The Dignity of Difference by the British Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, was one of the first works of serious theology that I ever read, possibly the very first one. It has had a tremendous impact on my thinking over the past few years, and I was a little apprehensive about revisiting it after my own thinking has developed, in case the arguments seemed less convincing.
I am not going to summarise a complex argument in detail here (there is a useful review article here (pdf format), which also deals with the controversy surrounding the book, but really the book is worth reading for itself – it is quite short and very readable). The book essentially lays out a series of moral dilemmas facing the twenty-first century world and explores how religion can either make them better or worse. Chief Rabbi Sacks states that ethical dilemmas require responses from systems that not only examine moral questions, but provide the social structure for the implementation of moral outcomes i.e. religions (although he does acknowledge that secular humanists share many of these goals). He lays out a Jewish case for greater social responsibility; for the free market as a stimulus to wealth creation; for tzedaka, wealth redistribution within the developed world and between the developed and developing world to counteract the flaws inherent in the free market; for universal education; for an end to social atomisation and the development of trust at a societal level; for greater care of the environment; and for forgiveness and conciliation in conflict zones.
This all a bit disconnected. However, taken as a series of individual essays on contemporary ethical problems facing mankind, this is very good and rather disturbing (in all the right ways). Highlights include the two ‘essays’ on the benefits and problems of the free market and the ‘essay’ laying out a Jewish approach to environmental sustainability, which Chief Rabbi Sacks argues is more nuanced than is often presented. The idea we own the world is not found within the Jewish tradition at all (he ascribes it to the importation of ideas from the world of classical Greece to the Christian interpretation of the Bible). Instead, the Jewish ethic is one of conservation and responsibility for pragmatic reasons (there is no one else to clear up our mess), ethical reasons (nature has its own integrity beyond whatever use we have for it) and theological reasons (the universe is God’s; we are only tenants).
There is a strange lack of Jewish sources in parts of the book, disguised to some extent by Chief Rabbi Sacks’ sheer erudition and the number of classic and contemporary philosophers, economists, political theorists, sociologists and games theorists that he quotes. However, other chapters are very Jewish. The book feels slightly awkward as a result, as if unsure whether it is intended for a Jewish or a non-Jewish audience. I suspect it was primarily intended for the latter, which is why the Charedi world objected to it.
The objections focused on the best chapter in the book, The Dignity of Difference: Exocising Plato’s Ghost. This is a plea for religious tolerance and acceptance and an attack on the Platonic philosophical idea of universal, ideal truths, arguing for the acceptance of multiple perspectives instead. “Truth in heaven may be platonic – eternal, harmonious, radiant. But man cannot aspire to such truth, and if he does, he will create conflict not peace… Truth in heaven transcends space and time, but human perception is bounded by space and time. When two propositions conflict it is not necessarily because one is true and one is false. It may be, and often is, that each represents a different perspective on reality, an alternative way of structuring order, no more and no less commensurable than a Shakespeare sonnet, a Michelangelo painting or a Schubert sonata.” (P.64, revised edition).
Despite what the Charedi world said, this is not an argument in favour of polytheism. Chief Rabbi Sacks’ previous book, Radical Then, Radical Now (US title A Letter in the Scroll) laid out his personal theology, his answer to the question of why an intelligent, sensitive, thinking person in the postmodern era would want to be an Orthodox Jew. This is the Dvarim (Deuteronomy) to that book’s Vayikra (Leviticus): taking the theology as a given, how do we implement it in the complex social world, where the absolutes of pure theology can be dangerous. Just as some bible critics see Dvarim and Vayikra as the products of two different religious traditions, so too some people are unable harmonise Chief Rabbi Sacks’ complex set of arguments in these two books. But there is really no conflict.
My reading is that the ‘truth’ of multiple religions being spoken of here is not that all the theological propositions of all religions are equally true (which is inherently illogical; some religious truths are mutually exclusive). It is that multiple ethical and ontological truths about the human condition can be true, as can elements of the different theological understandings of the nature of God. If “none of us knows all the truth and each of us knows some of it” (p.65, revised edition), then it is easy to draw a distinction between, say, a belief in multiple deities and the ethical teachings springing from that understanding.
Part of the problem is that the Chief Rabbi is an Oxbridge academic who fell into the rabbinate almost by chance (this is one of the reasons I like his writing so much), and this is why he has been the centre of so many controversies. He thinks, speaks and writes like a philosopher, but people without the patience, intelligence, training or inclination to follow him misinterpret what he says (the Archbishop of Canterbury recently had a similar problem). The relevant chapter is phrased in philosophical terms, a logical argument, rather than a sustained textual analysis. This is the reverse of the usual case in Orthodox, especially Charedi, circles. Chief Rabbi Sacks uses one Midrash and a quotation from Malakhi to support his case, but there are many more sources he could have used, had he desired (see the second part of this essay for several ancient and medieval Jewish sources asserting that non-Jews are not required to be monotheists, and suggesting that non-Jewish religions may be Divinely inspired). The issue is probably that Chief Rabbi Sacks did not see book as intended for just an Orthodox Jewish audience, and certainly not for a Charedi one (in the latter respect he would have been quite correct even if he had not been deemed heretical). He is clearly aware of some of the traditional sources that support his views, as he put them on his official website after the controversy broke and he was forced to amend certain passages (details of changes here).
Said Wittgenstein, “What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”
But what if the fly-bottle is a Klein bottle? Then there is no ‘outside’ and ‘inside.’ We can either believe we have escaped by remaining in ignorance of the true nature of our reality, or we can understand our surroundings and realize that there can be no escape.
Much has been written and said about the nature of religion, and a lot of it, especially in on-line debates between believers and sceptics, seems to miss the point. In my experience, both believers and sceptics alike try to argue from the positivist philosophical tradition, seeing only the empirically testable as valid. Occasionally, diversions are made to rationalism, which looks to the logically-sound deduction. I think this misses the point. Instead, we should look to – and beyond – postmodernism.
Postmodern theory argues that we never approach the world in an unmediated state. From a young age, we perceive the world in the form of language, itself a unit of culture (there is, I believe, some evidence that human beings actually think in language). There is no inherent link between a word and the object or concept it represents, so in a sense we never grasp reality directly, even when dealing with finite objects. When we move on to more complex concepts, like ‘God,’ ‘the nation-state’ or ‘love,’ we become even more culturally-conditioned.
Postmodernists use the term ‘meta-narratives’ to describe the totalizing ‘stories’ that cultures tell themselves to explain the world around them, whether religious (e.g. Christianity narrative of salvation), political (e.g. the Marxist narrative of progress to socialist utopia) or more loosely philosophical (e.g. the Freudian narrative of the sexual urge being the basis of much of human life). Postmodernists use the term ‘discourses’ to describe the jargon used by particular disciplines to describe – and delimit – their subject matter. For example, philosophy, law, medicine and science are all seen as having discourses; scientific papers are written in scientific language, and legal documents use formal, technical language.
I reject the extreme postmodernist view that our perception of all reality is coloured by our cultural conditioning to the extent that objectivity is impossible. The scientific method has proved excellent at exploring the natural world, and we can even achieve a degree of objectivity, albeit to a lesser extent, when examining the human world (e.g. in history and the social sciences). However, when it comes to living in the human world instead of merely examining it, I believe do rely on our meta-narratives, more so than many people realize.
