Category: Talmud

Musings of an amateur Talmudist

The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 3

David Porush5 Comments

We’ve seen (in Part 1 and Part 2) that the Bible tells the story of the origin of the alphabet as a gift from God to Moses on Mount Sinai.  God instructs Moses to teach this new disruptive communication technology to the Children of Israel and use it to liberate them from slavery in Egypt.  He and his brother Aaron then stage a contest of scripts in the court of Pharaoh. Pharaoh summons his hieroglyphic scribes to show that the new writing system is not so special. The war of demos takes the form of magical-seeming transformations and “signs” (the Hebrew word for “thing” “plague” and “word” are the same). Water turn to blood.  Frogs crawl out of the slime. But on the third contest, when Moses strikes the “dust of the earth” and summons “lice” all over Egypt, the Egyptian scribes are defeated.  They throw up their hands and exclaim, “This is the finger of God!”

Third Plague Charlton Heston
Charlton Heston about to demo the third plague in front of Yul Brynner in “The Ten Commandments” (1956)

But why do the Egyptians give up now after having no trouble matching the transformation of water into blood or summoning frogs from the mud? A clue is in the nature of the transformation. Hieroglyphic signs for frogs and blood are well-known. What are hieroglyphs for dust and lice?

In Egyptian, the spoken word for lice is “tiny” or “diminutive” (the same word used for little girls). But they didn’t have a glyph for it in the older hieroglyphics in use at the time of Moses, nor are there glyphs for any adjective, because they are abstractions, a quality attached to a thing and enormously hard to represent by itself (you could color a tunic or show a small person, but how what is the picture for “smallness”?) Nor does there seem to be a hieroglyph for “dust.” Lice, like dust, are ubiquitous but nearly invisible little nothings. They are like the finger of a ubiquitous but invisible Deity stirring the pot of the universe and history. Kinim [כנם], the Hebrew word here translated as “lice,” is used in Israel to refer also to those tiny gnats that make a buzzing sound but which can’t be seen. In the American South, we call them “noseeums.”

Furthermore, the Hebrew letters for plague are D-B-R [דבר]. By supplying different vowels from those in traditional interpretations, these letters can also signify words or things or statements or even commandments, as in the Ten Commandments. As a word, DBR דבר is, like EHT את, a one-word demonstration of the power and facility of this new script to add abstraction and multiply layers of meanings. Hebrew without vowels, the Hebrew of the Bible, intrinsically adds complexity and even poetry to even simple texts.

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The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 2

David Porush6 Comments

Re-reading the Hebrew Bible as the story of the phonetic alphabet

The Aleph Tav I am the…

The alphabet and the universal literacy it enabled was the ultimate disruptive new tech of its age, especially in its environment of hegemonic empires and nomadic oral (illiterate) cultures. Because it was simple and made literacy universal, anyone could broadcast their expressions to a much wider audience. It was like every citizen suddenly got a private printing press, just as anybody in the early years of radio and Internet could create their own channel or webpage and now everyone has a blog. It could represent any language well enough. It was more abstract and enabled new cognitive powers to blossom. It invited self-reflection and self-empowerment and self-affirmation. It enabled the writing of any concept, emotion or abstraction that could be said or thought in words, and therefore opened up the interior lives of people to each other. It created a new kind of intimacy.

Continue reading “The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 2” →

The Origin of the Alphabet: Part 1

David Porush14 Comments

We all swim in the alphabet like fish in water or birds in air, so it is hard to appreciate what an astounding communications technology it still is even after thousands of years of use. So imagine what this new flexible technology must have seemed like when humanity first discovered it around 1500 BCE.  The easy literacy the alphabet enabled must have been at least as powerful and transformative in its time as the printing press, the telephone, the atom bomb, or the computer. These inventions produced rapid, breathtaking transformations of culture, shifts in power and wealth, disruptions of society, and creation of new ways for humans to relate to the universe and to each other.

Continue reading “The Origin of the Alphabet: Part 1” →

When the brain was simple

David Porush

Mind to mind metaphysics in alphabet and cyberspace

The brain is a sur-rational machine for bringing worlds into collision, a metaphor device, a translation circuit for closing and opening the loop between incommensurate and mutually incomprehensible universes. In my view, it is already “meta-physical.”

Nature was finished when it invented the human brain

What is the brain? At its very simplest it is an entity that takes impressions from out there in the form of energy striking different nerve endings in the organs of the body (eyes, skin, ears, nose, mouth/tongue), converts the energy into information, shuttles the information to a central processor, a black box homuncular body without organs sitting in an ecology of incomprehensibly frothing and turbulent hormones, and somehow translates them into wholly different things in here – sensations, thoughts, flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarming, buzzing. The brain is intrinsically a sur-rational machine for bringing worlds into collision, a metaphor device, a translation circuit for closing and opening the loop between incommensurate and mutually incomprehensible universes. It is already “meta-physical.”

