Going Golem

"Going Golem" was the title I gave to this op-ed, which was published on June 14th in the Jewish Standard under the title, Going Golem… Or Moving the Letters Around. Can you remember back that far, when the Game of Thrones series had just wrapped up in a dissatisfying manner?

In any event, here it is now here on Blog Time Passing:

The recent controversy over the final season of the HBO series Game of Thrones brings to mind the essay by Michael Weingrad published in the Spring 2010 issue of the Jewish Review of Books: “Why There is No Jewish Narnia.” 

Weingrad poses that question, noting that fantasy literature represents “an entire literary genre—perhaps the only such genre—in which Jewish practitioners are strikingly rare.” He goes on to note that he “cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little.” 

Weingard speculates on the reasons for our lack of representation in this area, which include our historical memory. While Christians retain a romantic image of the medieval period as a time of knights in shining armor following a code of chivalry, Jews were shut out from this aristocratic system and often victimized by Crusaders claiming to be on a mission from God. For our people, modernity represented the moment of emancipation and acceptance as citizens in newly formed republics, with progress in politics following progress in science and technology. No accident, then, that there have been a great many Jewish science-fiction writers, not the least of them Isaac Asimov, the most prolific writer in any genre in American history.

While the question of whether there ever will be a Jewish Chronicles of Narnia or Game of Thrones remains to be seen—I imagine that someday there will be—for now I do want to point to one Jewish legend that has enormous fantasy potential—the golem.

There are many variations of the legend. The gist of it is a story about a human being creating an artificial being. A golem’s body typically is made out of clay, following the description in the Book of Genesis of God creating Adam’s body out of clay. In the story of Creation, God breathes life into Adam’s body. In Hebrew, the words denoting breath and wind also mean spirit and soul; breath is intimately associated with life itself, and also with speech.

A golem typically is brought to life not by breath or speech, but by the written word—it may be a series of letters in the Hebrew alphabet or God’s name inserted into the body. Letters also are used to spell out the Hebrew word for truth, emet. Usually they’re on the golem’s forehead. The golem can be deactivated by erasing the first letter, the aleph, leaving the Hebrew word met, meaning death. This reflects the idea of the Hebrew alphabet as sacred, and certain inscriptions as holy, for example, the Torah and mezuzahs.

A golem is not human. In some versions it cannot speak—speech is the defining characteristic of our species—while in others eventually it turns on its creator, sometimes because it follows instructions too literally. The story of the golem, then, often is a story of hubris, of human beings trying to play God, of trying to harness power that is beyond our control. It often is a story of unintended effects.

The best known version of the story takes place in the city of Prague during a time of oppression and pogroms. The golem there is brought to life by Rabbi Judah Loew to protect the Jewish community. We can understand the wish fulfillment fantasy behind this variation. Der Goylem by H. Leivick, a Yiddish dramatic poem and play, identifies Rabbi Loew’s golem with the legend of the Messiah ben Joseph, the messiah from the House of Joseph, who will precede the messiah from the House of David, and sometimes is associated with conflict and war.

The legend of the golem in all probability influenced Mary Shelley in the creation of what often is considered to be the first science-fiction novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Prague, after all, is not too far from the setting of Shelley’s story, Geneva, and the Czech connection undoubtedly influenced Karel Čapek in the writing of the play R.U.R. The initials stand for Rossumovi Univerzáln’ Roboti, translated as Rossum’s Universal Robots. This play introduced the term robot, which is a Czech word for worker, and the narrative follows the classic trajectory of a slave rebellion, with our own creations turning against us.

The golem narrative is even more resonant today, given the cutting edge of contemporary technology. On the one hand, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the development and implementation of artificial intelligence, from self-driving cars to facial recognition and surveillance to the easy generation of fake videos that appear to be utterly authentic. It’s not just about killer robots, terminators, and homicidal HAL; Google searches and Amazon recommendations also are types of AI. All these applications are brought to artificial life by a form of writing—this time not a holy word or name or sacred letters, but the zeroes and ones of computer code, which again follow instructions to the letter, entirely literally.

And when it comes to the question of emet or truth, our social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on come to mind as mechanisms that are so very effective at disseminating falsehoods, making them forms of computer code that have turned a blessing into a curse.

On the other hand, we have unlocked the code of life, DNA, and gained the ability to edit our own genes. Just recently it was revealed that a Chinese scientist engaged in gene editing to create “CRISPR babies” resistant to HIV infection had inadvertently shortened those children’s likely lifespans. DNA is in a sense the sacred script inside our bodies that animates us, and the question of whether clones have souls also could be framed as whether clones are golems. But with gene editing, we are in the process of turning our children and so ultimately ourselves into modern golems.

Admittedly, all this better fits in with science fiction than the fantasy genre, but my point is that a fantasy story featuring the concept of the golem is one that would have great relevance for the present day, just as Tolkien’s war of the ring appealed to post-World War II readers, and Game of Thrones, with its cynical view of conniving characters and political machinations, turned out to be the perfect narrative for the McConnell, Ryan, and Trump era.

Whether the golem legend can serve as the basis of the kind of grand fantasy that Tolkien or Lewis created, or even the more mediocre version written by George R.R. Martin, will depend on the inspiration and imagination of Jewish writers.

But I would suggest that the story, like the golem itself, has a life of its own, and sooner or later it just may write itself.

Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Spock

In the spirit of catching up with the last few months' activities, the March 6th issue of the Jewish Standard included another one of my op-eds, one I wrote regarding the  recent passing of actor Leonard Nimoy, best known for his portrayal of Mr. Spock on the Star Trek television series and motion pictures. Appearing under the title of Live Long and Prosper, with "Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Spock" as the subtitle, the piece goes like this:


The death of Leonard Nimoy on Friday, February 27, at 83, marked the passing of an American icon—indeed, a star of global renown, and a Jewish hero as well.

Nimoy’s accomplishments were many. He was an author, poet, musician, photographer, philanthropist, educator, and director, and of course an actor who played many roles on stage and screen. But he is best known for his role as Mr. Spock on Star Trek, the television series that first aired in 1966. It is a role he reprised in the various sequels, spinoffs, and remakes that appeared after the original series went off the air in 1969.

Nimoy was a Boston native, fluent in Yiddish, whose parents were Orthodox Jews who escaped from the Soviet Union. As he related in various interviews, his background informed his portrayal of the sole alien being on the Starship Enterprise. Spock hailed from the planet Vulcan but was also half-human, making him an alien on Vulcan as well. His status reflects that of immigrants and their children, first-generation Americans who, like Nimoy, grow up in a household, community, and culture that still has one foot in the old world.

As a child attending Orthodox services, Nimoy observed the Cohenim delivering the priestly benediction, and as an adult he appropriated their hand gesture when he introduced the Vulcan salute. The greeting that he added to the salute, “live long and prosper,” echoes the sentiment of the benediction, as well as the simple greeting “shalom” (further echoed in the ritual response, “peace and long life”). There is certainly cause for pride in this small Jewish contribution to global popular culture, but does this mean that Star Trek incorporates Jewish undertones, as Haaretz writer Nathan Abrams insisted in an article published the day after Nimoy’s death? Certainly, Jewish fans can take pleasure in the fact that Nimoy and co-star William Shatner are Jewish. So were several of the series’ writers, and we can assume that they all brought some elements of a Jewish sensibility to the program.

But let’s be clear that Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry, who was not Jewish, and who included characters from a variety of different backgrounds—Scottish, Irish, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and African—but never one who was identifiably Jewish. Indeed, the only characters with any real Jewish identity in the Star Trek universe appeared in a few of the many original novels published under license from Paramount Pictures. No doubt this is not because of any bias or prejudice on Roddenberry’s part, but rather because he associated Jewishness with religion, rather than nationality. His vision of the future was one in which science and progress reigned supreme, and any seemingly supernatural phenomena would inevitably be revealed to be a product of a highly advanced science, or biological evolution.

The conspicuous absence of any Jewish characters from Roddenberry’s melting-pot future can lead viewers to search for them in disguised, symbolic form, to look for what Sigmund Freud referred to as the return of the repressed. And the obvious form for a crypto-Judaic character to take would be that of an alien being. Indeed, while Shatner had the kind of looks that allowed him to pass as a WASP from Iowa, Nimoy’s features gave him what was considered at the time to be a relatively interchangeable “ethnic” appearance, so that earlier in his career he played Spanish, Mexican, and Native American characters. And certainly there are Jewish elements incorporated into Nimoy’s man from Vulcan, and into other aspects of Star Trek. Consider the episode called “Patterns of Force,” in which an alien planet patterns itself after Earth’s Nazi Germany, and is trying to wipe out their neighboring planet, called Zeon (an obvious reference to Zion).

But I want to suggest that Abrams and others are wrong about Spock being implicitly Jewish. It perhaps is revealing that Abrams mistakenly refers to the character as “Dr.” Spock, a mistake not uncommon among those not very familiar with the series. Nimoy’s character usually is referred to as “Mr.” Spock, in keeping with naval tradition about first officers, and occasionally by his rank, which was at various times commander, captain, and ambassador. Dr. Spock was, of course, Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician whose bestselling book, Baby and Child Care, served as a bible to the parents in the postwar era. Like Roddenbery, Dr. Spock was not Jewish. The name Spock is Dutch, originally spelled Spaak.




Spock’s home planet, Vulcan is named for the Roman god of fires and forges, and Vulcans are revealed to be related to another alien race, the warlike Romulans, named for the founder of Rome. Vulcan philosophy, which venerates logic above all else, represents a view that is very much in keeping with Athens rather than Jerusalem. Vulcans revere Surak as the founder of their philosophy. Surak has little in common with Moses but quite a bit with Socrates, with some Gandhi thrown in for good measure. So while Spock’s home planet is depicted as having the kind of hot, dessert-like climate that we associate with the Middle East, the stronger connection is to the European side of the Mediterranean.

Abrams associates Vulcan intellectualism with the people of the book, but the aliens do not seek a balance between faith and reason, in the fashion of Maimonides, but rather enforce a strict discipline, suppressing all emotion, in a way that is very much in keeping with another branch of ancient Greek philosophy, Zeno’s Stoicism. Moreover, suppression of emotions often is linked to dehumanization, as a means of forcing individuals to adapt to mechanization and industrialism, yielding a technological being well suited to being a cog in a machine, rather than a mensch, a real, well rounded human being. We may therefore identify with Spock’s struggles, and admire his superior physical and mental abilities, but it is his human side that is the most Jewish part of him.