It seems obvious to me that Judaism is closer to a meta-narrative than an empirically testable theological system. It was only with the utmost reluctance that Jewish dogmas were ever formulated (it was done primarily in response to Medieval Christian and Muslim jibes that Jews were atheistic), and Judaism remains centred on action, not believe. In this respect, it is cultural, a way of life based around a narrative (quite literally: the narrative of the Torah), not a religion based around dogma. You can not prove or disprove a way of life, all you can do is live it or not live it.
The analogy can be extended to other religions, including, perhaps, those which are more rigidly dogmatic. After all, every belief system, religious or secular, ultimately encourages certain actions, even if only implicitly, through creating a cultural outlook. This applies to atheist and agnostic philosophies too. An intelligent, thinking person whose discourse centres around Hume and Darwin is likely to act differently to one whose discourse centres around Marx and Trotsky. This may help explain why certain atheist or quasi-atheist philosophies (e.g. Marxism, Fascism, Nazism) induce something like religious zeal in their adherents.
In my first paragraph, I spoke of moving beyond postmodernism. Postmodernists are sceptical of meta-narratives, which they see as inherently totalizing, often leading to attempts to force one narrative on all people. They prefer ‘local narratives.’ Postmodernists can also be a little sceptical of discourses, which they see as exclusive, although they try to promote minority voices (this is seen a lot in postmodern art). I would argue that this misses the point a little. While meta-narratives, by definition, present a whole world-view to a person, I do not think that all meta-narratives are inherently totalizing in the dangerous sense of promoting conflict between people who use different meta-narratives.
For example, both Judaism and Sikhism are monotheist meta-narratives, but they do not conflict, because they are particularistic monotheisms. Each meta-narrative describes God’s relationship to that particular people, not to anyone else; outsiders are left free to write their own meta-narratives. I call these parallel narratives: they do not converge in conflict. This fits to some extent with the postmodern desire for local narratives.
More importantly, narratives can overlap. My personal identity is based on a mixture of Jewish, British and European narratives; it would be different if I were an American Jew, or a Christian Briton. Judaism and Britishness are convergent narratives: they do not conflict and can be combined.
I suppose I should clarify the subtext of my last post: there wasn’t one. It was just some thoughts that came to me late at night when I should have been getting ready for bed.
If you really want to root one out, I suppose it is this: Judaism as I understand it is a lot less like a ‘religion’ (as the term is commonly used) and a lot more like a utopian political ideology. This explains why I often feel a greater sense of kinship with the Levellers, the ‘moral force’ Chartists, the Manchester School, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Theodore Herzl, Robert Owen and Oscar Wilde (I’m thinking of The Soul of Man Under Socialism, not his better-known work), as well as the politically-subversive prophets of ancient Israel than I do with most contemporary Jews (Orthodox or Progressive), Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, New Agers, pagans, apolitical atheists and so on.
That is all there is to it. The fact that I lumped ‘mystical Judaism’ (which is most of contemporary Judaism, as anyone who actually knows anything about Judaism should realize) in with eschatological Christianity, Eastern mysticism and paganism should have been a clue that I wasn’t trying to set up a ‘Jews good/everyone else bad’ dichotomy, but apparently that wasn’t clear enough.
WARNING: this is probably offensive to everyone. I would probably have been offended myself if I had not written it.
I have previously distinguished between systems of meaning and systems of purpose.
Systems of meaning try to explain both the world and suffering.
Systems of purpose try to change the world to end suffering.
Systems of meaning tend to be associated with religious/mystical movements.
Systems of purpose tend to be associated with political movements.
Probably no single ideology is just a system of meaning or just a system of purpose. However, as a rule, the more mystical an ideology is, the more it tends towards being a system of meaning.
The more practical an ideology is, the more it tends towards being a system of purpose.
We can not say that an ideology of either system is automatically good or evil. For example, Nazism is a system of disgusting meaning and evil purpose.
Systems of meaning are popular at times of extreme suffering and confusion (personal and societal), because they promise to explain the world and give transcendent peace, and perhaps to control the (super)natural forces in the world by mystical means.
Systems of purpose are also popular at times of extreme suffering and confusion, because they promise to change the world and give societal peace.
Although I have characterised Judaism as a system of purpose, historically it seems to drift towards mysticism in the wake of national tragedies that seemed to demonstrate the impotence of the individual and even of the Jewish collective. However, this point requires more research.
Currently, systems of purpose are largely unpopular, at least in the western world. This is largely attributable to the disasters of Nazism, Fascism and Marxism (systems of purpose on a grand scale); to numerous scandals and problems in the liberal democracies over the last few decades, especially Vietnam and Watergate, as well as the economic and social disasters of the sixties, seventies and eighties; to the growing awareness of the power of big business, its influence over governments and the social and environmental cost of its activities; and to the tendency of politicians to converge on the centre and propose managerial, rather than utopian, methods of government. All these make utopian dreams seem unrealisable: at best impractical, at worst a method of changing one ruling elite for another.
The result in the western world is an explosion of systems of meaning that make little attempt to change the world: New Age and pagan religions; eschatological Christianity; mystical Judaism (both within Judaism and the sinister and cult-like Kabbalah Centre); Eastern religions; astrology; miscellaneous esoteric traditions; Scientology; UFO beliefs; beliefs in the paranormal; beliefs in the power of crystals, pyramids etc.; conspiracy theories of all kinds; alternative medicine (which is anti-scientific, prioritising supposedly-ancient wisdom ahead of science and pharmacological big business due to disenchantment with them). One might add a militant atheism that is vociferously anti-theist while not proposing an alternative approach to life (unlike Jacobinism and Marxism, which attacked traditional religion to promote an alternative ‘rational’ society). There is also a pick ‘n’ mix syncretism that allows the blending of elements of any or all of the above.
Militant Islam is perplexing. It is tempting to exclude it from analysis as being non-Western, but that is not accurate, as events over the past few years have shown. Any ideology that proposes global conquest is a system of purpose, yet any system that promises adherents reward only in the next life (suicide bombing means the usual ‘build a land fit for heroes’ wartime propaganda is worthless) is a system of meaning. I said that no ideology is entirely one or the other, but this is especially complicated.
In a democratic, capitalist age, it is difficult to influence the masses unless they already want to be influenced. If they want bland, managerial politicians, only bland, managerial politicians will get elected. If they want mystical religion instead of religion that seeks to change the world by promoting moral reform, they will abandon those religions that remain socially-orientated, or will flock to those clergy within that religion who provide what they want. It is difficult to know what ideological politicians or socially-aware, rationalist clergy can do to change this state of affairs. Possibly nothing, except to wait for the next ‘cycle,’ as these things change regularly.
For some time, I have been looking for a reliable source for this quotation, apparently by Wittgenstein, but not in any of my dictionaries of quotations:
“Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.”
Having searched around the internet a little, I still can’t find a reliable source, although I did find some apocryphal ones. I did, however, also find this apocryphal quote, again attributed to Wittgenstein:
“Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humour was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.”
