The Pull Request: Recent Episodes
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Technology, media, culture, religion and the collisions therein, from your utterly basic Cuban Jewish writer-technologist.
Stalin on elections: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how. Internet monetization is somewhat similar: It doesn’t matter who clicks and where, it’s who counts those clicks that matters.
Thoughts to my subscribers on the Pull Request anniversary, and various pseudo-events I've been involved in
On getting COVID with all your Twitter mutuals in a fancy Miami hotel
On sex work, dominating OnlyFans, and the digestive benefits of eating someone else's poop
A review of 'Four Days at the Capitol' and what it says about American politics, plus an invitation to a viewing and interview with the creators
2021 in Pull Request review
The most prominent American kippah-wearer addresses media and Judaism in the time of a cold civil war
Niall Ferguson on free thought, the role of higher education, and his new project: the University of Austin
Why we're always preparing for the wrong catastrophe, the difference between Jews and the Scots, and what's his deal with Fukuyama
Ross Douthat on illness, imprudent rural adventures, and finding God at the end of it all
The Hungarian parliament building on the Danube, one of the weirder detours in this New New Right story.First in a series on the New American Right. In addition to the National Conservative conference next week, as an interesting juxtaposition, I’ll also be attending the national banquet for Chabad, a Hassidic movement known for their engagement with and outreach to the secular world. It should be an interesting subscriber-only Pull Request post next week.
How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.
-Neville Chamberlain’s radio address on the German annexation of the Sudetenland (1938)
The motto of The New York Times, as echoed every morning on its front page, is: “All the news that's fit to print”. In reality though, the publication’s operating principle is “we printed it, so now it’s news”. Getting a write-up in The Times means the polite echelons of society—no matter how long-running, trite, or even scandalous the topic—can now discuss said thing openly.
The latest such elevation of an underground or non-mainstream topic is a long Times Magazine on the right-wing ‘nationalist conservative’ movement, a new, new right quite unlike anything this country has seen since World War II.
(At the bottom of this piece, there’s a reading list of the movement’s leading thinkers. I’ve been following them for a while and even know some of them, so finding them suddenly in the NYT spotlight is doubly interesting.)
Despite the conservative traditionalism, the movement is composed of Very Online People, and the sudden attention dropped like a bomb among its leading lights.1 Rod Dreher (who I’ve interviewed for Pull Request before) was quoted extensively for the piece, and despite some misgivings, was generally positive:
Rod Dreher @roddreherI was nervous about this NYT piece about the postliberal American right and its interest in Hungary, given how unfair most Hungary-focused journalism is, but even though writer Elisabeth Zerofsky took some shots at us, her piece was fair and informative. How the American Right Fell in Love With HungaryAudio Recording by Audmnytimes.comOctober 19th 2021
19 Retweets119 LikesYoram Hazony, author of one of the movement’s reference texts (link below) and who also puts on the movement’s annual powwow (and more on that in a bit), mostly concurred with Dreher:
Yoram Hazony @yhazonyThis is a surprisingly well-researched and balanced NYT essay on the growing rebellion against liberalism among American and European conservatives.
/1 Longform @longform
"The Orban Effect" Inside the right-wing romance With Hungary: https://t.co/oZKjRclazK (@zerofskaya, @NYTMag) https://t.co/jnKx5HovgbOctober 20th 2021
28 Retweets121 LikesAnother important figure here is Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor and author of Why Liberalism Failed, a tour-de-force jeremiad against what liberalism has become in our time (rather than what Mill or Locke once theorized). He was not so amused:
Patrick Deneen @PatrickDeneenThis article is a big mess, in which the author appears to have decided last minute to make it about Hungary, and tried to shoehorn all the other interviews into a narrative in which the subject was never discussed in interviews. Rod Dreher @roddreher
My response to the good @nytimes piece by @zerofskaya on the postliberal American Right and our interest in Hungary. Orban understands the world we live in better than most US conservatives. The future of the US Right is happening in Hungary & Poland. https://t.co/yDr9mgUrn2October 20th 2021
47 Retweets238 LikesAs Pull Request readers know, I too have my qualms with contemporary secular liberalism, and I’m sympathetic to Deneen’s critiques (as is Obama). The Times piece quotes and references him extensively, and rightly so, as he’s perhaps the most cogent critic of liberalism writing today. He summarizes himself best in Why Liberalism Failed:
Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cultures, traditions, places, and relationships, liberalism has homogenized the world in its image—ironically, often fueled by claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.” Having successfully disembedded us from relationships that once made claims upon us but also informed our conception of selfhood, our sense of ourselves as citizens sharing a common fate and as economic actors sharing a common world, liberalism has left the individual exposed to the tools of liberation—leaving us in a weakened state in which the domains of life that were supposed to liberate us are completely beyond our control or governance.
It’s noteworthy that this flavor of conservatism runs very counter to the garden-variety low-taxes libertarianism of the Reagan school. Again Deneen:
The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability … The global market displaces a variety of economic subcultures, enforcing a relentless logic of impersonal transactions that have led to a crisis of capitalism and the specter of its own unraveling.
This novel conservatism possesses an almost Berniebro level of anti-capitalist sentiment, lamenting the wide-scale destruction that (neo)liberalism has wrought on the more traditional bonds that once characterized human life. One can hear more than one echo of Rerum Novarum, the late 19th-century papal encyclical that inveighed against the depredations of industrial capitalism. Bow-tie-wearing DC wonks talking about tax policy this very much is not.
What this school is not is very clear; what this strain of thought actually is is harder to pin down on the conventional political spectrum. Deneen & Co. express a pox-on-both-your-houses bipartisan rejection of liberalism as it exists today, whether left or right:
The ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical liberalism and the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism end up reinforcing each other often go undetected. Although conservative liberals claim to defend not only a free market but family values and federalism, the only part of the conservative agenda that has been continuously and successfully implemented during their recent political ascendance is economic liberalism, including deregulation, globalization, and the protection of titanic economic inequalities. And while progressive liberals claim to advance a shared sense of national destiny and solidarity that should decrease the advance of an individualist economy and reduce income inequality, the only part of the left’s political agenda that has triumphed has been the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy. Is it mere coincidence that both parties, despite their claims to be locked in a political death grip, mutually advance the cause of liberal autonomy and inequality?