Following a long tradition in western culture, Roddenberry used orientalism to convey a sense of the alien, and this includes Jewish as well as Arabic, Persian, and Chinese elements. With his raised eyebrows, Spock bears a certain similarity to Ming the Merciless, the alien villain from the old Flash Gordon serials. But it was not until long after Roddenberry’s death in 1991 that a Jewish film director, J. J. Abrams, who was recruited to reboot the series, invokes the destruction of the Temple and subsequent diaspora by having the planet Vulcan destroyed by Romulans. In that 2009 film, called simply Star Trek, time travel is used to generate an alternate timeline, and Leonard Nimoy makes a cameo appearance as the original, now-elderly Spock, while Zachary Quinto takes on the main role as the new Spock. (Quinto is of Italian ancestry, and Italians and Jews often have been cast interchangeably in film and television.) Nimoy’s final film appearance was in the 2013 sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, also directed by Abrams.

 

As a science fiction fan, I can appreciate Star Trek in all of its iterations, and I can enjoy it as a form of American entertainment and popular culture without exaggerating its Jewish undertones. And as a Jewish-American, I can feel pride and affection toward Leonard Nimoy, as a landsman, as the producer and star of the TV movie about a Holocaust survivor, Never Forget, as the author of the photography book Shekhinawith its erotic Kabbalistic theme, and as the originator of the Vulcan salute and the saying “Live long and prosper.”

My MEA Keynote (If Not A Then E)

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, At MEA 2013, I gave a keynote address at the 14th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, hosted by Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 20-23, 2013. My talk was on Thursday evening, June 20, and as it turns out, my friends at Grand Valley, the MEA convention coordinators Corey Anton and Valerie Peterson, had all of the featured presentations videotaped, so I was able to upload a copy to my YouTube channel (all of them can also be found on the MEA's channel).

My talk begins with some extended opening remarks, including my dedication of the address to my old undergraduate professor, Jack Barwind, who passed away just recently. Jack introduced me to much of what I later came to know under the heading of media ecology, including general semantics and systems theory.

Once I get into the address itself, the focus shifts to the PowerPoint presentation, thankfully I would think, because how long can you just look at my talking head?  But once it's over, it's back to me for the Q&A.






Anyway, this is a live presentation, complete with interruption from a Skype alert from Valerie Peterson's mom, as I was using her computer for the presentation.  So it's a bit on the rough side. 

At some point in the not too distant future, and hopefully with a little help from my friends, I would like to create a polished, direct to video version of "If Not A Then E" to put out there. But for now, I suppose that this will do.

Piece of Pi

So, today is Pi Day, being 3-14, and more so, Palindromic Pi Day, being 3-14-13! That's certainly an interesting bit of memery (memeosity?), given that this special occasion was all but unheard before Y2K (remember Y2K?). My guess is that with the millennium, much more attention was paid to dates with interesting numerological qualities, like the recent 12/12/12, the last of its kind until the next century! 

Pi Day also reflects something of a technological mindset, that is a digital sensitivity brought about by the ubiquity of computers, smart devices, and internet connectivity, and the type of techie competence that makes this brave new world go round. Not that there's anything wrong with it, mind you!

But lest you think that it's all math and science and tech, and no art and music, please allow me to remind you that such separations are artificial, and did not exist in antiquity, certainly not among the old Greeks who gave Pi it's name, or rather initial (although ∏ wasn't actually assigned to the value until the 18th century). 

In fact, there are some folks who attempted to turn Pi into a musical composition. Here's one by Michael Blake:





Rather lovely, don't you think? By the way, here's a Pi Chart:

 

A rather amusing visual pun, don't you agree? And guaranteed to give you Pi strain, er, I mean eye strain.  Speaking of strain, let's trade an eye for an ear, but first, listen to what the composer of the piece I'm about to share, Carlos Manuel, writes about it over on YouTube:

There has been many attempts to make a conversion of the digits of Pi to musical notes, but I noticed that the methods used were pretty unrealistic. What they were doing was to convert the 10 digits of the decimal system in 10 notes, and then play them. Of course that doesn't make any sense because our musical notation has 12 notes! So I converted the digits of Pi to the duodecimal system (Base 12), and made a program to play it. Here are the results.

And here they are:



Quite the contrast with the previous piece of Pi, don't you agree? Did you listen to it in its entirety? Well, you might ask, what if you dialed Pi to a 1,000 places as a phone number, and added a bit of extra rhythm in the background? The results are not too bad:






And here's a rather interesting YouTube lecture combined with another take on Pi melodies by one Professor Philip Moriarity (no shoot, Sherlock!):





We may all be coded somewhere in Pi! What a conclusion! Now, here's a rather sweet version, with a synthesized, classical feel that I'd associated with Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman of Yes:





 In the write-up, the composer suggests that, because Pi existed before the human race evolved, and for that matter before life itself originated, this is the oldest song that you might ever hear!  Whether you believe that or not, one thing is for sure, that Pi music can take many forms:





Well, this is just a sampling of the many versions of musical Pi that are out there. But how about something from the movie Pi. No not, Life of Pi, but the 1998 film ∏ written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Here's the trailer:





Now, there's some media and formal cause for ya (note the plug for the book by Marshall and Eric McLuhan, easily ordered from the box over on the right). So anyway, I hope you had a happy Pi Day!

