Category Archives: Judaism

Articulation of preconceptual awareness

Judaism, Philosophy

If I did not already own a lovely hardback copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God In Search of Man, I’d be desperate to find a copy for my sacred library:

It is the assertion that God is real, independent of our preconceptual awareness, that presents the major difficulty. Subjective awareness is not always an index of truth. What is subjectively true is not necessarily trans-subjectively real. All we have is the awareness of allusions to His concern, intimations of His presence. To speak of His reality is to transcend awareness, to surpass the limits of thinking. It is like springing clear of the ground. Are we intellectually justified in inferring from our awareness a reality that lies beyond it? Are we entitled to rise from the realm of this world to a realm that is beyond this world?

We are often guilty of misunderstanding the nature of an assertion such as “God is.” Such an assertion would constitute a leap if the assertion constituted an addition to our ineffable awareness of God. The truth, however, is that to say “God is” means less than what our immediate awareness contains. The statement “God is” is an understatement.

Thus, the certainty of the realness of God does not come about as a corollary of logical premises, as a leap from the realm of logic to the realm of ontology, from an assumption to a fact. It is, on the contrary, a transition from an immediate apprehension to a thought, from a preconceptual awareness to a definite assurance, from being overwhelmed by the presence of God to an awareness of His existence.

What we attempt to do in the act of reflection is to raise that preconceptual awareness to the level of understanding.

An attempt to unfold the Sefirot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Judaism

People have asked me to explain the Sefirot. It is not something that can be explained. It is not an object of knowledge. The Sefirot must be entered and known-from. It is a subject of study.

The sefirot is the crystallization of a Jewish esoteric enworldment. First, it must be understood from a panentheistic perspective that situates all that can be given as real within a divine beyond-being that is essentially unknowable. However, this beyond-being occasionally births surprising new being from its own (apparent) Nothingness. Until we intuit and internalize this situation, none of the rest of the Sefirot can unfold in understanding. It remains a welter and waste of symbols — a perplexity that makes even simple ignorance seem lucid by comparison. But once this panentheistic enception is born in us, the understanding erupts forth and embraces the world, infusing it with meaning — or rather, revealing the meaning inherent within reality. We suddenly feel the necessity of balance in apparent opposites. We know that love without limits and limits without love destroy both self and other. We sense that unconstrained progress and static stability destroy all possibility of living, steady improvement. We recognize that tradition and institution must perpetually reform in order to live, and that these are needed for meaningful life.

Once this enworldment becomes given truth for us — once it isn’t a doctrinal fact-system, but a faith — a glance at the Sefirot is a prayer. We might be diffused by practical life, scattered, made vague and dull. But with a comprehending glance, lightning strikes from above and below, connecting above and below, with a flash of ascending and descending light. Descending: Where are you? Ascending: Here I am.

A sacred symbol is a visual prayer.

Ein sof – Unbounded – Unknowable, infinite beyond-being. To us, pregnant Nothingness — inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

Keter – Crown – Finitude. The possibility of finite being, defined against but devoted to infinite beyond-being. The inner surface of tzimtzum. To us, the principle of panentheism.

Chokhmah – Wisdom – Intuition of All, as yet enfolded, undeveloped, charged with potential. To us, the flash of knowing, preceding knowledge. Enception.

Binah – Understanding – Unfolding knowledge. Alchemical “adaptation”. To us, intelligibility. Conception.

Chesed – Love – Grace, mercy, lovingkindness. Self-transcending We.

Gevurah – Power – Limitation, boundary, law. Self-defining Me/Us.

Tif’eret – Beauty – Balance, harmony, perfection, completeness, rightness. The bringing together of difference into wholeness.

Netsach – Eternity – Agency, initiative, command. Compulsion to take action, challenge, innovate, effect change.

Hod – Splendor – Devotion, receptivity, obedience. Inclination to accept, respond, participate, shelter, conserve.

Yesod – Foundation – Establishment, tradition, teaching and learning, dynamic stability.

Malchut – Kingdom – Meaningful world. Divine presence in given reality. Also, Shekinah, divine feminine.