This amused me because, in a lapse of egotism, it reminds me of something I wrote myself a couple of years ago, in a review of Doctor Who’s seventeenth season, for the Doctor Who Ratings Guide:
“In fact, this comedy can be seen to embody the whole philosophy of the season. Comedy is not simply about being silly. Rather, it is a reaction to the unexpected, so that comedy by its very nature encourages us to look at the world from a different perspective and this is one of the main themes of the season. Destiny of the Daleks' emphasis on the importance of illogical actions establishes the key theme of season: imagination and irrationality, the ability to think about things from an unexpected angle, are essential because nothing is what it seems.
…
Despite the belief of many fans that jokes automatically render the show "silly" and "childish", this humour in fact expresses the freethinking, imaginative values behind these stories and prevents them becoming portentous and generic sci-fi.”
It has to be said, I was probably influenced there by George Orwell, especially his essay on Edward Lear.
Wittgenstein is probably am author I should investigate when I am feeling better. At any rate, Chief Rabbi Sacks (the biggest influence on my current thinking) says he is his favourite philosopher, and even given my limited knowledge of Wittgenstein, I can see how he influenced the Chief Rabbi’s thought:
“The essential message of the Hebrew Bible is that universality – the covenant with Noah – is only the context of and prelude to the irreducible multiplicity of cultures, those systems of meaning by which human beings have sought to understand their relationship to one another, the world and the source of being. Plato’s assertion of the universality of truth is valid when applied to science and the description of what is. It is invalid when applied to ethics, spirituality and our sense of what ought to be. There is a difference between physis and nomos, description and prescription, nature and culture. Cultures are like languages. The world they describe is the same but the ways they do so are almost infinitely varied. English is not French. Italian is not German. Urdu is not Ugaritic. Each language is the product of a specific community and its history, its shared experiences and sensibilities. There is no universal language. There is no way we can speak, communicate or even think without placing ourselves within the constraints of a particular language whose contours were shaped by hundreds of generations of speakers, storytellers, artists and visionaries who came before us, whose legacy we inherit and of whose story we become a part. Within any language we can say something new. No language is fixed, unalterable, complete. What we cannot do is place ourselves outside the particularities of language to arrive at a truth, a way of understanding and responding to the world that applies to everyone at all times. That is not the essence of humanity but an attempt to escape from humanity.
So too in the case of religion. The radical transcendence of God in the Hebrew Bible means that the Infinite lies beyond our finite understanding. God communicates in human language, but there are dimensions of the divine that must forever elude us. As Jews we believe that God has made a singular covenant with a singular people, but that does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures, and faiths finding their own relationship with God within the shared frame of the Noahide laws. These laws constitute, as it were, the depth grammar of the human experience of the divine: of what it is to see the world as God’s work, and humanity as God’s image. God is the God of all humanity, but between Babel and the end of days no single faith is the faith of all humanity [italics in original]. Such a narrative would lead us to respect the search for God in people of other faiths and reconcile the particularity of cultures with the universality of the human condition.” (The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks, pp. 54-55)
Here, although the theological ideas can be found in ancient Jewish sources, the way the point is argued, especially the comparison throughout of culture and religion with language, and the emphasis on the way we think in language, is very much a product of familiarity with twentieth century philosophy of language, on which Wittgenstein exerted a huge influence.
This was supposed to be a quick, fun post of one of my favourite apocryphal quotes to cheer me up before getting an early night. It is now gone 3.15am…
One of the reasons that I have never done any formal yeshiva study is that the detailed examination of the laws and legal arguments through logical, legalistic reasoning does not sit well with me. I realise that it has a particular purpose which it fulfils, but it is not a method that I find stimulating, meaningful or helpful. My primary interest is in the philosophical side of Judaism. I do not believe this is separate from the halakhic side; on the contrary, I see them as intertwined. However, I can only get to grips with a halakhic argument, really understand what is being said and why and therefore remember the points being made instead of rote-learning them, by examining the philosophical issues underlying it.
However, this is not the favoured method of study generally, which seeks to clarify the laws in the hope that this will lead on to understanding of the philosophical issues. Perhaps for most people (who, I realise, tend not to be interested in philosophical matters) this is the best approach. I certainly believe that on one level the mitzvot are intended to teach certain basic philosophical points (about ethics, theology, even epistemology and ontology) almost subliminally to a large population, and perhaps this ‘unconscious philosophy’ works well for the majority. I tend to find it dry, and so recently, inspired by Chief Rabbi Sacks, who frequently adopts this method in his divrei Torah, when I have come to a mitzvah or a halakha that I do not understand, I try to deduce the underlying philosophical issues at stake.
At this point, it is worth clarifying a point of etymology and one of history. In biblical Hebrew, belief is not a cognitive or emotional matter. That is to say, one can not believe something in the abstract. One can only act as if something is true, attempt to make an ideal come true through speech and especially action. This means that the link between the mitzvot and Jewish philosophy is very logical: the mitzvot are how we translate abstract concepts (justice, human dignity, equity) into action, moving them from the conceptual realm to the physical world.
As a result, it took a long time before any core set of Jewish beliefs was written. It was only in the late Middle Ages, as a result of antisemitic allegations that Jews had no real dogma and hence were crypto-atheist libertines, that various rabbis attempted to codify a set of basic Jewish beliefs, the most famous being Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. Here too the emphasis was on those beliefs that affect action. Believing in an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God who demands moral behaviour affects our actions in a tangible way; belief in demons (always a controversial idea among Jewish thinkers) does not, and so can not be considered an important belief one way or the other.
I have used this approach to understand a Mishna that has always perplexed me:
Rabbi Elazar of Modin said: one who desecrates sacred things, despises the festivals, shames his fellow in public, nullifies the covenant of our father Avraham [i.e. tries to surgically remove the mark of circumcision] or attributes meanings to the Torah contrary to the normative law, even if he has Torah knowledge and good deeds to his credit, he has no share in the world to come. (Pirkei Avot 3.15)
At first glance, this is confusing. The mitzvot chosen appear to be a random selection. None of the obviously serious aveirot are here (murder, the most serious types of sexual immorality, avodah zara, breaking Shabbat, theft), neither do the five seem to have much in common with each other. Moreover, not all of them are punishable by the courts. My suggestion is that they represent the negation of five fundamental Jewish beliefs (remember that Judaism is not interested in abstract beliefs or disbeliefs, only in their translation into practice). Rabbi Elazar is in effect saying that anyone who does not hold all five of these beliefs and put translate them into action is not practicing Judaism, regardless of how much Torah he knows or how many other mitzvot he performs.
Desecrating the Sacred: the Holiness of the Physical
By setting aside an object for a sacred purpose, one makes a statement about the nature of the physical world and our role in it. To sanctify something is to set it aside for a holy task, to give it a different purpose to that which it had previously. It represents man’s ability to take the entirety of the physical world and make it holy by using it for a holy purpose, by using it ethically and within the boundaries of the halakha. Moreover, it represents man’s ability to take himself – another part of the physical world, after all – and dedicate himself to a life of holiness and morality.