Before we were homo sapiens and the brain was simple, there was a neat Kantian fit between animal and environment: The rules of the world out there, its physics, were not challenged by the rules of the world in here; there was a nice match. But then through some urgency that it is just as easy to talk about metaphysically or teleologically as in terms of some deterministic chaotic evolution, the brain exploded, human-like hominids started walking upright about 100,000 years ago, looking forward, using tools, colonizing the world, creating new social structures. The brain, like some imperial culture exploding off a remote island, started projecting itself onto the world, terraforming the Earth in its own image and leaving in its wake a trail of non-bio-degradable tools and waste. Nature was finished. It was finished in the sense that it reached a fulfillment and a culmination, but it had also committed suicide, finished itself off. Not only did humans begin to massively alter the environment, but the brain also started talking, depicting, enacting versions of its experience in cave paintings, ritual dances, gestures, and a grammar of grunts. It became self-conscious. It recognized a mismatch between the world out there and the world in here: Hey! The world persists; we die! Self-consciousness and the idea of death were born in one fatal stroke. Finally, the brain framed everything it looked at: nature became a pastoral scene in the cognitive museum. The cosmos seen through human eyes was an artifice, always already available for use.

The C3 Loop

On the flip side, the human brain is a prisoner of the loop of cognition, culture and communication, caught in its virtuous cycle. We call the cybernetic device that initiated and grew in this loop language or symbolizing. Frances Hellige in his book on cognition and the brain, Hemispheric Asymmetry, describes this loop initiated by the development of language, with feed-forward and feedback components, as a sort of “snowball effect,” a cycle of ever-widening gyres that eventually embraces and creates everything between the poles of culture and the biology of the brain itself, including physiological changes in structure and size of different regions.2

In cybernetic terms, we call this a positive feedback loop. The cybernetic system (in this case, human brain) sends information out into the world-culture-environment, which feed newly intensified signals back into the (brain) system to destabilize the system anew, which in turn re-amplifies its message, like an over-sensitive microphone, and again re-broadcasts this message back onto the world until the universe screeches with the noise of the human brain echoed back to it, in it, a cyborg rock concert. It also changes the brain itself. Another researcher, Charles Lumsden, calls this process “the selective stabilization of the synapses” as a result of continuous exposure to cultural effects or stimulation, a collaboration between cultural invention and inherited genetic characteristics,” or “Gene-Culture Coevolution.”3

Neurophysiologists and cognitive scientists who study the alphabet note that its effects on the brain can even be seen in the lifetime development of individual people. The use of language reshapes the brain from womb to tomb. A whole new discipline of neural plasticity has emerged in the last few decades, showing that the brain is not the static, genetically-determined machine we once thought it to be. In other words, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in culture-gene co-evolution as well. Studies of aphasics and dyslexics show that the brain changes physiologically and progressively after injury, suggesting that parts of the brain grow even in the lifetime of individual humans.

Fun with your new brain: the rise of the alphabet

Using different alphabets (or losing the capacity to read the alphabet), even within the lifetime of an individual, is a bit like growing a new brain. Trying a new alphabet must have been (and still is) tantamount to an ongoing progressive hallucination. It lets you think things that you couldn’t have thought before, makes connections that simply didn’t exist physiologically – for which your brain wasn’t wired – and forces your brain into different information processing patterns, which presumably involve different mental events or experiences (as physiological-cognitive research overwhelmingly shows). It’s like having a whole new brain, or at least, a brain with whole new faculties, new circuits, new wetware. Now imagine the mass hallucination of an entire culture learning how to use an alphabet for the first time. Whole tribes of people, or important segments of them, put on this new cybernetic headgear, or what I have been calling a new form of telepathy, virtually all at once. We can imagine this mass cybernetic experiment would be accompanied by social, epistemological, and metaphysical revolutions, apocalyptic prophesies, and re-definitions of the self in relation to body, mind, others, and the invisible. In short, it might provoke the emergence of a new religion.

With this perhaps absurd hypothesis in our minds, let’s take a look at the advent of writing itself. Take (in our imaginations) a time-lapse photograph of the Nile Valley before and just after the advent of hieroglyphics, or (even earlier), the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia before and just after the very first invention of writing, Sumerian pictographs around 3200 B.C. These time-lapsed films would show millions of years of desultory animal activity, including the hunting gathering and low-level agricultural activity of upright hominids after 35,000 BC. As we approach 10,000 BC, activity begins to pick up pace and organization. Clusters of hominids show tool use, primitive mound building, expressive cave painting, and cultivation of the earth, though in indifferent and almost-random-seeming patterns. Then, suddenly, around 3200 BCE, BANG! Something leaps across the chaotic bifurcation into a new order of frantic self-organization. Compressed into a few frames is an almost instantaneous transformation; blink and you’ll miss the instant. These fertile regions undergo massive terraforming along rectilinear plots. Rivers are diverted into rectangular irrigation systems. Cities emerge, themselves rectilinear. Zoom in with me now into the square-ish walls of the cities, and into the very square-ish rooms of the city, and we will find the intimate source of this sudden change. There, a row of hard stone benches, arranged regularly. It is a schoolroom for scribes! Hundreds of boys, mostly the sons of privileged nobility, sit for hours hunched over clay tablets, learning to scrawl in regular lines. Indeed, if we superimpose the scratching of these lines they look like the lines of irrigation written on the face of the earth itself, as seen from an orbiting satellite. The harsh discipline of the schoolchildren being tutored in script “canalizes” their thought processes, reinforcing certain pathways. It is hard not to imagine that what’s written on the brain gets projected onto the world, which is literally “canalized,” too.

