Tag: Pharaoh

Patient Zero: 

David Porush

The source of the Jew Hatred virus is a negative miracle

The nations wish to vex God, but cannot, so they vex Israel – Exodus Rabbah 51

Jews and Jew-hatred were born together.  The Bible’s case study of Pharaoh, Patient Zero, shows the source of the disease is, like the Jews themselves, Divine.

Jew hatred as plague

After October 7, Jew-haters worldwide have mounted massive and terrifying protests against Israel and Jews. Otherwise ordinary citizens seem to be spontaneously afflicted with Jew-hating fever. They rip down posters of women and children who were abducted by Hamas as if it were their righteous duty. Mobs took to the streets of Western countries in the hundreds of thousands waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “From the River to the Sea.” Even when many of them couldn’t name what river or sea they were referring to, they understood what they wanted: celebrate bloodthirsty Hamas, prevent Israel from retaliating, and erase the Jews and the Jewish State from the map. The global pandemic of Jew hatred this year makes “Never Again” only a self-delusional slogan

A black hole. Image from NASA.

      The multiple ironies will drive you mad. As early as the next day, before Israel had even acted in Gaza, a chorus of calls for a ceasefire began as if a huge population was waiting for just this sort of moment to act against Jews. It is still intensifying today. Absurdly, after suffering the largest pogrom since the Holocaust, Israel was tried for genocide at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, though the word “genocide” was invented to describe what was done to the Jews by the Nazis and though Israel was trying to stop Hamas, terrorists explicitly dedicated to the genocide of Jews, or at least Zionists. The charge was so unfounded, even the ICJ, no friend of Israel, found no grounds.

Israelis are routinely called Nazis. Such evil inversions are one of the hallmarks of the Jew hatred.

     The UN, world leaders and governments, noisy Palestinian partisans, well-meaning but naive and ill-informed peaceniks on social media, Hollywood stars, reflexive liberals – all were in truth calling for Jews to lay down their arms and suffer barbaric slaughter without responding, to be less than human. They devalue Jewish lives while demanding that Jews show superhuman forbearance. Jew haters attacked Jews in what they thought were their safe spaces: Western countries, Jewish cities like New York, on U.S. college campuses, even in public schools and town councils in the US, and in their private psychic and political bubbles. Jews who faithfully signed up for the agenda sympathetic to all victims – Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI, undocumented immigrants and all the other array of intersectional and righteous victims now suffered cognitive dissonance. How could my allies not only refuse to express shock at the worst Hamas atrocities, including the weaponized rape of women, but celebrate them?  Their comrades’ implicit response was, “The Jews had it coming to them.” In the algebra of this ideology, Jews can’t be victims of Palestinians. They’re white colonialists. The implied conclusion was a familiar one. “Die, Jews!” 

In short, Jews found themselves in their history again. Jew hatred is as old as the Jew. Eventually it happens everywhere we live. There’s a Jewish tradition, rooted in both mysticism and statistical truths about the order of the world, that our hosts in the Diaspora only suffer us for about four generations before they expel or kill us. Many Jews deluded themselves into believing America was different, but now it seems they are doomed to join their forebears in Spain or Germany or anywhere else we enjoyed a few decades of peace and hospitality. What explains this? Over the last centuries, millions of words and thousands of books, articles, and scholarly papers have documented this phenomenon and tried to diagnose its cause.  They blame politics, culture, psychology, education, history, sociology, demagogic ambition, human nature, scapegoating,1 jealousy, Jews’ insularity, or some combination of these. They inspire paranoid conspiracy theories, blood libels, superstitious fears, and psychotic fixation: their allegiance is to Zion, to an internationalist family, to their network of global finances, to a secret cabal, to dark arts, to bloody rituals, to religious “protocols.” While every psychic, political and social route ends in forced conversion, state-sponsored genocide, expulsion or genocidal violence, none of these theories have satisfactorily explained the multiform ubiquity, irrationality, fluidity, virulence, spontaneity, disproportion, and inevitability of Jew hatred. In other words, no one has identified the root cause, much less offered any remedy.2 

Many have said that Jew hatred is a disease, an ineradicable virus. If the analogy runs deep, then let’s be rigorous about applying the methods of epidemiology to find a cause. When epidemiologists study a pandemic, they talk about finding “Patient Zero,” the first person they can identify as having the disease. If they find Patient Zero it sometimes enables them to pinpoint the source of the virus, then the virus itself, and then formulate an inoculation against it. This is our goal here: to identify the cause, what legalese calls the “cause in fact” as opposed to the many “proximate causes” that we often confuse for it.3  

Patient Zero

I believe this Patient Zero has always been right in front of us, hiding in plain sight in the Jews’ own origin story of their time in Egypt. It is the aboriginal and archetypal Diaspora for all future Jewish Diasporas, from Babylon through America. Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is the first leader of another nation who contends with the Hebrews after they’ve dwelled among them for several generations. He is also the first to exhibit all the symptoms of the full-blown Jew hatred virus.4 Here’s his back story:

Slave traders bring a captive Joseph to Egypt. Pharaoh dredges him out of jail because he has learned that Joseph has a special gift for interpreting dreams. Pharaoh is tormented by a strange nightmare his own wise men can’t decipher. Joseph tells him that his dream means that seven years of abundance will be followed by a seven-year famine in Egypt. Pharaoh is so impressed by Joseph’s preternatural insight that he appoints him as his second-in-command of all Egypt to put in place a strategy to prepare the kingdom for its impending disaster. Joseph’s first act is to rescue his eleven brothers, his father, and all their family and livestock from Canaan and settle them in Goshen, the fat of Egypt, on the Nile Delta in the northeast, closest to the land promised to their patriarch Abraham. Joseph then reorganizes the whole power and economic structure of Egypt to prepare them. He institutes a system of taxes of grain and produce to set aside during the fat years for the lean years, and builds a network of storehouses.  During the famine, Egyptians run out of food. Joseph sells them the reserves of food and grain. When they run out of money, they sell him their land. When they run out of land, they have nothing to sell but themselves, and they beg Pharaoh to accept their offer of indentured servitude. Finally, Joseph makes all Egyptians move from their hometowns and resettles them elsewhere, presumably for efficiency. In short, Joseph has created a completely re-organized Egyptian empire consolidated under Pharaoh, who is now the complete hegemon and absolute ruler of the state, nominal owner of all the land and all its citizens. If ever a ruler owed a debt to another party for giving him power, it is Pharaoh to Joseph and his descendents. However, as the Bible says:

And Joseph died, and his brothers and their entire generation. And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and grew very, very mighty and the land was filled with them. 

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who didn’t know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look! The people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Let’s deal wisely with them before they multiply, and when we’re at war they will advocate for our enemies and add to the hatred and go up out of the land.’  Therefore, they set taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, namely Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they loathed the faces of the children of Israel. And Egypt made the children of Israel labor hard, and they made their lives bitter with hard servitude, in mortar and in brick, and in all kinds of slavery in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was severe. 

And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives…and he said, “When you midwife the Hebrews … if it’s a son, then kill him…” And the midwives [failed and] said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are animals, and birth before the midwives come to them.” .. And the people multiplied, and grew very mighty. …And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, “Every son that is born you shall cast into the River…”

A Clinical Evaluation of Patient Zero

As this Pharaoh observes his empire. I imagine him in a high tower of his palace in Memphis, surveying a bustling capital city filled with many peoples like any cosmopolis. He looks just to the northeast, up the Nile Delta to the fertile Land of Goshen. The Hebrews are flourishing. Instead of seeing his diverse nation with satisfaction, he is unnaturally focused on the Children of Israel. Their success and growth don’t just unsettle him, they anger him and make him afraid. He conjures an Israelite population bomb and sees them filling the land when, of course, that was impossible. His paranoia makes him see them as a fifth column, lying in wait to join Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war, adding to some vague foreboding “hatred” for which he has no prior evidence. The accusation is all-too familiar; we’ve heard it throughout history from demagogues in Europe and Arab countries, and even in America at various times: those Jews don’t have patriotic allegiance, nationalist loyalty. They are simultaneously lower, dirtier, more animalistic and coarser than us natives, and at the same time threatening in their outsized dominance and superiority, as they succeed in the marketplace with preternatural ability and arcane practices. At best they have dual loyalty, dividing their dedication between us and Israel, the land promised to them in their mythology. At worst, they are just awaiting their chance to betray Egypt, already actively plotting against us in secret, stirring up imaginary hatreds among our enemies. Fueling his animus, although the Bible tells us that this Pharaoh has no connection to, no memory of and therefore no allegiance or gratitude to Joseph, it’s much more likely that he is all too keenly aware of the debt he owes to him and his descendants for the power and control Joseph gave him, and like many tyrants he resents any claim on him, so he seeks to erase any legacy with murderous intent.5 

Seized by his sudden irrational hatred and fear of Jews, he riles up his counselors. “Come,” he urges them. “Let us deal wisely with them.” He hatches plans to suppress the Israelite population. First he imposes “taskmasters” to extract progressively more burdensome taxes from them.  He starts oppressing them physically, appropriating their labor to build treasure cities.6 Then he turns to genocidal plotting, first hiding his crime by conspiring with midwives to strangle Hebrew males at birth. When this doesn’t work – the Egyptian midwives compare the Hebrew women to “animals” who give birth too quickly – he goes public, rallying his nation as many tyrants did after him, declaring a pogrom to kill first-born male Hebrews. Clearly he must have prepared the way with demagoguery and propaganda to turn his people against the Jews and arouse their collective hatred.7 Pharaoh’s hatred becomes a national obsession, the virus a pandemic. Since he controls the airwaves – hieroglyphic scribes are closely held priests of the pharaonic cult and most of the population is illiterate in the complex script8 – he is able to move the culture, and so it turns on a dime. 

What arouses Pharaoh’s hatred? “Mighty and swarming” Hebrews

Pharaoh may have had many proclivities, habits of mind, environmental circumstances and personal attributes – narcissism and megalomania – that made him prone to infection by Jew hatred. Like any king, he was responsible for foreseeing and planning to avoid threats to his kingdom. Like many tyrants, he is thin-skinned and defensive, quick to declare himself the victim of imagined slights, easily inflamed by his own imagination. Everything is personal. He sees no distinction between attacks on the state and attacks on himself. (L’etat c’est moi.) He is volatile, prone to sudden, extreme bouts of anger and changes of heart. He’s tormented by psychic events, like his dreams, and he acts on them.9 Where did the virus come from?

