for Shabbat. Their home became an anchor for me.

Then their three-month-old baby died suddenly from SIDS.

The grief was unbearable. But what stunned me was the rebbetzin’s continued faith. She told me she believed God only gives people challenges they are capable of surviving. Her theology held her upright in the worst moment of her life.

I wanted that kind of faith. I wanted to believe my pain wasn’t random. That it was purposeful. That God believed I could survive it.

So I adopted that theology. And for a while, it worked.

Framing my mental health struggles as divine tests gave my suffering structure. If this was a challenge from God, then I could survive it, and survival meant growth. The chaos felt intentional instead of arbitrary.

Until it didn’t.

As I explored more traditional Jewish practice (which came naturally with a more traditional belief in God), I ran headfirst into the limits of that framework. I was queer. I wanted to be a rabbi. I wanted to wrap tefillin and participate in all of what Judaism had to offer. When I was told that wasn’t “my role,” that God assigns different spiritual tasks to different genders, something inside me cracked again.

I couldn’t reconcile a loving, empowering God with a God who restricted my access to connection.

That was my second theological crash.

I thought belief in God required accepting an entire halachic system exactly as it had been handed to me. If I questioned one piece, I feared the whole structure would collapse. And for a while, it did.

For nearly three years, I had one foot in a traditional world and one foot in a progressive world, never really knowing where I belonged. I believed with my entire being in a God who knew me, cared for me, and wanted me to succeed, and yet I was worried that "success" would mean giving up everything I believed in otherwise. For nearly three years, I just sort of ignored the problem. I did my best.

But then, another crash, this time in rabbinical school. A classmate of mine pushed me: if God gives people only the challenges they can survive, what about those who don’t? What about children? What about genocide? What about the suffering that destroys rather than refines?

The theology that once comforted me began to feel insufficient. Even dangerous.

Crashes are painful. They destabilize you. They can feel like betrayal—by God, by community, by your former self.

But here is what I’ve learned: a theological crash is not the end of faith. It is the end of a particular version of faith.

About a year later, studying Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s interpretation of tzimtzum—the idea that God contracts to make room for human agency—I encountered a different possibility. A God who does not micromanage every detail. A God who partners rather than orchestrates. A God beside us, not above us.

That theology did not erase suffering. It did not answer every question, but it could hold the world as I actually experience it. It was a compromise in theology that didn't feel like I was giving up on anything, but rather embracing a reality that made sense to me.

We don’t talk enough about theological crashes. We talk about doubt as failure, as weakness, as rebellion. But crashes are often evidence of growth. They mean your lived experience has outgrown your inherited framework.

The alternative to crashing isn’t stability. It’s stagnation.

If your theology never fractures, it may be because you’re protecting it from reality.

Crashes hurt. They can be isolating. You may feel suspended between communities—too traditional for some, too progressive for others. You may feel like you’re constantly translating yourself.

But crashes also deepen you. They force you to ask harder questions. They strip away beliefs that cannot sustain you. They refine your image of God until it becomes something you can live with honestly.

I no longer fear theological crashes the way I once did. Now I see them as sacred disruption. And when (not if) I have another one, it will hurt just the same, and I will figure out my way through it.

There were seasons when the crashing felt like collapse. When I thought everything I believed was unraveling beyond repair. But looking back, I can see that what was falling apart was never strong enough to hold me in the first place.

Each crash stripped away something brittle. Each one forced me to ask better questions. Each one brought me closer to a God I could stand before honestly—without shrinking parts of myself.

My faith today is not what it was at eighteen, or twenty-one, or even five years ago. It has been broken and rebuilt more than once.

And I am grateful for every fracture that made it deeper.