Looking at a picture of the ancient Sumerian classroom for scribes found in Shuruppak (from ca. 3200 BC),

Sumerian schoolroom
Picture of Sumerian schoolroom for scribes from Edward Chiera, They Wrote on Clay (U Chicago: 1938)

we see familiar rows of benches and the headmasters desk up front. Then we are seized with a horrible and giddy vertigo, a terrible recognition: Five thousand years later, and we’re still canalizing the brains of our children in the same way, enforcing the discipline of writing in virtually the same methods and with not so dissimilar effects as did these ancient Sumerians, “that gifted and practical people” (as Edward Chiera calls them in his groundbreaking study, They Wrote on Clay). Sumerians invented cuneiform as a perfectly portable means to effect commerce, extend the authority of their kings, preserve metaphysical and transcendent information, and secure the stability of caste and rank.

The invention of pictographic writing by the Sumerians was “a secret treasure’ or mystery which the laymen could not be expected to understand and which was therefore the peculiar possession of a professional class of clerks or scribes,” Chiera writes. Furthermore, the metaphysics associated with this new telepathic technology becomes clear in the priestly functions these scribes served. Neo-Babylonian texts used the same ideogram for priest and scribe. Along with the script came a new mythology that, predictably, placed the power of language in the center of its metaphysics: “As for the creating technique attributed to these [new] deities, Sumerian philosophers developed a doctrine which became dogma throughout the Near East — the doctrine of the creative power of the divine word. All that the creating deity had to do, according to this doctrine, was to lay his plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name.

In fact, everywhere pictographic writing makes its advent, we find the sudden emergence of what we can think of as “tech writing empires”: civilizations geometrically akin in their compulsive rectilinearity to the hexagonal hive structures of bees. In China, among the Aztecs of Mexico or Incas in Peru, in Babylon, Sumeria, and Egypt, we see the same pattern of social, epistemological, and metaphysical organization. Along with these scripts come other inventions so predictably similar that they seem to derive directly from imperatives in the nervous system itself amplified or newly grown by use of the new cyborg device of writing: centralized authority in god/kings; monumental ziggurat-like or pyramidal architecture; hierarchies of priest-scribes; complex, self-perpetuating bureaucracies; fluid but clearly demarcated social/economic classes; trade or craft guilds; imperialism; slavery; “canalizing” educational systems; confederations of tribes into nations; standardized monetary systems and trade; taxes; and so on. Almost every conceivable aspect of empire, in its gross forms, was entailed in pictographic writing. Even the alphabet, with its greater efficiency and fidelity to speech, only seems to add abstraction and speed to what McLuhan described as the “exteriorization of the nerve net”

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What is Quantum Theology? – or – “You see that synagogue on the right? That’s the one I won’t go to.”

David Porush5 Comments

So a Jewish carpenter gets stranded on a desert island for 20 years. He is finally rescued, but before he’s taken off the island, he insists on taking the captain on a tour of his handiwork. He’s built a whole town by hand, you see: homes, a butcher, a baker, a tailor. The captain is amazed, and then he sees two magnificent structures on the hill overlooking the town,

“What are those two buildings?” he asks .

“Oh, those?” the carpenter says dismissively. “They’re two synagogues.”

“Two synagogues?” asks the captain in amazement. “Why’d you build two synagogues?”

“See the one on the right? That’s the one I won’t go to.”

Does science invoke God?

Screen Shot 2016-04-25 at 3.04.06 PM
Tweedledee & Tweedledum

If you’ve ever been a member of a congregation that is about to split over irreconcilable differences of theological opinion, you know how true the joke feels. But I tell it to mock the division between two faiths, science and religion. As the rift between the two has calcified, it’s looking more ridiculous and dispensable, like two old enemies who need to conjure each other in order to keep some militant vitality alive in their feud, Big Endians and Little Endians.

If we wouldn’t get excommunicated either from the Church of Science or the Academy of Belief, would we ask, “Is science a proper way to worship God?” If we wouldn’t be declared a heretic, would our church permit us to grant truth to all of science’s glory?