The original Hebrew of the Bible holds the key. As always, furtive meanings play across the text. Hebrew is at once more impoverished and yet richer and denser than our English. It contains hidden messages in the multiple connections among words. More akin to poetry, words skip their meanings across the text like stones on a pond, spreading ripples of overlapping echoes and meanings. Many of these hidden intents are lost in translation into English, which simply reads more stiffly than Biblical Hebrew.10

The Hebrew word for their proliferation is “rav,” Pharaoh sees Jews filling the land, overestimating their numbers wildly. Magnifying the size of the Jews (not to mention their power and influence) is one of the symptoms of the disease we’re studying.11 He conjures a dark future when the Hebrew population bomb overrun his kingdom.The Torah in its typically allusive fashion, echoes his dark vision in the swarming plagues (arov) that overrun Egypt. Pharaoh’s malign delusion about the Hebrews as a plague – the metaphor for the Jews throughout their history used to arouse natives to loathe them – manifests it in his divine punishment. God has a sense of humor – or at least of *poetic* justice. The plague of Jew hatred is answered by divine plagues. But the equation is made. They have a common source.

The core of Pharaoh’s pathology, what sickens him, though, is his absurd hallucination that the Hebrews are “mightier than” Egypt.  That’s even more fundamental than his distorted vision of their numbers, for surely were he to go to war to subdue the Israelites, he could easily do so with all the state military apparatus at his command. The root of the Hebrew word for this perceived mightiness is atzum. Two verses before Pharaoh’s vision, the text tells us that indeed, the Hebrews grew “very, very mighty” (וַיַּעַצְמוּ בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד). Here he says “many [rav] and mightier [atzum] than us” (רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ).

The word for might, atzum, also mean “bone.,” It is a relative of “tree” etz [עֵץ] and “spine”; in other words, the sturdy, deeply rooted core or essence of something. It is used to describe the logic of an argument. Pharaoh has an instinctive and profound insight into the Israelites’ strength: they have backbone and interconnectedness, like roots and branches of a tree. Like his dreams, his irrational argument has a tinge of prophecy in it. He perceives that the essence of the Israelites is that they are all one family.  However numerous they become, they are still aware of and feel a deep blood connection to each other. They are all literally one family tree, all the “children” of Israel – Jacob’s second name – the father of the twelve brothers who come to Egypt and spawn the tribes of the nation-to-be. 

The Darwinian Jewish Project: to evolve Domestication

This idea of the Hebrews as a family is not just a nice theme or metaphor, it is the deepest premise of the Jewish story in the Bible. The Hebrew epic adventure of their origin is filled not with mighty warrior deeds, but episodes that unfold a vast Darwinian project across centuries in selective breeding. Its purpose is to evolve a properly domestic human with the sensitivity to nurture family.12 In Genesis, the sons or their wives who are selected to carry the “Jewish” gene are the domesticated, sensitive ones. God wipes out Noah’s whole generation with a flood because they corrupt family purity. Abraham favors the meditative well-digger Isaac over the angry Ishmael. Isaac chooses nurturing Jacob over the violent Esau. Jacob prefers the creative (if overweening) Joseph over his unreliable older brothers. Even the little we know about Cain is that he was sensitive (perhaps too sensitive).The civil laws throughout the Bible assume that all Jews are branches of a single family who deserve the respect and allegiance of blood loyalty. Converts attain the same status. This is one family you can join. 

The result is a culture of divine domestication. When Esau and Jacob finally reconcile and Esau offers to accompany Jacob on his journey home, Jacob draws the line as keenly as any place else in the family saga when he averts the dangerous offer as diplomatically as he can:

‘My lord knows that the children are frail and that the flocks and herds, which are nursing, are a care to me; if they are driven hard a single day, all the flocks will die. Let my lord go on ahead of his servant, while I travel slowly, at the pace of the cattle before me and at the pace of the children, until I come to my lord in Seir.’ (Gen 33:13-14)

The other great thread of the Bible is that the laws it promulgates at great length are entirely aspirational. They form the utopian constitution of a nation not yet created, the prospective State of Israel that won’t be founded until the Jews finally reach the Promised Land forty years later. The chronicle of the Five Books of Moses ends just before this point, the world’s first and greatest cliffhanger, so while the entire story of the Hebrew is looking forward and idealized, the foundation is in the family, the blood shared among all citizens. Pharaoh sees the Israelitish idea is revolutionary and disruptive to his hegemony. Imagine a code of laws where justice is based on familial senses of allegiance, gentility, fraternity, generosity, mutual responsibility – even tenderness – instead of punishment. The Bible often uses the word “achim” – siblings – for the citizens of the future state of Israel. It took three thousand years for the French Revolution’s ideal of fraternité to re-imagine a nation based on it. Even the harshest of civil relations imagined in this future country, when a Jew becomes the slave of another Jew, is an economic transaction borne of unfortunate necessity, not oppression. Slaves have rights and their “owners” have responsibilities to them and owe them measures of respect. Slaves are still included in the religious circle of Judaism. The endpoint and goal of slavery everywhere else, (say, the Old South) was for the slave to be a perpetual motion machine for wealth: free labor with the great boon of making more slaves for free. The goal of Jewish slavery was for the slave to achieve freedom after seven years. At the end, owners must give their liberated slaves livestock, grain, and wine as a parting gift. 