One leading New Right voice conspicuously absent from the Times piece (and the upcoming National Conservative conference) is Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule. Another Catholic conservative, he is very publicly an ‘integralist’, a slightly squishy term in a religion populated with them. The three-sentence definition from integralist blog The Josias reads:
Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.
The key point is that politics should be subordinated to moral (or even religious) dictates; that the church/state divide that has typified American life, and legally sealed with Everson v. Board of Education (1947), is overdue for a change.
Vermeule is a prolific writer and tweeter (there’s wifi inside the scriptorium apparently), and he’s written extensively in both niche Catholic blogs and mainstream publications about his views.2 In line with integralist thought, Vermeule rejects constitutional originalism in favor of what he (and others) call ‘common good’ conservatism:
This approach should take as its starting point substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good, principles that officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges) should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution. These principles include respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers’ unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to “legislate morality”—indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority. Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society.
That this represents a total break with the secular Rawlsian liberalism that’s now taken for granted in the West hardly needs to be repeated.
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Michael Dunlop Young, Baron Young of Dartington: Labor activist, sociologist, and coiner of the satirical term ‘meritocracy’. This is a companion piece to my interview with Kathryn Paige Harden, author of The Genetic Lottery, a brilliant rumination on genetics and its implications for our ‘meritocratic’ economy. Due to the complexity of the subject (or my amateurish interviewing and a considerable esprit de l’escalier), I’m appending a commentary on the interview here.
O me! for why is all around us here,
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Idylls of the King’
It’s fairly common for words to go from having a positive or neutral connotation to a negative one. Take the very appropriate example of ‘smug’: it once meant ‘trim, smartly dressed, neat’, and eventually came to mean someone too enamored of their own achievements or stature. The reverse is rarer: we don’t often imbue positive meaning to something that was once a pejorative. A prime example of this linguistic retrofitting is ‘meritocracy’: once a neologism coined in a political dystopia novel meant to satirize the class which it described (a portmanteau of ‘merit’ and ‘aristocracy’), it’s now proudly bandied about by everyone from elites to educators.
Who could possibly be against ‘merit’? It would be like opposing happiness or security. But that’s the genius of this new gloss to the original term: you’re doing all sorts of introductory throat-clearing before you even get to the main point about what ‘merit’ even is, and how our our current conception of it might be lacking.
Take the retrospective comments by Michael Dunlop Young, author of the original The Rise of the Meritocracy, on observing meritocracy be enshrined as the summum bonum in the Blairite politics of his final years:
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
Or to put it more bluntly, picking someone from the Andover-Harvard-McKinsey assembly line isn’t going to help you deal with Pasthun tribesmen in Afghanistan (or anything outside of the elite bubble really), because they’re just hoop-jumping gunners with little in the way of civic virtue or intellectual breadth. To elevate a certain kind of analytical smarts, which happen to work well in a technologically-enabled society of consumerism and transactionalism, as the absolute measuring stick of merit is one-dimensional and, frankly, obtuse.
For most of human history and across many cultures, what defined either moral or civic virtue included a portfolio of qualities, including but not limited to loyalty, earnestness, honesty, steadfastness, abstemiousness, industriousness, grit and many more. Even hard-nosed Machiavelli with his princely virtù stipulated that the ideal leader should possess traits of bravery, skill, forceful dynamism, and a willingness to undertake anything to secure the interests of the state (qualities seemingly absent from our current crop of ‘meritocrats’). Does the SAT or the current batch of fashionable extracurriculars measure any of that, you think?
Worse, the sham meritocracy provides moral justification for whatever feedback loop of nepotism and credentialism ends up locking in what’s now at best an oligarchy.
Again, Dunlop Young with Blair as British PM:
If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.
Or as I wrote in Chaos Monkeys as one of my laws of Silicon Valley: meritocracy is what we use to bless the charade.
One of the high-level moral lessons I drew from Harden’s The Genetic Lottery (as well as related works like Freddie deBoer’s The Cult of Smart) was that we need to take a broader view of human moral value. We have equated the value and dignity of a person with their value to the economy in a way no politics or religion before us ever has.
Again Smith:
It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.
What’s wrong with being a welder or skilled machinist? I mean that completely non-ironically. They make good money, and their skills are much in demand. The well-pump guy on Orcas Island (where I once lived) made a bundle1, lived in a paradise, and had a life that most of the frazzled, anxious ‘smart’ Silicon Valley people could only dream of. Why would we maintain an educational policy that forces that guy into getting some BS (pun intended) degree that will leave him in massive debt? What’s so damn magical about ‘knowledge work’ (read: looking at screens all day) that we feel every member of society must partake to feel fully human?2 A better vision of education (one enunciated very clearly by Austen Allred of Lambda School in his Pull Request interview) is one where every individual is offered the ideal track for their own prosperity and human flourishing, and that’s not necessarily the track the DC elites who make education policy took to get where they are.
I would advocate for a complete abandonment of the term ‘meritocracy’, or a return to its original satirical meaning. Meritocracy, as it actually exists in the world, is bad actually. And thinking that it has anything to do with actual merit is like thinking ‘communism’ is actually about egalitarian communes. Let’s stop being naive (or deceptive) about it.
Ok, but what do we do about those people who are inclined to the intellectual or technical side of education? We are not launching some Ted Kaczynski-esque Butlerian Jihad against technology anytime soon, and we’ll indeed need engineers and biologists and physicians aplenty. How can we even tell where someone would flourish most, whether skilled craftsman or programmer? The moral reorientation I (and Harden to my reading) call for above would be at best gradual: what do we do about the controversies happening right now around equity and selective schooling?
Here of course is where we get into the more practical (and controversial) aspects of Harden’s book, issues she does not shy away from (again, I highly recommend it). Figure 8.3 in the chapter ‘Alternative Possible Worlds’ summarizes well both reality and Harden’s view:
Figure 8.3 from Harden. The circle is someone less educationally-inclined, and the triangle is someone more so. The curve is the frequency distribution of educational outcomes.Above we have what’s more or less the status quo right now, which is that those with a high penchant for education manage to more or less find those resources (either privately, or via the public school system), and everyone performs somewhat up their ability.
Alternative #2 is one idealized outcome: given smarter public policy as a result of sorting out the impacts of both genetics and environment, everyone is pushed to the educational maximum. The average outcome is higher for all concerned, but so is inequality of outcome. Harden references a common online meme about equity to make a point about how equity should work.
