Big Questions

Try to talk to me about proofs for or against the existence of God and I’ll just yawn. Try to sell me arguments for or against free will, and I’ll reach for my phone to check my mail. Don’t even bother trying to lure me into a debate on the existence of objective moral values. I’m not interested.

Bear in mind that the first thing I do every morning is to thank God for “returning my soul”, so my lack of interest in such matters cannot be explained as the allergy of a practical man to matters of the spirit or a secular firebrand’s allergy to anything that smacks of religion. What is it then that bores me about certain Big Questions?

It’s tempting as a first guess to suggest that I just find these fundamental problems intractable and so quickly conclude that my time could be more usefully spent on more manageable affairs. But this seems inadequate. There are plenty of hard questions that do sometimes engage me – matters of public policy, science, finance and many others – that are not obviously more tractable than the ones that bore me.

No, it’s something else – in fact, something quite subtle that gets right to the heart of some very deep questions. Let’s start working our way to the answer by asking a simple question: why should I wish to know the truth about anything at all?

Practical people will waste no time at all reaching for a practical answer: ignorant people end up drinking gasoline or riding bicycles off cliffs. In short, I should seek knowledge that might help me achieve goals, foremost among which is staying alive.

Thus, I need to know what I can safely eat and which animals to stay away from. I need to know the consequences of an altercation between a pedestrian and a moving truck. I need to understand human nature well enough to make educated guesses about which overtures are likely to result in cooperation that could keep me alive and prosperous. I need to know how best to cooperate with other people and when it is better not to cooperate. I need to understand myself well enough to know what will give me satisfaction. I need to know whose authority I ought to respect. I need to know when to indulge my desires and when it is prudent to restrain them. I need to know why the sum of two positive integers to the third power can’t equal another integer to the third power.

Whoa! Why do I need to know that?!

The truth is that most of what we study in college is closer on the usefulness scale to Fermat’s Last Theorem than it is to the identification of poison mushrooms. Of course, I can easily come up with a few “just so” stories to explain the pursuit of theoretical knowledge. It might be the spillover effect of an evolved inclination to know more obviously useful things. Maybe I have reason to think that a particular kind of knowledge will earn me prestige that results in power and influence, although maybe that just kicks the can slightly down the road: why would that kind of knowledge earn me prestige? Maybe I have good reasons to believe that what is theoretical today will be practical tomorrow. In short, with enough effort I could make a reasonable case that even what looks like the love of knowledge for its own sake serves some other, second- or third-order need. But I think that hard-headed approach misses the main point.

At the very least, the kinds of people who think deeply about the existence of free will and objective moral values and God don’t think that we seek truth merely for prosaic utilitarian reasons. They (and I) think that the search for truth is embedded in a broader set of evolved human needs, which includes the desire to live what I’ll call a meaningful life.

What perplexes them is why someone like me, who agrees that we seek truth to live a meaningful life, is bored by certain questions that seem highly relevant to precisely that quest.

Here’s what I think is the answer: my thoughts (and theirs) on those questions just don’t matter. That’s because when we pursue knowledge for the purpose of living a meaningful life, a very potent premise underlies our quest: that we can pursue knowledge for the purpose of living a meaningful life. And, as we’ll soon see, this premise alone resolves each of the hard philosophical questions that bore me.

Let me illustrate the point with some low-hanging fruit. Do human beings have free will? That sounds like a hard question with lots of good arguments in each direction. In fact, most of the good arguments favor the view that we don’t have free will and we’ll briefly consider some of them below. But none of those arguments actually make a difference. If our premise is that “we can pursue…” – the rest of the sentence doesn’t even matter – we have already assumed that we can choose to act the way we do.

Let me take pains to emphasize that I’m not arguing that we have good reasons to conclude that we have free will. I’m claiming that the assumption that we have free will underlies our quest to know anything at all.

I will be arguing that the Big Questions that bore me (and maybe you as well) all share this quality with the question of free will: the very premise that I can pursue knowledge for the purpose of living a meaningful life forces me into a particular position on each of these questions. In other words, these questions cannot be resolved by my quest for knowledge, since they are already decided the moment I engage in the quest.

This is a pretty bold claim. So, let me consider a string of Big Questions and try to convince you that it is true.