Boundless

Judaism

I am bothered by objective theological accounts of divine time or space or being.

Divinity has no outer edge, and so it cannot be defined or known objectively. Until we grasp this fact, any attempt to think religion is rooted in a category mistake that leads directly into a ditch of doctrinal nonsense. If this root idea is incomprehensible, a person is better off not thinking at all, and, rather, taking a purely devotional or practical path into religious life. Thinking objectively about religion will only damage one’s relationship to One.

If we are to approach religion with the intellect, we must start with knowing that there is absolutely nothing against which infinity (qualitative infinity, not to be confused with quantitative infinity, which is a relative infinity) can be seen as object. By definition infinity is all-encompassing and all-inclusive. Whatever is not-infinite must be encompassed within infinity as an intrinsic part of it. Even nothingness itself is encompassed within infinity.

Ein sof is real to us as only as uncomprehending acceptance of this unknowable point preceding the ultimate point of departure, Keter, where the possibility of finitude is established within the infinite. If I am not mistaken, Rosenzweig’s Aught and Naught is born within Keter.

So the opposition is all-inclusively infinite superset versus exclusive finite subset. There is nothing that is not entirely of God, but there is nothing that is the entirety of God, except God. In this view, the only contrast that matters is the purity of one’s orientation to the all-inclusive. This is an everted purity. Mundane purity is a matter of excluding all non-essential elements. The infinite is essentially all-inclusive, so here impurity is a matter of any exclusion of anything however vile, worthless or trivial.

Hazards of monotheism

Judaism

Susan reminded me of something Dara Horn said in a talk we attended last Thursday. She said that what has gotten Jews in trouble throughout history* is Judaism’s stubborn refusal to worship political gods.

Telling people that the bullshit they worship is not, in fact, God is an eternally unpopular act. It’ll get you ostracized in a hurry. And if you keep going, it will get you killed.

And Jews didn’t just point their critiques outward. Jews pointed their critiques inward, too, at their own rulers, priests and population. Jewish prophets were possible because of Judaism’s uncompromising monotheism. They knew the difference between the one and only God, and the myriad human imposters who attempt to usurp God’s place, and replace the transcendent God with some all-too-immanent monarch, aristocratic gang, make-believe divine character or ideology. This rebuking of anyone — including oneself, one’s own rulers and one’s own people is intrinsic to the Jewish tradition, and Jesus was very much a part of it.

Today, too many Jews worship political gods. They see themselves, no doubt, as prophets who critique the false nationalist god, Israel. But what they really do is criticize a nation for defending itself against an international theocratic totalitarian movement who will stop at nothing to annihilate it. And they refuse to acknowledge this basic fact because they are Progressivist ideoidolators, who worship a set of incredibly spurious beliefs as a god, and have lost the capacity for normal moral discernment and reasoning. To quote one exceptional Jew, “they strain gnats and swallow camels.” As I mentioned in my last post, they are driven not by principles but projections of their own petty emotions. Republicans, whose beliefs are stuck in the 2010s, remind them of their mean daddy, where Islamist dictators, whose beliefs are stuck in the 1200s, are exotic orientals who remind them of dangerous revolutionary possibilities.

Note: Jews were persecuted even before the wholesale theft of its scripture, divine status, tradition and land by the world’s two largest religions, who repaid the Jewish people with incessant persecution for the dire offense of continuing to exist past their expiration date.

Accounting for my anger

Biography, Judaism

I think my intense reaction to anti-Zionism has multiple sources.

My positive tribal loyalty only accounts for some of it.

Sadly, much more of it is a negative reaction to other tribes. More specifically, it is a bad reaction to the collective mind of these tribes — as it manifests in the personalities of members of these tribes. It is not even in the content of their beliefs, as expressed in opinions or ideological stances. The collective mind is most influential in in how thinking is thought, not what thoughts are produced or what facts are believed. The What is symptomatic of the How.

I don’t like any of the biggest, strongest tribes at large today who concern themselves with Israel, for or against.

