Jabberwocky, and the Human Condition: Theology for Non-Theologians
Anthropologist, cyberneticist, and all-around genius Gregory Bateson taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He reports walking through the crowded college corridors and overhearing colleagues discussing his many interdisciplinary interests: “Bateson is surely up to something,” they would say, “but I’ll be darned if I know what it is.”
In Jewish circles, that quizzical observation has generally applied to theologians, in particular, the late and great Eugene B. Borowitz, who pioneered the field of modern Jewish theology at HUC-JIR in New York. Shortly after I joined the faculty there, a senior colleague who, along with Borowitz, had been my teacher in my student years, took me aside one day to ask, “What exactly does Borowitz do? I know it’s called theology, but Jews don’t do theology. We do history, and text. Theology? Is that really Jewish?”
Well, of course it is—now: thanks largely to Borowitz. But you might not know it from the way most Jews go about their lives. Some years back, an Episcopal priest surveyed former Jews in his church to ask why they had left Judaism. Their answer? Because they couldn’t find rabbis willing to talk seriously about God.
Things have improved somewhat by now, but in 2010, HUC-JIR colleague Carole Balin recalled telling someone about a theology course she had offered in a synagogue and receiving the stunned response, “You’re teaching what?” Looking back at Jewish theology since World War II, she was able to conclude only that “God-talk has crept from the periphery toward the center of Jewish conversation.”[1] It was apparently just still just creeping, because I still have a growing list of Jews who think Judaism is theologically vacuous.
The late Mark Searle, an outstanding liturgist at the University of Notre Dame, used to ask Roman Catholic focus groups if they had ever experienced anything that they would call “God’s presence in their lives.” Some 95% said they had. I have replicated that exercise in dozens of synagogues by now, only to find that the positive response from Jews is under 5%. When I change the question, however, asking them, for example, if they have ever had experiences they would call “profound,” the number rises to 95% as well. And when I ask them to describe what those experiences are, the list is pretty much identical to what the Catholics call “the presence of God.” Human experience is human experience, but Jews are notoriously averse to identifying anything divine about it.
The problem lies partly with theology and partly with Jews. The Jewish part is clear enough. The early Church Fathers had gone the theological route because they were at home in the late Greco-Roman world of philosophical speculation; and because the very essence of the Christian claim—the simultaneously human and divine nature of Jesus—is theological. Our founding Rabbis, by contrast, preferred Talmudic argumentation, as did Jewish tradition, generally, through the ages. To be sure, great halachists could be great theologians as well: Maimonides (1138-1204), for example, whose legal code begins with theological verities and who also wrote Guide to the Perplexed; and, more recently, the great Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993) who is best recalled by his students for his reams of Talmudic insight, but whose published works are largely theological in nature. Still, overall, Jews today seem opposed to theology, as compared to secular discussion of Jewish history and easy-going dialogue about the personal and subjective meaning of the weekly Torah portion.
Theology has had its own massive problem as well: it is metaphysical and, in a world where science (in particular, physics) is considered the gold standard of what is real, serious metaphysical speculation has fallen on hard times, especially among Jews, who (unlike Christians) have not seen it as central, but who then are unable to grapple with ultimates: Does God exist? Are we a chosen people? Does God answer prayer? If our foundation narratives all the way from Abraham to Moses are just “stories,” if even the Exodus and Sinai never happened, if Judaism, then, is just an alternative way of life: why bother with it? To be sure, Judaism is thick with culture and rich in ethnicity. But it is hard not to judge secular culture as superior; and ethnicity tends to decline (and even disappear) after three generations. So, what then do Jews believe? What gives Judaism its depth? How do Jews talk about what really matters?
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, composed an account of the limits to what we can legitimately say in describing the world of science; it necessarily excluded questions like these. But “even when all possible scientific questions have been answered,” he concluded, “the problems of life remain completely untouched.”[2] The “problems of life” are metaphysical; they are theological. Do Jews have no theology?