Free Will

Well, now that I’ve told you that making arguments for and against free will is pointless, let’s do exactly that – specifically, let’s make the case against free will. This is a bit of mis-direction designed to make the punchline – in which it is revealed that our arguments were indeed all for naught – that much more dazzling. Bear with me.

The claim that we have free will implies that, at least sometimes, we are faced with multiple options and that, at least sometimes, we freely choose among them for our own purposes. If either one of these implications is false, we don’t have free will.

Here is a reason to think that at least one of them is indeed false. Engineers can send a rocket to the moon, or to targets in another country, and know precisely where it will land. Chemists can combine different materials and know precisely what chemical reactions will follow. These processes are deterministic – that is, if we know certain relevant facts now, we can determine certain other facts that will hold later. It is tempting to conclude that this determinism holds in a much more general sense: if we’d know everything about the universe right now, we could theoretically determine everything about the universe later. (The word theoretically is important here. We might not know how to compute some future state of the universe from the current one, or it might require more computational resources than we have, but that doesn’t matter for purposes of my argument.)

If determinism holds in the sense I have just described, then we are never faced with multiple options; based on the previous state of the world, only one of these options is actually possible (even if we don’t know which option it is). Thus, we don’t have free will.

The obvious way out of this is to deny determinism. Truthfully, your best bet here is to just say that full-blown determinism is a wild over-generalization based on isolated examples of determinism in certain narrow areas, and to leave it at that. Because if you insist on getting more specific about pinpointing non-determinism, you’ll find that your defense of free will is rather thin.

For example, one way we can try to flag some source of non-determinism in the world is to wave our hands about quantum randomness something something. But, even if we could actually nail that argument down, it wouldn’t quite solve our problem. If the only non-deterministic events are random ones, then we are not choosing among options for our purposes but rather are merely acting randomly. So the attempt to save the first implication of free will – that we are faced with multiple options – seems to undercut the second implication – that we choose an option for our purposes rather than merely act in a random way. Either way, free will loses.

So, are you convinced? Some people are and some people aren’t. That makes for some wonderful debates over beer. But here’s the thing: even if you’re on the no-free-will team in the bar, you don’t act like you think you think there’s no free will. You will still feel that you are making choices. You will still make plans and execute them, as if you have the ability to do so. You will still speak of your desires, your preferences and your intentions, as if you really mean it. You will still hold others responsible for their actions, as if they had a choice.

That’s because, forgive me, you have no choice but to believe that you have free will and neither do I. Remember: we pursue knowledge for the purpose of living a meaningful life. And this very quest assumes that we do indeed have free will. We could not choose to pursue knowledge without being capable of choosing; nor could we direct our knowledge to living a meaningful life without being capable of choosing. Our very participation in the debate over free will is predicated on the assumption that we have it.

Let’s call the premise that we can pursue knowledge for the purpose of living a meaningful life the Fundamental Premise. I’m going to call the assumptions that underlie the Fundamental Premise beliefs. I’m going to call anything else we think is true about the questions addressed by those beliefs opinions.

Thus, for example, we all believe that we have free will, even if some of us also have the opinion, possibly even a strongly-held opinion, that we don’t have free will. So our beliefs and opinions might sometimes conflict. But, in almost every way that matters, our beliefs are more central to how we live our lives than are our opinions. We will think, speak and act in accordance with our beliefs, not our opinions. We might argue for our opinions in bull sessions, august public debates, in social media posts and in formal essays or academic articles, but then we’ll get back to real life and act just like everybody else.

So, to restate my thesis here, the very important philosophical questions that bore me are the very ones for which my opinions don’t actually matter because, whatever my opinions, I hold certain beliefs – the ones that underlie the Fundamental Premise that I can in fact seek truth for the purpose of living a meaningful life. More baldly stated, some philosophical discussions are boring because they can’t change my beliefs.

Intelligibility

With that thought in mind, let’s move on to another implication of the Fundamental Premise. Suppose you look out your window now and see that it’s raining. You think to yourself “If I go out now, I’ll get soaked.” But then you’re suddenly put in mind of that class on skepticism in the Intro to Philosophy course you took long ago. Do you actually know that you’ll get wet at all? Maybe you’re only dreaming that it’s raining. Maybe your eyes are deceiving you. In fact, maybe your eyes have always been deceiving you and there is no connection between what you “see” and “reality”. Maybe your whole life is a dream. Maybe you’re actually starring in your very own version of the Truman show and even the rain is staged. Maybe rain used to consist of water, but starting today, it’s actually hydrogen peroxide. Maybe water used to make things wet, but that was then.