A nation defined by this mystical unity of blood is awesome and threatening indeed. Egyptian citizens are serfs and supplicants, not brothers and sisters, at least since Joseph reorganized the Egyptian economy for his predecessor. The Jews’ numerical size is not their threat, it’s their idea of humanity and nationhood. Their omnipresent, omniscient all-powerful infinite God demands that all humans treat each other as one family in order to make the world holy and thereby, know Him. 

The plague of the Jews is a negative miracle

This plague of the Jews has terrible ambivalence, two meanings at once: it both plagues them and makes their enemies see them as a plague. Even without a metaphysical explanation, we can see why it has no cure: Jews and Jew-hatred are twins. Pharaoh helps give birth to them; he is in effect their midwife. His dark plot leads to their enslavement, but also to their redemption. Everywhere we exist outside our home throughout history it follows us. It is the dark, mystical aspect of Jewishness itself, the other side of our coin. Jews cannot exist without Jew hatred. Our charge is to keep ourselves distinct – that is the meaning of the Hebrew word for holy (kadesh), but our distinctiveness arouses hatred.

Personally, the irrationality, inexplicability, spontaneity, persistence and ubiquity of antisemitism are dark testimony to the existence of God. Traditional Jewish writers often say antisemitism is “causeless [or baseless] hatred” [sinat chinam]13 which at first seems tantamount to a shrug of the shoulders. But there’s nothing in the cosmos that doesn’t have a cause.

When an inexplicable reality intrudes on ours we call it a miracle. In the instance of Jew hatred, it’s a negative miracle, evidence that the Finger of God stirs the pot of history, the violent price Jews pay for their mission, a negative miracle among the many positive ones that intervene in our history or surround us every day. It’s as if God needs both a holy force to encourage Jews forward to their redemptive destiny, and an evil one to drive them there. Perhaps it’s why the leaders of Jew hatred always seem to know more about us, our mission, than we do ourselves. It is no accident that Hamas perpetrated their horrors on Simchat Torah. The source of Pharaoh’s hatred isn’t that he is deluded about the Israelites, it’s that he sees the truth of them. If the superior Israelitish manner of organizing society is allowed to spread, it will drown him and his world. When Jews forget or abandon their mission and become more German than the Germans, the goad is waiting to remind us. This is the summary of all the Prophets on one foot, the story we tell ourselves.  

The realpolitik calculations of a supreme ruler like Pharaoh or a sheerly materialistic view of society like Marx’s or Epicurus’ don’t explain the cause of Jew hatred. Its provocation and foundation is in a supernal realm that unites everything in the universe. If they are honest and insightful enough, when confronted with a superior paradigm, worldview, or system of organizing culture, or operating the cosmos, or being in the world, they will see the truth, just as scientists when presented with a superior theory must ultimately bend to the truth. 

If Jews really do pose a threat to their host country, it is not by their number, nor by the potential for sedition or violence against their hosts, but by the transcendentally mighty idea they represent.14 As history has sadly shown, you can repress their number but not their symbolism. Even if they are a tiny fragment of a remnant in the world – less than 0.2% of the global population, and even if personally any particular Jew has little attachment to their tradition – they have a vision of the cosmos that enables their success, protected by a greater unity that no power on Earth has so far succeeded in eradicating. 

The cure?

If indeed the source of Jew hatred is transcendent and congruent with the idea of the Jew itself, then there really is no cure short of the vision written into the other part of the Jews’ script: complete redemption of the world. 

In the interim, while we endlessly await a Messiah, there is a kind of inoculation that might work with individuals, Jew-hater and Jew alike. Before the individual hater grabs a gun and comes to kill, before the psychic virus has completely dominated the reasoning faculties of a patient, before he or she joins the mob bent on pogrom, then perhaps there is still time. But it’s the exhausting, never-ending battle for truth. Jews, as they do in the International Court of Justice and the twittersphere, must continue to face the hatred with truth. For the Jew-hater has a weakness. He always lies, usually by first stealing the Jew’s truth, then trying to cover up the crime by erasing the witness, spiritual parricide. Though they invented the monotheism at the core of Christianity and Islam, they are its greatest enemy. It’s an exhausting and often fruitless fight, but it’s the only one that gives Jews any hope.

