The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People 
by 

Jonathan Kirsch

 

BlackOxford's review 

Sep 27, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: criticism, biblical, epistemology-language, jewish, philosophy-theology 

Words Are Not Divine

Judaism is not a faith. That it is often referred to as such even by Jews is simply a testament to the power of Christianity in its historical attempt to redefine religion as adherence to some form of doctrinal statement. Although Judaism is a ‘religion of the book,’ it has never, unlike Christianity, become a religion in which the meaning of the words of that book have become fixed by authority.

The woman of Kirsch’s title is Sarah, the wife of Abraham, the first person to accept the cult of YHWH. All Jews are descended from this Sarah, who is told by God in person that she will conceive a child at the age of 90. Then, as Kirsch says, “Sarah is so unafraid of the Almighty that she laughs at his words and then lies to his face,” claiming that she did no such thing. 

This little story is not just another biblical anecdote; it is an account of the precise moment at which what would become Judaism was established. It is a description of a new relationship created between the human and the divine (look no further for the inspiration of the story of the Annunciation in the Christian Bible). 

And yet at the core of this story is a message about the unreliability of words. Sarah dismisses the words she hears as ‘just talk’ and uses more words to hide her embarrassment when she is caught out. Even the Almighty let’s her fib slide as something merely verbal and therefore incidental. In this case, the word is not ‘made flesh’; it is entirely ignored - by both parties.

The story of Sarah is, in the best Jewish tradition, self-referential. The Torah, God’s word, is sacred. Yet the words of the Torah are not God. They were written, edited, consolidated, and re-written many times before they became ‘official.’ And then they were interpreted in many more ways, often contradictory, in the Talmud. A virtual endless stream of commentaries, Midrashim, have followed ever since. The words are there to inspire a response. Sometimes this response is laughter; sometimes it is a falsehood or self-delusion. 

Not that some in the history of Judaism haven’t attempted to fix the interpretation of these words. But they haven’t succeeded in making Judaism doctrinal, just possibly because of the inspiration provided by Sarah. Kirsch claims that “diversity rather than orthodoxy is the real core value of Judaism.” For him“the diversity that has always characterized Judaism begins in the Torah itself.” Many Jews might argue even about that. Exactly. Words are what keeps us together, Jewish or not. But they are not divine.

Ignorance: How it drives science by Stuart Firestein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Power of Not Knowing

The 19th century American philosopher C.S. Peirce was, I think, the first to point out that all inquiry is provoked by doubt.* Before there is a fact, there must be a concern. Concern implies doubt. And doubt implies ignorance. Firestein defines ignorance in a way that Peirce would certainly approve: “It is not an individual lack of information but a communal gap in knowledge. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense, don’t add up to a coherent explanation, cannot be used to make a prediction or statement about some thing or event. This is knowledgeable ignorance, perceptive ignorance, insightful ignorance.”

That productive ignorance is a communal attribute is a great insight. None of us knows what all of us knows; but we each can have access to what another knows if required. We can ask for it, or more likely just do a Google search. But what none of us knows is beyond language. We cannot ask for it because it hasn’t yet been brought into the intelligible world of language. The process by which the unknown is brought into language is what is meant by scientific method. But as Firestein points out through his case studies and analysis, this process has no fixed rules. Just as language itself has no fixed rules of development, the way in which new knowledge is created, that is, brought into language, is equally amorphous... and even mysterious.

Firestein locates the precise origin of any inquiry in a question. So did Peirce. In science a question is typically stated as an hypothesis, for example: ‘The theory of relativity predicts that gravity will affect the transmission of light. Can this be measured?’ It is the formulation of such hypotheses that is the really intriguing (and unsystematic) part of scientific inquiry. It’s the bit that no one has been able to specify reliably as an algorithm in an ‘expert system.’ While such systems are capable of generating a virtual infinity of inferences, and therefore hypotheses, from existing models and factual knowledge, they are unable to determine which of these is most interesting as a target of inquiry.

The determination of interesting, that is to say important or valuable, questions in science or anywhere else, is a political issue. The community rules. Even if the community is ultimately shown to be in error, it is only the community that decides this. The community may not always be right but it is never wrong. The reason for this apparent contradiction is that it is the community which is the arbiter of standards of rightness and wrongness. And it is these standards that are changing more or less continuously in science, as they also do in all political systems. The criterion for what constitutes good science today is as different from that of the nineteenth century as are the criterion for democratic election in each period.