And what's left to say, but...  3.141592653589793238462643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094 3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912 9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132 0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235 4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859 5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881 7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303 5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 8823537875 9375195778 1857780532 1712268066 1300192787 6611195909 2164201989 

et cetera...

Imperfectly Divine

 As I mention here on occasion, I'm a member, and in fact the president of Congregation Adas Emuno, a small Reform temple in Leonia, which is a town in Bergen County, New Jersey. So this year I started to attend our Saturday morning Torah study sessions, which are led by our rabbi, Barry Schwartz.  One reason I decided to do this rather than sleep in on Saturday morning was Barry's decision to have us study the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish philosopher and theologian.

You may not have heard of him, but Maimonides is considered by some to be second only to his namesake, the biblical Moses, in his influence on the development of Judaism. As an authority on the Hebrew bible and Talmud, he also influenced Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. In addition to being a theologian and philosopher, Maimonides was also a practicing physician.

Now, to backtrack for a moment, students of media ecology, and the history of writing, know that there are two major origination points for the alphabet. 

The first is circa 1500 BCE, when the Semitic alphabet first appears in the Sinai desert. This is a major breakthrough because previously, logographic and syllabic writing systems required thousands or hundreds of different characters, whereas the Semitic alphabet reduced it all down to 22 consonants.  Following the introduction of the Semitic alphabet, we get the events represented by the story of Moses, and a new kind of culture appearing in that region, which is to say, ancient Israel. 

The Semitic alphabet diffused across the Mediterranean to the Greeks by the way of the Semitic people known as Phoenecians, and the Greeks adapted it to their own language, changing some of the consonants into vowels in the process. Out of this came everything we know and admire about ancient Greece.

So, we have two major alphabetic cultures in antiquity, Greece and Israel, or as some put it metonymically, Athens and Jerusalem. Athens gives us our secular-humanist culture, associated with the Greco-Roman tradition, and Jerusalem gives us our religious and legal-ethical culture, associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. But advantage goes to Athens, not only because secular humanism has been increasingly more dominant since the Enlightenment, but also because the Christian church embraced Greco-Roman thought, especially once Christianity completely broke with Judaism, and was adopted by the Roman emperor Constantine.

We just recently discussed the book Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia in an MA class I'm teaching at Fordham University, and Paglia argues how pagan culture never truly vanished, but remained very much just under the surface of western Christian culture, in both its Apollonian and Dionysian forms. And it follows that the Apollonian side of pagan culture is the basis of our secular-humanist orientation.

Anyway, among the differences between the two alphabetic cultures is the fact that Jerusalem retained a strong connection to orality to balance out its commitment to literacy, and an aversion to visual imagery on account of the Second Commandment injunction against graven images of any kind, while Athens developed a highly visual and visualist culture, laying the groundwork for the extreme visualism that emerged via print culture in early modern Europe.

Walter Ong's media ecology sensibility was based, in large part, on his gaining an understanding of the strong residual orality of Judaic culture, and the absence of the visualism that shaped ancient Greece. The 20th century Jewish theologian and philosopher, Martin Buber, had significant influence on Ong's thought on the subject, although the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy is typically associated with Leo Strauss.

Hellenism posed a great challenge to Jewish culture and thought in the ancient world, and the minor holiday of Hanukkah, which we'll begin to celebrate this coming Saturday evening, represents the first major battle between Jerusalem and Athens, not in the sense of direct warfare, but as a war waged within ancient Israel to rid itself of Hellenistic influences. Mostly, however, the battles were intellectual ones, as for example Philo of Alexandria provided an early attempt to synthesize Greek and Jewish thought, one that was largely ignored by Talmudic scholars, but held some influence within the early Christian Church.

Now jump ahead to the 12th century, and we have Maimonides being thoroughly schooled in ancient Greek philosophy, as it was preserved in the Islamic empire, embracing Aristotelian rationalism and attempting to apply it to Talmudic scholarship and Judaic thought. Now this may set off warning signals among followers of general semantics, but after all, Aristotle's logic represented a major advance for its time, and we certainly cannot expect a find a Korzybski-like non-Aristotelian approach in the 12th century.

So, just as Aristotle tried to provide organized summaries of the philosophical thinking of his time, Maimonides tried to do the same for Judaism and Talmudic scholarship. And this effort to summarize and organize can be understood as a shift towards Greek visualism.  In doing so, he left out all of the Talmudic references, the differing points of view that are recorded, removing the sense of an ongoing conversation, dialogue, debate and disputation. The result is something more like a textbook, a step towards the Ramist revolution of the early modern era that Ong researched (interestingly enough, Ramism was the basis of Puritan education, and Maimonides was an important source for Puritan theologians, who argued that they were the new Israelites).

It occurred to me that to take on this kind of summary, and more importantly, to want to make it available to others, suggests an increased accessibility of written works, along the lines that Harold Innis discusses in his seminal media ecology work, The Bias of Communication.  So I checked, and found that the manufacturing of paper, which was invented in China in the 2nd century CE, had spread to the Iberian peninsula during the 10th century.  It follows that by the time of Maimonides, paper had become plentiful, opening the door to and creating a demand for efforts such as he was engaged in.