Of course, the meme is somewhat inaccurate in that, along certain dimensions like education, the outcomes might not be the same for everyone; rather, public policy has bolstered everyone up to a common level of flourishing in all its forms.
Alternative #1 is what we’re actually doing now: focusing so much on driving precisely equal outcomes, even if it means outright hamstringing potential top performers. The average society-wide performance does indeed go up, but the variance in outcome is squeezed down to a minimum. Excellence, in all its forms, suffers. That world looks more like this trolly version of the above meme:
Consider a very close-to-home San Francisco drama: for the past year and a half, the SFUSD school board has been busily engaged wrecking the city’s one merit-based public school, Lowell High School. The entrance exam was originally suspended using the COVID pandemic as pretext, but many (including myself) suspected that was simply a setup for another maneuver in the ‘equity’ playbook. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened and school board leaders like Ali Collins and Gabriela Lopez waged a long-running campaign against the exam-based admissions of Lowell.
Before my soul couldn’t take it anymore, I used to dial into the SFUSD board meetings via Zoom. When the issue of Lowell came up (and it was often postponed in a passive-aggressive move to table the issue), it was absolutely heart-wrenching. Parents would put their kids on, and and they’d talk about how much they were looking forward to go to Lowell. One kid, I forget his name, came on and in the earnest tone of an anxious eighth-grader and said: my parents aren’t rich, I studied hard, this is my one way out. And they listened to all that feedback from parents and students, and went ahead and wrecked the school a few months later anyhow.
In New York, outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was phasing out the city’s gifted programs3. There might be hope however: incoming NYC mayor Eric Adams has vowed to restore the city’s gifted programs, and the SF school board responsible for the Lowell demolition is currently facing a recall election. Broadly, parents across the nation are rebelling against school administrators too eager to experiment with the education of other people’s children.
If we’re going to create a mandarin class of the purely intellectually endowed (possibly at the expense of other virtues), well then…let’s fucking go. Let’s do it for real then and select an elite picked on brains alone. I suspect the outcome will not be as snow-white as many detractors of merit-based admissions assume (as indeed, the workforces of Silicon Valley companies reflect).
The real beneficiaries of the current equity program are rich mediocrities who will manage to coast ahead of the poor, smart and determined kids who would otherwise academically eat them alive and ultimately replace them in the elite firmament. Recall again that Lowell was majority Asian, and whites were actually under-represented (the school was 82% minority). The animus against Asians in higher education bears an obvious comparison to the quotas around Jews in the Ivy League that prevailed well into the 1960s (and at schools like Yale who are now the biggest enforcers of the equity agenda). The difference now is that discriminatory admissions is not done in the name of WASP xenophobia, but in the putative name of ‘equity’. We live in the Golden Age of Irony if nothing else.
For all the supposed meritocracy—a charade even the left plays along with—our society resembles an oligarchy far more than the aristocracy of the meritorious. Aristocracies, for as odious as they might seem to democratic minds, at least possessed a certain level of noblesse oblige to wider society, something seemingly absent in the current crop of meritocrats. Individual accomplishment within a collective baseline of universal human dignity and possibility should be our goal; not a forced equality of outcome imposed on the middle and lower classes that the affluent evade via wealth and private education.
In the end, a society that makes equity the enemy of excellence will not produce much of either. And a society that only grants dignity to those of service to an increasingly specialized economy will eventually be rejected by those deemed inadequate by their supposed meritocratic betters. Arguably, that’s exactly what we’re seeing with the rise of populism all over the world. Such political dramas don’t typically end with the feel-good vibes of online equity memes.
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1I paid $130/hour for his services and he was booked out weeks ahead. He’d disappear to go fishing in Alaska at random times and you just had to deal. He had a comfortable house, family, zero concerns about crime or affording anything, and brewed beer in his spare time. What do I put in my LinkedIn to land his gig?
2A fascinating rumination on the nature of work and how the manual trades are studiously dismissed by the college crowd is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Shepherd. Shepherd, who held a PhD and worked as a policy wonk inside a think tank, left all that behind to open a motorcycle shop.
3From the linked NYT piece: “Though about 70 percent of the roughly 1 million public school students in New York are Black and Latino, about 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes are white or Asian American.” Note how Asians get bucketed together with whites to give the impression that there’s some sort of overt segregation going on. A similar split happens when Silicon Valley companies report diversity stats, and Asians suddenly don’t ‘count’ as minority.
Kathryn Paige Harden is a professor of psychology at University of Texas at Austin and an eminent researcher on the topic of behavioral genetics. Recently she published The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, a fascinating book that explores both the science and politics of genetics.
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Must I at length the sword of justice draw?
Oh curst effects of necessary law!
How ill my fear they by my mercy scan,
Beware the fury of a patient man.-John Dryden, ‘Absalom and Achitophel’
Shortly after the publication of my memoir Chaos Monkeys about my time in the early days of Facebook’s ads team, I was doing a media hit and was introduced as a ‘Faceboo…
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The heavens declare the glory of God,
the sky proclaims His handiwork.-Psalms 19:1
(Epitaph on Wernher von Braun’s grave.)
My religious cri de coeur, ‘Why Judaism? On abandoning secular modernity,’ did rather well last week. I received many DMs of support from Jews, one anti-Semitic piece of hate mail (I think that’s on the conversion checklist), and some ribbing from proud secular liberals who felt their worldview axiomatically cannot be opted out of.
One issue I did not address, but which I often get asked as the second question after ‘Conversion? WTF?’ is ‘Do you believe in God?’
Here on the pixelated pages of The Pull Request we will finally provide an answer to this timeless riddle.
First, an asideAs everyone who reads Pull Request knows, I (and others) have gone mad with the idea that Christianity is so intellectually fundamental to the Western worldview, even secular people have trouble escaping its assumption (here’s an interview with the pope of post-Christian secularism, Tom Holland).
