THE TEXT AND EVERYTHING AFTER:

First Moon Colony: A star physicist teaches us how to read the Torah, book by book. First up: Genesis. (Jeremy England, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Editor’s note: This is the first of five columns by Jeremy England. England is an American-born physicist noted for his argument that the spontaneous emergence of life may be explained by the extra energy absorbed and dissipated during the formation of exceptionally organized arrangements of molecules. He is also a rabbi. In this series, he will teach modern readers how to understand the Torah, one book at a time. First up is Genesis, a book that, according to England, establishes a specific truth—one that many of us, under the sway of the Enlightenment’s caricature of biblical thinking, misunderstand: “God is not a claim about the facts of the world to be proved or disproved, but rather is the focus for a method we are meant to use to interpret the events of our lives and the world.” —The Editors

Here are a few tips for how to read Genesis. Assume the book’s account of God is absolutely correct, which means He wrote it, as well as all other books and your genome. Assume God knows everything you know, everything you could know, and more. Assume God is the unfettered author of your life, world history, and the universe. Infer, therefore, that the Hebrew Bible—“Tanakh”—is unique not because its existence expresses the Creator’s will (since that’s true of everything there is) but rather because its content serves as the Creator’s official autobiography and a job description for His willing servants. Given all this, note that trying to prove its statements to be factually true or false is about as confused as trying to reach someone on the phone by dialing the license plate number on his car.

You don’t have to be an Albert Einstein or a Richard Feynman to know that plants need sun to grow. So when plants make their first appearance in Genesis “before” the sun does, even the most skeptical student of the text might conclude that he is not, in fact, perusing a simple chronology. If he manages, just for a moment, to forget how our post-biblical culture expects us to read biblical text, he might even notice that a basic message of the seven days of creation is that true statements about God are guaranteed to sound enigmatic in some way.

While this is an evident enough point to discuss with an interested 7-year-old Jewish day school student, it was lost on a great many Jewish atheist theoretical physicists during the last hundred years. Never has so much intelligence done so little to justify arrogance as when Feynman or Steve Weinberg mouthed off about theology. For all their genius, these Wicked Sons were never taught to read, and so, sadly, when it came to the subject of Eden or Abraham they applied their intellects to bludgeoning straw men and sniping at a heritage they did not even try to understand.

I too was once a Jewish atheist theoretical physicist, who, like many others, grew up worshipfully reading Feynman’s memoirs, hoping to understand “the universe” as profoundly as he and Weinberg and a dozen other Torah-rein 20th-century yidden had. However, through a series of providentially happy accidents, I managed eventually to get a glimpse past the smokescreen. Imagine my shock to discover that the most profound and free-ranging intellectual pursuit I had ever experienced—Torah study—had been distorted or even deliberately obscured from view by the pontifications of my childhood heroes. Weinberg once said, “[Scientific education] is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing, too!” Today I can retort that quantum field theory may be fun and useful, but it only ever amounts to playing around in one little sandbox according to a stultifyingly narrow set of mathematical rules. Maybe one day I will forgive Weinberg and Feynman for the way they stunted my understanding of the world and mankind’s condition in it, but I’ll have to avenge myself on them first.

The best revenge I can think of is to turn the eye of a physicist to righting the false trail laid out by Weinberg and others. Proper scientific education is favorable to proper religious belief, and vice versa, and it’s a good thing, too.

So let’s begin.

LOVE ONE ANOTHER, AS I HAVE LOVED YOU:

To Die Well, We Must Live Well—And for Others (Marianna Orlandi, 9/24/24, Public Discourse)

Lonely deaths are the inevitable product of our independent lives, the necessary outcome of decades spent “focusing on ourselves” as our culture mandates. They are the natural consequence of hours dedicated to running on a treadmill instead of chasing children; of hundreds of hours studying privately, uninterrupted by conversations with friends and peers who might have slowed us down; of hectic sleep schedules that prevent us from taking part in our friends’ plans and parties; of choosing solitary meals over shared ones. Such a focus on oneself is typical of today’s culture across the board. And it is by no means exclusive to single people.