So science really can’t be a commitment to truth since truth only applies to that which is already formulated within language. Nor is it a commitment to some universal method or standards of research since these change continuously within the scientific community. Rather science is a commitment to the community of scientists; more precisely a commitment to the politics of that community at any given time. Rivalry rather than cooperation and personal disdain rather than admiration are often part of this politics. But scientists, in order to be scientists at all, submit to the ultimate judgements of this community.

Peirce’s friend and collaborator, the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce generalised Peirce’s idea of the scientific community. Royce used the term ‘loyalty to loyalty’ to refer to the kind of communal relations which accommodates even the most contentious disagreements. But there are severe problems with this formulation, among others the implication that the object of loyalty is irrelevant. Loyalty itself thereby becomes an absolute and applies as much to a commitment, say, to a fascist dictator as to the profession of medicine.

Firestein solves this Pericean/Roycean problem by defining the commitment of authentic inquiry to ignorance. Such a commitment is the sign of membership in the community as well as an indication of the activity demanded of those included within it - to bring that which is yet beyond language into language. Such activity does not reduce ignorance. Productive inquiry is much more likely to create yet more uncertainty and doubt, paradoxically expanding the domain of ignorance. A commitment to ignorance is a stand against doctrine, and therefore a stand against those who believe they already know all that needs to be known. But it is also a stand for an inclusive community which admits anyone with doubts.

This is the real power of not knowing - it continuously relativises the very tool it uses, language, to remind both scientists and everyone else that reality always lies beyond what can be said about it.

* Firestein quotes Peirce’s contemporary, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.” But I am fairly certain Peirce made the point first.

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Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Too Stupid to Know You’re Stupid

Joe Bageant returned to his boyhood home in rural Virginia after 25 years to find it ravaged by unemployment, poor health, alcoholism, drug addiction and fundamentalist religion. He traces all this to bad politics. The town is controlled by a mafia of local worthies who have run it into the ground in their own interests. State government collaborates in this destruction through anti-union and other neoconservative legislation. Nationally, the Democratic Party has long ago abandoned the working-class interests of the locals; and Republicans have exploited the political vacuum mercilessly by providing a stream of meaningless slogans and misinformation.

Essentially, Bageant believes that everything that could possibly go wrong with democracy has done so in Winchester, Virginia. He also believes that Winchester is a synecdoche for the entire United States, at least that part of the country that lies between the cities and what hasn’t yet been suburbanised. He wants the urban ‘liberals’ who have chosen to throw towns like Winchester under the bus of globalisation, meritocracy and social change to know that they’re not taking it anymore. They might not know what they want, but they know it isn’t the current state of affairs. And they’ll do just about anything to get even.

As an explanation and prediction of the rise of someone like Donald Trump, Bageant’s book is essential reading. At least a decade before Trump’s political appearance, their economically and intellectually impoverished nihilism was just waiting for his arrival. Today, Trump represents nothing positive to them... except themselves. Hence their intense loyalty to a man who in fact despises them. Bageant makes a compelling case for the systematic and complete corruption of democracy to which Trump is a cogent response not a cause. The folk of the Winchesters throughout the United States want revenge on the entire system; they wouldn’t mind at all if it were destroyed.

However, as a suggestion for what to do about the situation, the book is less than enlightening. Bageant sees education as the solution to the political problem - in the first instance the education of the urbanites who don’t have a clue about the dire condition of their neighbours; and then of the natives of places like Winchester who are unaware of the forces that conspire to oppress them. Unfortunately, education is and always has been a political issue. If democratic politics is corrupt, education is the first casualty, not the solution.

In any case, Bageant doesn’t really help his cause much by his description of what there is in Winchester to educate. He would like the rest of us to have sympathetic feelings for fellow humans who have fallen on hard times. They may have red necks but they also have hearts of gold and deserve a break. Maybe so. But their born-in-the-blood racism, obdurate resistance to comprehending their own interests, and profound ignorance of themselves as well as the world around them aren’t traits likely to ingratiate them to the folk that might help their plight.

Postscript 15Oct20: Things have got considerably worse since Bageant wrote about the place: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireS...

