Then I realized, aboutness isn’t in the proton; it’s in me. But then I realized that I am also only matter and energy, a bunch of things like protons that aren’t about anything. I read more and found out that “being about” something is meant to be an emergent property, which is a nice way of saying that we don’t know where it comes from, but it appears to coincide with lots of matter and energy bouncing off each other or whatnot. “Aboutness” is illusory in the outside world and exists only in our brains, which are very complicated hunks of matter we don”t understand, and the only place where something can be about anything else. So whatever science is about, it’s all, mysteriously, in our heads.

It is a touchstone of scientific skepticism to declare no supernatural powers have ever been demonstrated. Still, it’s hard to know how scientific skepticism can be about this without resort to a supernatural explanation. There is no concept of “supernatural powers” or “scientific skepticism”; there is only matter/energy and special matter/energy in brains. Suppose the natural is defined by that whose mechanism science can empirically demonstrate. In that case, the skeptic’s very question reflects powers unrecognized by science, and James Randi should have paid himself the money.

(Perhaps the mechanism of the “miraculous” is unprovable because it’s similarly what a person, not non-choosing matter/energy, is about. And there may be a Person whose favorite choice is being about us, which entails a neutral meeting ground so that we have the opportunity to be about Him. And if that’s not love (love is a very intense form of aboutness also totally waved off as the science of the future), then I really don’t know what I’m on about.)

~~~

If there is no aboutness, then there is no love. If I am not in some way about my beloved but merely another hunk of matter/energy fulminating and gearing into new configs, we can never be together. We can only be technically similar as we are separate, my matter in one shape and yours in a complementary one. It is unclear who or what is beholding or bearing this similarity, as they themselves would need to be about the similarity. And so our relationship really rests on an un-culminated infinite regress, our love what a theoretical third-party observer who could be “about” would unite us with. He, in turn, would need a fourth-party observer, and so on and on, like putting the matter to a vote and more and more congressmen walk into the hall and never stop.

Without “about,” all “similarity” or “connection” is an illusion arising from profound and irreparable loneliness. The G-d who creates such a universe would taunt us with a totally unexplained and inexplicable mental capacity for construing “aboutness,” with no real base-level metaphysical power to bear or possess your beloved. Surely if G-d wouldn’t “taunt” us with fossils, and there really were dinosaurs, aboutness (which seems infinitely closer and more common than fossils) must reflect some base reality? But this is folk wisdom, and science exists to disabuse us of our experiences by telling us what we’re really about.

If anyone actually submits to the regime of “aboutness for me but not for thee,” or any other denial of base intentionality, the emotional effect is what I’ll call austerity.

The austere servant can’t be about G-d; they can only ever fit into a certain external and superficial standard and mold others to it. Since no opening of my heart to G-d is really possible because my heart (and brain) are just created hunks of stuff dancing their mysterious emergent dances on their own, there is no ordering of effects.

There is no reason why the superficial good deed should reflect some actual soul state of connection; in some sense, there are only deeds. Without aboutness, even a feeling of love is a deed. After all, the deed is a word spoken with the breath of the world, and a word is a thought brought forth from privacy. A thought is a self brought into self-interaction. The self is just a node situated by what it’s about and not about, what we could call “love” and “fear.” But if there’s no “aboutness,” then being about something is just a technical state of affairs, no different from moving a coin. So there is no real reason to attach the coin’s motion to any particular feeling; there is only will and manipulation at every level. There is no authenticity; there is only the achievement of a “desirable” state of affairs, whether that state is a feeling or an action. In short, the very concept of authenticity, of the superficial reflecting and conveying some profound reality, is lost.

Without authenticity, where some things are mere communication of yet deeper (deeper = more-directly-about!) things, all that’s left is austerity. While we usually parse austerity as severity, scrimping, the harshing of the mellow, I put it to you: Is there any form of harshness that doesn’t derive from an insecurity about the external state of things? Who is harsh with others and with themselves because the aboutness is out of alignment? On the contrary, “harshness” toward aboutness is nothing but a manifestation and demand of love—Where are you? Why are you not here with me? Real austerity doesn’t believe you can be here with me because we are inherently apart. It just wants to know why you are failing to conform to the most desirable set of circumstances!

You are erased. There is no life from the outside.