And of course, Israel is always an object of intense concern for precisely the worst tribes. The tribes who claim to be the true heirs of the Jewish covenant are always a powder keg, even when they seem momentarily friendly. Their benevolence can always reverse in an instant, and with little warning.

And those latterday puritans who mistake themselves for secular, who imagine themselves above religious disputation, will have no god apart from their own ideoidol. To them this ideoidol is just self-evident, commonsense truth and morality, and not even an ideology at all. It is to be obeyed, not questioned.

There are other things going on, too. But watching so many people around me get picked up by these mental tornados and spun into generic strangers has been unpleasant and upsetting.

And those whose feet are still on the ground have done so through the magic of compete, alienated indifference.

One other thing I am anxious about. The more right-wingers make Israel their own cause, the more the enemies of the right will make hating Israel their cause. Zionism and anti-Zionism will become another signifier of tribal allegiance, like wearing an N95 mask, getting a vaccine, adopting new pronouns.We should not cultivate prejudices for and against different categories of person, but when we proudly adorn these prejudices as tribal emblems, no good can possibly come of it.

J’accuse

Ethics, History, Judaism

I wrote two long diatribes against supersessionism today, but I’ve thrown them out.

I’m just going to start by saying something simply and bluntly: There are not three religious faiths with equal claims to the Holy Land. There is one faith alone with a legitimate claim, and two with utterly ludicrous claims, based on violence, lies and delusions.

Allow me to explain.

The only reason the Holy Land is considered Holy is because Jewish scripture says so.

The only reason Christians and Muslims also think the Holy Land is holy is because they believe what Jewish scripture says about the holiness of the Holy Land. They believe this scripture because they stole it. They stole their scripture from the Jews, and they tried to steal the whole tradition and deprive the Jews of what Jews developed.

They did not simply say “We, too, see value the wisdom of this tradition, and wish to incorporate it into our new flavors of this faith.” Had they done that, everything would be different.

Of course, some modern Christians and Muslims have come to see things this way, and I respect the religions these two faiths have evolved to become. They are true, good and beautiful, and those of these faith partake of these qualities. None of the true and unflattering things I have to say about supersessionists apply to them.

But it must be said that both of these upstart faiths began as supersessionist. They believed their faith was not some new, improved version of Judaism, but rather its replacement. Supersessionist Christians think Christianity replaces Judaism, that Judaism is null and void as a faith, and Jews who continue practicing it are heretics who deserve the punishments of heretics. Supersessionist Muslims think the same thing.

And central to this doctrine is the belief that whatever belongs to the Jewish people — including scripture and territory — now belongs to them.

No European or Arab cared about the Holy Land until Europeans and Arabs converted en masse to Christianity and Islam. This happened thousands of years after the Jewish faith began its history. They are both late chapters of a much older story.

So Jews built a civilization on a small patch of land over thousands of years. They claim God enabled this to happen. You can get all secular about this and say God had nothing to do with it. Fine. But that only makes it even more the property of the Jewish people, doesn’t it?

Then Christians made up a religion that says the Jewish tradition was magically transferred over to them. If you think it really happened that way, congratulations, I can’t argue against that. But if you are secular, that makes this whole issue the furthest thing from a religious quibble. This makes it an act of political aggression, justified by the most spurious of religious claims.

And Islam is somehow even more spurious, and much more recent. The Muslim hoards were an invading foreign army, using the Jew’s own scripture which they stole for themselves, to justify stealing everything else belonging to the Jews.

And it did not stop there. Since the Jewish diaspora, followers of these supersessionist faiths have persecuted Jews wherever they tried to live. They resented the continued existence and flourishing of Jews. The hatred of Jews found innumerable channels of expression. You can come up with your own theories on why this would happen. Projections of guilt? Unconscious envy of the covenant and unconscious worries about the validity of one’s own status? Who knows? But antisemitism has been a real problem, and it continues to be a real problem. It has continued to break out sporadically wherever Jews have lived, however much they have tried to assimilate.