To be sure, synagogue goers regularly encounter Jewish theology in prayer which claims that God is holy, that God made a covenant with Israel, that a world to come awaits us at the end of historical time, that Elijah will introduce a messianic era, maybe even an actual messiah in person, that some things are right while others are wrong, that the Land of Israel enjoys special Jewish status and the like. But they know such claims only as a thin conceptual veneer that they mostly pass over. Traditionalists daven through the service without paying much attention to anything in it; Reform Jews focus on the pages of their prayer book that conveniently bypass traditional theology by substituting pithy aphorisms and poetry, selected for their modern appeal in the first place. Lots of Jews encounter theology but do not take it seriously.
There are, of course, exceptions. Any number of people enjoy Jewish theological discussion as a pastime, something to think about, if not literally believe in. Others believe uncritically in the actual existence of the things theology describes: a God who hosted Moses on Mt. Sinai; a personal messiah who will restore the sacrificial cult; Jewish chosenness, not merely as a secularized meditation on the uniqueness of Jewish history, but as Jewish exceptionalism—God somehow singling out Israel as different. These people are insiders. It is easy to talk to them. My concern is the outsiders, the majority of serious Jews who do question the existence of God, revelation, Jewish chosenness, and the like.
Outsiders are subject to what I call the Jabberwocky Principle – from Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem, Jabberwocky.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbel in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
The jaws that bite the claws that catch,
Beware the Jubjub bird and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch [etc.]
We can easily imagine an entire literature describing the nature of toves, mome raths, and borogoves. “What makes the toves slithy and the borogoves mimsy?” for example. “Are Jabberwocks worse than Jubjub birds? Are even baby Bandersnatches frumious?”
To outsiders, Jewish theology must sound like learned discussions on Jubjub birds and Jabberwocks. I do not just mean the obscure technical discussions that even the initiated might find dense. I mean as well the ordinary theological sentences that we all get to with regularity and get through with ease: like Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous claim that “God is in search of man” [sic]. But what if people are not sure there is even a God to do the searching? That is all well and good, they may say, but there is no God and no search; no Jubjub birds, no Bandersnatches.
“ How do we speak theologically to the great many people (maybe the majority) who suspect that a choosing God, a chosen people, a messianic age, and a world to come are like Jabberwocks and Jubjub birds: fun to talk about, but unreal?”
How do we speak theologically to the great many people (maybe the majority) who suspect that a choosing God, a chosen people, a messianic age, and a world to come are like Jabberwocks and Jubjub birds: fun to talk about, but unreal? They are the conceptual garb in which theologians clothe their conversations; but what if the theological emperor has no clothes?
The problem lies in what is called a “category error,” a term generally traced to a 1938 discussion by philosopher Gilbert Ryle who puzzled over the fact that it makes perfect sense to say “Gilbert Ryle” is in bed,” but not “Saturday is in bed.”[3] No one would actually say “Saturday is in bed,” of course, because we all know that “Gilbert Rye” (a person) and “Saturday” (a time) are different categories; and that “being in bed” can be meaningfully attributed to people but not times. “Saturday is in bed” is just senseless.
God-talk poses a particularly extreme case of category error. Compare, for example, “God answers prayer” with “Teachers answer questions.” The two sound alike, but what if neither “God” and “Teachers” (on one hand) nor “prayer” and “questions” (on the other) are in the same category? The category error is treating theological sentences as if they are just like other sentences that are categorically different even though they sound the same. Go back to my Notre Dame example, “God is present.” That sounds like, “My sister is present,” but “God” and “My sister” are different categories. We know how to determine the truth of the latter; but not the former. What would count as the presence of God? What would count as evidence?
So too with everything we say theologically: no amount of empirical evidence can prove the truth or falsity of “Israel is the chosen people,” “There is life after death,” and even (for that matter) “Covid is part of a divine plan.” Theology is just not amenable to empirical debate. It is a different category. That is not to say that such claims are non-debatable! They most certainly are, but not with the expectation that their validity is the same sort of thing as the validity of truths that are justified scientifically.
