It's an age old question:  how do we delineate reason and faith?  For some, the answer is clear:  we do not.  Faith has no place in today's world.  For others, the response is that, yes, we need reason to make sense of the world, but we cannot make full sense of it without faith.  We will inevitably encounter questions we cannot answer.
     Ah, the first group will reply, this doesn't mean that we must necessarily turn to God to fill in the gaps.
     Maybe not.  Yet in the life and work of Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz, a prominent Jewish teacher who died recently at the age of 91, we see that perhaps we have no other option if we wish to fully come to grips with who we are.
     Borowitz made his mark by insisting that we must balance reason with a commitment to the covenant if we hope to understand ourselves, the world, and God.  We know what reason is; what's the covenant?  It is the understanding of every Jew that she is in a unique relationship with God.  Out of all the peoples of the world, God is unreservedly loyal to the Jews and, in the best of all possible worlds, Jews are totally loyal to him.
     Without getting into a contentious debate about what this means for the geopolitics of the modern Middle East, we can nonetheless realize that the fact of a covenant affirms several critical dimensions of reason's limits.  If we insist that we must never exercise faith to understand our world, it seems that we are saying that, in our reason and in our reason alone, we can understand what we now cannot.  All it takes is further research and time.
     Maybe so.  But if we are totally honest with ourselves, we must admit that there are things that science will never tell us.  Foremost of these is the query:  why are we here? Why us?  What's the point?
     Perhaps we do not understand or accept all the ramifications of the covenant, but we can certainly comprehend that without admitting that we cannot possibly know it all--and why this is--we cannot assert that we can fully explain the life, here and there, we have now.
     As one of my Jewish rabbi friends has often told me, "Reason ponders the small questions after faith settles the larger ones.  Reason tells us how to get there after faith tells us where to go."
     Rest well, Rabbi Borowitz.