In the twenty-first century, an alert and dispassionate science should be able to admit that physics requires a metaphysical assumption about the way the universe works. Logic is a faith in its own, and believing in a universe that can be completely explained by logic requires a spiritual leap and even a certain blindness, especially after Kurt Gödel proved the limits of logic. On the other side of the limitations of reason lies the inexplicably unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in explaining the world (as Eugene Wigner noted in 1960), the crazy serendipity of, for instance, Planck’s Constant.

At the same time, to just say science explains what it can and let God be responsible for the rest – let God take the hindmost – is a losing gambit. It protects apparently shrinking territory.

I propose here that God has positive explanatory power in both science and religion. Quantum mechanics as we increasingly understand it almost demands the invention of some God-like Consciousness. And a vital faith, especially an organized and systematic monotheistic faith in God, should embrace our evolving, unfolding, scientific knowledge of the universe as Divine. 

Yes, we risk falling into the trap laid by the fact that mysticisms end up looking like each other. The oceanic currents that course through prophets during their seizures of revelation show remarkable consistency across ages and cultures. There might even be a neural pathway in the brain that maps the mystical feeling of oneness with the universe and divine insight. (See my essay “Finding God in the Three-Pound Universe: The Neuroscience of Transcendence,” Omni Magazine 16, 70-80 (1993). Sometimes, inimical faiths have at their most transcendent depths remarkable similarities that can’t be explained by direct influence. As Steven Schwartz writes in “Islamic Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah: Shining a Light on Their Hidden History,” 

Muslims and Jews further possess mystical customs — Islamic Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah — that are so close to one another that the presumption of mutual influence is inescapable. Yet the transmission of these spiritual doctrines and practices between them is still historically mysterious.

The moral of the story is that anyone who is tempted to see support for theological constructions of the universe in quantum physics should tread carefully. That hasn’t stopped speculations by amateur physicists but professional mystics, and professional physicists but amateur theologians, to leap to the hope that quantum cosmology proves there is a God. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1984),  Atoms, Snowflakes and God: The Convergence of Science and Religion (J.L. Hitchcock, 1982), The Science of God (G. Schroeder, 1998) are just three of many. There’s even an ideological rant with the title Quantum Theology (Diarmuid O’Murchu, 1987).

The God I mean isn’t a Christian God. He isn’t a Newtonian God. He isn’t a Cartesian God. He’s not the Great Clockmaker in the sky. The cartoon Western concept of God as static, perfectly rational, immutable, unitary, immortally consistent and knowable is inherited from overly-idealistic Greeks, from Plato and before him Pythagoras. They had a brilliant fetish for order and a gift for making sense. This Platonic ideal has had its splendid multi-millenial run. It gave us mathematics in all its elegance and the beautiful, aspirational dream of a rational universe that was smooth and simple and explicable and could be reduced to a Unified Answer.

Postmodern science, by contrast, calls for the non-Sense God of the Hebrews that Moses saw in the Non-burning Bush, the Dynamic Essence, forever unknowable, sometimes contradictory, receding, transcendental, yet mutable. Not One and Done, but always Becoming, involved in every aspect of the universe all the time. The grand project of our minds, the systematic quest for truth, is an expression of Divinity. A God needing interpretation as best we can by sixty-three volumes and centuries of commentary in the Talmud and the billions of words He has invited in the 1500 years since. The God that can be worshiped through science is an inconceivable God of Infinite Complexity, Abstraction, and Attentiveness Whom we can only strive to but never quite comprehend fully. This is the God who gave us the primitive alphabet for language in all its untranslatable ambiguity, not a reductive idolatrous god who gave us algebra and geometry and golden triangles and code as if the dazzling universe could be disambiguated in a cubicle. This God left clues as to the inter-connected nature of everything in everything waiting for us to enliven them with our gaze and imagination. In short, this is the God of Language, of a Holy Tongue, not Binary Code, an Author, not a programmer.

Metaphysics of the church of physics

Woody Allen said, “Love may be the answer. But while you’re waiting for the answer, sex poses some pretty good questions.” A Grand Unified Theory of Everything may be the answer, but while we’re waiting, quantum physics poses some pretty good questions, theological questions about the origin of life, the nature of mind, and the possibility that the universe collapses into this reality because Someone Impossibly Infinite to Imagine is observing every quantum event in the universe. The alternative is an equally inconceivable explanation: that every time a quantum probability wave collapses into reality, another universe is created, the so-called Multiverse Hypothesis.