As an example of this, consider how the word ‘faith’ is used almost synonymously with ‘religion’ in the English-speaking world. But faith, as it’s being referenced here, is a strong component of only certain flavors of religion. Or even certain sub-flavors of certain religions. The strong faith relationship with Jesus—Jesus died for my sins! Jesus saved me!—is a very particular type of religion; if you take that as the general experience of Christianity, never mind religion as a whole, you’re either accidentally (or willfully) mischaracterizing the human experience of religion more broadly. I think I can count with the fingers of one hand the number of times the word ‘faith’ was used in the year-long Jewish conversion course I took which involved hours upon hours of hermeneutical debate of cryptic texts. The personal experience of God wasn’t even a footnote, much less relationships with his prophets or intercessors.
Even Islam, which reveres Mohammed as humanity’s great prophet, does not think him divine as (most) Christians do Jesus. In Christianity, God has assumed human form, and that emanation of the divine can have personal relationships with his adepts. Even non-Christians understand this, so when I’m asked “Do you believe in God?” the implicit question question is ‘Do you feel this magic man is part of your life and do you talk to him?’
I just got here to Judaism, so to speak, so I feel a little uneasy generalizing my limited view for a general audience (though suddenly having pugnacious opinions about Judaism might be a mark of my final conversion). But that is, ahem, not exactly how Jews think about God and their relationship with that entity, whatever its nature and whether it exists at all (and some Jews think it does not). I can’t be expected to disabuse readers of their conception of the divine, particularly one fed to them at an impressionable age by the seductive likes of 80s and 90s-era televangelists, in a few paltry paragraphs. But hopefully this disclaimer gets us past some of the theological chitchat that precedes this question in 21st-century America.
God, actuallyI find it intriguing that the most pro-science people take a very empirical “Let’s find God in the world” tack when discussing the issue of his existence. If God were to exist in our physical universe where the Plank Constant is just right to support the life-filled planet we see, it would be at an abstract level of an as-yet undiscovered particle or field or something else altogether. To this experimental physics PhD dropout, the question seems less Why don’t we detect God? and more one of How could we ever possibly detect such a thing with such relatively rudimentary experimental science as we have?
I hate the term ‘agnostic,’ as it seems a kind of half-assed skepticism that doesn’t want to go all the way to nihilist atheism. My position is more of a I don’t think the question is even answerable, so why bother asking?
Asking me to find traces of God’s existence would be like asking me to prove that there’s not a single live chicken in the entire Empire State Building. This would be nigh impossible, as I’d have to monitor every corner of an immense edifice at once to really definitively say. So I’m just not going to have opinions on whether chickens exist there or not.
The counter-argument to that of course is: Well, negatives are hard to prove, while positives are easy (i.e., I only have to find one counter-example of a chicken on the 92nd floor bathroom). Why should I have to prove a negative about God? It’s you who has to prove Empire State Building chickens aren’t a patent absurdity.
Which really means the question devolves to, who has the burden of proof here? The religious in a universe we assume to be godless, or the atheists in a world we assume has some something driving this order-out-of-chaos we see? We observe seeming miracles like babies self-organizing out of cells, seeds growing into enormous redwoods, the very universe itself existing; which side has a case to make?
Other than creationist nitwits, not many cases are made for the existence of God these days. The bookish religions like Catholicism and Judaism have ceded the material realm to science centuries ago (despite claims to the contrary); they’re happy to live in a purely metaphysical realm, and their claims now live there alone. The case against God typically varies according to the God in question; we put the Big Guy on trial according to whatever his divine rap sheet says.
Consider the common atheist attack of theodicy, or the problem of evil, i.e., why do bad things happen to good people? While evil in the world is something that every religion takes on in some form or another, it’s a much tougher nut to crack when you believe ‘God is love’, as recounted in the Gospel of John. If God is love, why do we have pediatric cancer wards in hospitals, where innocents die tragic and horrible deaths? Why did Kevin Cosgrove, by all accounts a loving family man, die in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, screaming out ‘Oh God!’ into the phone as the building collapsed around him? You could of course cite countless other examples of innocence cruelly punished and persecuted.
From my reading of the Hebrew bible, the Jewish notion of God is something other than pure, unadulterated love. But to prove Godwin right yet again, let’s take the Jewish spin on this question: Where was God at Auschwitz? Pretty absent, from the looks. But he was also pretty absent in other bloody episodes in Jewish history, like the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans and the destruction of the Second Temple, which involved enormous amounts of slaughter and destruction and set the Jews on 2,000 years of exile. God abandoning his chosen people (usually preceded by the reverse) is a running motif of the entire Hebrew bible; the Holocaust is a barbaric tragedy that defies understanding, but it’s not the first time the Jews found themselves abandoned to a horrifying fate.
Jews celebrating Yom Kippur during the Second Temple. From one of the thousands of paintings of 1st century Jewish life used in the animated film Legend of Destruction (2021). Click image for a trailer.Christianity however is about happy endings; it’s about the happiest ending of all, which is the coming of Christ the Messiah and the Kingdom of God, either in this life or the next.1 Christians believe God walked on the Earth in the form of a historical Jesus during a time about which we have much recorded history and archaeological remains. Many churches in Europe even claim to have artifacts of his divine existence, in the form of wood from the Cross or vials of his blood. In a religion where the central rite of the Catholic eucharist involves drinking Christ’s blood and eating of his body right here on Earth, how indeed do we have kids dying of brain tumors?
Which is a long way of saying, while theodicy remains a massive problem in Christianity (and one of its great critiques), this might be less of an issue in other religions where the divine is not expected to provide us happy endings in life. A religion where the focus is instead on avoiding sad endings by holding up our end of a covenantal bargain that was struck 3,000+ years ago on Mount Sinai (if you’re the sort of Jew who believes it happened, and some do not). A religion where we are enjoined to ‘remember Amalek!’ and guard against the great enemy of our people and defend against their murderous aggressions.2
In that view, any justice or peace in this world will be rendered by us, not Jesus or God’s direct divine presence on Earth. To the extent God’s divine will is expressed on Earth, it’s through human action in this world; the messiah seems to be taking his sweet time. Which is why, to suddenly cite a very contemporary example, we must cyber-attack the Iranian nuclear reactors to thwart Amalek and another genocidal Persian plot yet again.3
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While messianism of course exists inside the Jewish tradition, by and large God is not bringing rainbows and unicorns and world peace any day now. Rather, the big ‘He’ is a distant abstraction that’s a counterparty to a pretty spare set of moral axioms that we humans are bad at following. Like some landlord who gets snippy about a tenant’s maintenance request when that tenant is behind on rent, the Jewish God is rather more aloof, judgy, and mercurial. God’s wrath in the Bible is often a stand-in for the fate of the Jewish people itself, much as Americans bemoan the sad state of their politics due to our abandonment of our covenantal deal. By my lights, the theodicy problem is a bit less damning of God in Judaism than it is in Christianity.