2024

  1. Even the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the U.K., embraces this conventional and powerful explanation. He writes, “Much of the theoretical basis for analyzing the scapegoating phenomenon was laid several decades ago by the French-born philosopher Rene Girard. In Violence and the Sacred [ Johns Hopkins U Press (1972)] he wrote, ‘The victim or victims of unjust violence or discrimination are called scapegoats, especially when they are not punished for ‘the sins’ of others, as most dictionaries assert, but for tensions, conflicts, and difficulties of all kinds…Scapegoating enables persecutors to elude problems that seem intractable.” Girard’s definition covers many aspects of the scapegoating of Jews and Israel.” With all due respect to R’ Sacks, he misses the point. Rene Girard was my thesis advisor. He was a devout Catholic who understood that the source of scapegoating was theological, following the typology of Jesus who was for Girard (and Christianity) the ultimate archetype of the sacrificial scapegoat. But he expresses this in a veiled way, in terms of sociology and innate human instincts (he calls it mimesis): the phenomenon that leads to scapegoating begins with  mimicry, then jealousy, then rivalry, then antagonism, and finally violent confrontation of the Other, ending when the stronger vanquishes and erases (or murders)  the weaker. R’ Sacks was correct when he saw that this dynamic perfectly explains the repetitive violence against Jews.  After all, Jesus was also a Jew. ↩︎
  2.  The Wikipedia article on “Antisemitism” has over 300 bibliographic entries and “The History of Antisemitism” another 300. Many offer explanations, few offer solutions, and the ones that do have obviously failed. ↩︎
  3. The other car veered into my lane and hit mine: that was the proximate cause. But the cause in fact is that the driver was drunk because he just broke up with his girlfriend and was trying to drown his sorrow. ↩︎
  4. Peter Schafer, writes, “Antisemitism may have originated in Egypt and been spread by the Greek retelling of Ancient Egyptian prejudices.” In modern history (since the Greeks) it becomes “universal and virulent.” Schäfer, Peter, Judeophobia, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 208
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  5. Some speculate that this Pharaoh represented a new regime that rose to power when the Hyksos rulers of the Fifteenth Dynasty (c. 17th-16th c BCE, who have been closely associated with a “Canaanites”)  were supplanted by the Eighteenth Dynasty of Akhmose in the 14th c BCE. ↩︎
  6. Ironically he is following the script by which Joseph both rescued and subjugated the Egyptians for his predecessor. ↩︎
  7. Midrash – commentary on the Torah by Jewish sages – say that at first, the Egyptian public were still admiring of the Hebrews and would have been too civil and thus resisted Pharaoh if he suddenly declared war on them.
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  8. See The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 2 and The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 3 ↩︎
  9. Theodore Rubin described the psychopathology of antisemitism in depth. He calls it “symbol sickness.” In Anti-Semitism, A Disease of the Mind (NY: Continuum, 1990), he shows how antisemites project onto the Jew whatever psychic frailty they suffer from, externalizing their  internal conflicts: guilt, envy, self-doubt, defensiveness, scapegoating, identity confusion. Yet, these describe the mechanics of the disease, rather than its cause. Why do Jews particularly become the symbol of deep seated troubles rather than, say, Hispanics or Asians? ↩︎
  10. It has a lexicon of only about 9000 words as compared to, for example, the 200,000 in English; it lacked vowels, so the same three consonants that form the root words of Hebrew could have more than one possible meaning at a time and many other technical features. See “Literature, Letterature, Liturgy” at Literature, Letterature, Liturgy 
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  11. On a flight to Albany, NY in 1995, I sat next to a history professor at Williams College. When he made a remark about the Jewish lobby controlling our foreign policy towards a presumably evil Israel, I asked him, “How many Jews are there in the world?” He seemed startled and then said, “Oh, I don’t know. About a quarter of a billion?” When I eventually told him the real number (15 million maybe), he didn’t believe me, got angry, and didn’t talk to me the rest of the flight. Similarly, many people are shocked to see the true size of modern Israel on a map of the region, let alone the world.
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  12. See  The Mystery of Mysteries” Part 2: The Bible’s Darwinian Experiment ↩︎
  13. Dovid Fohrman, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/watch-what-is-sinat-chinam-or-baseless-hatred/ 
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  14. There’s never been a case of Jews mounting sedition against their host country in all the history of the Jewish Diaspora, unless we count pathetic ones like the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII or in Egypt in 115 CE, both of which were crushed (by the Nazis and by Rome, respectively). ↩︎

The Quantum Theology of Matzah [long]

David Porush5 Comments

In recent years, matzah seems tastier to me.  I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve got so many good associations with the other tastes of the holiday, including brisket, matzah brie, gefilte fish, and macaroons. Or maybe the shmurah (super-orthodox watched-while-it’s-baked) matzah we now get is better than Manischevitz of yore. But I’m probably fooling myself. Matzah really is the bread of affliction. It’s dusty, dry, brittle, tasteless, mean fare. Every year, I ask the ancient theological questions plaguing the Jews, “Does matzah ever go stale? Would anyone know? Why would such a dispiriting food be so central to the most delightful, and perhaps the most important, Jewish holiday? Why is matzah so important that even the Torah calls Passover The Holiday of Matzahs?“

Screen Shot 2017-04-18 at 11.16.48 PMMatzah is itself and an invitation to interpretation

Like many things in Jewish ritual, matzah is both itself and symbolic of many other things all at once. When we eat matzah, we collapse the 3330 years between us and our slave ancestors by reliving the sensation of the Children of Israel, who ate matzah on the night before the Exodus. They then ate it a second time when they didn’t have time to let the bread rise before we exited Egypt. We can taste what it’s like to be slaves who cannot choose the bread they eat. Matzah means itself.