There is now a serious discussion about the way quantum mechanics may be implicated with the biology of consciousness as well with the fabric of the universe. For instance, in an otherwise brilliant and lucid book, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (2014) Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalidi show that quantum physics drives the biochemistry of photosynthesis, genetics, enzymes, smell, and perhaps even consciousness. This is transcendence, requiring the collapse of epistemological boundaries between macroscopic biology and sub-atomic quantum events. Yet, when the authors consider the possible role of quantum biology in how the mind arises from the brain or life from inorganic matter, they are quick to protest their orthodoxy by bracketing out any whiff of theology:

Can our new understanding of life [as having its source in quantum mechanics] replace the soul with a quantum vital spark? Many will regard the very posing of this question as suspect, pushing the bounds of conventional science beyond respectability and  into the realms of pseudoscience and spirituality. That is not what we’re proposing here.  Instead, we want to offer what we hope is an idea that might replace mystical and metaphyscial speculations with at least the grain of a scientific theory.” (p. 310)

It never occurs to these authors to consider the middle they have excluded, that the very “grain of a scientific theory” they are exploring in quantum biology is the essence of the mysticism they loathe.  Of course, they can’t. They’d be excommunicated. Or at least, denied tenure. But let’s linger on this excluded middle. At the slippery, frothing interface between mind and matter, serious physicists who are quick to disavow any theology in their science end up sounding defensive, but not convincing. If we wouldn’t get kicked out of Church of Science, would we pose that pretty good theological question: Is life, the soul, a quantum process?

NEXT: The Quantum Theology of Matzah.

(1) Philip Clayton writes, “In this brief sketch of the history of Western metaphysics,  we have seen that the problem of matter remains an unsolved conundrum. Although the problem was continually reformulated and redefined, every attempt to understand matter ends up focusing on the active principle of the intellect– that which makes understanding possible – rather than what was supposed to be understood, which was matter as qua [exactly that which is] non-mental. Again it is as if matter continually recedes from our grasp. One even wonders: could it be that matter is in essence that which cannot be understood, that which inevitably recedes from us as we approach it? Here one thinks of the notion of the transcendental signified” in the work of the influential French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. [1995b, 1998]. If the parallel indeed holds, matter is another name for what Derrida called la differánce, that which is always different from our formulations and which is always deferred into the future whenever we seek to  understand it.” P. Clayton,”Unsolved Dilemmas,” in Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics. ed by Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson (Cambridge UP, 2010: pp. 50-51).

Of course, I believe that Derrida was an anti-theological Jewish mystic and prophet, who erected an entire philosophical system, preserved Jewish ways of knowing and discoursing, and even in part Jewish ethics, by substituting a very Jewish understanding of God with the idea of differánce, but that is another long story.

(2) Thomas Pynchon, that great epistemological jokester, quipped, “…excluded middles, they’re bad shit.”  (The Crying of Lot 49).  Oedipa Maas is hung up between the poles of deterministic logic and transcendence:  “She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.” 

See also an exploration of the philosophy of excluded middles since Pythagoras and its role throughout Pynchon’s fiction in “Pynchon and the Law of the Excluded Middle” by F. Collado-Rodriguez)).

Beheadings and the “Precarious Joint”

David Porush2 Comments

Talmud, ISIS, and the Decapitation of Civilization

When decapitations occur, the connection between heaven and earth has been severed

Today, September 2014, I’m unable to shake the images that infected me from watching videos of beheadings by ISIS. These are horrific, but with all due respect to the victims, it’s hard not to appreciate them as brilliantly successful social media retroviruses injected into the worldwide teletechnoculture. They have achieved their authors’ goal: after billions of views on YouTube and elsewhere, a few savages with an instinct for stagecraft and low-budget indie production values have awakened the giant American war machine.

Beheadings aren’t new. Jewish law was concerned about them thousands of years ago, but not as a means of revenge and spreading true faith. Rather, beheadings are symbolic of a problem that concerns the rabbis in the Talmud. A beheading plays the central role in a mystery that worries them.  They imagine a corpse, victim of a murder, found half way between two cities. Who is responsible for pursuing the criminal? Judging the crime?  For burying the body? And if the crime is not solved, how do we rid the world of guilt when when there is no clear authority? Chaos threatens. For the sages, beheadings were symbolic of the retreat of holiness rather than as a means to achieve it. But the symbolism runs even deeper.

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Divine Telepathy: Reading Talmud

David Porush

Reading is Telepathy

Ox Gores Man
Bull Gores Man at Pamplona http://news.nationalgeographic.com 

 

 

Writing and reading are acts of telepathy.  The author tells me what’s in his mind. I try to decipher it. It can be an ecstatic communion, or dull. But assuming there’s another mind may help us out of the postmodern moral abyss.

Yes, the author’s story is just a version. The characters are just representations. The author tries to reduce the arbitrariness of selecting these few signs out of an infinity of possible others through force of will and practice and erasure. If we resonate with what we read, we respect and admire and can be pleasured by word art. But who is to say what is right or wrong in anything?

Welcome to the postmodern abyss, where morals throw themselves off the cliff to die. Where ethics are a matter of local taste. Where the world is anything you make it. Chacun á son goût. Or a “Negative Theology,” what Charles Taylor saw in Derrida’s philosophy.

When you open a book, are you already judging the author against some ideological test? Or do you try to know the author’s mind first before deciding he had failed your personal litmus test?

Reading the Talmud is good training for suspending your judgments.