Marriage and family life is not, in itself, a remedy to our egocentric cultural ethos. We all know families who leave elderly parents alone or even acquiesce to family members’ desires to give up on life. Said differently, there is little that an institution, even one as noble and as necessary as the family, can do on its own. Marriage and childbearing are paths to self-sacrifice and community, but they are not the only way, and they are not sufficient. I recently had a conversation with a psychiatrist here in Austin and she and I agreed that, at least partly, this may be what the latest surgeon general’s advisory indicates. After a life spent focusing on careers and on how to invest “our” time, and never having cared for younger siblings or older relatives, upon becoming parents, adults lack the virtues and skills that caregiving requires. Family life must be approached with a self-giving rather than a demanding heart, but there is nowhere for young people to learn the former attitude, which is not just a natural instinct. Today, this self-giving love and care are in critically short supply—from conception to natural death.

I believe the remedy is to recover our ability to see the other and to love him or her in all the different stages of life (and to allow ourselves to be the subjects of such love). We are made for communion, for relationships. Even the first man, Adam, was lonely before he encountered Eve, who was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. He had everything a man could want, but he felt lonely nonetheless. The same is true for us: we are utterly incomplete without one another. It was with Eve that Adam found joy and fulfilled his likeness to God. He became able not just to generate new life, as animals do, but to embody human souls. As one of my young students reminded me, it is revealing that sacrifice is an absolute requirement for Adam’s fulfillment: his rib needed to be taken from him (literally) for Eve to exist.

Contrary to what we are generally taught in school and popular media, we need to rediscover that a happy life requires not just the company of another, but sacrifice for the other. At the same time, we need to see the other as an end, not just as a means to our personal happiness.

To see the other and love him is the entirety of morality.

BETWEEN IRRESPONSIBILITY AND EUGENICS HE’S THE FACE OF ABORTION:

Trump Becomes a Pro-Choice Champion… for Florida’s Abortion Rights Movement (Marc A. Caputo, Oct 11, 2024, The Bulwark)

MOVE OVER, MARGARET SANGER. The new face of abortion rights in Florida is . . . Donald Trump?

One of the groups backing Florida’s abortion-rights initiative is trying to attract Trump voters with mailers and a soon-to-be-released digital ad that highlights the former president’s opposition to the state’s existing six-week abortion ban.

NO APOLOGY REQUIRED:

An Apologia for ‘Doubting’ Thomas (Zach Hollifield, 9/05/24, Mere Orthodoxy)

Jesus’s Commands
“See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray…Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand. So, if they say to you, ‘Look, he is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.” | Matthew 24:23-26

Question: What is the general command here? Answer: Don’t be had by those claiming to be the returned Christ, and don’t believe anyone who tells you they have found him.

Scenario: You are one of the 12. You return from being out and about and the other disciples tell you, “We have seen the Lord!” Immediately, the above teaching of Jesus that you heard earlier that very week, bursts into your head: “See that no one leads you astray…If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it…If they say, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ [the disciples saw Jesus while hiding in a house] do not believe it.”

What do you do? You have not seen him for yourself. All you have to go on is the testimony of others claiming to have seen him–the very situation presented in Matthew 24. What do you do? It would be entirely reasonable for you to conclude that to believe the claim would be in direct violation of Jesus’ command in chapter 24.

If this is the case, then rather than doubting, Thomas did exactly what he was supposed to do.

Ultimately, he only doubted the fellow Doubter. How could a mere man not?

mAN fELL:

SimCity Isn’t a Model of Reality. It’s a Libertarian Toy Land (Kelly Clancy, 6/27/24, Wired)

After Bill Clinton won the 1992 US presidential election on the platform of health care reform, a nonprofit foundation commissioned Thinking Tools to design a hospital-management simulator. Released in 1994, SimHealth was played by policymakers and the public alike—including, famously, Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea. Maxis marketed SimHealth as more than mere entertainment: It was a policy tool and could be used to explore and reason about complex systems. Players assumed the role of a newly elected politician campaigning for health care reform. They used their finite political currency to promote policies that aligned with the values on which they based their election promises. They could track their policy changes against their stated values using a compass-like indicator that pitted Liberty against Equality and Community against Efficiency—ideals that are, in reality, by no means opposed.

Unlike SimCity players, SimHealth players could tinker with the underlying model and adjust hundreds of parameters. Yet tweaking the parameters was not the same as tweaking the models themselves, and the game had a clear ideological bias. Much as in SimCity, there wasn’t exactly a win state. But SimHealth’s values were hard to miss. The game trumpeted a somber funeral march whenever the Canadian-style single-payer socialized medicine plan popped up on the screen. As Keith Schlesinger writes in a review for Computer Gaming World, there was one easy way to win: “All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal health care (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100–$300 billion per year.” Unfortunately, this could hardly be called a health policy victory, as it left the virtual citizens entirely without health coverage. Even the private insurance companies went bankrupt in the first few months. The game was a flop, and 30 years later, health care remains an intractable issue plaguing American politics.