And this problem necessitated zionism. The outbreaks of antisemitism have always happened with little warning. And they were always accompanied by outbreaks of total indifference among folks who pretended to be friends and allies of Jews. Jews have learned and relearned in the hardest way that they never have friends and allies when they most need them. We have only ourselves.

During the last great outbreak of antisemitism, cowardice and indifference, when Jews needed a place to go, the United States refused. Canada refused. England refused.

And judging from how “friends” have behaved since October 7, 2023, they would refuse us again.

Had Israel existed, they would have been taken in.

And this is why Israel must exist.

And now, somehow, today’s antisemites blame Israel itself for antisemitism. Or Israel’s stubborn insistence on defending itself from constant attacks from these assholes. But how then do you explain Muslim’s 1942 collusion the German Nazis to murder all regional Jews even before Israel even existed? You can’t because you probably don’t know about it. You don’t have a dog in this fight.

So, actually, never mind. Israel doesn’t care what antisemites and indifferent cowards think. Israel will do what it takes to ensure its safe and prosperous existence. We might fail. But we are not counting on your loyalty, nor are we asking your permission, to succeed.

Totality : Infinity ::

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Some ideas alive and other ideas are not.

Nonliving ideas are mere content components. These content components can be combined with other content components to construct larger and more complex content component systems.

Living ideas are not mere content. Living ideas generate content.

Some living ideas participate in infinite being and others do not.

Transcendent living ideas are aware that they are organs of infinite ultimate being, and it this awareness that allows them to participate in being that transcends their comprehension.

Comprehensive living ideas believe they are themselves the totality of ultimate being, and whatever they cannot comprehend is, to them, nonexistent.

Levinas named his magnum opus Totality and Infinity. This book could have been given a very different title.

Letterpress sefirot

Biography, Design, Judaism, Letterpress

An old friend of mine introduced me to a master letterpress printer who lives in the Atlanta metro area. The printer connected me with one of the nation’s best die makers. I immediately ordered a plate for my first project, which will be a letterpress sefirot.

I am doing this project because nobody else has. I have been unable to find a beautiful letterpress printed sefirot, so in order to have one I will have to print it myself. This is something that should exist. I’m excited to have a supply to give away to friends.

The final printed artifact will look like this:

Metaethics

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

When contemplating moral action, we seek ethical principles. We do this almost by cognitive reflex. We ask: “By what principle is this action justified?” We expect to find an answer. Is this because we believe that the essence of morality is rules — rules we must follow in order to be good?

In his Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig situates rational ethics within a broader nonrational context, which he calls metaethics. Metaethics still obligates us to act, but not on the basis of something we can codify. We act on the basis of relationship, on intuition of the living reality of another person.

It is tempting for anyone from a Christian conditioning (which emphatically includes progressivists) to assume the metaethical ground of ethics must necessarily be merciful. But doesn’t this just establish another rule to obey — a rule to abolish enforcement of rules? A rule of unconditional kindness, of self-sacrifice for the good of the other, of imitation of the crucified redeemer — of automatic altruism?

My Jewish instincts are inclined to view that as an evasion of moral responsibility. Face to face with being who transcends our own, we are addressed and called to respond with one’s own extra-logical conscience. Hineini.

Perhaps Kabbalists are right, that the balance tilts toward Chesed (mercy and love) and away from Gevurah (severity and law). As a holdover from my old math-mystic days, I like to imagine the balance at approximately 61.8% Chesed to 38.2% Gevurah. This tilt implies that we should err toward mercy or charity, while still exercising our judgment as fully and faithfully as we can. But unless I am deeply mistaken, Kabbalists understand the necessity of Gevurah’s discipline, and that the desire to annihilate Gevurah and leave Chesed entirely unrestrained is a form of evil-enabling evil.

I am urgently interested to see if Rosenzweig develops his concept of metaethics in a direction that holds each person metaethically responsible for his own choice and application of ethical systems.

Taste of infinity

Exnihilism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations.

We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically negate limits and believe we cognize infinity. The former is the stuff of religious fantasy, the latter is the stuff of scientistic rationality.