As an Aristotelian, Maimonides sought to establish first principles, in order to provide a logical basis for Jewish thought, and therefore set forth 13 principles of faith, the first time anything like that had been attempted.  He also argued for highly abstract notions of God and the human soul, in ways that seemed to me to draw on Plato's ideal forms. Again, this is a shift away from the oral, dialogic mode into a more abstract, visual, rational approach.

Now, while recognizing the significance of his accomplishments, my preference is for the Kabbalah and Isaac Luria, as mysticism seems to better work with spirituality than rationality does, although logic can be useful in regard to ethics.  But given our modern understanding about the limits of deductive reasoning (only as good as its premises), the proven effectiveness of empiricism (relying on observable facts), and my own preference for that non-Aristotelian approach of general semantics, and media ecology, I find Maimonides difficult to relate to in many respects, although fascinating to study.

So now, while this doesn't relate directly to Maimonides, I was interested to come across a recent post on the New York Times Opinionator Blog, dated November 25th, and entitled An Imperfect God, by Yoram Hazony, president of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of, most recently, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.  Here is how he begins:

Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe "theism" as the belief in a perfect being - a being whose attributes are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something like this view is common among lay people as well. 

This view, I should point out, would directly correspond to that of Maimonides, and of course most other medieval and modern theologians. Anyway, to continue with the post:

There are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice. Similarly, it's hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came from.

The second problem is that while this "theist" view of God is supposed to be a description of the God of the Bible, it's hard to find any evidence that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or "Old Testament") thought of God in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he's repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.

Here, Hazony is raising the famous problem of free will, one that Maimonides among many others have taken up. Maimonides insists that we have free will, and his emphasis is on proving that this is the case based on Biblical sources, but he does not really tackle the problem of how this is inconsistent with the view of God as a perfect being.

Philosophers have spent many centuries trying to get God's supposed perfections to fit together in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the Bible. By now it's reasonably clear that this can't be done. In fact, part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their insistence that the doctrine of God's perfections makes no sense, and that the idealized "being" it tells us about doesn't resemble the biblical God at all.
So is that it, then? Have the atheists won? I don't think so. But it does look like the time has come for some rethinking in the theist camp.

I'd start with this: Is it really necessary to say that God is a "perfect being," or perfect at all, for that matter? As far as I can tell, the biblical authors avoid asserting any such thing. And with good reason. Normally, when we say that something is "perfect," we mean it has attained the best possible balance among the principles involved in making it the kind of thing it is. For example, if we say that a bottle is perfect, we mean it can contain a significant quantity of liquid in its body; that its neck is long enough to be grasped comfortably and firmly; that the bore is wide enough to permit a rapid flow of liquid; and so on. Of course, you can always manufacture a bottle that will hold more liquid, but only by making the body too broad (so the bottle doesn't handle well) or the neck too short (so it's hard to hold). There's an inevitable trade-off among the principles, and perfection lies in the balance among them. And this is so whether what's being judged is a bottle or a horse, a wine or a gymnastics routine or natural human beauty.

What would we say if some philosopher told us that a perfect bottle would be one that can contain a perfectly great amount of liquid, while being perfectly easy to pour from at the same time? Or that a perfect horse would bear an infinitely heavy rider, while at the same time being able to run with perfectly great speed? I should think we'd say he's made a fundamental mistake here: You can't perfect something by maximizing all its constituent principles simultaneously. All this will get you is contradictions and absurdities. This is not less true of God than it is of anything else.

I think Hazony's argument here is quite brilliant, not the least because he is using logic to refute logic.

The attempt to think of God as a perfect being is misguided for another reason as well. We can speak of the perfection of a bottle or a horse because these are things that can be encompassed (at least in some sense) by our senses and understanding. Having the whole bottle before us, we feel we can judge how close it is to being a perfect instance of its type. But if asked to judge the perfection of a bottle poking out of a paper bag, or of a horse that's partly hidden in the stable, we'd surely protest: How am I supposed to know? I can only see part of it.

Yet the biblical accounts of our encounters with God emphasize that all human views of God are partial and fragmentary in just this way. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, is told that he can't see God's face, but can only catch a glimpse of God's back as he passes by. At another point, God responds to Moses' request to know his name (that is, his nature) by telling him "ehi'eh asher ehi'eh" -"I will be what I will be." In most English-language Bibles this is translated "I am that I am," following the Septuagint, which sought to bring the biblical text into line with the Greek tradition (descended from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's "Timaeus") of identifying God with perfect being. But in the Hebrew original, the text says almost exactly the opposite of this: The Hebrew "I will be what I will be" is in the imperfect tense, suggesting to us a God who is incomplete and changing. In their run-ins with God, human beings can glimpse a corner or an edge of something too immense to be encompassed, a "coming-into-being" as God approaches, and no more. The belief that any human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.

I find this extraordinarily important in that it points to the fact that the translation of the Holy Scriptures from Hebrew to Greek was not just a matter of linguistic substitution, but actually a translation of worldviews and philosophies. That this is inherent in the act of translation relates to the concept of linguistic relativism, and what has often been referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that different languages convey different ways of viewing the world, an idea important in both media ecology and general semantics.