Well, all those weird possibilities seem rather unlikely, you say. But, first of all, bear in mind that your ideas about what is likely are based on your past experience and if all that experience was deceptive, so are your thoughts about likelihood. Moreover, even if these weird scenarios are merely possible, if not especially likely, it still means that you don’t actually know that you’ll get wet in the rain.

Assuredly, none of these thoughts are going to deter you from taking an umbrella as you head out into the rain. You trust your senses, you almost always know that you’re not dreaming, you never take seriously the possibility that you’re in the Truman show or the Matrix or that you’re a brain in a vat. In fact, you assume that well-established patterns of nature will continue to hold into the indefinite future. And the same goes for me.

How do we know? What basis do we have for this assumption? Well, you might argue that scientific induction has worked until now, so we have reason to expect that it will continue to work, but the circularity of that argument ought to be obvious. To appreciate this point, imagine asking an anti-inductivist, who holds that whatever was is exactly what will not be, what basis he has for believing that. If he’s clever, he’ll respond “well, it never worked until now.” Furthermore, there is more than one way to generalize a discernible pattern. Maybe the law is that the sun comes up in the east every day only so long as there are no flying cars in Jerusalem. Everything in our experience so far is consistent with this law.

And yet we all get up every day confidently expecting the floor to be there when we get out of bed and the sun to be inching its way up in the east. Clearly, we believe that whatever version of folk science we have in our heads is at least a crude guide to how the world works. In fact, I’m pretty certain that even the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who first called attention to the difficulty of justifying scientific induction, didn’t put his hand on a lit stove just to see if fire still burns.

The explanation for all this is straightforward. If I’d entertain the idea that nature is unintelligible or that I can’t know anything about the present or the future on the basis of the past, everything I know would be upended and I wouldn’t be able to live any kind of coherent life. More specifically, the intelligibility of the world to human beings underlies the Fundamental Premise. I can’t seek truth for any purpose if I can never ascertain reliable knowledge about the world and I can’t achieve any purpose if I can’t make some predictions about the future. So whatever idiosyncratic opinions I might indulge about the intelligibility of the world, I have no choice but to believe that I have some ability to navigate it.

Social Progress

So far, I’ve discussed the easy cases, mainly for the purpose of hammering home my somewhat quirky version of the distinction between beliefs and opinions. Now let me try to persuade you of a few somewhat less obvious implications of the Fundamental Premise.

For my next trick, I want to argue that it follows from the Fundamental Premise that history – or at the very least, the history of our own society – is, in some sense, directed; one can discern in the development of a society a historical arc.

This is so because to speak of a meaningful life, I must be embedded in some society that gives meaning to what I do in life and that will continue even after I die. So, not only does my sense of self persist through my lifetime, it in fact projects out into the future. Whatever projects I undertake or participate in – personal, communal, academic, commercial, national – have meaning for me or for others only because they contribute to human endeavors that include other people and extend beyond the here and now. Simply put, it is an underlying assumption of the Fundamental Premise that my actions matter – not just momentarily, but in the longer term.

To appreciate this point, imagine that, as a result of some natural disaster, all human beings have become sterile. Once those alive today live out their lives, the human race will end. This scenario, contemplated by the writer P. D. James in her novel The Children of Men, is the basis of a thought experiment considered by the philosopher Samuel Scheffler.

Scheffler’s persuasive “afterlife conjecture” is that the knowledge that the human race has no long-term future would already suck all the life out of us. Clearly, we’d no longer see any point in engaging in activities, like long-term research projects, infrastructure development, reform of public institutions, or international diplomacy, that are meant to pay off only in the distant future. But, Scheffler asserts quite plausibly, we would actually lose our taste even for activities that ostensibly give us pleasure in the here and now, like the consumption of music, art, food, and sex. That is because our pleasure from these activities depends on their embeddedness in our lives as wholes, and more broadly on our lives’ embeddedness in ongoing human history. In short, even for those of us who are childless, the value we ascribe to the things we do assumes that we are each links in some ongoing chain of human life.

