December 18, 2002
AND GOD SPAKE ALL THESE WORDS:
Unending Journey Through Faith and Heartbreak (CHRIS HEDGES, December 15, 2002, NY Times)It has been 26 years since the Asches lost Jennifer, whose portrait hangs over their bed in their apartment. Her death was the start of a long journey to cope with loss and grief and anger, to make sense out of the senseless, to face the deadly indifference of nature and the awful fact that suffering falls on the just and the unjust. It is a journey, the Asches realize, that has no end.In their grief and questioning they turned to their rabbi, Harvey Tattelbaum, and the Bible. They clung to a divine presence in their lives. But at the same time, they realized that the only way they could sustain their faith was by rejecting the belief that the death of their only daughter was God's will.
In doing so, they felt they had to reject the first and most fundamental of the Ten Commandments. The commandment says that God brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt and that believers should worship no other god. The commandment is interpreted to mean that what happens in the world is ordained by God, that God is a force that can intervene in human history on behalf of the righteous. It posits the possibility of a moral universe, one where the wicked are punished and the good rewarded. This, after the death of Jennifer, filled the Asches with outrage.
"I do not believe in the notion of a supreme being sitting on high ordaining things," said Mrs. Asch, 65, "but I do not reject the presence of the divine. I just do not know what that presence is. It is not black and white for me."
More than 3,000 years after they were written, the Ten Commandments have a haunting power, capturing many of the deep spiritual and moral dilemmas that beset humankind. For some, they are divine laws, handed down by God to Moses, that cannot be questioned but must be obeyed. For others they are important religious precepts, part of early civilization's effort to lay down rules to foster peace and community. And for still others the commandments are quaint and anachronistic, serving as little more than guides, if that, in the effort to live a moral life.
Over the next 10 days, this series will tell the stories of ordinary people like the Asches and how their lives intersected with one of the commandments - directly or indirectly, consciously or as a matter of course. Their stories are of Christian, Muslim and Jew, and deeply personal. In the end, they are about the inner struggle to make sense of ancient commands and fit them into modern life.
This is part of am unlikely but welcome NY Times series on the Ten Commandments, Thou Shalt Not, which owes an obvious debt to Krzysztof Kieslowski's great Poliish television miniseries Decalogue. It's interesting to note that Mr. Hedges begins his series by turning the Commandments into mere human constructs and tells a heartbreaking but entirely familiar story. (It's also strange that the couple in the story repeat a canard that the wife was taught, that there's no afterlife in Judaism.)
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2002 8:26 PM
And the boy wouldn't have fallen through the
ice if his father had trusted in God? What in
the world is your point?
By the way, my engineer brother likes to
distinguish between engineering and science.
In engineering, he says, you never have all
the information you need to make a scientific
decision, and the trick to being a good engineer
is knowing when you can go ahead anyway.
That's the point.
Posted by: oj at December 18, 2002 10:50 PMAh, as my mother was fond of saying, "Don't walk out on thin ice and then expect God to save you!"
Posted by: dcj at December 19, 2002 6:48 AMHarry -
"Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance."
-- A. R. Dykes, a British engineer
Mr. Judd;
I fail to see the logical connection between the First Commandmant and the idea that everything that happens is ordained by God. Isn't that just Calvinism in another form?
AOG:
I agree that the story's understanding (and perhaps Judaism's?) is dubious. I was suggesting that science is not a fit substitute.
Annoying Old Guy - you completely miss the point which is that the father put's all of his faith in science, the modern religion of the secular humanist. When he refers to the father performing the necessary calculations to determine the thickness of the ice, think instead the father is performing a ritual augury, asking science if the ice is thick enough for his son to skate.
The lesson to be taken away is not that everything that happens is ordained by God, and it is much less that the child would have died if the father had trusted in God, rather the lesson to be taken away is that putting faith in false (man-made) gods carries a terrible price. In this case the man-made god was science, which is proven to be wholly fallable, and the cost for putting faith in science before God was the loss of his son's life.