By desecrating a sacred object, one makes the reverse statement: that the physical remains physical and can never be used for a holy, moral purpose. By extension, mankind can never rise above the impulsive, instinctive, animalistic elements of human nature to an ethical form of existence. This attitude is inherently incompatible with Judaism, which sees the elevation of the physical world into a world of holiness and morality as its ultimate goal, which has mitzvot to bring holiness into the most mundane or instinctive actions (eating, drinking, sexual intercourse etc.), and which sees the entire Jewish people as holy – that is separated from other people to live a superlatively ethical lifestyle: “You shall be holy for Me, for I Hashem am holy, and I have separated you from the peoples to be Mine.” (Vayikra/Lev. 20.26)
Despising the Festivals: the Divine in the Physical
If desecrating sacred objects is an attempt to deny that the physical can be made holy, then despising the festivals is the denial of God’s involvement in the world. I would suggest that this is why the festivals are mentioned, not Shabbat. Shabbat testifies primarily to God’s creation of the world, not to his supervision and control of it (although the latter is mentioned with relation to it). The festivals are about God’s involvement in the world, whether through the natural processes of the agricultural year (Pesach, Shavuot and Succot), through history (all of them, to a greater or lesser extent) and through His personal supervision of every nation and every individual (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur).
Despising the festivals therefore shows either a lack of belief in a God who cares about humanity as a whole and about each individual, who controls nature and who intervenes in history or a dislike of this idea, a desire to live in a universe without Divine supervision, where there is no ultimate moral law. This runs in complete opposition to the idea of the Jewish people as living testimony to God’s involvement in the world’s affairs: “And now, thus says Hashem your Creator, O Yaakov; the One Who fashioned you, O Yisrael: Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called [you] by name; you are Mine. When you pass through water, I am with you; through rivers, they will not wash you away; when you walk through fire you will not be singed, and no flame will burn you… Fear not, for I am with you; from the east I will bring your offspring and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north ‘Give over!’ and to the South ‘Do not withhold! Bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the ends of the Earth…’ You are My witnesses – the word of Hashem – and My servant whom I have chosen, so that you will know and believe in Me, and understand that I am He; before Me nothing was created by a god and nor will there be after me. I, only I, am Hashem, and there is no deliverer aside from Me… You are my witnesses – the word of Hashem – and I am God.” (Isaiah 43.1-12)
Shaming One’s Fellow: the Equal Dignity of Mankind
The Mishna now moves from the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, between mankind and God, to the social sphere. Shaming one’s fellow is a very serious offence in Judaism. The rabbis saw no moral distinction between murder, the literal ending of a life, and character assassination, the destruction of all that is worthwhile about a life: friends, respect, dignity. Obviously the two were not treated the same legally, and that may be why the lesser offence is singled out here, not the greater one.
Few people in any society would go so far as to kill a fellow human being in cold blood. Even aside from moral scruples, the risk of consequences, whether legal or the blood-feud, would be too great. Yet to destroy a person’s reputation, or even to humiliate him or her momentarily, is often considered insignificant. It can be rationalised in many ways, both to avoid punishment and to calm one’s conscience: “I didn’t know he was so sensitive,” “she needs to get a sense of humour,” “I was just joking around,” “sticks and stones…” However, when the tables are turned and we are subject to humiliation, we rarely make the same calculations to justify those who hurt us.
A person who hurts others, whether physically or emotionally, is fundamentally guilty of failing to see his fellow as equally human, as another person with his or her own emotional needs and psychological desire to be treated with respect. This belief in the superiority of some people (even just the self) over others is contrary to a fundamental Jewish belief: that all mankind are of equal worth: “For this reason, man [i.e. the first human being] was created alone to teach that whoever destroys a single life is as though he had destroyed an entire universe, and whoever saves a single life is as if he had saved an entire universe.” (Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4: 5). This was seen by the rabbis as the basis of Judaism: Rabbi Akiva saw the commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself” as the fundamental principle of the Torah, while Hillel summarised the Torah as “that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary: go and learn it.” (Shabbat 31a)
Nullifying the Covenant: Mutual Responsibility
The individual has an inherent dignity, a particular set of rights. Yet no one exists in the abstract. While people have legitimate demands they can make of society, at the same time, society makes legitimate demands of them. The key word is ‘reciprocity’. The nature of a covenant is a set of reciprocal obligations between both participants. The particular covenant of the Jewish people connects each individual not just to God, but to every other member of the covenant, across time and space. Together, they pursue a shared vision of society. This is symbolised by circumcision of the male reproductive organ, linking it to the eternal, cross-generational aspect of the covenant. “God said to Avraham: ‘And as for you, you shall safeguard My covenant; you and your offspring after you through their generations. This is my covenant which you shall keep between Me and you and your offspring after you: circumcise every male among you.’” (Bereshit/Gen. 17.9-10)
To attempt to nullify the covenant is to attempt to remove oneself from the Jewish people completely. It is to indicate that one has no interest in the sense of common history and purpose that joins Jews together to try to build a just and equitable society built on halakhic lines. Such a person is in effect stating an intention to forego the benefits of a covenantal relationship with God and with the Jewish people in order to avoid any obligations towards anyone other than himself.
Contradicting the Halakha: Shared Purpose
If all Jews have a set of responsibilities to each other and to God, the obvious question is, “where are these found?” The answer is found in the final one of Rabbi Elazar’s statements: in the Torah – and not just in the Torah, but in the entire halakhic interpretive tradition. This tradition allows for logical debate using certain known interpretive principles. To attempt to promote a different set of rules is to attempt to turn Judaism into something completely new. Furthermore, it is to deny both that God has communicated His ideals and commandments to the Jewish people via the Torah and that the sages have been able to correctly determine the meaning of such commandments, which would go some way to denying the earlier principles that God is involved with humanity and that mankind can successfully engage in holy pursuits. For the Torah and the halakhic process is the very lifeblood of Judaism, the blueprint for our society, our sense of identity (that which makes us different), our sense of history and our purpose wrapped up together: “See, I have taught you decrees and laws as Hashem my God has commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. Observe them carefully, for this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ What other nation is so great as to have their God near to them the way Hashem our God is near to us whenever we pray to Him? And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this entire Torah I am setting before you today?” (Devarim/Deut. 4.5-8)
To summarise: I believe Rabbi Elazar is reducing Judaism to five key points, namely:
1) the physical world can and should be made holy through ethical, halakhic living;
2) God is involved in human affairs;
3) every person is of equal worth and has an inherent dignity;
4) the Jewish people are bound by an unbreakable covenant to each other and to God;
5) the terms of this covenant and the obligations it places on both parties are found in the Torah as elucidated via the rabbinic interpretative process.
Anything that does not meet all five of these points can not, therefore, be considered Judaism, and any Jew attempting to live a life of active, considered denial of these points is deliberately removing himself from the Jewish people and the Jewish way of life, hence he has no share in the world to come because he has completely cut himself off from his spiritual purpose. It recently occurred to me that many of my complaints against diverse aspects of modern society (politics, journalism, culture and life in general) might have a common root cause. This is not intended as a definitive statement on the subject, but a hypothesis, a work-in-progress, a prompt for greater discussion. If it’s wrong, then at least it indicates some of my neuroses.
It seems to me that there has been an important change in the attitudes underpinning life in the last half-century or so. Previously, society and individuals based their lives on a moral foundation. This was not necessarily a religious foundation. In many cases it was (although it would not necessarily have conformed to any particular doctrine), but it could be based on a rationalist philosophy or a code of honour, a clear sense of what was and was not done within a particular community. Certain things were just ‘not done,’ while others were effectively obligatory.