As Maimonides insisted back in the twelfth century, we ought theoretically to say nothing about God at all because no sentences about God can do God justice. We cannot even say “God exists” because that too is a sentence. And yet, we do talk about God, and we ought to figure out what such talk might actually mean.
Wittgenstein considered the case of sick person saying, “This is a punishment by God.” We might well debate that, but not because we have better evidence to demonstrate that it is not. The matter is beyond what we normally consider evidence. At stake, says Wittgenstein, is the prior fact that the two parties are working from different pictures of reality.[4] We should think of theology, then, not as an empirically demonstrable debate, but as a way to pursue the necessary human task of developing a picture of reality—a conceptual backdrop for the imponderables of the human condition.
The Covid-19 crisis is such an imponderable. Is the Covid virus like an Egyptian plague, a punishment caused by God, so that if we repent and pray, we will be spared? Is God present in our lives while we lock down at home? Do our homes become sacred the way the synagogue sanctuary is? What is our ethical responsibility to others in this crisis? No possible empirical evidence can answer these questions; or better put, whatever empirical evidence we have is insufficient in and of itself to prove the case one way or another. The best we can do is fit whatever facts we have into the Jewish picture of reality—to see them anew within the Jewish framework that we call “theology.”
To be sure, not just any old picture works. Jabberwocky didn’t, for all sorts of reasons. A viable theological picture requires a supportive set of factors that lend it plausibility: a theologically committed community; rituals that make the theology come alive through music, poetry, and drama of worship; a set of stories that exemplify our picture in action; and a sophisticated tradition of bringing the picture into focus, reworking its details in times of change. Given none of that, Jabberwocky remains just a clever bit of nonsense.
If the entire Jewish canon were only a solitary poem (like Jabberwocky) that, for the first time ever, used the word “God,” if we had no centuries of interpretation, no Jewish communities who study and worship together, no experience of a Jewish People across time and space, no familiarity with Shabbat, Yom Kippur, and a Passover seder, then we might well see the term “God” as no different than The Jabberwock. But we have all the above, and instead of prejudging it all as science gone wrong, we ought to see it as a picture of how to go about our task of living in the world. It is a picture with tried and true staying power, but only for those who have lived with it, explored it, prayed with it, and taken up residence in a community that affirms it as a helpful commentary on whatever life throws at us.
The rabbis correctly characterized human beings as m’daber (“speaking”): the sole species with advanced language, and, thus, with the cultural capacity to wonder about the world in the first place. Such wonderment fuels science, ethics, and art but also religion, which can be defined as the practice of communicating in a register that does justice to the fullness of the human condition. From the human condition, there flows the human project: our need to satisfy our advanced linguistic consciousness through science, ethics and art—but also religion, which conceptualizes and celebrates a picture of who and what we think we are in the first place.
Theology is the discussions we have about that picture, in particular, as it relates to the “problems of life” that remain (as Wittgenstein said) “even when all possible scientific questions have been answered.” It is partly about God (“theology,” narrowly put). But it is also our religious perspective on human nature (religious “anthropology”) and a religious vision of the world in which we live (religious “cosmology”). It names certain experiences as divine, affirms or denies moral progress, supports or rejects science, finds human existence meaningful or pointless, welcomes outsiders or labels them “dangerous” (best kept at a safe distance or even eradicated altogether).
“It is helpful to see “Theology” more broadly as a conversation about God (theology), human nature (anthropology) and the cosmos (cosmology). ”
It is helpful to see “Theology” more broadly as a conversation about all three: God (theology), human nature (anthropology) and the cosmos (cosmology).