So if it's not a bundle of "perfections" that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible referred to in speaking of God, what was it they were talking about? As Donald Harman Akenson writes, the God of Hebrew Scripture is meant to be an "embodiment of what is, of reality" as we experience it. God's abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before him, his at-times devastating responses to mankind's deeds and misdeeds - all these reflect the hardship so often present in the lives of most human beings. To be sure, the biblical God can appear with sudden and stunning generosity as well, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. And he is portrayed, ultimately, as faithful and just. But these are not the "perfections" of a God known to be a perfect being. They don't exist in his character "necessarily," or anything remotely similar to this. On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel's faith: We hope that despite the frequently harsh reality of our daily experience, there is nonetheless a faithfulness and justice that rules in our world in the end.

The ancient Israelites, in other words, discovered a more realistic God than that descended from the tradition of Greek thought. But philosophers have tended to steer clear of such a view, no doubt out of fear that an imperfect God would not attract mankind's allegiance. Instead, they have preferred to speak to us of a God consisting of a series of sweeping idealizations - idealizations whose relation to the world in which we actually live is scarcely imaginable. Today, with theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well, we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible conception of God couldn't hurt.

I can really appreciate the idea that the God of the Hebrew Bible represents reality, what is, rather than some ideal form being passed off as realism, and that God represents a reality that is dynamic and evolving, not immutable.  And again, I go back to the Kabbalah, as Jewish mysticism incorporates a concept of God that is quite different from the absolute perfection of Hellenized theology, a concept of God and Creation as incomplete, requiring our help to compete the project, to heal and repair the world, aka tikkun olam. If nothing else, it is a worthy sense of mission for humanity. 

And in any event, Hazony helps us to better understand how the worldviews of Athens and Jerusalem are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile, so that we can appreciate that Maimonides made a valiant attempt, but in the end, the two cannot be merged, although they most certainly can co-exist.

Numbers

I served as lay leader at Congregration Adas Emuno of Leonia (Bergen County) New Jersey for the 2nd week in a row (see my previous post, The God Particle and God's Word) this past Friday, July 13, and again I thought I'd share the sermon or D'Var Torah I gave (the Torah portion for last week was Parsha Pinchas).

For the past 8 weeks, the weekly Torah portion has come from the 4th book of the Torah, whose Hebrew name is Bamidbar, meaning in the dessert.  It was given that name because the book begins with God speaking to Moses in the Sinai dessert, and all of the events that occur in this book take place in the Sinai.  Of course, the fourth book is better known by its Christian name, which is Numbers.  Actually the original name given to it by the church was the Greek word arithmoi, from which we get our English word arithmetic, but the meaning was not so much numbers as it was magnitudes.  That is to say, it was not about abstract mathematical concepts, but about the practical act of measurement, and counting.  And the fourth book was given this name because it includes the taking of a census, not once, but twice.  

For any society, counting up the number of people that we have helps us to organize ourselves, which is why modern governments do it, for example in the United States every ten years.  In the Book of Numbers, the first census indicates that there are 603,550 Israelite men age 20 or older.  But this population experienced a loss of faith when 12 scouts are sent out to Canaan, and 10 of the 12 report back that giants dwell in that land.  Because the Israelites didn't trust in God and were afraid to enter the promised land, they were then made to dwell in the dessert as nomads for 40 years.  

Why 40 years?  Because that is the period of time that traditionally constitutes one generation.  So after 40 years, a second census is taken, and this time there are 601,730 men counted, and this is the population that will at last enter the holy land.  This week's Torah portion includes the results of the second census, and also a passage where Moses name Joshua as his successor, Joshua having been 1 of the 2 scouts, along with Caleb, who came back from Canaan painting an inviting picture of a land flowing with milk and honey.

Counting is a part of our history, and it is a part of our religion.  The 4th Commandment tell us "to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.  For 6 days you shall labor and do all your work. But the 7th day is a Sabbath to Adonai, your God."  And this serves as a celebration, and in a sense a re-enactment of God's act of Creation, as the commandment goes on to say, "For in 6 days Adonai made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but on the 7th day he rested."  To keep the Sabbath, we have to keep count.  

The same is not true for keeping track of day and night, as those transitions are signaled by dawn and dusk, and even though the days may be longer or shorter depending on the time of year, high noon is always the same.  So the day is based on earth's rotation, which the month is based on the cycles of the moon, and the year on earth's orbit around the sound, which can followed by observation of the changing position of the stars.  Only the 7-day week is completely arbitrary, and requires us to learn to count. and to keep an accounting.

In English, the days of the week are named after pagan deities and the sun and the moon, but in Hebrew they are simply identified by their number.  So Sunday is Yom Rishon, which means the 1st day, and Monday is Yom Sheni, which means the 2nd day, Tuesday is Yom Shlishi, which means the 3rd day, Wednesday is Yom Revi'i, the 4th day, Thursday is Yom Chamishi, the 5th day, and Friday is Yom Shishi, the 6th day.  

Each new day, in our tradition, begins at sunset, and the 7th day is called Yom Shabbat, or simply Shabbat, identifying it not by number but as a form of sacred time.  The numerical names for days has its origin in the Book of Genesis, in the story of Creation, where each episode of God's creative labors ends with the line, "And there was evening, and there was morning, the 1st day," "And there was evening, and there was morning, the 2nd day," and so on.