It thus follows from the Fundamental Premise – specifically, from the possibility of living a meaningful life – that I must believe in the viability and potential for continued development at least of the society of which I am a part. In particular, I must believe that my society is engaged in some ongoing project that connects that which has preceded us with that which will succeed us and that gives meaning to the things we do.

Objective Moral Truths

The arguments against the existence of objective moral values are easy to lay out. I’m confident that it is an objective fact that elephants are larger than mice because I’ve experienced this many times with my own eyes and my experience has been confirmed by reports from everyone else who has weighed in on the matter. I’m quite certain that 13*7=91 not just subjectively, because I have done the calculation.

Now, compare this with moral claims. Our moral views seem to depend on the culture we belong to; they vary widely even among individuals in the same culture; they are usually vague even for a given individual. This suggests that the primary method we have of divining moral truths, namely our intuition, is not very reliable. It’s plausible that that’s because there is no objective moral truth out there to intuit. In fact, maybe what sound like moral claims ought to be interpreted as merely emotive (hurrah for charity, boo to child abuse) or imperative (give charity, don’t beat children), rather than as claims about the world.

But nobody actually believes that. Even the philosophers most strongly opposed to moral realism don’t hesitate to express moral opinions, usually regarding political matters, as if they take them quite seriously. When we say that charity is good and child abuse is bad, we mean exactly that and we mean it sincerely. We believe these claims as strongly as we believe that elephants are bigger than mice.

And why is that? Because the assumption of the Fundamental Premise that we can strive to live a meaningful life itself assumes that some ways of living are more meaningful than others.  But this means that some ways of living are objectively better than others, and not merely in an instrumental or subjective way. More concretely, we necessarily regard activities that sustain the social projects that give our lives meaning as morally better than activities that hinder them. And, conversely, the social projects that give our lives meaning and by which we measure our society’s progress must be ones that we already regard as morally worthy. That’s why whatever our opinions about moral realism, we believe that some choices really are morally superior to others.

God

This brings me to the last of the beliefs that, I claim, follow from the Fundamental Premise – belief in the existence of God. There are good reasons not to be of the opinion that God exists. The whole idea sounds spooky, weird and pointless; in fact, it’s not even sufficiently well-defined to argue about.

But these objections suggest that the real challenge here is to figure out what people mean – in concrete and well-understood terms – when they say they believe in God. That is, we should not be talking in abstract terms about God’s existence, regarding which there is not much of value that we can say, but rather about God’s manifestation in the world in ways we can experience.

Watch this sleight of hand. We have already seen that we are compelled to believe each of the following:

1. the world is intelligible to us;

2. there are objective moral truths accessible to us;

3. we are free to choose to live by these moral truths;

4. our societies progress in accordance with these truths.

I’m going to call a world in which all these compelled beliefs hold a world in which God is manifest – but you might prefer to call it something else. If you buy my terminology, it follows that even atheists – who hold the opinion that God does not exist – must believe that God is manifest in our world.

Conclusion

We hold opinions that we don’t actually believe – and our behavior often gives us away. Some of these are about politics or human nature or our own abilities and preferences, but many – the ones that concern me here – are about Big Questions.

I realize that my arguments regarding the gap between our beliefs and opinions on the various Big Questions I considered here are not all equally convincing. Perhaps you weren’t persuaded by some of them. Never mind, that’s not the point. What is crucial is that there are some Big Questions contemplation of which just doesn’t matter: particular answers to these questions are the foundation of any quest for truth and not its product. Contemplation of these questions can only shift our opinions around, but those opinions don’t count for much in the face of our inescapable beliefs regarding such matters. 

Among the many questions that these beliefs do not resolve is what specifically constitutes a meaningful life. Now that is an interesting question.

Note: If you want to read the whole series in the natural order, use the url: moshekoppel.wordpress.com?order=asc

Let’s finish by returning to the dining hall in Princeton where this series began. I’ve written this series in response to Heidi’s challenge to the justice of my tribal loyalties and her insistence that the appropriate lesson of the murder of six million Jews is the danger of parochialism, including Jewish parochialism. But the truth is that when that conversation actually took place, I just sat there slack-jawed, staring at her uncomprehendingly. Had I been a bit less naïve and sheltered, had I had the vaguest idea where she was coming from and what she wanted from my life, I might have simply said the following:

I make no more apologies for my tribal loyalties than I do for my family loyalties. I’m a Jew both by blood and by choice and my life has meaning precisely because I share with the Jewish people a history and a destiny, and a system of values that connects one to the other. As for your implied assertion that tribal loyalty comes at the expense of universal love, you have it backwards. No society can function for long without leveraging the lessons of a specific evolved tradition. No society will do good for others without a moral system that first inculcates kindness to kin and clan. No society will produce decent human beings without arbitrary-seeming rules that restrain base animal instincts. No society will have the will to bear children, to invest in them love and energy and to teach them good from bad, without believing that it has some mission on this earth that gives life meaning and purpose.