Over the past few decades, there seems to have been a shift strongly away from this. This is probably the result of the decreased respect for not just religion, but for all traditional societal structures and conventions, combined with both increased economic individualism and social atomisation resulting from post-industrial lifestyles: the world of the flexible marketplace (with jobs in different locations and even different industries every few years), the tele-commuter, the internet and multi-station television, which break up existing social groups (local communities, work colleagues, clubs for leisure). The new basis for action is not moral, but emotional and self-centred. It places emotional integrity, being true to oneself, as the primary goal, leading on to personal fulfilment. This is not necessarily immoral, just as the old moral codes did not necessarily exclude personal fulfilment, but I’m talking about general trends here; obviously it is not the case that originally everyone followed some moral code and now everyone only pursues their selfish interest.
In politics, this has led to the triumph of personalities, emotional conviction and gesture politics over intellectual debate about the issues. Where once politicians tried to prove themselves able administrators, now they seek to show that they are just like the voters. They are ‘ordinary guys’ in touch with their emotions. They feel our pain. We can count on them to do what we would do, to act in our interests, because they are just like us; if they act in accordance with their emotions, they do what we would do.
Actually, this type of politician has not quite triumphed, but they are almost certainly in the majority. Kennedy and Reagan were perhaps the earliest appearances of the emotional politician; Clinton, Blair, Bush Jnr. and Cameron represent the perfection of the form. After the American presidential election of 2000, it is increasingly hard to imagine an intelligent, experienced statesman triumphing over a foe who is his inferior in every way except that he has the ‘common touch’; it is no wonder Gordon Brown is frantically trying to turn himself into an emotional politician and ordinary man. Comparing David ‘Dave’ Cameron with Anthony ‘Tony’ Blair before he became Prime Minister (perhaps even up until September 11) is like reading the end of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
This political system encourages emotional sincerity over moral integrity or intellectual achievement. In the early days of his government, Tony Blair was always turning up on our TV screens emoting over something. Sad, even tragic events, such as the death of Princess Diana, are now hijacked by politicians who feel the need to say something, however trite. They may even be right, because it seems large sections of the public do want them to say something. The new system allowed President Clinton to lie to the nation and get away with it, because he managed to look sincere (as George Burns put it in a slightly different context, if you can fake sincerity, you’re made). It allowed the Deputy Prime Minister to get away with committing an act of assault in the middle of a general election campaign, because it was brushed off with the line “John is John.” How can you blame a man for being true to his nature?
It is not only in the political world that this shift has taken place, but across society. A culture’s values are clearly preserved in its art. Books, films and television programmes show the shift in values. Once, fiction posed moral questions. Now, it primarily asks if the protagonists can achieve personal emotional fulfilment. Once, a tale of ‘forbidden love’ made the protagonists question everything they held dear and whatever choice they made, there would be long-term consequences for them. Now, it is obvious that if the star-crossed lovers end up together, everything will be fine; if not, nothing will be.
The difference between these two types of fiction is quite profound. It is not that the old style did not investigate the emotions. That is quite absurd. Rather, it probed them, pushed them to the extreme, placed them under pressure to see what happened. As the desire for emotional fulfilment came into conflict with the wider values of society, priorities were tested. Whatever the outcome, the viewer or reader gained a greater understanding of the nature of humanity and of emotional conflict.
For example, Julius Caesar makes us question the nature of treason, whether love for the state outweighs love of one’s friends. This play could not be written today, for it is based on the idea that morality is complicated, that an ethical decision involves weighing factors both logically and emotionally and that sometimes there is no right answer. The modern view is that following your heart is always right, unless you are Evil, except, perhaps, if you are actually being oppressed by someone else who is Evil. A version of Julius Caesar based on the modern outlook could make Caesar a villain and Brutus a hero, driven by his love of the Republic, or it could make Caesar a hero and Brutus a villain, misled or coerced by others or driven by his own ambition, but it could not produce the complicated characters of the play, not clearly heroes nor villains.
What the new philosophy of life has produced in great abundance is stories which do not widen the audience’s view of the world, but instead provoke an instant empathic reaction, based on a similarity with the viewer’s own experiences or fantasies. This is perhaps epitomised by the ‘Rom Com’ genre, often tales of lovers separated by nothing except their lack of personal emotional awareness. There is a momentary burst of emotion, but it is empty, not based on anything lasting, no insight into the human condition, nothing the viewer can take away to deepen his or her understanding of life. In short, it is a kind of emotional pornography. This, incidentally, is what I think underlies the phenomenon of ‘shipping,’ and it is no surprise that the boundary between that and genuine pornography is notoriously blurred at times.
For an example of how the new philosophy works differently to the old, it’s worth looking at two very similar scenes from Doctor Who, one from 1975, the other from 2005. In the former, from Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor is given the chance to destroy the Daleks at their conception, but finds himself agonizing over his right to destroy an as-yet innocent creature: "If someone who knew the future, pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives... could you then kill that child?" The Doctor turns the question to his companion, and, implicitly, to the audience, generalising it to take it away from the fantasy presented on-screen and nudging it slightly closer to the real world that the viewers know. By doing so, the script makes the viewers think how they would answer the question, provoking thought about fundamental issues of morality.
Thirty years later, The Parting of the Ways gave the Doctor a similar dilemma: to destroy the Daleks by killing innocents, albeit this time humans. However, here it was framed very differently. The moral dilemma is based largely around the Doctor’s character: what is he: coward or exterminator? It takes place in the context of the Doctor’s ‘emotional journey,’ his on-going attempt to deal with being the only survivor of his race and his emotional scars from his role in the Time War. Far from opening the question out to the audience, allusions to the Doctor’s role in the Time War and the destruction of his people prevent the audience applying the question to their own lives. Aside from Jack (revived to return later), the fact that the Doctor asked other characters to die to buy him time which he ultimately did not use is not mentioned. Nor is the fate of the Earth, ruined by the Daleks, making the Doctor’s salvation by Rose intensely personal, even before the romantic imagery appears. The fact that the Doctor has achieved emotional contentment through his decision is all that matters. The wider ethical implications of his decision are ignored.
As all this implies, there are several dangers resulting from the adoption of this emotion-centric philosophy. Firstly, there is a tendency to use emotional intensity as an ethical yardstick to judge the morality of all actions. It is frequently claimed (including by the Prime Minister’s wife) that suicide bombers act out of despair and anger, and that their actions are therefore, on some level, justifiable. This is apparently on the grounds that only an extreme emotion could provoke such an extreme action. This is fallacious reasoning. Aside from the fact that I seriously doubt that anyone suffering from real extreme despair could organise a crime of any kind (such despair makes it hard to get up in the mornings, let alone plan a terrorist attack), it assumes that all cultures operate on the same value system, with the same liberal views of the sanctity of all life. It ignores the question of whether there really are grounds for the despair and anger. But worst of all, it assumes that if the emotion behind an action is strong enough, the consequences of the action itself is not important. In reality, strong emotions prove nothing as to the morality of an action. After all, hatred is a very strong emotion, and few people would say that that justifies any action at all. However, we are so used to seeing a correlation between strong emotions and praiseworthy actions in fiction that we take the connection for granted.
However, the fundamental issue at stake here is, I feel, no less than one of free will. Living with emotional fulfilment as one’s sole aim produces a contraction of one’s conceptual world. One’s responsibilities decrease to very little. It is not that such a person is immoral or cruel. He or she may give money to charity, for example, but would not see it as a moral decision, but one of personal choice, even whim, to depend on mood. To such a person, there are no moral consequences from not giving, merely emotional ones: will I feel bad when I go back to my comfortable, warm home if I don’t give money to the beggar? Free will shrinks to the question: how will I feel?
