Why Do I Exist? The Courage to Live in Multiplicity

“The children struggled in her womb, and she said, ‘If so, why do I exist?’ And she went to inquire of the Eternal. And the Eternal said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, two peoples shall branch off from each other; one people shall be stronger than the other, and the elder shall serve the younger.’” (Genesis 25:22–23)

Rebecca’s question pierces through the text: “If so, why do I exist?” Her body becomes the site of divine contradiction. Two nations inhabit her, two futures wrestle within her belly. The Torah’s image is often read as a prophecy of inevitable conflict, yet it can also be read — as the feminist Jewish theologian Judith Plaskow teaches — as a revelation of multiplicity.

In her essay “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” Judith Plaskow writes that feminist theology “is rooted in the experience of a larger and richer way of being, which it seeks to express within and against the terms of tradition.” Throughout her work, Plaskow argues that revelation is not a fixed deposit but a continuing, communal work — one that grows by integrating previously silenced voices and holding creative tensions. Rebecca’s turmoil thus becomes not a curse, but a calling. Within her, competing truths coexist; she embodies a covenant that contains tension.

Seen through this lens, Rebecca’s pregnancy is a theological metaphor for Jewish existence in societies that demand singular allegiance. Her question: “If so, why do I exist?” is the cry of every community caught between faith and nation, tradition and modernity.

Nowhere did that struggle become more acute than in France, the cradle of Jewish emancipation and, later, of institutionalized conformity. When Napoleon convened the Grand Sanhedrin in 1807, he sought to integrate Jews as loyal French citizens while compelling them to redefine their faith within the logic of the state. The Sanhedrin’s task was to answer 12 questions proving that Judaism was compatible with the Code Napoléon: Would Jews marry non-Jews? Obey civil law over halachah? Serve in the army?

While not all of these questions were necessarily asked in good faith, the Jewish community willingly embraced Napoleon’s project aimed at reconciling two nations within one body: the French Republic and the Jewish people. However, integration came at the price of autonomy. Out of this effort emerged the consistory system, a centralized structure designed to control Jewish religious life under state oversight.

A century later, Rabbi Louis Germain Lévy (1866–1946), one of the founders of the Union Libérale Israélite de Paris (ULIP) in 1907, confronted that legacy. A respected scholar and rabbi of the Rue Copernic synagogue, Lévy sought to affirm both French identity and Jewish spiritual independence. He embraced the Republic’s universalism while resisting the Consistory’s monopoly. Like Rebecca’s twins, these two impulses struggled within the same body.

Lévy’s sermons and writings reveal his effort to interpret Judaism as a moral and rational faith compatible with French civic values but not something that could be condensed into them. He believed that Judaism’s vitality required freedom of thought and reform of ritual. The Union Libérale offered a home for Jews who felt French in spirit yet longed for a Judaism open to modernity, equality, and intellectual honesty. In this sense, Lévy enacted Plaskow’s vision of revelation as dialogue: tradition speaking anew in the language of its time.

But, as in Rebecca’s womb, the relationship between the nations remained tense. The Consistory accused the Liberal Jews of betrayal; the Liberal Jews accused the Consistory of stagnation. Both claimed to carry the true inheritance. In France, as in Genesis, the question was not only who would rule but how both could coexist without annihilating the other.

Plaskow’s theology invites us to read this not as a tragedy of division, but as a sign of life. A faith that can hold opposing truths is a faith that is still alive. The French Jewish story, like Rebecca’s, is not the triumph of one over the other; instead, it speaks of both civic and covenantal duties enduring within one identity.

Today, Liberal French Jewish communities, organised under Judaïsme En Mouvement and La Fédération du Judaïsme Libéral, stand as a bridge between tradition and modernity, Jewish distinctiveness and universal ethics. Their commitment to gender equality, interfaith dialogue, and republican values reflects an identity that refuses singularity.

The story of Tol’dot invites us to ask what we do with the tensions that live within us. Do we see them as threats to unity, or as signs of a living covenant? In Rebecca’s struggle and France’s negotiation between faith and citizenship, we glimpse that contradiction is not a flaw; it’s a condition of vitality.

To live as Liberal Jews is to embrace this complexity — to know that faith, identity, and belonging will always pull in more than one direction. Our task is not to resolve these tensions but to inhabit them with integrity. Like Rebecca and the pioneers of French Liberal Judaism, we affirm that divine blessing is found in the courage to live truthfully within multiplicity.