The Talmud is a hypertextual text of a symposium among hundreds of rabbis and scholars spread across continents over the first five centuries after the Destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

The  Mishnah plus Gemarah that make up the canonical Talmud, along with inclusions of sanctioned commenatries by Rashi and others, are at least 6000 pages long. But the Talmud project has never stopped growing and promises to keep growing as commentators comment on commentators to adapt the Torah to an evolving reality. Easily millions of pages have been written about it. Not only is it a cryptic attempt at capturing a convoluted conversation, the conversation itself is an attempt to reconstruct a text that was never supposed to be written down, the Oral Law of the Jews. In short, the mere act of learning to read the Talmud requires years of study just to give it a fair hearing, to try to understand what the sages were trying to say before deciding if what they said had any merit.

Anyone can dip into this sea of interpretations and stories and pronouncements and duels among rabbis and extract something out of context to prove a point. But just to learn the names of the “authors,” the eras and cultures in which they lived, the assumptions underlying their discourse,  and the pretexts for that discourse, requires a lifetime.  It’s good practice for suspending your self-interested interpretations when reading a mere 300-page novel by a single author.

 

 

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History & Metaphysics:

David Porush1 Comment

The Holy Tongue and the Decapitation of Israel

I believe understanding the historical context of the Talmud deepens its metaphysics.

The Torah imagines a scene worthy of a Hitchcock mystery.  A corpse is found between two cities. Who is responsible for it? It tells us, reasonably enough, that the closest city is responsible for it. That city has to perform a ritual to bring the cosmic scales back into balance, by breaking the neck of a calf and throwing it over a cliff.

The Talmud tells us that the pronouncement at the ritual is so solemn that it is one of only eight utterances that have to be said is the holy tongue, Hebrew. [1] The whole list [2] is surprising for what it doesn’t include: the Shema, for instance, or blessings over bread or Shabbat. So why this obscure and arcane ritual?

Talmud goes on to imagine increasingly farfetched scenarios: “What if the corpse is equidistant?” it asks.  In doing so, the eglah arufah becomes as mysterious and profound as its more famous cousin, that other slaughtered calf, the Parah Adumah, the Red Heifer. As it does, it hints at why the unclaimed corpse between cities is so vital its ritual must be pronounced in Hebrew.

The Mishnah says the Sanhedrin, the assembly of 71 judges in Jerusalem, has to come out to measure which city is closer. Then the elders of that city sacrifice an unblemished calf to rid the world of the unattributed evil. They take it  down to a stony ravine, and they break its neck with a hatchet, from behind. Then they declare over this eglah arufah, in Hebrew, they are not responsible for the death of the corpse, or more literally, “This blood is not on our hands,” obviously meaning the blood of the corpse, not the poor calf, which is now on their hands.

The Talmud imagines several scenarios that have increasing unreality:

What happens if two bodies are found exactly on top of each other? Is one body exempt because it is “floating” atop the other? Is the body underneath exempt because it is covered by the body on top? Are both exempt?

What if they are both exactly between the two cities?

What if a body is decapitated and the head and the body are in different places? Do we bring the head to the body, or vice versa?

Dexter or CSI Miami has nothing on the gruesomeness of the debate. The Talmud often considers improbable, even absurd scenarios.  A guy with a pole who rushes around a corner and breaks the jug carried by another guy who was rushing from the opposite direction. A dog brings a hot coal in his mouth to ignite a neighbor’s haystack. A goat jumps down from the roof and breaks someone’s utensils. But the empirical unreality of this whole discussion about two corpses found atop each other exactly equidistant from two cities, combined with the seriousness of the crime which presumably is behind it, suggests that there is something deeper at work here.

Gemara asks: If the corpse is decapitated, do we measure to the nearest town from the head or from the body? R. Akiva maintains you measure from the head, specifically the nose, because that is the source of neshama itself. R. Eliezer says measure from the body because the fetus forms from the navel outward – מטיבורו – mi’tiburoh. The Gemarah does not resolve the dispute, nor does Schottenstein, even after conferring with Rashi. Instead, the Mishnah itself concludes:

Rabbi Eliezer ben Yakov says, ‘They measure from the place that he becomes chalal, that is, from his neck.”

Think about that for a moment, and you realize, of course, that this is no resolution at all!

If a body is decapitated, where does the neck go? What is the neck? Anatomically, it may be the series of seven vertebrae C1-C7 connecting the head to the body, but conceptually it is the indeterminate boundary between head and body. When a body is severed at the neck, the neck as such disappears.

So specifying that measurement is to be taken from the neck of a decapitated body defers but doesn’t resolve the problem. The neck disappears into the same limbo or indeterminate space between as does the guilt of the murderer, which now threatens to taint both of the nearest cities. The necks of the calf and the corpse are not the only things that are broken.