Without a clear moral distinction between right and wrong, it is impossible to exercise free will, which is predicated on the idea that whatever you do, you must live with the consequences. When the Jewish mystics say that God’s kindness, if unrestrained, would destroy the world, this is what they mean. If God prevented anyone from harming another person, there would be no suffering, but there would also be no free will. It’s like the film Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character is lives the same day over and over. While it’s fun at first, as he exploits his position to do what he wants without consequences, he soon discovers that this life is meaningless, because he can’t change anything; he can’t even commit suicide.
Free will, based on the existence of lasting consequences to actions, is the source of responsibility. Without the possibility of negative consequences resulting from actions, there can be no responsibility. If most decisions are believed to have no moral dimension, and therefore no consequences outside of oneself, there can be no true free will over what decision to take. The result is emotional determinism, the setting of childhood - the most selfish, unthinking, immature aspects of childhood - as the general state of mankind.
Furthermore, without free will, there can be no meaningful relationships (in all senses), in the sense of people freely accepting each other as individuals on their own terms. Such acceptance is only meaningful if one can choose not to do that. If it is simply determined by external factors, there is no meaningful relationship. This is true even if that external factor is mood. “I love you, because you make me feel good” is not a meaningful, adult relationship of the kind “I love you for who you are."
I don't mean to deny the importance of emotional fulfilment. I haven't stressed it here, because there is no need to in this culture. The point is that emotional fulfilment alone is not a sufficient criterion by which to live one's life. One needs a moral code, whether secular or religious. One needs priorities, principles and methods of application outside of one's own emotional impulses in order to interact with the world in a mature way, aware of the consequences of one's actions for other people. Naturally a sense of empathic awareness is important here, but it can not be the only factor involved.
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neohippie1 posted here about Richard Dawkins, which spurred me into finally setting down some thoughts that I’ve been working through for a while about the relationship between science and religion and the nature of belief, faith and doubt. I should warn that this is very long indeed.For anyone disagreeing with Dawkins’ frequent pronouncements on religion, the obvious flaw in his argument is his absurdly extreme positivist view of the universe. According to Dawkins, only that which can be empirically proven is true. This seems sensible enough, yet it ignores the fact that nothing can be proven to the ridiculous degree of certainty that he demands. Science rests on implicit fundamental assumptions: that the universe behaves in a consistent and logical way, that it is observable and that humans are capable of observing accurately and drawing logical conclusions. These are largely unnoticed because they are the assumptions on which everyday life depends, but nevertheless they are assumptions that can not be proven. I can not prove that I really do think logically, and do not just imagine the logical basis of my arguments; being part of the system, I can not assess it properly. Likewise, I can not run an experiment to prove that the laws of physics are different when observed scientifically to how they are the rest of the time, because such an experiment would by definition get the ‘scientific’ results, not the ‘unscientific’ ones. Even mathematics, is not immune from this reliance on assumptions. According to Godel’s incompleteness theorem, every mathematical system must always rely on assumptions unprovable within that system. If even maths is based on assumptions, what hope does anything else have?
The point I’m making is not that logic or science are ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’, but that Dawkins’ apparent belief that everything could be proven unequivocally is demonstrably false. Science relies on assumptions; it can not claim superiority over religion simply by claiming not to do so. Scientists, like the rest of us, have to use standards of probable likelihood, not certainty, and there is nothing wrong with this. Without it, life would be impossible. Anyone who’s read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe might remember that towards the end we are introduced to the Galactic President. He turns out to be an old man whose standards of proof are so exacting that he doesn’t even trust his memories of his own observations, and is constantly experimenting with his pencil to see if he can write with it. Ironically, this book was written by Dawkins’ friend Douglas Adams. Life is impossible without believing things that are likely but not absolutely certain. To criticise religion for being improbable is one thing, but to criticise it for not being plainly true beyond a shadow of a doubt is sheer stupidity. Still, this is such an obvious flaw in his argument that I feel obliged to confront him on more challenging ground.
I don’t agree with Dawkins that science could replace religion. Dawkins is trapped in his own circular logic. “Assume,” he effectively says, “that all religions started as a way of explaining the universe. Now, science explains the universe better than religion, because it is empirically testable and makes itself clearly open to re-evaluation. Therefore, science has replaced religion.” This is all perfectly logical, but it happens to be untrue, because it rests on a false assumption.
The fact that some people see their religious beliefs as sufficient explanation for the existence of the world does not alter the fact that at least some religions are not primarily about explaining the nature of the world, but the purpose of world and how to behave in order to further that purpose. This is ethical philosophy. It is of course possible to argue that an atheist ethical philosophy will replace religion. However, that ethical code will be the product of human thought and value judgement, not empirical observation. That is to say, it will be the product of deductive reasoning from an assumption that seems highly probable to a logical conclusion, not inductive reasoning from experimental data to a tentative conclusion that seems probable given what is known.
Like religions, non-religious ethical codes rely on certain assumptions. The oft repeated charge against religions, that they encourage violence because “if you think your God wants you to kill someone, you will, even if it’s wrong” is actually just a particular application of a general problem applying to all ethical codes. In the absence of a universally agreed moral code, every attempt to create a system of ethics must rest on certain assumptions. For religions, this is that a God or gods want certain actions to be performed. It is true that, by phrasing the question in a certain way, the sceptic holding different assumptions can get the desired shocking outcome, but the same tactic can easily be used on any other belief system. A pacifist would let war crimes be committed if the only way to prevent them was to use violence against the attacker; a utilitarian would kill a minority for the greater good; someone who values stability and the rule of law above all else would kill if authorised to do so by the state. As with the question of killing in the name of God, these are not hypothetical instances, but have actually happened on many occasions. The real question to show the nature of an ethical system, incidentally, is not “would you kill if your God wanted you to?”, but “under what circumstances, if any, do you believe your God [or any other source of moral authority] would want you to kill?”
If all ethical systems ultimately rely on certain unprovable assumptions, then there will continue to be legitimate moral dilemmas and debate, regardless of the ethical code followed. For example, Dawkins asserts that were it not for religion, there would be no arguments over the morality of abortion. That is highly questionable. Few people would argue that one human being has the right to kill another in cold blood. No one would say that a baby, once born, is not as much of a human being as an adult. Most atheists, and some religious believers, would argue that a newly conceived embryo is simply a bunch of cells, and its death is morally comparable to cutting one’s fingernails. Yet the point at which the embryo moves from being a bunch of cells which can morally be aborted to a human being which can not be murdered is a valid point of discussion even in an atheist context.
Furthermore, this is not a question science can solve completely; there must be some independent value judgement, which is always open to question. This is because the terms ‘human’ and ‘life’ are, within boundaries, value judgements. Does human life start when a foetus can exist independently of the womb? When it can feel pain? When it can react to its surroundings? These are valid questions, because ‘human life’ in this moral context is a theoretical construct, not an empirically observable reality, although observations as to the point in time when an embryo meets those criteria are of course possible.