But both of these negating negatives takes us a single step toward the infinite. They both transpire within the realm of already-conceivable. Religious fantasy conceives immortality by removing a conceived feared event, death. Or it conceives omniscience by removing a conceived limitation of knowledge. Or it conceives clairvoyance by removing the confinement of inward thought to oneself. And so on. Most miracles are negations of natural limits. And scientistic infinity does the same thing — generally by counting endlessly. We never stop counting units of time. We never stop counting units of distance. Whenever we imagine an end to time of space — which is never really imagined, because an end of time or space is literally inconceivable — we close our unseeing eyes in order to not see what we don’t see anyway, and resume counting just a little longer, just to prove our power over the infinite.

But the infinite is precisely on the other side of countability. No amount of counting countable units can amount to infinity. It can get us just a little closer to infinity, qualitatively closer, if we start counting unlike units, producing what Ian Bogost named a “Latour litany”. Here’s a spontaneously invented example from Graham Harman: “neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.” A sincere effort to complete that series, which also must include the list itself at every stage of completion, will — while never producing anything even approximating infinity — induce a better conception of what infinity means. As will reading and internalizing the core insight in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The closer we get to perfecting our theories, the closer we get to discovering that we must rethink that theory in some as-yet inconceivable way. Staring directly into the migrainescape of an undeniably real but as-yet inconceivable problem for one second gives us a sense of infinity that a lifetime of counting minutes cannot.

And an epiphany that changes everything all at once, followed by another epiphany that changes it again, each time bringing into existence, out of inconceivable nothingness, new species of conceivable somethingness — genesis ex nihilo — this helps us conceive the character of miracle.

Even the slightest taste of infinity, just barely enough to stop misunderstanding infinitude, is sufficient to induce exnihilism.

I’ve called mine a “metaphysics of surprise.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about this inexhaustible transcendent source of surprise is that it wants something from us, and it wants to give. We can opt out, but we should not. This is undeniably so, as our intensifying denials demonstrate.

Dark glass

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

Twenty years ago when I was first reading Nietzsche, fully on fire and burning to pure ash, I became convinced that Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian of some weird variety. The belief lacked evidentiary foundation. Not only could it not be proved, but proving it seemed somehow wrong.

The belief was rooted in hermeneutic experience: having sacrificed my old truth at the altar of interrogation, a new kind of truth could emerge. That truth made the clearest and most vital sense of the Gospels. Please notice — it was not only a new truth, a new “belief system”, a new set of opinions on what was and wasn’t true, good or existent. It was a new kind of truth and entirely different way to approach truth. This new kind of truth was not a set of facts to look at and to accept or reject. Rather, this was a truth to be looked through, which revealed a new world of givens — and that new given world was infinitely preferable to the old one.

Nietzsche’s comments on Christianity, on Christians, Jews, Jesus, Saul/Paul and his use of polyvalently charged appellations — like “the founder of Christianity” — make his attitude toward the Judeo-Christian tradition highly… multistable. Depending on the tone of our reading and the care we take in considering everything Nietzsche might have meant in each of his statements, we could take his utterances as a whole to be radically atheistic or passionately (but covertly) evangelical. Or something else entirely.

When we look through a dark glass what we see is a matter of focus.

We can focus into the dark glass and see what images the glass reflects, which includes the image of our own selves as objects, and all the objects that lie behind and around ourselves. Our human-all-too-human eyes are magnetically drawn toward our self-image. “There’s me!”

Or we can focus through the glass to see what images the glass transmits — the objects on the other side of the glass.

If we never reflect on focus and just take the image we see at face value, we naturally assume we have seen what there is to see in the glass. We look into it and never look through it, or we look through it and never look into it, and, consequently never understand the full reality of the dark glass, which is, whether we look into it or through it, always involved — unseen — in the act of seeing.

T’shuvah and-or metanoia

Design, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

This morning I am reflecting on the crucial difference between two words, clumsily translated into English as “repentance”, the Greek word metanoia (a transformation in how we think), and the Hebrew word t’shuvah (a turn to, or back to God).