All that said, let’s consider the theodicy problem anyhow, as a particular case of a more general “Does God exist and intervene in the world of humanity?” question, which I do think is a good one even outside a Christian context.
The only solutions to the theodicy problem seem to be threefold:
Either we relinquish the (anthropocentric) notion that the universe will naturally tend toward justice and human flourishing, and that God acts to punish the evil and reward the good. In other words, while there may yet be some pervasive life-giving force that animates the wondrous complexity of life we see around us, balancing the moral books inside the world of Homo sapiens sapiens may not be as big a priority as we selfishly think. Whatever cosmic forces conspired to give us the periodic table of elements and French bulldogs and Fermi-Dirac statistics doesn’t directly care about human well-being (at least no more than it does any other species). There is some driving logic and force to the universe, but we’re not the headline item we’d like to think; a just human world is in our hands, not God’s.
Or, we take the simply incomprehensible human suffering involved in something like the Holocaust and amortize it out through the centuries and try to give it some logic; this terrible thing X happened but good thing Y happened after, so it’s all part of God’s long game. I find this a perverse utilitarianism, and a little bit too ‘just so’ to pass serious intellectual muster.
Or, we take the out provided by the Anthropic principle, which says that we’re asking questions about whether there’s God in a universe because we happen to inhabit one with physical laws that allow life to evolve and ask that big question. We can posit there’s some driving force that created life and that reverses entropy into order for seemingly fluke-y reasons (while still respecting thermodynamics of course), but we also might be deluding ourselves.
We can even choose to call that thing ‘God’ or ‘Hashem’ or ‘Cthulhu’ or whatever we like, but whatever that it is, we should consider ourselves like lottery winners lucky to have won a universe we can puzzle over. To give it much more purpose than that is an enormous error of sample bias: We’re not considering all the universes and times with different non-life-creating assumptions and physical constants, because they never produced the human life that asks these questions on Substack.
My intuitive take on all this is that if there is a God operating in the physical universe we see, it must be such a transcendent force so beyond our limited human experience, we’d never be able to ‘prove’ anything about it … at least not for a very, very long time of mental, technical and cultural evolution. All of our ancestors were banging rocks together on open plains as hunter-gatherer bands not more than a few thousand years ago. To quote Vonnegut: “Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.”
Ultimately, God is no more true or false than ‘democracy’ or FICO scores or oil futures, and look how many humans run around like agitated ants because of those concepts. Intangible things become real when enough humans act like they’re real.
As a thought experiment here, consider the humble nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, which is a much-studied model organism in biology. The nervous system of C. elegans has been completely mapped down to the individual neuron, as has its genome. Does our friend the nematode ask itself whether humans exist, and just how is it that their entire nematode universe is constantly being rocked by these enormous, divine-seeming beings?
We’d be about as likely to understand whatever God-like thing might exist as that nematode is to understanding us or the Electoral College, which is not at all. The gap in mental ability between C. elegans and us, as great as it might seem, is surely less than the gap between us and whatever God-like thing is out there driving all this, whether that’s some novel uber-particle, a hyper-advanced alien species, or whatever else. We’d no more be able to make sense of ‘God’ than the nematode will figure out the human culture that resulted in his species being used for genetics experiments in research labs. Both gaps, the real worm/human one and this hypothetical human/God one, are just too immense to be bridged by the inferior species in question.
To be absolutely clear, I salute the human urge to explore and explain the universe, and think we should be doing more of it; our curious, meddlesome species should poke and pry the ends of the earth and the solar system and beyond. But I find it more than a little cheeky when a species of hairless apes that figured out antibiotics and genes and the full implications of relativity only a few decades ago suddenly declares “Yup, we know everything about the origins of this immense universe, despite barely having stepped foot off our rock.” And by the way, in addition to claiming to have figured out the intricate clockwork of the universe with our big brains, our brilliant species still flips out like chimpanzees over optical illusions such as the ones my five-year-old loves. I think we’re a little high on our own supply here; a certain amount of epistemic humility and understanding of just how little we understand should push us toward less dispositive conclusions about the true nature of the universe.
The truly materialist anti-anthropocentric view here would be skeptical of the reasoning abilities of a species whose major issue right now seems to be its addiction to the blinking lights of a thing called Facebook. To discard any notion of God in the universe, you have to enthrone humans and their grand intelligence in that role instead, and I think the throne is a bit too big for us at the moment.
Sure, the ‘man in the sky’ vision of God is silly, and no doubt some credulous believers have that conception in their heads, but it’s a lame atheist counter-argument when you attack only the weakest versions of your opponent’s arguments. It’s a rather different matter to take on (say) physicist Paul Davies and his various ruminations on how the universe is arranged such that we can even sit around and ask these questions (just to cite one example of science-inspired metaphysical speculation). ‘The man in the sky’ is easy to debunk; why the fine-structure constant is 1/137, just the right value to make physics and biology work, is a harder nut to crack.
Ultimately, at our level of technology, God is no more true or false than ‘democracy’ or FICO scores or oil futures, and look how many humans run around like agitated ants because of those concepts. Intangible things become real when enough humans act like they’re real. In our species’ feverish drive to imbue symbols of our own devising with as much reality as a pouncing tiger (and often generating as much emotion), asking if those abstractions really ‘exist’ amounts to little more than philosophical repartee.
I’ll (once again) draw on a hopefully illuminating example from the Jewish world:
Judaism has had two temples, the first a somewhat legendary one involving David and Solomon, and a more recent one of very historical reality which the Romans destroyed in 70 AD (you can see the violent shenanigans in the Arch of Titus in Rome to this day).
At the center of the Second Temple was the so-called Holy of Holies, the holiest site of Judaism even now (though where it sits on the Temple Mount is still debated). That space, toward which every Jew then and now prays … was empty. The Ark of the Covenant of Indiana Jones fame (which stood in the First Temple) had long ago been lost during the Babylonian exile. The sanctuary had a bare dais, a sort of negative-space symbol for the ark, and not much else.