For something so flat, matzah also has so many layers of meaning that it seems to be a paradox about layering. It is flat but infinitely deep. During the seder, we focus on the difference between bread and matzah and bring out the symbolism that makes it the centerpiece of Passover. This is one of the beauties of the seder: along with teaching children the central story of our people, it also teaches them a way of thinking. The matzah and the other objects on the seder plate multiply meanings, which we somehow hold in parallel in our minds like a symphonic theme weaving in and out of different instruments and keys through the course of a performance. Somehow, the meanings don’t clash. They magically harmonize and make each other grander. Even more amazingly, after all the sermons, the things in front of us, the egg, greens, bitter herbs, matzah, charoset and wine remain fully themselves. In the end, though, we still get to eat them, to ingest the sermon.

Even at my grandfather’s home, where he blazed through the seder in Hebrew  (he was born in Jerusalem in 1899), Passover seemed like deliverance from the slavery of school. Compared to the arguments of the seder, school was all rote learning and dull algebra, a race to get the one right answer. In school, the signifier meant one thing only, a simple tune played on a three-penny pipe. The seder was a tutorial about the promised land of full-throated, orchestral argument, where even children are urged to join in. The other grand traditions of our seder – the red-faced shouting about politics and the cutthroat 25 cent pinochle game at the end – all seemed to flow from the sages in Bnei Brak who tried to one-up each other over the number of plagues. Such disagreements, as Rav Kook said, are a noisy route to universal peace.

That’s why this year I was so childishly excited to discover a new sermon in matzah that harmonized with all the others. By looking at the most literal physics of its nature, this is what I saw:

Matzah is a sermon on God’s absence. By noting matzah is not bread, we open a door, inviting Him to enter the home during the seder. It is the secret twin of Elijah’s Cup, asking the same question left by the untouched wine in Elijah’s cup: Where is He?

The Matzah Sermons

The Matzah Sermon has many versions.

We forego bread because the difference between bread and matzah is inflation, the chewy fullness that grants satisfaction. We should beware our own puffed-up egos and liberate ourselves from enslavement to the things that make us too swollen with pride and arrogance.

The difference between bread and matzah is our taste for sensuality, so beware enslavement to material things that give us sensuous pleasure. As the Zohar says, the Hebrew word for “taste” – tam – also means “reason.” Don’t let temptations of the body blind you to the truths that come from your higher intellect.

The difference between bread and matzah is time: if you let even flour and cold water sit for eighteen minutes, it will begin to ferment.  Matzah was hurried because the Israelites had to stay small in the night. So they ate humble bread while the terrible tenth plague, the slaying of the first born, passed over. Then they had to hurry because the next morning they were rushing out of Egypt. They made and ate matzah a second time. Rush towards redemption. Yearn for freedom.

The difference between bread and matzah is we eat bread three times a day through the year, but “on this night, only matzah.” Beware enslavement to routine habits or desires.

Matzah is bread without spirit, its golem. Beware idolatries, worshiping things that are mere flat objects, empty of true dimension or inner meaning, else you will become like matzah, flat and de-spirited.

Many hosts answer the invitation to interpret by writing fashionable causes du jour into their Haggadah. Fifty years ago, the spirit of Passover helped fuel the civil rights movement. Now, almost every homegrown haggadah now includes passages about Martin Luther King, or genocide and slavery in other regions of the world, or calls for equality for transgender people and an end to the oppression of animals by us Pesach carnivores, or analogies between an unpopular president and pharaoh, or even, chas v’chalilah, insanely misguided pleas for Israel to end its so-called apartheid.

For that reason, the sermons that move me the most are not political but ones that drive to mystical implications. Matzah reminds us that God himself intervened in nature and time to free us. Because in Egypt we had only flattened slave-perception, we, and the world, had to witness His miracles firsthand to be convinced. At other times, He works only through nature, quietly if ubiquitously. In the kabbalistic  tradition, matzah represents the absence of this true knowledge and understanding of God.

Metaphysics in the physics of matzah

It was my idolatrous love of sushi that drove me to look at the physics of matzah.

This year, I thought we would fulfill the theme of liberation by “going Sephardi”: giving ourselves permission to eat rice on Passover. Since Talmudic time, all Jews who follow strict practices have agreed to avoid the five grains that expand when cooked – oats, barley, spelt, wheat and rye. But a schism arose in the last five centuries between the Ashkenazi, Jews of Europe and the Sephardi, Jews descended from exiles from the Spanish Inquisition (and then most Arab countries in Northern Africa and the East). Maybe because they lived where the weather made them grumpier, Ashkenazi Jews constructed the anti-inflation rule strictly and also forbad lentils, beans, corn, and rice. The Sephardi continue to enjoy them. I voted for rice, largely because I had a fantasy about kosher for Passover sushi.

I lost. But to defend my unpopular position, I was driven to science to try to find out what exactly caused the dread “inflation.” What I discovered didn’t help me win my case, but it opened up an incredible vista about the difference between bread and matzah incarnated in the biophysics of yeast.

Matzah and bread both are essentially wheat flour and water. Outside the seder, on Passover we can add eggs and salt for flavor, and some matzahs that are KLP (kosher for Passover) even include oil, honey, juice, or even wine, as long as they don’t make the dough rise. But during the seder proper, we are supposed to eat only “poor matzah”: flour and water. To make bread, you need yeast.