I don’t doubt that your advocacy of universal love comes from a genuine longing to make the world a better place, but I’m equally convinced that high-sounding enlightened platitudes won’t get you any closer to that goal. You’ll only cut yourself off from your own people and your own best hope to be part of a project that will give your life direction, while your carefully curated collection of ethnically diverse friends will have the good sense to combine the skills they’ve learned in university with allegiance to their own cultures and traditions.

I might have gone on in this vein, making all the arguments I have marshaled in this long series of posts, telling Heidi all about Shimen. Heidi would no doubt have had many questions and counter-arguments. Are any of the claims I’ve made about Jewish tradition unique to Judaism or could many other religions make the same claims? Does allegiance to such a tradition require being born into it and, if so, what paths are open to someone who was not born into such a tradition? Are cultures like Shimen’s capable of sustaining themselves or do they assume the proximity of other cultures like Heidi’s to sustain them?

These are all challenging questions, but I’m certain that, with some effort, Heidi is perfectly capable of figuring out her own answers to each of them.

***

So, that’s that.

We’ve spoken here of some grand ideas but, when all is said and done, they’re all just fancily-dressed advertisements for the importance of humility. We can choose to live like those who, given the privileges of wealth and leisure and fueled by an exaggerated sense of entitlement, set off on a foolhardy quest to reinvent civilization in the name of cosmic justice; but then our inevitable failure is likely to leave us estranged from those who preceded us and with little to pass on to those who follow us. Or we can choose to live like Shimen and others who, even when robbed of every worldly good, live purposeful lives of quiet dignity that honor the wisdom of those who came before them and bequeath that wisdom – and perhaps just a bit more – to those who come after them.

I take leave of you now, dear reader, in the hope that in my own efforts to add just a bit more, I too have not neglected to honor and bequeath.

Most of the people who work in my office in Jerusalem are in their 20s and 30s. One grew up in a chassidic family with a father like Itcha Meir and is writing a book on haredi sociology and ideology, but he self-defines as non-religious and is sitting here in shorts and sandals. Another is a dayan (religious court judge) writing a doctoral thesis on theocracy. One woman grew up in a non-observant family and was active in the peace movement and is now religiously observant and an expert on and sympathizer with the hard-core of the settlement movement. Another fellow was raised in a secular-Zionist family with a mom like Adi and still self-defines as non-religious, but he davens with a minyan every day and observes Shabbat. Another is scrupulously religious, but refuses to wear a kipa. Another was raised Litvish-yeshivish, but now self-defines as national-religious and is beginning an academic career. One is a product of mamlachti religious Zionism with a dad like Bentzi, but is now a gung-ho evangelist for full-throated capitalism. Another just completed a thesis on the phenomenon of non-religious Israeli celebrities, mostly artists and musicians, who are now loosely connected to various Jewish spiritual groups, most prominently Breslav, and are observant in a variety of idiosyncratic ways, but refuse to self-define as religious or non-religious.

You might find any one of these life choices admirable or lamentable, but that’s not the point. The phenomenon is interesting in aggregate. There seems to be a great deal of fluidity here and the fluidity is strangely painless. These people are at peace with themselves and with each other. What’s this all about?

We’ve grown so accustomed to the centrality of signaling to Judaism that we can hardly imagine what Judaism would be like with less of it. We wear shtreimlech or hats or kipot of a certain color or none of the above, we daven in this shul but never in that shul, we use the right dialect of Yinglish and the appropriate accent, we eat here but not there, we flaunt our very special family minhagim, we bagel, we batel, we battle. We are so used to Judaism being spoken like a second language that we are perplexed when we see the early signs of the return of Judaism as a first language.