Imagine lines representing each of the three (theology, anthropology, and cosmology). We inevitably take our stand on each of them. Imagine, further, that the lines intersect so that the three places where we stand overlap in our consciousness, giving us our core identity. Because that identity provides the values by which we live, philosopher Charles Taylor calls it “the self in moral space.” Because we necessarily root our values in stories of who we are and whence we came, another philosopher, Daniel Dennett, calls that “self” the “center of narrative gravity.”[5] Theology is the picture of our moral compass and the story of who we ultimately are.
Theologically speaking, we come to terms with Covid-19 and its woes by fitting it into our prior theological picture. I have room here for two brief examples.
First, I find the age-old Jewish imagery of exile compelling. Although God is said to have brought it about, God is also seen as regretting the decision, but not on that account altogether ending it. Rather, God went into exile with us.[6] God holds our hand throughout it, as it were. Sickness is like exile, banishing us, in effect, to increasing solitude and loneliness,[7] so our tradition further says that when we are sick, alone, in hospital, God takes up residence with us. God sits, however, “above the patient’s head,” beyond the patient’s sight lines. When we visit the sick, we are to sit “in front of the patient,” opposite God, that is.[8] Patients may not see God directly, but they see God reflected in the eyes of their visitors. When Jacob reconciles with Esau (Gen. 37:10), he says, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.” We see the faces of one another, and in those faces, we see God.
In the days of lonely lockdown, then, I miss many things, but I do not miss God. I scan my computer screen filled with Zoom’s many close-ups of faces, and I find in them the multiple reflections of God.
Second, I draw an ethical message from it all. Ethics too depend less on the evidence than on the preexisting theological perspective from which we view it. Still our conclusions must accord with certain striking facts: 1. a pandemic strikes humanity indiscriminately; anyone can get it; anyone can die. 2. We actually infect one another. 3 Even in lockdown, we increasingly access the entire world of culture, people, news, and creativity. 4. Our last best hope is science which knows no tribal boundaries; scientists round the world are collaborating as never before: a model for climate change, global hunger, and so much else.
Tribalists abound who want to save themselves, and the rest of the world be damned. America first; my state versus yours; White people matter; Black people don’t; it’s China’s fault; keep out all immigrants. My Jewish picture, however, calls all human beings kin. From the story of Adam and Eve, the Rabbis learn that we all descend from a single set of parents.[9] To be sure, persecuted and rejected by their host cultures, medieval Jews emphasized Jewish particularity—how Jews were different, even better, than our neighbors. But Reform Judaism recaptured the universalistic picture that I see Covid-19 reaffirming. I believe we can emerge from Covid-19 one giant step closer to the world community we are meant to become.
When Covid-19 ends, my Jewish “self in moral space” will be all the more committed to those whom tribalism would expel from the human register. My “center of narrative gravity” tells a Jewish story about exile and history’s inevitable arc toward universal redemption. I waste little time on meaninglessly asking if God really exists, and if so, who God really is. I have no problem identifying God’s presence unseen but beside me; and reflected, mirror-like, on all those human faces who visit me on Zoom calls.
[1] Carole B. Balin, “Preface,” in Elliot J. Cosgrove, Jewish Theology in Our Time (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010), pp. xiv, xi.
[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D.F Pears and B.F. McGuinness, trans. (London: Routledge, 1961), 6.52.
[3] Cf. Gilbert Ryle, “Categories,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 38 (1938), 189-206; Idem, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1949).
[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Cyril Barrett, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, nd), p. 55.
[5] Cf, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p. 28; and Daniel Dennett “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” Pamela M. Cole, Frank S. Kessel, Milton D. Hakel, Dale L. Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Lawrence Erlbaum (New York: Psychology Press,1992), pp. 103-115.
[6] Meg. 29a.
[7] See Lawrence A,. Hoffman, “Illness and Acculturation,” The Yale Divinity School Kavanagh Lecture, October 12, 2004, Colloquium: Music, Worship, Arts 3 (Autumn, 2006): 9-23; drawing on Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).
[8] Cf. Tur YD 335, Bet Yosef ad loc.
[9] San. 38a.