Humans recognized and harnessed the magical properties of yeast even before they could write. Yeast makes flour and water into bread. It also makes grapes into wine. It seems to add life to inert foodstuffs, transforming them magically into something else alive. Grape juice is just a soft drink. But wine is literally a spirit. A cracker is a good delivery platform for dip, but bread is the staff of life itself. By ingesting wine and bread, we take some of that magic into us. Bread sates. Wine leavens our spirit. It’s no wonder bread and wine were worshiped by the ancients and are central to many religious rituals.

Though the technology of yeast has been perfected, the science of yeast still holds mysteries and surprises. To put it another way, we know the mechanics of how yeast work down to the molecular level, but we’re not completely sure how it performs its magic. 

The quantum physics of yeast

Yeast is a single-celled living creature. When we let these critters feed on their favorite food, sugar or anything that contains sugar or carbohydrates, they digest it into sugar’s components: energy, alcohol, carbon dioxide, and some residue molecules that add flavors. The process the ancients observed was bubbling, rising fermentation. When we bake bread, the heat evaporates alcohol produced by the yeast into gas bubbles that expand and burst, contained by the sticky dough. This gives bread its texture. In the cooler processing of wine (and beer), the alcohol is completely contained in the liquid for our pleasure.

All this you probably learned in high school chemistry as an example of enzymatic activity. But what they didn’t teach us, because chemistry isn’t etymology, is that “enzyme” is just the Greek for “in yeast.” And what you didn’t learn, because chemistry didn’t know, is how yeast, or enzymes, are the gateway between the living and the inert, literally life and death.

The new science of quantum biology has started to answer the question of how yeast performs this magic.

Yeast is the ur-type of all enzymes. Enzymes are present in all living things, in every living cell, and in every process that sustains life: digestion, neural action, making new cells and repairing old ones (growth and healing), reproduction, and so on. There is an eternal philosophical battle between materialists and vitalists. Materialists believe the universe and everything in it, including humans and human consciousness, is a vast machine. It is made up only of physical things and the physical processes or forces between them. Vitalists argue that there is a meta-physical force in the universe that animates all life, a force that cannot be reduced to mechanical explanations. Human consciousness particularly illustrates the problem and limitation of materialism. Fundamentalist materialists argue that everything can be explained ultimately, by self-consistent systems of reason, like logic or mathematics. Religious vitalists argue that the metaphysical force is divine.

Although yeast is a living thing, enzymes have until recently seemed to be purely chemical machines. In the debate between materialists and vitalists, enzymes have been the best proof for the materialist view of life. They seem to explain how life is introduced into inert matter without resort to non-mechanistic explanations. Until now.

It turns out that enzymes require quantum effects to do their work, and quantum mechanics defies the materialist view of the cosmos. At its best, quantum mechanics defies logic, though we’ve learned to use them in MRIs and computer chips. At its worst, every quantum process requires an aware being to watch it work in order for it to be real.

I know to most of  you unfamiliar with it this claim for quantum mechanics seems just weird. There’s no way to explain any quantum process without over-simplifying it or resorting to analogies which dangerously distort its actual, full-on weirdness. Many have tried and some have succeeded. (See a very spare reading list at the end of this blog of some I think do the best job.) Let’s just say the quantum is profoundly counter-intuitive. But here are a few of the weird facts that you will need to know as we continue with our discussion of matzah. I leave it to you to discover whether you buy any of it yourself:

  1. Sub-atomic entities behave like both waves of energy and particles at the same time.
  2. A sub-atomic entity isn’t in any one specific place until you observe it. Then it seems to settle on one. (Uncertainty)
  3. A single sub-atomic particle can be in two places at once. But if you affect one, its other self will react, even if they are separated by millions of miles. (Superposition)
  4. They can pass through otherwise impassible-seeming barriers (quantum tunneling) and “travel” faster than the speed of light.
  5. When a subatomic particle is observed or measured, it “collapses” from its various possible quantum states into one state. Ie, it stops behaving quantumly and starts behaving classically. (Measurement)

To understand the quantum theology of matzah, the last aspect is the most important. Until now, biologists have been fairly content to leave the weirdness of the quantum world among physicists. They assumed there was an unbreachable barrier between the sub-atomic world of quantum weirdness and the macroscopic world of biology obedient to classical laws of physics. Thankfully (they believed) micro monkey business collapsed when it poked its head up into an organism because the complexity of the organism automatically “measured” (observed) it (though no one specified how). They now seem to be really wrong. It’s uncomfortable.

Resurrected by water, living yeast seems to make the inert come alive. Yeast works enzymatically to ferment the sugars in flour. It explodes the flat mound of dough and makes it rise as little bubbles of alcohol explode inside. It adds tastes by creating new molecules. But what was once thought to be a classical, if incompletely understood, mechanical process (catalysis) we now know requires quantum tunneling.

Quantum tunneling in yeast

Here’s the technical explanation: an enzyme in yeast takes a positively charged sub-atomic particle, the proton from the alcohol it has created, and transfers it to another molecule. This new molecule, with the addition of its extra proton, now has a positive charge. Like a magnet, it now attracts molecules carrying a negatively charged particle, the electron. So the new molecule the yeast created (called nicotinamide alcohol dehydrase or NADH) becomes a very effective carrier and releasor of electrons. With NADH, the ingredients can now perform their actions very quickly and efficiently. It’s like the brew now has an electric current running through it, with electrons able to hitch a ride and jump off when a chemical reaction needs an extra jolt of energy to make it happen.