Throughout the Talmud, there are several passages where the rabbis cannot reach a conclusion. And there are also  other passages when the conclusion is to invoke a chok or a commandment that defies rational explanation, a transcendent mystery we’re supposed to obey without understanding. Like the attempt to decipher the parah adumah, the sages here seem to let the physics of the matter dissipate into metaphysics. And yet, if we view this part of Sotah as having literary coherence, it reveals what the rabbis may have had in mind and helps us penetrate the mystery.

When the Mishnah calls out the ritual, it doesn’t say “the ritual to expiate the guilt of an unclaimed corpse,” which would be both more dramatic and make more sense, but eglah arufah, the calf that has its neck broken.

Second, the Gemara goes into careful detail about a corpse that is decapitated. A corpse has special status and its own name (“korbah”) if it is strangled by the neck and is different from a corpse slain by an instrument like a hatchet, in which case it is a “chalal.” (There’s a great one-liner in here. The Gemarah sees fit to tell us that, “If a corpse is still writhing [because it was insufficiently strangled] it is not yet a corpse.”)

Third, the Mishnah then details exactly how the neck of the calf is to be broken: it is to be decapitated with a cleaver to the back of its neck. In other words, the calf is like the imaginary corpse they were just so concerned with that has been killed at the neck.

Fourth, where is to this be performed? One would think that it would be precisely where the body was found, but rather the Mishnah prescribes it to be done in a desolated valley or a river, a wasteland, a no-man’s land. Further, Rashi explicitly says this must be land that has never been planted and is unsuitable for planting or working, and after the rite of eglah arufah is performed, the land is never again to be worked. The immediate symbolism is clear: just as the the unknown murderer, the real no-man, disappeared into the twilight zone, the expiation is directed there, too.  We recall, perhaps, the second of the Yom Kippur sacrifices, the scapegoat sent into the wilderness for our sins.

Eisan - desolate valley

There are may other mysteries worthy to be called out here. For instance, with the inevitable logic of rituals, the calf, too, must be one that has never been worked in yoke, invoking again, the neck … but I’ll skip over these to drive to what I believe is the heart of the matter. Why does the neck, forgive me, bear so much weight here?

The Lubavitcher Rebbe comments on “the neck.”  He calls it “the precarious joint” :

In the Torah, the neck is a common metaphor for the Holy Temple… The Sanctuaries are links between heaven and earth, points of contact between the Creator and His creation. … G-d, who transcends the finite, transcends the infinite as well, and He chose to designate a physical site and structure as the seat of His manifest presence in the world and the focal point of man’s service of his Creator….

The Sanctuary, then, is the “neck” of the world … the juncture that connects its body to its head. the neck that joins the head to the body and channels the flow of consciousness and vitality from the one to the other: the head leads the body via the neck. …

… The Sanctuary’s destruction, whether on the cosmic or the individual level, is the breakdown of the juncture between head and body — between Creator and creation, between soul and physical self. Indeed, the two are intertwined. When the Holy Temple stood in Jerusalem and openly served as the spiritual nerve center of the universe, this obviously enhanced the bond between body and soul in every individual….

from “The Neck” chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/3222/jewish/The-Neck.htm

The intensity of care taken by the rabbis to assign responsibility for unclaimed corpses, and presumably unsolved murders, to this or that town increases even more so in the Diaspora (the galus), when there is no Sanhedrin and no Temple in Jerusalem.  This impossible hypothetical, and the seriousness with which the Rabbis debate its halachah, seems to be as much about a lamentation of the Destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the Jews’ exile to a dispiriting, liminal, desolate, precarious realm. We inhabit a “no-man’s land” where law and order has broken down and corpses are piling up, and bodies are stuck equidistant between cities so that there is no clear authority. We’re stranded between two Houses of Judgment, not just two cities, but two order of preserving the Jewish religion and two orders of being, the Temple with its ritual, and the Talmud, with its exegesis and elaboration. Assigning responsibility becomes impossible.

The end of Sotah depicts an apocalyptic scenario of the breakdown of all law and order, a recounting of the terrible things that occur when there are so many unsolved murders that the rite of eglah arufah has to be abandoned and there so many adulteresses that the ritual of Sotah ceases.

WHEN [THE SECOND] TEMPLE WAS DESTROYED, SCHOLAR  AND NOBLEMEN WERE ASHAMED AND COVERED THEIR HEAD,MEN OF DEED WERE DISREGARDED, AND MEN OF ARM AND MEN OF TONGUE GREW POWERFUL. NOBODY ENQUIRES, NOBODY PRAYS AND NOBODY ASKS.UPON WHOM IS IT FOR US TO RELY? UPON OUR FATHER WHO IS IN HEAVEN … THE COMMON PEOPLE BECAME MORE AND MORE DEBASED … IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE MESSIAH INSOLENCE WILL INCREASE AND HONOUR DWINDLE; … THE MEETING-PLACE [OF SCHOLARS] WILL BE BROTHELS… AND THE DWELLERS ON THE FRONTIER WILL GO ABOUT [BEGGING] FROM PLACE TO PLACE WITHOUT ANYONE TO TAKE PITY ON THEM; THE WISDOM OF THE LEARNED WILL DEGENERATE, FEARERS OF SIN WILL BE DESPISED, AND THE TRUTH WILL BE LACKING; … A MAN’S ENEMIES WILL BE THE MEMBERS OF HIS HOUSEHOLD; THE FACE OF THE GENERATION WILL BE LIKE THE FACE OF A DOG, A SON WILL NOT FEEL ASHAMED BEFORE HIS FATHER. SO UPON WHOM IS IT FOR US TO RELY?