Almost certainly, the word used by John the Baptist and Jesus in the Gospels was t’shuvah, which is actually (I think) closer in tone to the English word, even if it etymologically maps less perfectly. In t’shuvah, we are to turn back to God in every way — certainly in our thinking, but also in our feelings, and most of all in our behaviors. Or to put it Jewishly, in t’shuvah we turn with our whole being, heart, soul and strength. (Jesus did not invent this formula. This, and many other of his most famous utterances, referred to Torah and other Jewish scripture, and derived their authority from these references.) Metanoia, on the other hand, is more spirit-first — a change in thinking or worldview that effects a change in feeling and behavior.

I’m not a New Testament scholar, but I would be curious to hear if Paul’s works-versus-grace distinction was essentially a t’shuvah-versus-metanoia distinction.

The reason I am reflecting on this question today is I am realizing that in the book I am slowly developing, I have differentiated these two concepts, and placed them under different domains. (The three domains I explore are religion, philosophy and design.) I didn’t even realize until today that I was doing this!

I assign metanoia, not to the domain of religion, but to philosophy. I take it even further, even; I make a somewhat reckless normative claim that the essential purpose of philosophy ought to be metanoia.

I assign t’shuvah to the domain of religion. T’shuvah can involve engagement with thought, but it must engage with more than thought, and more likely will with behavior, and will always engage and change aspects of our own being outside our cognitive grasp.

(And, please, when I speak of engagement beyond thought, please do not modernize what I’m saying by shoehorning it into “the unconscious”, that iron lung of late modernity, which pumps artificial spirituality into unrespirating secular bodies. It is time to pull that plug. And I don’t mean making changes to our physical bodies. I care less than nothing about neurons or neural pathways or brain physiology. These ideas are valid in some contexts, but play no role in my thinking. People who must compulsively physicalize, psychologize and scientize ideas in order to make them compatible with their existing thinking will dislike what I have to say, because, in fact, I’m gunning precisely for their most sacred ideas. They will not understand what I am saying until they undergo a metanoia that renders this scientizing unnecessary.)

The overlap between philosophy and religion consists of metanoia that effects t’shuvah, and t’shuvah that effects metanoia. Not all metanoia turns us to God. Most metanoia does not, though all metanoia experiences feel like “religious conversions” as moderns misconceive religion. Much metanoia turns us away from God’s infinitude, toward closed finite theory-systems, like Hegelianism or inverted Hegelianism (Marxism), or other closed theory-systems, such as Progressivism. These seal us off and insulate us all that exceeds the grasp of cognition.

I’ll tease one more tangentially important idea. Design (the third domain my book explores) is also concerned with material and social realities that exceed the grasp of cognition, and which can, through our thinking, feelings and behaviors, effect both religious and non-religious metanoia — and/or t’shuvah.

Richard J. Bernstein on evil

Ethics, Existentialism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have been observing an uncanny moral blind-spot among many people I know. They are apparently oblivious to an obvious distinction — that between 1) a violent desire to annihilate another people and inflict and savor their suffering, versus 2) an unavoidably violent defense against those who wish to annihilate and inflict suffering.

It is as if they need to skeptically dismiss out of hand making such distinctions.

Or maybe they know how to make this distinction among individual people, but cannot discern these distinctions among groups of people. (I do think an incapacity to understand political bodies plays into this problem, which is tangled up with the compulsively identitarian politics of the illiberal left and right, but I do not think the bizarre amorality I am witnessing is caused by this incapacity.)

These morally-blind people try to see the difference between better and worse strictly quantitatively: How many people have died on each side of the conflict? If the tally on one side is too big, the side with the larger numbers is morally abhorrent.

I am deeply bothered by this seeming incapacity of so many people to see perceive moral truths. I feel pain over it. And I intuitively blame them for their blindness. But I have not clarified this intuition, articulated it, or justified it.