So far so good. This is all safe, mechanical chemistry.

As it turns out, though, the speed at which electrons get transferred from alcohol to NAD+ to make NADH cannot be explained by classical chemistry. On the other hand, quantum tunneling, number three on our list of weird quantum effects above, can. Again, at the risk of over-simplifying, a subatomic particle can help an electron travel across barriers instantaneously by using its superpower of quantum tunneling. As this effect occurs among millions of molecules in the dough, it speeds up the process enough for biologists to say it must be involved. [1]

This neat explanation of the quantum role in enzymatic action leaves one huge mystery, though: In order for the transport of the electron to occur, it can’t be just a probability, and in order for it to be more than a probability, it has to be observed or measured. The probabilistic quantum behavior – the electron can be here or there and therefore nowhere at all, really – has to become classical behavior. I see it now. Until now, biologists, scientists and other materialists have maintained that the macroscopic bulk of the organism in which the quantum action occurs collapses any quantum craziness. I.e., the fact of the organism itself performs the “observing.” But that argument no longer holds water and even seems like a tautology, fabulous circular reasoning, because enzymes involve quantum action. Enzymes, and the quantum, is ubiquitous in every process of every cell in an organism. In fact, it seems to be the essence of life itself.

“Enzymes have made and unmade every living cell that lives or has ever lived. Enzymes are as close as anything to the vital factors of life. …. [T]he discovery that enzymes work by promoting the dematerialization of particles from one point in space and their instantaneous materialization in another provides us with a novel insight into the mystery of life.”

– Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology  (Broadway Books, Jul 26, 2016) p. 97

There’s simply too much quantum funny business going on everywhere in a living being to say one part of the organism is classical and collapses the other part that’s quantum.

Another way materialists banish the quantum: the Many Worlds Hypothesis

Scientists have resolved the measurement problem another way. They hypothesize that instead of collapsing the quantum into the classical through observation, every time a quantum event collapses into a classical one, other universes are spawned. All the other probabilities that didn’t occur here does occur there, in these new universes.

This hypothesis is mathematically satisfying and sidesteps any suggestion of metaphysics. But there are a virtually infinite set of quantum events occurring everywhere at every instant everywhere in an organism, let alone the whole universe. Each of them would create an incalculable set of alternate universes. You do the dizzying math. Or alternatively, ask yourself: Which is the more ridiculous vision of the cosmos? This vision creates an even crazier and more incomprehensible cosmos than the one we have.

But who knows? That’s what they said about quantum theory in the twentieth century. And that’s what most well-educated, modern, rational sophisticated people say about God.

Quantum theology of matzah

Quantum theology is a term used by a few but growing number of theologians and mystics. Many of their essays and speculations are plagued by vagueness, weak understanding of science, and an over-heated, optimistic leap into the irrational analogies between quantum science and mysticism to prove God’s existence. Their “proofs” often require taking analogous-sounding mysteries as equivalents. Quantum theology is largely the provenance of well-educated fundamentalists.

The case of yeast is different. In this dance between the material and the vital, between science and faith, the science leads us to conclude something mystical is happening in bread that doesn’t occur in matzah. That matzah has been promising something like this is lurking in its layers of meaning is a deligthful coincidence. Even on its own terms, though, the new science of quantum biology shows quite specifically how the process of life itself depends on quantum action. In every possible process where life is created or sustained, enzymatic action is involved. And with quantum action comes the requirement that someone or something is observing the process. The nose of the quantum camel has entered the tent of biology, but it was summoned by the biology. In fact, the tent is the camel. Something or someone has to be observing omnipresent quantum events in enzymes to make them operative in life. Someone or something has to be operating life. Omnisciently.

Couple the biophysics with the metaphysics of the matzah and we get a powerful sermon. Matzah is bread without attention, perhaps without the attention of a Cosmic Consciousness. It represents enslavement to inert material. It is both literally the bread of affliction, the food of slaves, and symbolically life without redemption from our inner Egypt, the body without a soul. Matzah invokes a God  who redeemed the Children of Israel from slavery more than three thousand years ago and Who continues to operate the universe today by attending to its every quantum event. He is an incomprehensibly vast God Who observes every infinitesimal event, all the infinite infinitesimal events that occur every instant to sustain each living cell of each living organism. This is a God that watches everything actively. This God expands and unfolds His Cognizance as much as the universe imagined by the Many Worlds Hypothesis multiplies infinitely bubbling alternatives, only this God gives it life and an elegant unity. I like this God and this idea of Him.

One of the sermons on matzah is a kabbalistic one. Isaac Luria, the 16th century mystic of Safed, explains that the three matzahs on the seder plate represent Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom. Matzah invites us to stretch our scientific wisdom to its fullest extent beyond enslavement to our preconceptions. Matzah also contains a sermon about the liberation of science from its prejudices.

[2] Prof. Judith Klinman of UC Berkeley first suggested that quantum processes were involved in the enzymatic action in 1987. She has more recently found experimental evidence for it. See, for instance, Judith P. Klinman and Amnon Kohen, “Hydrogen Tunneling Links Protein Dynamics to Enzyme Catalysis,” Annual Rev Biochem. 2013; 82: 471-496.

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” →