Young Israelis like the men and women in my office and the sons and daughters of Itcha Meir, Bentzi and Adi, aspire for Judaism to be a culture, not a counter-culture. They don’t need to prove that they’re not assimilating; there aren’t enough goyim here to assimilate into (which is why Itcha Meir, unlike his kids, needs to imagine Zionists as goyim just to keep his shtick going). They are sick of wasting energy on broadcasting their loyalty to this box and not that box. That mix-and-match of modes of dress, ideology and practices that seem incongruous to old fogies and diaspora Jews are simply inchoate attempts at breaking down the boxes and separating the signals from the substance.

Adi, Bentzi and Itcha Meir and their friends are the last of the ideological dinosaurs. The generation after them is looking for some form of authentic Judaism rich enough, substantial enough, realistic enough to serve as a national culture and not merely as a counter-culture sufficient to sustain a minority. This will happen slowly and from the bottom up. In the meantime, there are some small tentative steps in interesting directions. Galgalatz, the radio station that determines Israel’s Top 40 hits, includes in its playlist songs that might be sung as zemiros at the Shabbes table. Literary awards go to books that straddle the boundary between secular and religious literature in Agnonesque fashion. Zefat and Jerusalem are flush with galleries purveying serious (and not serious) art with profounder Jewish content than Chagall.

The much bigger question is what is happening with halacha? Halacha can’t and shouldn’t change dramatically and quickly for all the reasons I explained much earlier in this series. But there is a qualitative difference between, for example, Jewish agricultural law – sabbatical years, farming charity, etc. – as a series of largely ceremonial obstacles that need to be circumvented, steamrolled or dumped in somebody else’s backyard and those same laws adapted to modern circumstances in a way that honors their purpose and intent. There is a difference between Shabbat as a personal observance and Shabbat as a communal and even national day of rest, prayer and study. There are many more mitzvot that take on new meaning when they are observed by an entire society and not just a select minority. How will these evolve?

It’s too soon to say. As Itcha Meir’s kids and Bentzi’s kids and Adi’s kids find more common ground in their diverse paths towards some authentic form of national Judaism, things will begin to ferment. Remember, I’m not talking about the likes of Heidi or Ben bending Jewish observance to reconcile it with a dominant outside culture that they have internalized or aspire to internalize, but rather Jews in a Jewish state seeking to live Jewish lives. This much I know: as Israelis from diverse backgrounds begin to speak the language of halacha more fluently and as they continue to speak to each other, their halacha will become more like Shimen’s: balanced across the moral flavors, less focused on signaling, fluid as the Oral Law is meant to be, and less uptight and anxious than halacha becomes when under constant threat. In some ways, it will assume qualities beyond Shimen’s halacha: it will be more meaningful than symbolic, it will be normal rather than defiant, and it will be less baroque and esoteric.

This last point bears explanation. In the normal course of events, languages become more complex with the natural accretion of increasingly nuanced grammatical rules and oddities; in this sense, halacha is no exception. Moreover, when halacha is observed by a select minority and the study of Torah is left to an even more select minority, it is sometimes made deliberately opaque to keep impostors from meddling. But, when languages are adopted by many non-native speakers or when speakers of different dialects are suddenly thrown together, an opposite process takes place and the language’s grammar is simplified; this already happened with the transition of biblical Hebrew to the simpler modern Hebrew we now speak. It is likely that a similar process will take place with halacha: as many come closer to tradition and as the integration of communities from different diasporas accelerates, we will see a greater focus on principles common to diverse Jewish communities at the expense of marginalia specific to certain communities or to aficionados of esoterica.

This has all been made possible by the ingathering of exiles in a Jewish state. It took several generations, but the freedom and purpose that Israel has provided the Jews is finally resulting in a generation of young people who not only have a sense of mission and responsibility, a strong desire for self-sufficiency, and confidence in themselves and in each other, but also a realistic assessment of what is achievable and what is utopian and a thirst for authentic Judaism that can serve as a foundation for personal, communal and national life. In short, Israel’s success is the precise opposite of what many of its founders saw as its purpose. Instead of overcoming Jewish tradition, it has facilitated a return to it; instead of replacing Jewish communities with the state, it has given those communities the space to flourish and to influence each other.