~~~

“Aboutness,” of course, is another word for Pnimius – the doctrine of inwardness, the notion that things have an inside and not just active, verbal, mental, emotional, and intellectual outsides. It is the notion that there is something else in addition to mere causality, a cause of causes, an inversion of reality, in which manifestation is grounded in something else.

Aboutness lets us be about G-d, which is the deepest and most profound of all human states in that it unites the two infinite edges and, by the power of aboutness, reduces all circumstance to nothing. It strips all concealments (for no concealment is actual concealment if it’s seen to be about!) and lays bare the ultimate inwardness of all things. In that place, there is no austerity.

The magic of aboutness lets us live from the inside rather than from the outside.

G-d knows me, but “from the inside.” The commandments we are commanded to keep, but from the inside. The Torah we are to study, but in a way that it’s what we’re about, like real human beings, rather than as a willed manipulation of circumstance.

We are charged to change everything, yes, but from the inside. We must transform this world, but not with the austere and alienated lever-pulling or compulsion of policy or group dynamic. From the inside! Yes, the outside matters and matters profoundly, and that’s why the world is here, but outsides only matter (rather than simply exist by fiat) from the inside.

We are to love each other, and as we already know, the only way to honestly do so—to truly connect and not merely contort alone—is from the inside. The “inside” is also called faith, “the “outside” knowledge. To live from the inside is for knowledge to be about faith, for faith to be the deepest truth of knowledge. “From the inside” means that the separation becomes the bridge given the axiomatic connectedness of all things.

If we’re about G-d and each other, we can discover endless triumphant forgiveness within. The state of sin and violation can then exist only “from the outside”. “From the inside,” all evil is contextualized by our participation in it. We can always fix what we do; we can one day set aside all this distraction and be together.

The differing commandments/nuschaos of “to know G-d” and “to have faith in G-d” are, paradoxically, both completions of each other and as far from each other as East from West. They are united in the soul, but perhaps only because the soul has the capacity for contradiction.

Knowledge is turned outward, the soul knowing the thing by the way it fits with and relates to other things, through its effects. And to know rationally is just to be another thing relating; “to know” is a special case of “to rationally be”, with the protean mind able to receive the form of that to which it relates.

But faith in G-d is turned inward rather than outward, a repudiation of outwardness, a black question lying at the heart of each medium and intermediary: Why not be together without all the stuff in between? Why do I need to meet G-d in or through anything? Why should I know Him only in His external form, as something outside of Him? And if I can relate to Him without a middle-man, can I not relate to anything without a middle-man?

Knowledge is mistaken for faith when people talk about “finding G-d” and search for an external object of some kind, whether physical or spiritual or scriptural or philosophical. As Sallah once told Indiana Jones, you are digging in the wrong place! You are trying to intellectually know which is to know indirectly which is to know outwardly, and we live in a broad culture (even among the “spiritual”) convinced outwardness is all that exists and everything “makes sense” and can in some way be assimilated into our journey of self-perfection.

The truth is somehow both more mundane and more occult. You have to look inside, at what precedes all thought. Not at someone else’s theoretical “inside” which you cannot know except through intermediaries, but your own inside. Only then can you know directly. And knowing directly is called faith, mundane because it is closer to us than our own thought, occult because as close as it is to us, the more immediately present we are to all other things.

The universe actually has two infinite edges, one where you expect it to be beyond where the eye can see and the physicist can calculate, and the other inside you. You can spend your whole life trying to navigate toward G-d through the thimbleful of external realities floating in a pool of night we call the universe, or you can realize you already stand outside it. That within you, the water leaks in. And then, wonder of wonders, what you discover is that G-d creates us with external interfaces in a finite and bound body in a certain time and place for a specific reason, and that most do not realize they are “behind enemy lines”. And then you realize that—though you cannot access them directly—within each time, and place, and body, within every facet and quality and member of the external world, is another spark of G-dliness, another infinite edge. That not just you but each and every substance around which your mind snaps shut is just a penumbra of clothes and jewelry and letters and media around a node of faith, a pearl secreted around a core of nothingness, that the doors out of the enemy camp lie in the hearts of its soldiers and weapons and black dogs hunting in the night. We are here not to escape it or to break it or to ignore it but to fix it, to find each other, to hold the infinite against the finite ’til it catches alight with the dark fire and sheds obsidian rays blotting out all outwardness.