Witnessing someone who lives in our smartphone era—LinkedIn profile, mortgage, Amazon Prime membership, the full catastrophe—pressing their heads to the pavement in the direction of Jerusalem’s Holy of Holies is a memorable experience. Doing it yourself even more so.
Secular modernity stands like the Second Temple, with an empty room at its center. The relics of God’s direct involvement on Earth in the form of the Mosaic tablets, if they ever existed, are long gone. The last prophets who served as mouthpieces of God, whether they were even real prophets or not, were centuries ago and exist now only in ancient cautionary texts. It is up to us to symbolically fill that space with something worth our devotion and praise.
Nihilism, true existential nihilism, is something most of us can’t really live with for any length of time. Do it long enough, and you’ll end up like me strung out on SSRIs and benzos for months until you find some way out of it, assuming you ever do. In reality, we all populate that sanctuary with something; none of us has an empty Holy of Holies.
One of the most striking moments in the Jewish liturgy is when the rituals of that Second Temple and its Holy of Holies are replicated in the synagogue Judaism we see today. During Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, a rabbi will mimic the high priest of old, and invoke God’s name in public. It’s one of the rare occasions in modern Judaism where Jews will bow and prostrate4 themselves fully.
Witnessing someone who lives in our smartphone era—LinkedIn profile, mortgage, Amazon Prime membership, the full catastrophe—pressing their heads to the pavement in the direction of Jerusalem’s Holy of Holies is a memorable experience. Doing it yourself even more so: It’s jarringly self-abasing; you stand up and feel a head rush the moment you recover your usual standing altitude. You can see why there was so much bowing and kowtowing and prostration in the ancient worlds of the bible, or more traditional societies before modernity. It makes you feel small and submissive; you’ve definitely declared to yourself and everyone around you ‘I submit to the object of my obeisance.’
Religious imponderables around God’s existence or the explainability of evil are nice and all, but ultimately mostly irrelevant to day-to-day life. What’s inside that sanctuary is what really matters, even if its contents are often mysterious even to ourselves. But when the name of your God is called out—be it capitalism, consumerism, social justice, or an idol you’ve erected to yourself—and you reflexively genuflect in reverence, you’ll know the choice you’ve made.
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1Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, makes the interesting point that Christian narratives are intrinsically different from Jewish ones. Consider how the Gospels are providential and uplifting: Christ has died! Christ has risen! Christ will come again! Even the trippy final book of the New Testament, Revelation, tells of a new Garden of Eden emerging after all the apocalyptic drama.
The Torah ends in ambiguity and suspense: Moses dies within view of the Promised Land, addresses each of the twelve tribes and deals with some estate planning, and then THE END, roll credits. This epic exodus drama that started with a promise made to Abraham and veered through a parade of strife, doubt, destruction, redemption, and general mayhem, and then that’s it: the Jews finally get to their birthright and who knows what’s next. Forget happy endings; it’s not even narratively a clean end. It’s like the mysterious last page of a journal kept by a shipwrecked sailor discovered on some desert island, detailing years of resourceful survival and concluding with a comment about the coconuts: Holy fucking shit what happened next??
Whatever the supposed divine succession that happened here, the two testaments are not dealing with the same God. If ‘God’ at the end of the day represents the organizing narrative and moral arc of the people who worship that deity, then the Jewish and Christian worlds are operating off of very different scripts.
2“Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt—undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the LORD your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” Deuteronomy 25:17-19
3At some point I’m going to muster the courage to write something about how the Western world’s (mis)understanding of Israeli foreign policy is based on a Christian notion of universalism and forgiveness, two forces relatively much weaker in the Jewish worldview. For now however, Meir Soloveichik’s take on the differing notions of Christian and Jewish justice in armed conflict, ‘The Virtue of Hate,’ will have to do.
4Due to the Judaic hyper-allergy to anything even vaguely smacking of idolatry, the religion isn’t big on kneeling and bowing in general. The casus belli of the Esther story that inspired the Purim holiday is Esther’s father Mordechai refusing to bow to the Persian vizier Haman (though the reasons why, like almost everything in Judaism, are still debated).
The facade of Tempel Synagogue, Krakow, Poland
I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day … and with those who are not with us here this day.
-Deuteronomy 29:13-14
You will watch your parents die and be buried. You will watch your newborn child emerge in a messy circus of heaving grunts and high-pitched wailing. You will watch your dreams and projects dashed, only to wake the next day and greet the fruits of your failure anew and cobble a life out of them all the same. You will punctuate the cavalcade of events with moments of transcendent meaning that will linger in memory like fading signposts during that final moment: your death.
Navigating that journey without a religious tradition is like trying to cross open country without a path: you can do so, but you’ll do lots of stumbling and very likely lose your way. Trying to get through dense woods—a serious depression, the death of a loved one—without a marked trail requires the most arduous labor for the merest progress. Furthermore, if you tackle these wilds in their raw and uncleared state, you will almost certainly do so alone. Going off-trail means a hard solitary journey, while the marked trail involves communal groups headed in your same direction. What some might describe as a cultural rut—some timeworn lane that limits movement—might just be the only thing that guides you through this daunting wilderness of life whose many paths all end in the same destination.
To DIY your own world of life signifiers, you have to think you can improve on a bar mitzvah as a coming-of-age ritual, on shabbat as a form of digital detox, and as teshuvah as a way to grapple with your guilt (or analogs in other religious traditions). Many do of course, and every trendy San Franciscan has their personal regimen of special diets, meditation schedules, intermittent fasts, escapes to nature, a canon of mimetic culture usually drawn from their online feeds, a smattering of trendy texts that inform their values, and some slew of Netflix shows that serve as cultural touchpoints with others in their cohort.1
This is all in keeping with the current liberal project’s moral goal, which is creating lives devoid of any unchosen obligations and absolutely rife with chosen identities of fanciful and recent coinage. The problem is that it’s the unchosen obligations—or the obligations chosen but whose downstream responsibilities cannot be unchosen—that will give us the only real meaning in life. Family, children, our hometowns, our childhoods, our ethnic identity (if we have one), or the chosen-but-undoable commitments—marriage, joining the military, that company we start, religious faith—are the defining obligations where our selves really play out.