The ancient symbol of our people and our faith is the Menorah, which is described in the Book of Exodus as having 6 branches, 3 on either side, and 7 lamps.  In one interpretation, the 6 branches represent the 6 days of the week, and the 7th middle shaft represents Shabbat.  The Hanukkah menorah, more properly called the Hanukkiah, is a variation on the regular Menorah, in adding 2 extra branches so as to symbolize the 8 days of the holiday.

The Torah also commands us to keep track of every 7th year, which is a Sabbatical year at which time the land is given a rest and must remain fallow, debts are forgiven, slaves freed, and so on.  And the Jubilee year follows 7 Sabbaticals.  The Torah also commands us to engage in the counting of the Omer, counting 7 weeks, 7 times 7 days, the 49 days between the festival of Passover, celebrating our escape from Egyptian bondage, and that of Shavuot, celebrating our receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

We all know that 7 is considered a lucky number, and all of the 7s that come up in the Bible are no doubt one of the reasons why.  And we all know about the superstition about 13 being an unlucky number, so much so that there is a word for the psychological condition marked by an irrational and overpowering fear of the number 13, triskaidekaphobia.  Architects apparently suffer from this condition as an occupational hazard, because most buildings do not have a 13th floor, or more specifically, skip from 12 to 14 in their numbering.  And today is Friday the 13th, a day that is considered especially unlucky, unless you are a producer of horror films.  

No one is really sure how the number 13 gained this negative image, but one theory is that it is on account of anti-Semitism, because 13 is considered a lucky number in Jewish tradition, not the least because it is the age of maturity.  Traditionally, 13 is the age when a boy becomes Bar Mitzvah, and in the traditional Bar Mitzvah speech typically says, today I am a man, and in traditional Jewish practice is considered a full member of society, and able to join a minyan, and lead prayer services. 

For the past 90 years, we have also included the Bat Mitzvah ceremony for girls, which also is sometimes associated with age 13, and sometimes a year earlier, because girls mature faster than boys.  But 13 is the first of the 7 numbers that end in teen, and maybe its negative image came from its association with teenagers?  I'm joking of course, but I should add that in our tradition, 13 has other positive associations connected to Rabbinic commentaries and Kabbalistic teachings, and for us, Friday the 13th is good luck, it's mazel tov!

Odd numbers like 7 and 13 stand out, and especially when they are prime numbers, that is numbers that cannot be divided evenly by any other number.  

Even numbers, on the other hand, give us a sense of balance and wholeness.  The symbol often used to represent the Jewish people and Judaism as a faith is the six-pointed star.  The symbol of the House of King David, we commonly refer to it as the Star of David, although the Hebrew phrase, Magen David, means Shield of David.  The six-pointed star is sometimes known as the Seal of Solomon, King Solomon being the son of King David.  The Jewish Star, as it is also called, has been used as a symbol of good luck since the Middle Ages.  The hexagram formed by the union of two equilateral triangles serves as symbol of unity, and community.

Given that symbolism, it takes sense that if you multiply 6 times 2, you get 12, and that is the number of the sons of Jacob, the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel.   And if you multiply 6 time 3, you get the number 18, which means chai, life, and that is why we often give gifts and donations in multiples of 18 for B'nai Mitzvahs and weddings, and donations to the synagogue (hint, hint).

Why is the Hebrew word for life given the numerical value of 18?  The letters of the Hebrew alphabet serve double duty as numerals, so that aleph represents 1, bet is 2, gimel is 3, and so on up to yud, which is 10.  Following yud, kaf is 20, lamed is 30, mem is 40, and so on up to kuf, which is 100.  The remainder of the letters, including the final forms of chaf, mem, nun, pei, and tsadi, bring us up to 900.  To represent values of 1,000 or more, letters are reused.  

But the important point is that, because the Hebrew letters are also used as numerals, every written word also has a numerical value, and this is the basis of numerology.  Jewish numerology is known as Gematria, and is associated with the tradition of Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah.  Kabbalistic scholars believe that there are hidden messages encoded within the Torah, and some draw on the Gematria in an attempt to uncover hidden numerical meanings in the Five Books of Moses. 

Of course, numbers typically are used for practical concerns in the Torah, for example in the results of the census found in this week's portion.  In Exodus, in the same parsha that tells us how to make a menorah, we find instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant, specifying that it should be 2½ cubits long, 1½ cubits wide, and 1½ cubits high, and that there should also be a table 2 cubits long, 1 cubit wide, and 1½ cubits high.  And this section contains many more specific measurements for the cloth and planks of wood needed to make the Tabernacle and its enclosure.  For that matter, long before Moses or Abraham, the Book of Genesis tells us that Noah was commanded to build an Ark 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits wide.

What we can infer from all of these numbers is that our tradition encourages a certain facility with numbers.  Numbers don't come 1st, of course.  Genesis does not begin with a countdown to Creation, it begins with God's word, and it is the word that we venerate above all.  We are the People of the Book, the most sacred object in our sanctuary is the Torah scroll, and our b'nai mitzvah ceremonies are not math exams, they are literacy tests.  But literacy is closely connected to numeracy, together forming what we sometimes call the 3 Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic.  

These skills gave many of our people a way to survive in times when most occupations were closed to us, and we played an important role in helping to bring Europe out of its feudal economy and into the modern world of free enterprise.  I think we can also understand how people who don't know how to read, write or do arithmetic, and therefore don't know how to reason in abstract terms, would not be able to understand the concept of paying interest on loans.  And how it would be all too easy to blame the messenger when tax collectors came around on the orders of the king or government.  These factors do not account for the origins of anti-Semitism, but they certainly added to that practice of prejudice and scapegoating. 