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A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization by Jonathan Kirsch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Charter for Hatred

Jonathan Kirsch is a Jew. This is not incidental to an appreciation of his book. The author of the Apocalypse, like the John of the roughly contemporary gospel to whom the book is historically (and erroneously) attributed, was also a Jew. It probably takes a Jew to understand the real horror of phrases like “the synagogue of Satan.” And it takes a Jew to notice the psychological and sociological subtleties of the conflict between the Judaic traditions of hope and the then recently proclaimed Pauline mandate of faith. If nothing else, the Apocalypse is a case study of a mind caught between Jewish hope and Christian faith. The result is a sort of mindless disgust with the world, a religious nihilism which echoes in the pronouncements of today’s evangelical politicians.

For me the central historical issue of Christianity is the process by which the meek, Jewish Jesus of Mark, the first gospel, became the merciless Christian warrior-king of the Apocalypse, the last book of the New Testament. There may be as much as a century between the two; and the transition from a message of universal salvation to that of almost universal revenge and retribution is startling. What theologians call a ‘tension’ in Christian thought, and the rest of us simply see as a contradiction, is deeply set. Perhaps only fundamentalists take the detail of the Apocalypse seriously; but as Kirsch is keen to demonstrate, its central ideas have had profound and enduring cultural and political consequences.

Arguably the strangest aspect of the Apocalypse is the way it’s arcane symbolism is typically taken by its most ardent readers. On the one hand, the book belies any attempt at the biblical literalism of fundamentalists. It simply cannot be read literally with any coherent meaning. On the other hand, rather than undermining literalist beliefs, the book seems to provoke the most outlandish interpretations of its symbols by true believers so that every age since it was written has been identified as the subject of its ‘prophecies.’ Institutions as diverse as the Roman Empire, Islam, the Catholic Church, the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, and (more recently) the American Democratic Party have all been tagged as the Whore of Babylon which is to be destroyed as the Saviour rolls out from the heavens to carry out mass carnage and start his thousand year Reich (where did you think the Nazi idea of the Third Reich came from?).

Paradoxically the fundamental ambiguity of the Apocalypse may be its greatest attraction to believers. It can be made to mean anything they want it to mean. Equivocations about the blessedness of the meek, the virtue of restraining from retaliatory violence, and the merits of unconditional forgiveness of wrongs committed against one, all clearly stated in the gospels, have limits. At root they all straightforwardly require followers of Jesus to act in the interests of others rather than themselves. As we all know from experience, this demands an incredible effort and often results in at least as much physical distress as spiritual satisfaction. The Apocalypse gives the green light to violence on an unlimited scale. It justifies the resentment and hatred which all those do-gooding parables and weak-willed gospel-stories are bound to generate.

In this sense the Apocalypse is the most human, if also inhumane, of the Christian Scriptures. It is also the most Jewish of the books in the Christian canon. The apocalyptic mode is a standard of Jewish tradition. It pops up every time the Almighty seems to have abandoned Israel to the slings and arrows of natives, invaders, and unsympathetic governments for no discernible reason. Unlike the prophecies of an Isaiah, for example, which call upon Israel to repent its wicked ways, the apocalyptic parts of Daniel, Ezekiel, Baruch and Ezra, and the (non-canonical) book of Enoch are not so much concerned with repentance as they are with relief from oppression. Even the synoptic gospels contain an apocalyptic hint in their reference to the enigmatic Son of Man who will unite all the peoples of the world. This is probably the intellectual seed from which the Apocalypse itself grew.

But there is an important difference between Jewish apocalyptic and the Christian Apocalypse. Jews just want to be left alone and are satisfied with the prospect of communal survival. Christians want to rule the planet, indeed all of creation. Their clear expectation is global regime change. Jewish apocalyptic typically involves the demonstration of the unparalleled majesty of the Hebrew God, which non-Jews can observe and be moved by to improve their behaviour. The Apocalypse predicts annihilation not edification for those who are not faithful members of the Christian tribe. The subsequent history of Christianity provides testimony to the power of this message - not just in the relations between Christians and non-Christians, but also among the perennially numerous Christian factions separated from each other by their antithetical ‘faiths.’

Ultimately no one understands what the Apocalypse has to say about the future, except that there will be winners and losers in the spiritual game. Being on the right side is the only thing that is important. And the sure-fire way of being there is the expression of passionate hatred for those on the other side. Thomas Jefferson thought the author was a maniac; George Bernard Shaw was sure he had been a drug addict; Martin Luther didn’t think he wrote about anything Christian at all. And they weren’t even Jewish.