This might be why Richard J. Bernstein’s 2001 book Radical Evil leapt off my shelf and caught my attention a couple of days ago. It opens with this gut punch:

In 1945, when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and the full horrors of what had happened during the war years were just beginning to emerge, Hannah Arendt declared, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Later, when Arendt was asked about her first reactions to the rumors about the extermination camps (which she first heard in 1942), she said that it was as if an abyss had opened. “Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us can.” Arendt, like many others — especially the survivors of the camps — felt that what happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical form of evil. “Auschwitz” became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and has come to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century. We might also mention Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia — names and sites so very different, yet manifesting horrendous events that we desperately try to understand, but to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Yet there is something extraordinarily paradoxical about the visibility of evil in our time — a visibility that can be so overwhelming that it numbs us. Andrew Delbanco acutely observes, “a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. Never before have images of horror been so widely disseminated and so appalling — from organized death camps to children starving in famines that might have been averted. … The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.” We have been overwhelmed by the most excruciating and detailed descriptions and testimonies; nevertheless the conceptual discourse for dealing with evil has been sparse and inadequate.

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

This brings the problem into the heart of my existentialist project.

For many people, what is thinkable limits what they will accept as real.

By “thinkable”, I do not merely mean what can be explicitly spoken about or argued. I mean what their faith can grasp. What exceeds the reach of their faith’s intuition, they regard not only as inconceivable, but unreal, non-existent. “If I cannot conceive the holocaust, it must have been exaggerated or invented.” If I cannot conceive the murderous mindset of Hamas, it must be sneaky Jew-propaganda fiction.”

I’ve noticed that people who approach the world this way resist whatever threatens this obliviousness. It is as if they viscerally need whatever realities transcend their faith to not exist. And they harbor semi-secret contempt for philosophy, so nothing can really challenge the solipsistic omniscience of their gnosis.

As an existentialist, I truly believe that existence precedes essence — “thatness” precedes “whatness” — that reality far exceeds the scope of our actual and potential faiths, which means completeness of truth content is the least of our worries. We lack the mental fingers required to grasp the truth of a great many realities.

And today, some of these realities loom directly before our faces, staring malevolently directly into our eyes, unseen.

By finding ways to conceive and speak about these unspeakable realities, we can detect them and respond to them. This is why philosophy is urgently important, especially right now.

But precisely those who need it most feel superior to philosophy. They see it as irrelevant, idle, speculative, abstract. They see it as a clumsy approximation of their gnostic omniscience. How wrong they are.

Jewishly

Judaism, Love

For my entire adult life, I’ve returned, again and again, to C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, usually to re-critique it from a subtle variation on the same basic complaint. In his meditation, Lewis observes a beam of light from the side, and has an insight that this looking at the beam of light from the side does nor reveal the light the same way that looking directly up into the beam does. My complaint is that maybe there are better things to do with light sources than examine their beams or stare directly into them. Perhaps I am just weird, but my preferred use for light sources is to illuminate spaces and the objects in those spaces.

I mean this both literally and metaphorically.

Today’s version of the complaint is no different, except today I want to suggest (or re-suggest) that this complaint I’ve been making is a Jewish one. And by “Jewish”, as always, I mean in accordance with Buber’s fundamental insight of I-Thou, which is the whence of my faith — the from-where — or to translate it into hippie, “where I’m coming from”.

Here is what Buber says in I-Thou, which I read as an expression of my complaint.

When you are sent forth, God remains-presence for you; whoever walks in his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, he cannot attend to God but he can converse with him. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the world movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the world movement of turning toward.

It might be helpful here to re-quote Saint-Exupery:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

I believe, with my entire stubborn Jewish faith that the famous Jew that so many people want to face, contemplate, love and worship, never wanted to be loved face-to-face in that romantic  way that lovers love, as they stare into each other’s eyes.

With Buber, I believe that this exceptional Jew very Jewishly wanted us to stand next to him in the light of creation, our backs warmed by his Father’s radiance, and look out upon a divinely-illuminated world with him.

Please do not hate me for saying these things, which I fully believe and consider of highest importance. I love Jesus, Christians and Christianity, but my love is a thoroughgoing Jewish love.

Hineini and amen.