But what I want to stress is not money, but mathematics.  Being raised in our tradition does not guarantee that you will be good with numbers, some of us hate math, and have no feel for equations, and that's no sin.  But as a population, we are statistically well represented in occupations that involve counting and calculations, and that's because our culture encourages and aids the acquisition of arithmetic skills and abilities.  You might say that it helps to open a door, or many different doors in fact, doors that each individual may or may not step though.  And some doors may lead to business, or banking, or finance, or to being an accountant.  Other doors may lead to physics and chemistry, to medicine, to engineering, or to computer programming.  Still others may lead to pure mathematics, or economics, or to being a sports statistician, or a chess player, or to being a rabbi studying Kabbalah and Gematria. 

Whether we're mathematically inclined or not, as a people we count the days of the week, and the months, and we also count the years.  The Hebrew calendar tells us that this is year 5,772, and in a couple of months it will be 5,773.  So if we were to count backwards, where would that leave us?  Tradition has it, the calendar goes back to the origin of the world, but of course modern science tells us that cannot be correct.  The obvious answer might be, it goes back to the time when we started counting.  And there is some truth to it.  

In ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerians had been using various systems of notation for approximately 10,000 years, and those systems evolved into the first form of writing, cuneiform, about 5,500 years ago.  And who invented cuneiform?  It was the ancient accountants, who used it as a method of keeping track of property in the palace and trade in the marketplace.  And the first written characters to be introduced were numerals.  So it was numeracy that gave birth to literacy, and the Hebrew calendar roughly coincides with this development, with the introduction of numerals for counting.

Traditional Jewish history begins with the patriarch Abraham, who was not Sumerian, but one of a number of Semitic peoples who lived in Mesopotamia and had come to dominate that region about 4,000 years ago.  Among them, the Babylonians were especially advanced in regard to mathematics for that time.  Hebrew numerals were born in the Sinai dessert, however, around 3,500 years ago, and the origin of the Semitic alphabet at that time roughly coincides with the events represented by the story of the exodus from Egypt.  Numeracy, along with literacy, was spread throughout the ancient world by the Semitics peoples, by the Israelites, the Babylonians, and the Phoenecians.  When it reached ancient Greece, about 2,700 years ago, the result was geometry.  

When numeracy was brought east to India, about 2,300 years ago, the result was the invention of the number zero, and with it positional notation.  Neither our ancestors, nor the Greeks or Romans, had conceived of zero, of nothingness, and none of the earlier numeral systems used the concept of positions that is now in common use today, where the 1st position on the right refers to the units 0-9, the 2nd position represents multiples of 10, the third represents multiples of 100, and so on.  This gift from India opened the door to all forms of mathematics beyond adding and subtracting, and was delivered to the west through another Semitic people, the Arabs, which is why our numerals are commonly referred to as Arabic numerals.  During the Middle Ages, the Jewish people lived in peace and prospered within Islamic lands, and shared in the benefits of this new form of numeracy long before it was adopted in Europe.

But beyond all of the practical advantages of numeracy, there is something about the world of numbers that excites the imagination of individuals of all sorts of different religions, faiths, and belief systems.  There is something about the simplicity of numbers that brings to mind the spiritual.  There is something about their purity that brings to mind the sacred and the sanctified.  There is something about their abstract quality, so removed from the compromises and approximations of the material world, that brings to mind the transcendent.  There is something of their perfection that brings to mind the divine.  

This sense of the mystical aspect of numbers extends to the concept of infinity, which fits in so well with the monotheistic conception of God.  In Kabbalistic tradition, God is described in terms of infinity as ein sof, without end.  According to the 16th century Kabbalist, Isaac Luria, God was ein sof before Creation, and being infinite, was all that existed.  In order to make space for something other than God, Adonai had to engage in Tzimtzum, which means withdrawal, contracting into himself in order to free up space for a finite Creation.

The thing about infinity is that it is not a number.  Infinity cannot be numbered, cannot be counted.  When you consider the concept of infinity in numbers, if you add one to infinity, you still have infinity.  But the same is also true if you subtract one from infinity:  you still have infinity!  And there are greater and lesser infinities.  A one-dimensional line stretching endlessly in both directions is infinite in length, but a two-dimensional plane, stretching endlessly in all directions is infinite in area, and therefore a greater infinity than the one-dimensional line.  And a three-dimensional-space that is without end would be greater still.  So in the case of Tzimtzum, God could withdraw into himself in order for there to be something other than God, becoming less than God was before and yet, still be infinite.

The lesson for us should be plain enough.  We too can engage in Tzimtzum, self-withdrawal.  That is what Shabbat affords us, a time to withdraw from the world, from the constant activity and demands of the world.  We can withdraw to make room for something other than ourselves, and yet not lose anything in the process, for there is something of the ein sof, a spark of the infinite inside all of us.  We can withdraw, and in doing so, find that we have gained something that we would not otherwise have had.

Albert Einstein once said, "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."  On this Shabbat, may we be guided by the humbling realization that all of our days are numbered, so that we may resolve to make each and every day count, and so that we may be determined to be individuals that others can count upon.