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Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“I Think That I Think, Therefore I Think That I Am”
- Ambrose Bierce

I am reminded not only of Ambrose Bierce’s aphorism above (which is mentioned by Greene) but also of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment upon visiting a bridge under construction in the North of England. Hearing the almost incomprehensible Scots and Geordie banter among the workers, he remarked ‘Isn’t it amazing what people who talk like that can do?’

It is indeed almost miraculous what human beings can do with language. But many believe they can use language not just to build bridges but to tell the rest of us about ultimate reality. Descartes used language to prove the reality of his own existence in his famous Cogito Ergo Sum. Before him, Anselm of Canterbury used language to demonstrate what he thought was the reality of the divine by simply defining God as ‘that of which nothing greater can be thought’. Brian Green thinks we’ll eventually be able to explain everything about reality - ourselves and God included - if we just tell enough stories about it.

Greene considers himself a reformed reductionist - that is, someone who used to believe in one fundamental story about reality. He now believes that the scientific stories by chemists, physicists, and biologists are not the only stories that are meaningful. “There are many ways of understanding the world,” he says. A non-scientist who reads novels, biographies, and poetry can only agree. What matters for him is that the stories that are told are increasingly consistent and coherent with each other. It is unclear how he proposes to compare, say, Finnegans Wake and the second law of Thermodynamics for consistency and coherence. Nevertheless, this is his measure not just of scientific progress but also of human cultural development.

The story he likes best because of its inclusiveness is that of gravity and entropy. The way he tells it, gravity is the force which sparked the entire cosmos in the Big Bang. A small and statistically unlikely perturbation in the microscopic ball of proto-energy caused that extremely low entropy ball to expand in a billionth of a second to a universe billions of light years in size. The photons and other nuclear material contained in the original singularity are spread through newly existing high-entropy space virtually instantaneously. Ever since, gravity and entropy have been in a continuous battle, driving not just the creation and destruction of galaxies, stars and planets, but also the life that has emerged on the latter, including us. We are little islands of relatively low entropy, contributing the best we can to the eventual heat-death of the universe. Even without our industrial level carbon footprints, we can’t help but turn high quality energy into useless background radiation.

Great story. But here’s a layman’s problem: Gravity hasn’t been considered a force, much less the originary creative force, since Einstein formulated his theory of relativity. Gravity, as I understand it, is a perturbation of space-time. So when Greene states “According to the general theory of relativity, the gravitational force can be repulsive,” I start to get seriously confused. Did space-time exist before the Big Bang? If not, how can gravity be its motivating factor?

And Greene goes on to explain that critical moment of orgasmic cosmic release, “When a tiny speck of space finally makes the statistically unlikely leap to low entropy, repulsive gravity jumps into action and propels it into a rapidly expanding universe—the Big Bang,” I am left speechless as he treats this non-thing of entropy as a substance that colonises the newly formed world. Entropy is not a force or a substance but a descriptive condition. Having it do cosmic battle with another non-force/non-substance like gravity seems to me to be pushing a metaphor beyond its design tolerances.

Is he condescending to popular usage or just being sloppy? In any case, I’d really like to understand how a tiny nick in the constitution of the speck of initial energy could cause an apparent violation of quantum laws of movement wherein light and atomic particles can move millions of time faster than photons (not to mention matter) can travel. His cavalier treatment of time and alternative entropic ‘trials’ before the Big Bang seem to me just hand-waving. I felt like an eager adolescent searching for the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But just when things start to get really hot, Greene changes the subject.

According to this story, if the universe is expanding forever, entropy is the winner of the cosmic game and the universe is effectively eternal. On the other hand, if there is an ultimate cosmic collapse, gravity triumphs. But in the latter case, there would be a limit to gravity’s reign, just as there is in the formation of stars. When densities increase sufficiently, nuclear fusion kicks in, and gravity gets checked and the gravity/entropy “two-step” is ignited anew. So the whole process would start again - and crucially not from the same place as the Big Bang. But this too implies eternity.

Eternity bothers me because it points to something beyond language. It’s an indication, like the word ‘God’, of the ultimate inadequacy of language to describe reality (‘reality’ is also one of those words). I am encouraged that Greene doesn’t think that a single scientific or mathematical story is sufficient and that we must ‘sweep in’ as many accounts of existence as we can, including non-scientific ones. But I despair when someone like Greene thinks that this will improve our understanding of reality. It may help us to stop persecuting each other; it will certainly result in faster, more powerful, and more varied machines and products of all sorts. But it will get us no closer to reality, to that which is permanently beyond language.

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