Whereas SimRefinery gave players a new perspective on a complex, though defined, process, the US health care industry is so complex that SimHealth only muddied the waters. Paul Starr, who was a health care policy adviser to the Clinton administration, dismissed the game entirely. “SimHealth contains so much misinformation that no one could possibly understand competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them, on the basis of the program.” He was concerned that people would mistake the game for a legitimate description of reality. He despaired that his daughter, an avid player, accepted the game’s libertarian-leaning strategies because that was “just the way the game works.”

All simulations are ultimately constrained by their creators’ assumptions: They are self-contained universes ticking along to preprogrammed logic. They don’t necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we may want it to be.

The Bible is the story of even The Creator learning this lesson, which bequeaths liberalism.

DISCOURAGING TURNOUT SERVES THE HARDLINERS:

Reformist, ultraconservative qualify for Iran runoff election (Ramin KHANIZADEH and Payam DOOST MOHAMADI, June 29, 2024, AFP)

Pezeshkian got more than 10,400,000 votes and Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator, has more than 9,400,000, said Mohsen Eslami, spokesman of Iran’s election authority. […]

Out of around 61 million eligible voters, some 24,500,000 voters headed to the polls, he added, with a turnout of around 40 percent — the lowest yet in the history of the Islamic republic.

NO ONE MISSES ROE:

The Puzzle of Roe v. Wade (Mary Zeigler, June 14, 2024, Yale University Press)

This interest in Roe is even more puzzling given the scholarly criticism the decision has received. Almost from the start, commentators across the ideological spectrum have questioned the opinion’s reasoning, which did not draw on constitutional text, history, or other conventional sources of interpretation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would become the Supreme Court’s most vocal defender of abortion rights, often argued that Roe went too far too fast and undermined the prochoice movement’s earlier progress. Feminists like Catharine MacKinnon described it as paternalistic and unconvincing. Originalists, starting with Robert Bork, have found it little short of horrifying. It is surprising that we care so much about a decision that is criticized by so many.

The interest is a function of the fact that it was an exercise in power politics, not jurisprudence.

RELIGION ITSELF REVEALED THE SILENCE:

Leo Tolstoy and The Silent Universe: Frank Martela relates how science destroyed the meaning of life, but helps us find meaning in life. (Frank Martela, June 2024, Philosophy Now)

What makes ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ such a powerful question that inability to deliver a satisfactory answer can push a person to the brink of a suicide?

When I started investigating the history of the question, the first surprise was how recent it actually is. We often think of it as an eternal question asked since the dawn of mankind; but actually, the first recorded usage of the phrase the ‘meaning of life’ in English took place as recently as 1834, in Thomas Carlyle’s highly influential novel Sartor Resartus: “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force.”

Before asking the question, Carlyle’s protagonist goes through the classic steps of an existential crisis. First came loss of religious faith: “Doubt had darkened into Unbelief… shade after shade goes grimly over your soul… Is there no God, then?” Without God, the universe becomes cold and silent: “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” In a mechanistic universe void of any transcendental values, nothing seems to matter any more.

For Tolstoy, the existential crisis stage was marked by being constantly tormented by the question ‘Why?’ He attended to his estate. But why? Because then his fields would produce more crops. But why should he care? Whatever he did, whatever he accomplished, sooner or later, all would be forgotten. Sooner or later, he and everyone dear to him would die and there would be, as he wrote, “nothing left but stench and worms.” Since everything vanishes and is finally utterly forgotten, what’s the point of struggling?

The silence of God drove even Him to despair.

NOT HOW IT WORKS:

C. S. Lewis & Maksym Kryvtsov: The Experience of War and Godforsakenness (Yuliia Vintoniv, May 20, 2024, Church Life Journal)

The multifaceted experience of Christ’s cry: the raw intensity of “cursing in fight and toiling,” and the desperate plea of “Stop! Stop it! Enough!” These evocative expressions paint a vivid picture of godforsakenness—that moment when grief plunges so deep that even faith and hope seem to waver. Yet, nestled within this existential struggle lies the possibility of kenosis, a self-emptying love we discover through Christ’s ultimate sacrifice.

