God as an Idea (Part Three)
- By Ilan Stavans and Justin David
A Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation
(Link to Part One)
(Link to Part Two)
(Link to Part Four)
Ilan Stavans: You read the biblical stories, it seems to me, to prove a higher morality; I, instead, see them as just stories. They are like Greek mythology: a constellation of characters doing human things in order to entertain us. God is part of that constellation, both in the Bible and in Greek mythology. He is a character with human characteristics: compassionate at times, irascible in others, and always verging on the inscrutable, like the rest of us.
The God of the Bible, in my eyes, creates in order to destroy and vice versa. Why? It’s a game.
Needless to say, we are cursed to live through interesting times. Although all times are interesting, aren’t they? Anyway, two opposing movements are in evidence today. One is the return to religion by people—or their descendants—who for years embraced secularism. That return is at odds with the conception, held at the end of the nineteenth century, that religion was a thing of the past, and that science and technology would finally bury God, at least the God of the three monotheistic religions, in the same pantheon where a plethora of deities have been disposed over time. The other trend is the rise of atheism among intellectuals. By rise I mean a disquieting fervor, almost a fanaticism.
Rabbi Justin David: Yes, I find it disquieting, too. Having two teenagers, I see around me a kind of popular atheism that attracts young people with a kind of centrifugal force. From the intellectual side, we must remember that people like Dawkins and Hitchens, as brilliant as they are, have written polemics. Polemics are really the other side of apologetics—they have an agenda that they pursue aggressively without giving reasonable, if any, attention to contrary points of view. Their greatest flaw is that they simply do not understand religion from the inside. I don’t mean to say that they’re at fault for not believing.
But if they’re going to approach religion rationally, then they need to take seriously the insights from 150 years of the academic, “scientific” study of religion. This is a discipline in and of itself, begun in the great universities of Europe and alive and well today, that allows outsiders to gain the tools of insiders in order to yield new insights. Among these insights are the ways in which individual traditions are diverse and flexible, changing over time and adapting to new circumstances. What Dawkins and Hitchens do (the great Terry Eagleton refers to them together as “Ditchkens”) is quote the most offensive lines out of context in order to skewer Western religion in general. It’s a cheap trick beneath such great thinkers and writers. Hitchens is no longer alive but let Dawkins look at a Talmudic text that envisions Moses arguing with God, or Maimonides showing how popular, time honored beliefs are false, or mystical texts that show our everyday perceptions to be illusion, and see where they come out.
Ilan Stavans: It’s easy to say these atheists quote lines out of context. Don’t rabbis, priests, and dervishes do this too? When composing a sermon, or else a Talmudic digression, that’s what happens all the time: one picks and chooses in order to make a point. There must be better ways to debunk Dawkins and Hitchens. Or else, let me invoke Jean-Paul Sartre, who was convinced that Jews need anti-Semites to exist and vice versa? Maybe atheists exist for theists to fortify their argument and the other way around? Remember the maxim: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Might this be true for belief?
Justin David: It’s actually not so easy to debunk the very forceful arguments of what we might call the “new atheism.” Belief and non-belief arise are shaped by the cultural context, and we have so many examples of the dangers and violence of belief that I view the burden of proof as upon us, the purveyors of religion. Dawkins and Hitchens actually go after religious truth claims on their own terms, and without the scaffolding provided by centuries of argument, philosophy and mysticism, it’s quite difficult for the assumptions of any tradition to stand up to the challenge.
The religion that the new atheists decry is not the religion I live and practice. For one, I do not maintain that logic or some kind of universal, authentic experience leads us inexorably to God. But I do feel that the universal experience of human beings articulating something of what we call “holy” points to something real. Each tradition in its own way tries to make sense of these universal experiences.
That’s why, for me, the stories of the Bible, as well as the Talmud, are not merely stories: they are mirrors of as well as signposts to ultimate experience, whether spiritual, moral or interpersonal. They partake of universal themes and human strivings, but they are primarily part of the narrative of a family, my family, both actual and imagined. I suppose I could view them as stories, folktales, if I wanted to. But to me, they speak with a charismatic depth that goes way beyond the explicit words on the page.
Ilan Stavans: I agree: I’m constantly drawn to the stories of the Bible because they contain our DNA: the characters in them are archetypes through whom we read ourselves. Indeed, they always make me I’m but a character in a larger-than-life novel God is constantly writing, an infinite novel, with a cast of billions, whose tortuous paths give, at first, the impression of being unique but in fact are nothing if not a repetition of the same handful of reactions all humans have, starting with Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Abraham and Sarah…
Justin David: There are so many books that I believe we should read to understand the patterns of thought in our society and culture. Don’t worry: I’m not going elitist on you. Why then is the Talmud worth our time? Its concerns are so archaic and at times so parochial. Its dialectics can be maddening and seemingly leading to nowhere. In fact, it is easy to get lost in the “Sea of Talmud.” Put another way, by reading it, by making it one’s own narrative, one runs the risk of turning into a “Nowhere Man.” Why go there if you don’t have to?
Ilan Stavans: I’m at awe with Talmud. Unlike the Bible, it is a non-linear narrative. I’m constantly struck by the way Rabbis think: never in straightforward fashion but in circles. Or maybe that geometrical imagery isn’t the right one. Their arguments are shaped by association. Alison, my wife, says that, precisely, is how my mind word: one idea leads to another, onwards at infinitum. A colleague of mine who is an analytic philosopher and teaches at the University of Buffalo adds that I’m like a volcano: ideas for me erupt rather than follow a logical order. Perhaps that’s why the Talmud appeals to me. Years ago, I read a book-long essay, The Talmud and the Internet (2000). Its argument is that the Internet too is associative.