If I were to go back and say one thing to my younger self as a warning from the future, it’s this: the eventual cost of optionality in life—all the commitments you don’t make to preserve your ability to instantly change course—is usually not worth the upside that optionality eventually produces. And even when that optionality is rich indeed (and I know a thing or two about the exploding value of literal financial options), your commitment to that remunerative course, fully cognizant of your wider obligations, will serve you better than the anxious FOMO-ing of the hyper-optimizer. Which is a long way of saying that at some point you do have to ‘choose a hill to die on,’ because if you don’t, you won’t really ever have lived at all. Here, I will attempt to lay out why you should also do so, and why I chose the Jewish hill that I did.2
Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, Maurycy Gottlieb (1878)
Every society needs a metaphysics that allows it to have moral and political conversations with itself. Liberalism’s preferred metaphysical framework of utilitarianism—in effect, ethics by Excel spreadsheet—is at best a simplistic hack that illuminates some trade-off, much as microeconomics can inform the pricing of Starbucks’ various coffee sizes. That’s assuming society can even do the hard math of exchanging one type of human well-being (or even entire lives) against others in a rational way.
It’s more than a little pathetic watching an avowedly atheist materialist society, whose epistemology ends at empiricism, play at metaphysics. It makes them suck even at empiricism, as reality must be warped to suit whatever non-empirical argument they’re incapable of expressing any other way.
Consider the epistemic chaos in the United States as every side tries to ‘win’ COVID, and show that their side’s interpretation--vaccine mandates, mask mandates, no mandates, ivermectin, COVID zero, my cousin’s friend’s swollen balls, whatever--aligns with empirical reality, which is the only mode of reasoning about even immaterial questions. Thus the constant citation of half-assed studies (many later corrected or retracted) attempting to marshal evidence for what are effectively moral or religious stances3.
The questions we should be asking are the ones that secular modernity doesn’t even possess the moral vocabulary to discuss anymore:
Do we sacrifice the old for the sake of educating the young during a pandemic?
What is the duty of the citizen to the state, and does that include collective sacrifice like vaccination?
What is the duty of the state to the citizen in presenting policy as truthfully as possible, rather than as a purportedly noble lie?
To what common good should the state intervene in our lives?
Toward what common good should we all be striving?
The answers to those questions are not to be found in any iffy study those doing online COVID battle could cite, and even our wider political culture is bereft of any coherent philosophical platform. Figures like John Rawls and Robert Nozick once provided something like a cogent political worldview (though it took Rawls several hundred pages of Harvard-level disquisition and ‘veils of ignorance’ analogies to restate Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Matthew 7:12).
But that’s all gone now, and there’s nobody even remotely in the position of a Rawls. For the first time in my life, no political faction in the West has anything like a generative vision of the future.4 Your point on the current political spectrum is defined by the year to which you’d like to somehow magically return society: 2009→Obama-ite; 1952→Conservative; 1984→Reagan nostalgist; and so it goes.
It may well be the case that liberalism is unsustainable without a real illiberal antagonist. If none exists, one will be invented. Each political side now perpetually assures us the other side is prepping for tyranny at any moment. The thought that our government, which bungled both a pandemic response and a war against a medieval religious sect, would be capable of iron-fisted autocracy in a modern country of 330 million seems … almost wishfully ambitious in its fear.
To the extent there’s anything like a forward-looking plotline in our national conversation, it’s the old fallbacks of every (post) Christian society in a tizzy of panicked confusion: millenarian brooding about a coming apocalypse, and revivalist fervor around some utopian project or another.5 Beyond the latest episode in the political telenovela—Russiagate! QAnon!—what else do we talk about other than the zealous demands of wokeness and the perils of climate change?
For the first time in my life, no political faction in the West has anything like a generative vision of the future. More and more, secular modernity looks like a shaky edifice of convoluted fantasies built over an abyss.
Leaving the elevated realm of politics for the more quotidian one of personal morality and rule of law, matters aren’t going much better.
Consider for a moment the Noahide laws of Judaism, the basic moral principles thought to apply to all humanity. In addition to the usual proscriptions around murder, theft, and adultery, we have a very unique one: the requirement to establish courts of justice to adjudicate human behavior. Without that, in the Jewish mind, humanity would live in brutish savagery.
How does our society rate against the Noahide Laws? What are our courts of justice?
Nowadays, our judges are mostly narcissistic sociopaths gaming Twitter’s engagement algorithms to get someone fired over some perceived moral lapse (this week, it was over another confused encounter involving dog-walking). This week’s online Hester Prynne was instantly fired by a corporate management happy to consider an online mob’s verdict as binding as anything from the Supreme Court. Another such duet of mob outrage coupled with corporate cowardice led to my firing from Apple (that time via the internal vector for mob mayhem, Slack).
This moral cowardice is ironic in a corporate world suddenly bursting with people with ‘ethics’ or ‘equity’ in their job titles. Mostly, they’re charlatans regurgitating the improvised tropes of whatever faddish academic or corporate cult has sprung up to fill the God-sized hole at the center of liberalism.
Meanwhile, politicians advocate for more and more public sacrifice around COVID while skirting their own restrictions, and the only person sitting in jail for the Afghanistan fiasco is the one officer who dared demand accountability for it. There is no real public court of justice or moral code in our modern-day world anymore, and deep down we all know it.6 Our current society wouldn’t pass the last and arguably most important of Noah’s Seven Laws for minimally civilized behavior.
The core problem here is that at the heart of any real political or moral reasoning, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re left pointing at a document or set of principles and arguing by sheer faithful assertion alone: These principles we believe to be true, and we will make decisions of life-and-death import according to these moral foundations. If you disagree, sorry, we don’t have much to talk about as we simply live in different moral universes.
Faced with the secular alternative of bitchy Twitter foodfights and ‘cancel culture,’ I choose to believe there are sterner (and wiser) judges in this universe than the blue checks of Twitter and the ‘People’ department at companies like Apple. More and more, secular modernity looks like a shaky edifice of convoluted fantasies built over an abyss, and I for one am tired of pretending to take it seriously. Those who reject the modern sham and wish to reason seriously about politics or morality must necessarily strike a pose—half-pointing, half-saluting—toward some set of sacred principles; on the political front, I choose to salute the United States Constitution (so long as we can keep it); on the moral front, I gesture toward the bible of the Hebrews.
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We have arrived at a unique point in history where many Americans love nothing more than themselves, and the only functioning organization that touches their lives is a corporation. That’s all good and well as a single striver sprinting along our treadmill of an economic system; the above realization takes on a more somber tone when confronted with the only form of immortality available to most of us: our children.