Biblical commentators highlight Christ’s cry as a powerful expression of human despair and a desperate plea for help from the gathered crowd. This interpretation draws support from the Greek text, where words like βοάω (Mark) and ἀναβοάω (Matthew) signify a loud cry or an anguished outburst. Notably, Christ re-utters this cry at the very moment of his death (Matt 27:50; Mark 15:37; Lk 23:46). This echoes the cry that raised Lazarus from the tomb (Jn 11:43) and mirrors the cry accompanying the angel’s dramatic arrival in the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:3).[6] However, other exegetes offer a distinct perspective. They argue that Christ’s experience of Godforsakenness signifies him taking on not only the burden of “sin for us, who knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21), but also the very consequence of sin itself: the agonizing separation from God and existence outside God the Father’s divine presence (cf. Gen 1-3). In this interpretation, Christ plunges into the depths of sin without succumbing to it himself.

Such exegetes simply can not accept God having become fully human.

MONOTHEISM IS THE WHOLE MAGILLA:

Civilization is from the Jews (Andrew Doran, May 25, 2024, European Conservative)

Most will agree that civilized behavior, at a minimum, consists of abstaining from ritualistic torture, rape, sexual mutilation, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and related conduct. Yet for most of human history such conduct was normative and often sacralized. Habits of ritual violence and scapegoating to satisfy blood lust and communal anxiety were ubiquitous.

Human sacrifice was a near-universal practice in primitive pagan societies, even among sophisticated pagans. Greeks had elaborate religious rituals for killing their pharmokoi (scapegoats). Romans buried sacrificial victims alive in religious rituals to spare Rome from enemies like the Carthaginians, and though human sacrifice was later banned, crucifixion, mass executions, and murderous entertainment continued until banished in the Christian era. The Carthaginians, like their Phoenician and Canaanite ancestors, sacrificed their own children, as did many Mediterranean peoples. Aztec, Maya, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian civilizations all had rituals for human sacrifice.

Ritualistic violence among low pagans was less well documented but often more horrific. Christians from the medieval to modern eras, travelers like Ahmad ibn Fadlan and Samuel de Champlain, and missionaries all personally witnessed ritualized torture, murder, and cannibalism, from North America to Northern Europe and Asia. Celtic and Baltic, Germanic and Angle, Comanche and Guanche—more peoples partook than can be numbered because most have gone extinct. Ritualistic barbarity was universal.

We probably cling to the myth of the noble savage despite the evidence because the truth—that we all descend from inbred cannibals who made a sacred ritual of torture, rape, sexual mutilation, child sacrifice, and murder—is too unpleasant. We have no desire to confront our history, ourselves, or what the world looks like with different gods. The earth beneath us is a vast crime scene, and those of us walking around descend from something far worse than our simian ancestors. Apes are incapable of the tortures humans inflict on one another.

So what brought most of that savagery to an end? And why do we believe in universal moral norms that restrain violent impulse rather than indulge it? Each inquirer is free to examine cause and effect throughout history. But if by progress we mean the spread of universal concepts of human dignity, equality, and morality—rather than, say, democracy or roads or sound architecture or law—then it all began with the Hebrews. It was the Jews who gave us monotheism, universal moral standards, the notion of the human person, and much else besides. Civilizational progress came from the Abrahamic faiths—unevenly, imperfectly, and undeniably.

Sacrificial violence and scapegoating were cathartic. They satisfy blood lust and the innate sense that there is injustice, that something is wrong, and that someone ought to be held to account, hence the sacrificial victim. The Hebrews shifted the violent cathartic urge from man to creature, and Christians shifted it to bread and water.

There are of course examples of civilized conduct among high pagans, though many of these had a threshold for quotidian violence that we conveniently ignore. And there are Abrahamic peoples who, often in the name of God, inflict unspeakable violence—much of it on each other, and the worst of it on the Jews. However, in general, civilized conduct among high pagans requires a deviation from pagan norms, and uncivilized behavior among Abrahamic communities requires a deviation from their own morality. Sorting through the genealogy and authenticity of moral systems today is nearly impossible for many reasons. Suffice it to say, most of us behave very differently from our pagan ancestors—and why we do so has everything to do with Judaism.