– Sotah 49a-b

This is just a small section of the Yeridas HaDoros, the Decline of the Generations, a work of vast Rabbinic imagination and mourning.

I believe the historical context for this apocalyptic vision doesn’t explain away but rather deepens the Talmud’s  metaphysical intensity. Knowing that this is a lamentation for the Temple helps us understand the entwinement of Hebrew as holy tongue with the Temple with the spiritual health of Israel. Speaking and reading Lashon HaKodesh is meant to recall that broken entwinement, to bridge over the fissures, to heal or prevent the ruptures at the core of functioning society itself by connecting the bloody and mundane, the hard valley of the wasteland, to the world to come, olam habah.

Israel is the calf whose neck has been broken. Israel is the floating corpse unclaimed between two cities. In a time of calamity and the breakdown of social order, even the ritual itself is to be abandoned, as is the ritual of sotah.

If we read Sotah correctly, we are being admonished that the only thing that will put our head on our shoulders, that will connect the soul to the body of Israel, is to preserve Hebrew, especially to be recited in these moments of rupture and decapitation.

 Palo Alto

Shavuos 5774

NOTES:

In honor of my classmates, Boris Feldman, Joseph Joffe, and Sam Tramiel, and my teacher Rabbi Yitzchak Feldman –

[1] Sotah 45

[2] The eight utterances that must be said in Hebrew are:

  1. THE DECLARATION MADE AT THE OFFERING OF THE FIRST FRUITS  during Shavuos
  2. THE FORMULA OF CHALIZAH [renunciation of a Levirite marriage] releasing a woman to be able to wed again if her husband dies and she is childless
  3. THE BLESSINGS AND CURSES to be pronounced from two mountaintops when the Jews cross the Jordan and were united with the land of Israel
  4. THE PRIESTLY BENEDICTION All the Kohanim are commanded to bless Israel on Yom Kippur
  5. THE BENEDICTION OF THE HIGH PRIEST on Yom Kippur, upon finishing reading of the Torah
  6. THE SECTION OF THE KING, The “HaKahal” (assembly): Every seven years the King assembles everyone in Courtyard and recites from Deuteronomy … “and One who hears it and doesn’t understand Hebrew must still stand in awe as if receiving Torah at Sinai.”
  7. THE SECTION OF THE CALF WHOSE NECK IS BROKEN when corpses are found between cities
  8. THE ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE BY THE PRIEST ANOINTED [TO ACCOMPANY THE ARMY] IN BATTLE.

“Towards the end of parsha Noah we read the story of the Tower of Babel. We are told: וַיְהִי כָל הָאָרֶץ שָׂפָה אֶחָת וּדְבָרִים אֲחָדִים, “The whole earth was of one language…”. (Gen 11,1) Rashi comments that the language was Hebrew.

Midrash Rabbah (Lev. 32,5) says that a virtue our ancestors had in Egypt and one of the causes for their redemption, was “they didn‘t change their tongue.”

In 1913, the “Language War” erupted in Palestine after word leaked out that the German Hilfsverein (Ezra) Organization was planning to make German the language of instruction in its Technion Institute in Haifa. A rebellion of students and teachers successfully imposed Hebrew as the language of instruction.

I think it was David Bar-Ilan, former editor of the Jerusalem Post who said about the miracle of Hebrew being resurrected as the living tongue of Israel, “King David would be more comfortable speaking Hebrew on the streets of Jerusalem than Shakespeare speaking English on the streets of London.”

 

 

 

What to Pray for When You’re Pregnant

David Porush

How did the rabbis of the Talmud know details of pregnancy 1500 years before science did?

Screen Shot 2016-03-05 at 3.15.53 PM

There are no atheists in foxholes, and every expectant parent prays for the wellbeing of the life growing inside the mother. So first, I assume you’re here because you or someone you know is pregnant. Good luck and bless you.

The Jews have ancient wisdom for what to pray for when you’re pregnant.  In fact, the Talmud prescribes different prayers for different stages in the pregnancy that incredibly correspond to biological facts that science wouldn’t know about for fifteen hundred years. Continue reading “What to Pray for When You’re Pregnant” →

God Laughs

David Porush

… at History, at Man

Man plans, God laughs.

The world has come to admire the wisdom of the old Yiddish expression. Even our best-laid plans are often doomed to laughable failure in this crazy mixed up world of ours.
Continue reading “God Laughs” →