Robert - AOG was referring to the faulty understanding the Asches have of Judaism. First they misunderstand Judaism, then they get outraged at their straw-man version of it. The NY Times reporter does nothing to correct that and the only Jewish authority he cites - Rabbi Tattelbaum - repeats the mistaken interpretation and then says, "I reject the First Commandment." Sheesh! It's not like Jewish thinkers have never reconciled the Ten Commandments with the problem of evil.
Posted by: pj at December 19, 2002 1:37 PMOnly science hasn't been proven totally fallible.
The engineer miscalculated.
If he had calculated correctly, he would have kept his son off the ice.
The other option -- trusting to god or something -- is a crapshoot.
Robert M
Putting faith in man-made gods extracts no more a terrible price than putting faith in the "true" god (I would argue that they are all man-made), if the price to be paid is to suffer from random, tragic events, and eventual death. That is the price that we all pay for living. The religious, for all their faith, have to pray this price as well.
Only a fool would think that science can prevent all tragedy. This is not the "faith" of secular humanism, merely a heresy of it.
Robert:
But, unlike Harry, with his "the calculations must have been wrong", we don't pretend to understand the mystery, as science does.
Science is a means, not an end.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at December 19, 2002 10:27 PMBut a means of what?
Posted by: oj at December 20, 2002 9:05 AMI disagree Robert, I believe that it is the opposite. Science only claims to provide answers as to what is knowable, specifically what is observable and testable. It is religion that goes beyond this limit, and claims knowledge of what lies beyond the observable. Religions have built whole structures of "knowledge" based on extrapolations from the words of their prophets, from how many levels of Hell there are, to how many years in Limbo an unbaptized child will wander, to how many angels will fit on the head of a pin, etc. The secularist does not have "faith" in science the way that the believer has faith in religion. He doesn't ask the same questions ("Why are we here, What is my purpose, etc), and doesn't expect the same answers. As Annoying says, it is a means to an end, a tool for gaining knowledge of the world that surrounds us. To answer OJ, the end of science is the satisfaction of our curiosity, whether that be for practical means, such as technology, or just a pure desire to understand the universe. It provides answers, not the "Answer".
Posted by: Robert D at December 20, 2002 9:31 AMRobertD:
Yes, but, as Richard Weaver writes in "Ideas Have Consequences", reason and science don't necessarily proceed from an established view of the world. Their "answers" therefore may not even be to the right questions or, worse, may be quite terrible. So, reason and science may be able to identify the maximal genetic pattern in humans for evolutionary purposes, but because they are silent on whether we should act upon this knowledge they must be seen as subsidiary.
Orrin, I agree with you. The other questions still need to be asked, the questions that science cannot answer, such as "what is good", "what is beauty", "what is the good life", "what should our our ultimate concern be", etc. For the believer, only God can answer these questions. For the secularist, men will have to take their best shot at answering them, and live with the consequences. It is a self-serve Universe, for better or worse.
Posted by: Robert D at December 20, 2002 1:50 PMAre you suggesting it is not possible to measure and calculate the strength of ice? Of course it is.
If someone miscalculates, that does not prove it could not be measured and calculated.
The parable betrays not wisdom about spirituality but ignorance about humanity. Jesus's parables were uncommonly clear, but as Thurber demonstrated, parables are a deceptively simple way to making a point and the point one makes may be different from the one he intends.
My favorite example was the guy whose feet hurt. He went to physician after physician, but his feet kept
hurting. Finally, a friend said to him, "Try my chiropractor, he's great."
So he went to the chiropractor, who told him to buy shoes one size larger.
Chiropractors tell this story to make the point that "allopathic" doctors don't listen, are expensive and prescribe useless and possibly dangerous drugs.
The the moral I draw from this parable is that the ideal chiropractic customer is a man so stupid he has to pay somebody to tell him to buy shoes that fit.