The fact that science can observe when an embryo meets certain conditions, without being able to define which of those conditions mark the start of life indicates an important point. Science can tell us how the world works, but not how to live in it, yet it can provide some helpful information for disciplines attempting to answer that question. Neohippie1 quotes Carl Sagan:
“A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
As for why no modern religion has really done this, I can offer no answer, although I would say that atheist art has proved itself almost equally unwilling to use the imagery of modern science as a way of understanding the human condition. However, I think Sagan is right in saying that old religions can benefit from understanding the complexity and elegance of the physical world as revealed to us by science. It’s interesting that the twelfth century Jewish rationalist philosopher Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) encouraged the study of ‘natural philosophy’, the science of his day, as a way of understanding God and His creation, and being inspired to reverence of Him (incidentally, he also said that if the biblical creation account could be proved wrong in a literal sense, he would see no problem in understanding it in a metaphorical one).
Personally, I do indeed find much of what I know about science to be very inspiring and complementary to my Judaism. Take evolution. Not only do I have no problem with it, it seems to me one of the most morally profound of all scientific theories. For millennia, Judaism taught that people, like animals, are composed of physical bodies, but that we also have a soul of Divine origin, like angels. People are different to animals in one key respect: we have the ability to make moral choices. If we act morally, we are like angels; if we act immorally, we are like animals. Now science has shown that there literally is no physical difference at all between man and beast. Far from challenging my beliefs, this clearly demonstrates the choice before us: act morally or be an animal; there is no third option.
Similarly, the stranger side of modern physics is helpful in several ways (although perhaps I find it the most helpful science simply because it is the one I know best).
Western philosophy has been characterised by logic. Under such a system, something is right or it is wrong. It’s a binary system. Jewish thought has always operated differently. The Talmud records differing opinions on many subjects and although on points of law a majority opinion is followed, nevertheless whether legal or philosophical every opinion is seen to reflect the truth (provided it is proven from the Torah following a few basic rules of textual exegesis). Truth is not entirely a matter of perspective, because there is absolute truth, God’s view of the universe. However, we are finite beings who can not comprehend the totality of creation, so our truths are relative. In the moral and philosophical sphere, what seems true to me, based on my experiences, may seem false to you, yet neither of us is necessarily wrong. I believe in truth revealed by God through the Torah. Others do not believe this, holding other religious beliefs or no beliefs at all. Yet every culture has a perspective on the truth.
In many ways this seems illogical and it is certainly hard to comprehend. It took me years to understand why we spend so much time studying arguments and rejected opinions. Even if it seems tolerant of individuals, surely something is either true or false, not a bit of both? Yet the modern understanding of physics supports this view of the need for multiple perspectives and equally valid, but contradictory, points of view. Quantum uncertainty, the idea that it is the act of observation that decides whether something is a particle or a wave illustrates that reality does seem different depending on how you look at it. Relativity has shown that even the very nature of time and space depend on the situation of the observer. This is not meant as a literal comparison of the two, as I don’t believe there is a direct link between the relativistic or quantum view of the universe and the Talmudic understanding of the universe, but it does show that nature itself is not a system of clear-cut differences, but of different perspectives on the same thing.
Relativity has also helped my understanding of God. Dawkins points out that God is not sufficient explanation for the universe, because “what created God?” This is a frequently cited criticism of religion (or religions that believe in a creator). The answer is that the question is invalid; God exists outside time and space and has no beginning. “Well, this is no explanation at all!” says the sceptic and in many ways it’s hard to argue with this. Except that that’s precisely what science does. Relativity links time and space to energy and matter. I don’t pretend to understand the theory properly, but I know that anything ‘outside’ time wouldn’t have an existence in time. No existence in time means no beginning and hence no creator. An entity with no existence in the physical universe, a purely spiritual entity, would be outside time. Of course, to us finite, physical beings it still makes little sense, but that’s what our current scientific knowledge suggests.
Indeed, the creation of the universe poses certain problems to both science and religion. Physics traces the creation of the universe to the explosion of a singularity, the Big Bang, yet what created the singularity that exploded is unknown and probably unknowable, as the physical laws as we understand them breakdown under such conditions. There is nevertheless speculation about an eternal multiverse from which our universe ‘broke off’ or an infinite cycle of exploding and collapsing universes. I’m not going to be so fatuous as to claim this proves a creator exists, as the creator would simply be one unproven hypothesis among all these others. But what it does show is that there really are some things that science admits we quite literally can not understand or know for sure and that just because something does not seem to meet standards of common sense, it’s not necessarily the case that it isn’t true.
Actually, quite a lot of modern physics is either logically consistent, but empirically untestable, or alternatively empirically proven, but counter-intuitive, even illogical. For example, wave-particle duality shows that sub-atomic particles can be particles or waves and that the act of observation is somehow important in deciding which it is at any given point in time. This was one of several things I learnt doing A-Level physics which my classmates and I had trouble conceptualising. Our teachers simply told us not to try and think about it in logical terms and just accept that what we can test empirically and show mathematically indicates that this is correct. Moreover, I’ve since seen leading physicists claim that this is the only way they can understand their own work. It makes sense on its own terms, to anyone persistent enough to learn the ‘language’ needed to understand it (in this case physics and mathematics), but seems like nonsense to anyone else. It is a closed system of thought that must be assessed on its own terms. Nevertheless, some positivists are unwilling to accept that anything else – a philosophical or religious belief system, for example – can operate on similar lines. It’s not that anything goes once we enter the realm of metaphysics (whether religious or atheist), but that the kind of arguments constructed are not scientific ones and necessarily so; if they were, ethics would be a scientific discipline, not a philosophical/theological one. This means that often the most we can say about an argument is that it is logically and internally coherent, not that it is ‘true’ in a way that is clear to everyone.
In fact, it is not just philosophy and religion that fall in this area between precisely verifiable fact and complete speculation, if not fabrication. History, perhaps more than any other discipline, deals with the truth, in the sense of things that actually happened, yet in an unscientific way. History is not repeatable. A historian can not run experiments to see the relative importance of the causes of the French Revolution by running the revolution several times, changing the circumstances in the country slightly each time. Several people, most famously Marx, have tried to develop a ‘scientific’ theory of history and its supposed underlying laws, without success. The problem (if indeed it is a problem) remains that history deals with reality and events that certainly occurred, yet once we start to organise them and interpret them, to try to understand the general pattern of cause and effect for a given event, any resemblance to science breaks down. A variety of completely contradictory explanations can all be equally likely on the evidence available, with no way of knowing, perhaps ever, which, if any, is right. Assuming the interpretations explain the known facts equally well and are equally internally coherent, there is no way of telling them apart.
The best example I can think of, which I have used elsewhere to illustrate different arguments about epistemology, is a problem I encountered when an undergraduate studying late Anglo-Saxon England. One historian said that England in this period must have been very poor, because documentary and archaeological evidence show that large sums of money were sent out the country as Danegeld to pay off the Viking raiders, and given what factual evidence we have about the productive base of the Anglo-Saxon economy, this must have been a huge drain on resources. However, another historian disagreed, stating that we have evidence that lots of money was still minted and continually used to pay the Danegeld. It was the great wealth of England that attracted the Vikings. They would have stopped raiding England if they had impoverished it. Only a rich country could afford to pay the Danegeld as England did. The argument went on without reaching any firm conclusion, with two consistent, logical theories, based on the known evidence, arguing diametrically opposed positions.