Justin David: A wonderful book by Jonathan Rosen. It offers us the pleasures of associative, organic thinking, which can free us from the box of linear thinking that gets us ahead in most high school and college humanities classes. In the Big Book of Jewish Humor (2006), edited by Moshe Waldoks and David Novack, there is a beautiful illustration by the artist Mark Podwal. It shows the opening page of the Talmud, with the text in the center and the commentaries on the side, as usual. But instead of the commentaries being written all the way down the page in neat columns, they begin that way but spiral and fly off the page. It’s funny yet true: studying Talmud necessarily steers us away from the text and yet back to it at the same time.
Adin Steinsaltz, in his Reference Guide to the Talmud (2014), speaks of how the text will follow its own train of thought, and anyone starting out who wants a good, thorough introduction should look at that book as a first step. Although following the train of thought in the Talmud can be puzzling, I find it liberating. I enjoy the invitation to see a subject – any subject from prayer to banking—as a microcosm of core questions of human experience such as justice, spirituality, and interpersonal ethics.
However, I wouldn’t call it “free association,” although when the Talmud delves into stories, it truly goes to the realm of fantasy. Instead, one of the tasks and joys of studying Talmud is to tease out the unique logic of the text in bringing together seemingly disparate—and often contradictory—ideas and perspectives. In teasing out this logic we may find depth and wisdom, or at least surprising inventiveness.
This adamantly “disciplined” associative quality of the Talmud feels like a voice of caution to humanity, enjoining us to remember that, no matter how well-honed our capacities for reason, the world is never as it seems.
Ilan Stavans: I love your comment: a disciplined associative mode. That is exactly what the Talmud does: it defies logic by creating illogically logical arguments. Or maybe logically illogical ones. This reminds me of a statement Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush, used to say: in life there are known knowns and there unknown unknowns; but there are also unknown knowns as well as known knowns. By these he meant that there are things we know we know and things we don’t know we don’t known, yet there are also things we know we don’t known and things we don’t know we know. There is a playful logic, as well as a probing view of the mind, in Rumsfeld’s philosophical sequence.
The pleasures of the Talmud are multifold as so are the obligations. The pleasures will become clear in our conservation. So let me state one of its obligations: it forces us to read a page unconventionally. The image you invoked of Mark Podwal allows me to stress my point, albeit in a different way. In a traditional page, one reads, in English from left to right, in Hebrew and Aramaic from right to left, and in both cases from the top line to the bottom line.
Other languages might have a different approach, for instance Japanese, which is vertically, from top to bottom, and from the back to the front. But in the Talmud the language does and doesn’t set our reading pattern, for we read in blocks, jumping from one paragraph to another. And in Steinsaltz’s English translation, our rhythms combine Roman and Hebrew characters. Quite a feast!
The Talmud also doesn’t include images. (The Steinsaltz translation does, of course.) This significant feature, or absence thereof, allows me to make another: the Talmud authors seem to me allergic to description in the standard narrative way. Seldom do they delve into an extended portrait of anything, an object, a person, a landscape.
Anyway, I like the Hillel saying: “If I am not for myself, who will be? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?” Let’s unravel the riddle. Is this what religion in general is about: a claim for collectivism? Or, if it’s a unique Jewish view, does it make us Jews less individualistic?
Justin David: I love this saying of Hillel, too: not only is it quintessentially Jewish but it might also be the greatest Jewish joke ever told. On one level, I have no idea what it means, and that may what makes it so profound. Each thought makes sense by itself, but taken together, it feels like a paradox wrapped up in a conundrum. Separately, each question highlights a different prominent of rabbinic tradition: service to others, pragmatism and urgency. Together, one can rationalize them as saying, “Be aware at every moment of the needs around you, but be sure to take care of yourself.”
But I think it’s much more exciting to be drawn into a world of tensions: the moral imperatives of self and other, the needs of now and the needs of the future, self-reliance and dependence. And amid all of these tensions, Hillel’s statement brings a moment of reassuring order. Even if we pick it apart and realize that maybe we can’t simultaneously be for others and ourselves, Hillel’s vision points us to a more hopeful and more nuanced place.
Ilan Stavans: Let me take a stab at it. Hillel’s is what I would describe as “fortune-cookie philosophy.” It is midrashic in that it is centripetal, pushing in various directions at once. In my eyes, it is a code of behavior built as a triptych: the first rule is to defend your own interests, or, if not defend, at least to represent them. This reminds me of Spinoza’s maxim: all things want to be perpetuated in themselves. That, he says, is what self-love is: not only to be one’s self, but to do anything in order for that self to exist.
The second rule refutes the first: to be only for oneself is to betray humanity for humanity, in the end, is the encounter between two selves. This reminds me of Buber: the “I” only finds meaning through the “Thou” and vice versa. And the third rule is about the present as an imperative: the encounter between the “I” and the “Thou” occur always in the present because, in truth, the present tense is the only tense in which we as humans are able to inhabit. The past and the future are sheer fictions. In sum, Hillel’s approach is categorical: be thyself yet never forget the others.
I disagree with you, though: I don’t see hope in his dictum. On the contrary, it imprisons us in the “here and now.”
Justin David: All the more so does his question haunt us, “If not now, when?”
(Link to Part One)
(Link to Part Two)
(Link to Part Four)
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Rabbi Justin David is the spiritual leader of Congregration B'nai Israel in Northampton, Massachusetts.