Daddy, why is that man living in the bus stop? Daddy, why are you gone working so much? Daddy, can I read this book or watch this show? Daddy, what’s this flag I’m holding?
Suddenly questions like the ones above go from the heated but ultimately vain stuff of Twitter threads to daunting conversations with the one thing left in the world you’d sacrifice yourself to save. Those big, brown eyes staring at you demand an answer to those questions; her absolute receptiveness to your answers yokes you with a responsibility to posterity that hedonistic modernity has distracted you from your entire life. What do you put in that mind that will outlast yours?
Nowadays, the exercise seems less one of curating a personal time capsule, and more that of a shipwrecked sailor trying to salvage what’s worth keeping from a vessel (or a society) that’s foundered on a rocky shore. Much like that sailor would, we agonize over what books, and ultimately what stories, we choose to salvage and keep on reading and repeating to one another.
Consider another example drawn from the Jewish world: Most of the planet commemorates the Holocaust on January 27th, the day the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Every country considers that Holocaust Remembrance Day, except the Jewish state of Israel itself. They commemorate the Holocaust on the 27th day of the Jewish month of Nisan, the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when poorly-armed Jews fought to the death against the Nazi war machine rather than passively submit to annihilation. The nascent state of Israel thought it important to enshrine that as the nation’s Holocaust narrative (as Yom HaShoah), rather than a narrative that had Jews passively saved, much too late, by an outside power.
As frivolous as they sometimes might seem, the stories we tell ourselves are what we ultimately become as people and a civilization. There’s perhaps no more important choice we face as stewards of the present than what we pass on to the future as shared narrative. We all subconsciously realize that, which is why the debates over The 1619 Project or Critical Race Theory have grown so heated and deafening. With the grim examples of slavery and the Holocaust in mind, let’s revisit the question: what then do we put in our children’s heads?
For me, the choice is very simple. My children are the descendants of Holocaust survivors, refugees from an Islamic revolution, and exiles from two Communist revolutions (both Russian and Cuban flavors). The 20th century, in all its turmoil, flows through their veins in the oddest of admixtures. This extended family has seen many a government fall and world implode. Many times in our collective memory, what once seemed like the bedrock firmament of a sane society was soon demolished for a fresh hell of human devising. In a present moment that seems similarly pregnant with change, I will invite my children to open one of humanity’s oldest body of works, and once again read about…
Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi (1620) …the cunning ruthlessness of Judith willing to do anything to save her tribe; the self-indulgent hubris of David; the righteous guile of Esther; the genocidal wrath of Jacob’s sons avenging the rape of their sister Dinah; the fierce defiance of the Maccabees hellbent on saving their tradition; the murderous envy of Cain; the reluctant, bungling leadership of Moses who somehow managed a spectacular exodus; the smoldering sensuality of the Song of Songs; the evocative verses of Psalms whose catchphrases litter every Western language; the wailing nostalgia of Lamentations; the all-in loyalty of Ruth; the unshakeable faith of Job; the dancing, timbrel-playing triumph of Miriam; the castigating tirades of Jeremiah; the comically-inept procrastination of Jonah; finally, the existential world-weariness of Ecclesiastes.
All of humanity is there, in all its sublime or squalid expanse: an adult life will be populated by its own personal bible of Cains and Davids and Esthers. But unlike the epic characters in such timeless works as the Odyssey or Beowulf, or even distant references like Aeschylus or Shakespeare, this gallery of characters populates a still-extant tradition whose adherents sway in collective fervor every holiday.
This very week was Simchat Torah (Hebrew for ‘joy of the Torah’), when Jews take the Torah scrolls out of the synagogue’s ark and joyfully parade them outdoors, dancing and singing with their scripture’s heavy burden slung awkwardly on their shoulders. It marks the end of the annual cycle wherein an advancing Torah portion is read aloud every sabbath, one turn of the scroll at a time until the very end. It is the one Jewish festival not divinely ordained nor the product of some historical event; this the Jews put on for themselves in their obsessive love for their collective story. And when all the singing and dancing is over, they immediately rewind the scroll and start reading again, as they have for millennia: “In the beginning God created heaven and Earth…”
As that scroll is returned to the ark after the reading, the gathered crowd recites: “It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it.” Indeed it has been a tree of life to a people who made it the foundation of their civilization, a people that stubbornly persisted in a world that often wanted nothing less than their total extermination; a world that even now begrudges the Jews the tiny state they perilously safeguard.
Stuck in a secular modernity that’s lost the plot, and that no longer knows what it is or where it’s going, I choose to hold fast to that tree of life. I also say, as the loyal convert Ruth once said to Naomi: “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.”
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1The politico-cultural canon of a mainstream secular liberal these days seems wholly composed of The Handmaid’s Tale, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and some vague references to WWII and the Nazis.
2I realize this post titled ‘Why Judaism?’ is turning into ‘Why not secular liberalism?’ and perhaps that’s what it really is and I’ll need a part 2.
3That’s leaving aside the patent absurdities stated as scientific ‘fact’ when it comes to things like genetics, IQ, or gender. The anthropocentric ‘divine spark’ that places humans at the center of Creation, and separates us from mere animals who follow otherwise uncontroversial biology, is alive and well in our secular world.
4With one exception: the Zionist project of Israel. Perhaps not coincidentally, Israel is the only Western country with above-replacement fertility. The rest of the West is unwilling to will itself into the future.
5Read the classic The Pursuit of the Millennium by Normal Cohn, for an historical litany of the Christian West having apocalyptic meltdowns in response to crises like our present one. Perhaps the only consolation is that our outbursts, like the Seattle CHAZ, are less bloody than those of the past, like the Münster Revolt.
6Pop quiz: Who’s the last public figure, official, or celebrity who lost their job for a serious moral lapse or act of egregious incompetence? We hear about so many cancellations all the time; how many have gotten canned for really having fucked things up or acted in an undeniably depraved manner? Did anyone get ‘cancelled’ for killing an entire innocent family in the final days of the Afghanistan evacuation? “Nothing matters” is the phrase of resigned nihilism I keep hearing in my private groups when some outrageous fault is found out, and it’s quickly whisked away into the selective outrage and short memory of our political bickering.