To complete this process, Israel needs to give its citizens freedom not only from enemies and hostile cultures, but from their own government. Education in Israel would be better and more balanced if bureaucrats would let schools choose curricula and parents choose schools; communities would be more connected to religion if bureaucrats let communities appoint (or not appoint) rabbis and run their own religious services; we’d all be more equal if the state didn’t sponsor academic and judicial juntas that enforce their own self-serving versions of equality. The Zionist notion that the big state will guide its citizens to the ideal balance of Jewishness and democracy has it exactly backwards; it is the little “night watchman” state that seeks to do no more than keep us safe – or rather that serves as the framework within which we keep each other safe – that will create the opportunity for us to figure it all out for ourselves very slowly and very surely.

Some ideologues still think that we are on the verge of messianic times and it’s our duty to restore the top-down control of society by a revived Sanhedrin or Politburo or Council of Sages. But they are all mistaken. The rabbis say that the messianic era will be distinguished only by freedom from political subjugation (BT Shabbat 63a) and that mashiach is one of those things (along with scorpion bites and windfalls) that come only behesach hadaat, when we are least expecting them (BT Sanhedrin 97a). The redemption of the Jewish people will not be bestowed by the state; rather, it will be the result of slow evolution from the bottom up, as healthy Jewish instincts under conditions of freedom are gradually made manifest in the public sphere. If the state and all the determined do-gooders just leave us alone, one day, when we are least expecting it, we might just look around and think to ourselves: you know what, here we are, free Jews living in a Jewish country, building it and sustaining it, learning Torah and mostly living by its commandments, raising proud and non-neurotic Jewish kids. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.

****

One more post to go.

It looks like our second-generation cast of characters have failed to reproduce the balance that characterizes Shimen’s way of life. Certainly, it isn’t easy to identify in their respective versions of Judaism anything you’d think of as a project connecting a richly-recalled past with an intensely-conceived future, giving life direction and meaning. Adi and Heidi attach little value to the continuity of Jewish tradition, while Yitzy and Itcha Meir regard it as stagnant. Bentzi unwittingly guts Jewish communities by advocating for the Jewish State to usurp their roles, while Itcha Meir fails to acknowledge how the existence of such a state fundamentally changes the nature of the challenges faced by Jewish tradition. Ben is acculturating faster than he realizes, while Yitzy’s halacha is formalistic and impervious to moral intuition.

The key to the problem might be that all these characters live in boxes. The circumstances of their lives are such that the range of realizable positions along the continuum of Jewish identity and practice is limited to a small set of available boxes. These boxes – secular-liberal, modern-religious, haredi or whatever – are defined by ideological least common denominators and tedious institutional interests and they lead to intellectual conformity.

American and Israeli Jews are not equally encumbered by the extent to which Jewishness is boxed. A generation ago, in the days when I was being lectured on Jewish duties by Heidi in Princeton, it would have been clear that Israel was much boxier than the United States. Shimen and the parents of Yitzy and Ben sat so comfortably between the Haredi and Modern Orthodox worlds that they were completely unaware that the distinction even mattered. Similarly, the Conservative community in which Heidi grew up filled the gap between Modern Orthodoxy and secular liberalism.

In Israel, on the other hand, the gap between anti-religious secularists like Adi and religious Zionists like Bentzi was occupied solely by marginalized traditional Sefardim, who had yet to find a strong and distinctive voice. The split between Bentzi and Haredim like Itcha Meir was dichotomous by definition: Bentzi and friends went to the army and Itcha Meir and friends did not. This led to other dichotomies: religious Zionists learned professions and got jobs, while Itcha Meir and friends did not. American Jews who moved to Israel were often frustrated by the unavailability of the kinds of intermediate versions of Jewishness to which they were accustomed.

Some of this still holds to a lesser degree, but if instead of looking at snapshots of Judaism in the States and in Israel, we consider the respective trajectories of developments in each country since those days, a different picture emerges.

Judaism in the United States has become much boxier. The center is not holding. Just as Israeli young men have to choose between serving in the army or avoiding the draft, young American Jews need to decide between remaining in the ghetto or buying into the dominant campus culture — Heidi’s cosmopolitanism, if they’re lucky, or Amber’s radicalism, in the likelier case. The social and professional cost of bucking that trend is quite high and is only worthwhile in exchange for the social capital available exclusively in very tight-knit and isolated Jewish communities.