What this shows is that the attempt to divide ways of understanding the universe into ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ is flawed. When dealing with something like history, they do not describe the intellectual processes involved accurately. However, there are many areas where they simply are not valid categories. I can make an emotional connection with art, music, humour or natural beauty – these can ‘speak to me’, if you want to put it in quasi-mystical terms – and these can be genuine life-changing experiences. Yet they can not be described in terms of a true/false or rational/irrational duality. There are important parts of the human experience which simply are not rational, but can not be described as ‘irrational’, with all the connotations of ‘anti-rational, unreal, imaginary’ that that word has; I shall refer to them as non-rational.
However, I do not believe that such subjective emotional experiences and phenomena are sufficient basis for a system of thought or ethics. Such experiences could lead to actively irrational actions, that is, ones diametrically opposed to logic. I believe that there must be an interaction between strict rationality and non-rationality. I suspect this to be true in all areas of life. Since the eighteenth century, if not earlier, western society has increasingly separated the rational, scientific and logical side of life from the non-rational (perhaps even irrational), artistic, emotional side of life. I think that this is a mistake, in all areas. While there is a place for pure logic and for pure art, humour and so on, I think it is unhealthy both for an individual and for a society to compartmentalise itself completely. By acknowledging that it isn’t a choice of either science or art (or religion or humour or any other combination), but rather of using certain disciplines for certain questions, then we can reach the point of being able to mix the disciplines together to answer more complex questions which can’t be solved by one alone. This is, in my view, more interesting and worthwhile. The most important of these questions are naturally the big existential and moral questions of ‘who am I?’, ‘why am I here?’, ‘how should I live my life?’ and so forth. At its most mundane level, it allows the use of scientific knowledge to help deal with these problems in a primarily metaphorical way, as I demonstrated above, but I think the rewards would be even greater if this was done consistently by whole societies.
Now, in reality all of us do mix those different methods of understanding the universe, which we might characterise as empirical and experiential, to some extent, but we tend not to be conscious of it or to be embarrassed by the mixture of rational and non-rational. Once again, here is Richard Dawkins:
“In the course of a recently televised conversation, I challenged my friend the obstetrician Robert Winston, a respected pillar of British Jewry, to admit that his Judaism was of exactly this character and that he didn’t really believe in anything supernatural. He came close to admitting it but shied at the last fence … When I pressed him, he said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline to help him structure his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has not the smallest bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural claims.”
Here, Dawkins fails to understand Judaism, its complexity, its difficulty and, ultimately, its strength.
Judaism is a religion centred on deeds, not beliefs. There are many reasons for this, but one is particularly relevant here. The Talmud states that the “light of the Torah” experienced through performing the mitzvot (commandments) and Torah study leads to faith in God, not the other way around. Now this seems illogical. After all, if one does not believe in something, why do it? I would be tempted to agree with this counter-argument, were it not for the fact that I have evidence against it. I think like many people I have had times of existential doubt and uncertainty and often in posing the question “how do I know my beliefs are true?” I can find no answer. However, by asking a different question, I produce a different outcome. Ask “why do I do what my beliefs tell me I am commanded to do?” and the answer is not that I think I will be rewarded for doing so (I do, but it’s not a primary motivation) or that I will suffer if I don’t (broadly speaking I think that too, although it’s theologically thornier and more complicated – but in any case I think about it less). No, the answer is quite simply that I can see that doing these things turns me into a better person: kinder, humbler, more patient, more forgiving, more tolerant, more aware of my responsibilities to others (whether friends, families, my local community, the Jewish community or mankind as a whole), not just because they are good things to do, but because doing them actually transforms my character.
It is not just the mitzvot between myself and other people (which I might or might not have thought of doing had I never encountered Judaism) that effect this change. It is also due to those between me and God, which, when done properly and with understanding are not empty rituals, but meaningful expressions of a coherent, consistent, integrated system of life, encompassing abstract thought (both rationalist and mystical) and mundane actions, embracing the entire emotional spectrum in a sustained programme for improving oneself and for tikkun olam (literally ‘repairing the world’), establishing a society built on justice, social justice, kindness and peace. Moreover, the more I study the Torah, the more I see that the conceptual framework supporting these actions and justifying them, is one that is only logically coherent so long as the ‘supernatural claims’ of Judaism are true. Naturally this does not prove those claims in any logical sense, but nevertheless I have observed (the nearest I can get to empiricism regarding this) that these things make a change for the better in myself with positive results for myself and those around me: family, friends and strangers, Jews and non-Jews. This is not a logical argument, but it is not an illogical argument either, and while I can think of other arguments to justify my faith which are more logical (although not flawlessly), I think this is the most powerful one.
Nor is this just my view. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, writes in his book Radical Then, Radical Now that there are three fundamental Jewish beliefs, Creation, Revelation and Redemption, and three mitzvot that epitomize them, and thereby Judaism as a whole:
On Shabbat we live creation. Learning Torah we live revelation. Performing acts of hesed, covenantal love, we live redemption. We do not philosophize about these things, we enact them. Jewish faith is not primarily about creeds or theologies; it is not faith thought, but faith lived.
No unified theory will ever finally settle the question of whether or not the universe was created by a personal G-d. No historical investigation will ever resolve the question of whether, at Sinai, the voice the Israelites heard was real or imagined. No political theory will ever determine whether or not a just and compassionate society is possible. That is not because these things are irrational. It is because they represent truths that can only be made real in life. I can believe that love exists, or I can believe that it is an illusion. Both views are consistent and coherent. I must choose, and that choice will shape my life, leading me to marry or to stay aloof, perhaps having “relationships” but not a total commitment of one life to another. Believing in love, I find it. Disbelieving it, my world is without it. Faith is neither rational nor irrational. It is the courage to make a commitment to an Other, human or divine. It is the determination to turn “ought” into “is”. It is the willingness to listen to a voice not my own, and through hearing, find the strength to heal a fractured world. It is truth made real by how I live.
And it works. Throughout the ages, Jews were known for their strong families and communities, their passion for study and the life of the mind, their commitment to helping the poor, the needy and the oppressed. Somehow, in, oppression they kept their dignity, in persecution their hope.
This view that faith consists of action more than belief is shared by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in his book Simple Words:
The very concept of purpose is essentially a religious statement, and the quest for purpose is a spiritual journey. This may be an unpleasant revelation for some people, who vehemently claim that they are atheists or agnostics, that they do not believe in anything. Even people who see themselves as living in a labyrinth without an opening can nevertheless see life as a very dignified existence – an adventure filled with danger, challenge, and beauty, with opportunity to love, to pursue justice, to raise a family, and to care for others in the world. The grandeur and the challenge of that kind of existence do not seem trivial at all, even for people who believe that when they die, that is the end of it. That sense of the beauty, the grandeur, and the adventure give meaning and purpose to life. Without using God’s name, that person is really a very believing person, with a deep faith that there is a transcendental meaning in living the adventure of life in a dignified way.
That is the essence of faith. It is deep belief in things that cannot be proved. I cannot prove beauty, dignity, honesty or integrity, yet I may live a life filled with all these things. A person who has nontrivial answers to these questions of purpose and meaning is, in one way or another, speaking about God, even if, for some inexplicable reason, he does not want to call it that. The atheist who is living a dignified, ethical, and spiritual life is an unconscious believer.