The fate of the Conservative congregation that Heidi grew up in is instructive in this regard. In trying to cater to Heidi’s cohort, the congregation briefly resisted but then enthusiastically adopted every fashionable progressive trend until it was left with no distinctive message to offer. Broadly speaking, the offspring of Heidi’s friends – to the extent that they have any – are, like Amber, less Jewish and more radical than their parents. The congregation’s building was recently sold to a Korean church.

As it happens, Ben’s kids and Yitzy’s kids are also drifting further from their grandparents’ delicate balance. Of Ben’s three kids, one son is no longer affiliated with a Jewish community and another is a member of a Reconstructionist LGBT community; Ben’s daughter has gone yeshivish and lives in Ramat Eshkol with her husband, who shares her background and is now “learning by Reb Avrohom Yehoshua”, hoping (vainly) that the Rosh Yeshiva will one day nod in his general direction.

Yitzy has three daughters and three sons, in that order. He hit what he believes to be the jackpot with his eldest daughter’s husband, said to be “a blitz, one of the best guys in Lakewood”, by promising to forego retirement to support his son-in-law while he sits in kollel for the rest of his life. He could not afford a similar arrangement for his second daughter and had to settle for a lesser scholar; his third daughter is having trouble finding a shidduch altogether. As for his sons, the second one is now “in shidduchim” and learning in Lakewood. The third son is learning in Waterbury, while secretly planning to one day make a killing in shady real estate deals. Yitzy’s eldest son, once the apple of his eye, is now never spoken of, so as not to harm the others’ chances of getting good shidduchim; he had been serially molested by his fourth-grade rebbe and is now “off the derech” and addicted to opiates. Yitzy’s daughters are decently educated and hard-working; his sons and sons-in-law sort of speak English, Yiddish and Hebrew, but are incapable of completing a sentence in any of the three.

Except for Ben’s yeshivish daughter who seeks out the company of her second-cousins, Ben’s kids and Yitzy’s kids each regard the other as object lessons in the dangers of the wrong kind of Jewish education and want nothing to do with each other. Their estrangement is representative of the broader bad relationship into which their respective cohorts have been sucked, an equilibrium characterized by mistrust, spite and alienation.

Many of you will be surprised to hear that the current situation in Israel is quite different. Israel has become much less “boxy”. The default culture is no longer that of secular progressives like Adi and there is now little pressure to conform to it. Unlike in the United States, the threat of assimilation is limited, so the degree of fear across groups is diminishing. Moreover, the rigid ideologies that separate Israeli haredim, religious Zionist and secular progressives are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Itcha Meir’s kids speak standard Hebrew, their political views are Zionist in substance even if not in name and they would love to find a way to learn a trade and make an honest living. Bentzi’s kids have lived through the Oslo agreements, the Disengagement and other follies of Israeli governments and openly mock their father’s mamlachti Kookian ideology. Adi’s kids – even the secular Adi has a Jewish husband and three kids – are embarrassed at their parents’ firm, if unspoken, conviction that the state is rightly owned by the descendants of Labor Zionists and that others live here at their sufferance.

Adi’s kids and Bentzi’s kids meet in the army and at work and they speak to each other with typical Israeli candidness, free of both rancor and the kind of correctness that typically stems from distance or mistrust. Increasingly, Itcha Meir’s kids are participating in these conversations as well; as soon as a technical solution is found to the problem of haredi enlistment, the gap between them and the others will close very quickly.

In short, the boxes are breaking down in Israel. This has two salient consequences, each of which is only now beginning to become apparent. The first is that the question “are you hiloni or dati or haredi?” is, for many people, becoming hard to answer. Increasingly, degrees of Jewish observance in Israel lie on a spectrum, not in the familiar boxes, slowly converging to a normal distribution over the range, with a peak somewhere in the center that drops off slowly and symmetrically. (One consequence of this is long tails on each end populated by loud and strident outliers, giving the false impression that extremists are getting stronger.)

The second consequence is that the usual bundlings of ideologies, religious practices and outward signals are unraveling. We have become accustomed to the idea that if we know how someone dresses or how they act in a given situation or where they went to yeshiva, we can pretty much guess all the rest. Forget that. The flourishing of a Jewish state and the confidence it has brought are leading to a new and surprising re-alignment.

In the next post, I’ll discuss the nature of this realignment, what it tells us about the actual – and much misunderstood – value of a Jewish state, and how all this heralds the return of an organic Judaism last seen in the days of Shimen.