People with faith drink a drop of mashke and sing a joyous tune, for they have tasted the secret that they are not something trying to stay afloat but nothing to speak of at all, a fathom calling upon a fathom of the fathomless deep.

Image: M.C. Escher, “Bond of Union,” 1956

If to answer your mind reaches for political ideologies or bio-psychological theories or, heaven help us, sociology, stop. That way lies only pain, for you will eventually seek to define the word ‘good’ (the opposite of ‘evil’) by what the discursive intellect understands, which means that ‘good’ will have to be defined in terms of ‘evil’ and so never wholly good. The cold human intellect has serious issues overcoming the being/non-being distinction that serves as its earliest intuition and founding principle, which is a good thing if you value “objectivity” and the like.

I have a better place for the mind to reach: Jerusalem’s bristling legion of beggars. If you travel to the Holy City and give one a few shekels, he or she will tend to respond in reflex with the two Hebrew words meaning ‘you should merit to good deeds.’

The beggar of Jerusalem does not reply to selflessness with blessings of health or wealth but rather, with a touch of stealth, as follows: G-d should reward you for this good deed you’ve done by allowing you to do further good deeds!

What a strange thought, that my one good deed was a reward for a prior one and will be cause for a future one! It’s good deeds all the way down, as it were, for as the Mishna says, a Divine Commandment drags another in its wake.

Many critics of what is perceived to be religion have wondered over the millennia why, if the deed is ‘good’, must the reward be in some paradise from which no one has ever returned. The beggar of Jerusalem knows the secret! The true reward of a good deed is a good deed, for any reward other than a good deed pales beside it.

The beggar reminds you that the ‘good’ in the action of placing the coin in the beggar’s hand is not some qualified kernel buried deep beneath the compromises of this world and contingent on the means and ends of humankind. It is not ‘good’ because the beggar is going to use it for good things, or because feeding a family is of cosmic worth to the human mind, or because good means a highly evolved misplaced, badly malformed, and dyspeptic liver sense of tribal altruism.

The good in your tiny act, in a coin passing between sweaty hands on a hurried and a harried hike up from the Kotel, is a yawning black hole. It is a true and impossible infinite regress, the mouthpiece of Gabriel’s Horn at the lips of the Creator. It is an infinitesimal point at which our reality empties out and inverts, a single drop of water purifying every body in the world, the period of the first sentence of morning swallowing the day. The good in the good deed draws upon the Highest Good with which it is One, source of all things, at a point where the universe finds itself burned through until all facades remember they are and are not facades. The coin, between hands, winks in the light, and all time reaches conclusion in an eternally arriving departure, multiplicity reduced to the negative space around the supernally strung pearls of His Will accomplished and thus existing more profoundly, more eternally, good.

We eagerly await the messianic age, which perhaps in some sense is nothing more or nothing less than seeing the good deeds—of which even the empty are “full like pomegranates”—for what they are, rather than what they appear to be. For an infinite reality full of light so true it can consume any darkness and be any darkness. For a justification underlying all that is possible and all that is impossible. For G-d.

The hippies, not the real ones (because who cares), but the vision, the love and peace and all that, pulled me from a morass at fourteen. My life could have gone differently at a dreary school, very real and austere and on-the-rails. Then I switched over and found joy in the freedom of the spirit where anything went, and you were more or less left alone within some loose expectations. The hippie school was less religious than I was and had no vessel for those budding inclinations, but it didn’t matter, because they let a thousand freak flags fly, and that’s beautiful, and seeing it’s beautiful is what makes a hippie, you dig? So they smoked, and I dreamed of Jerusalem, and it all worked out, more or less.

Now the school has an alumni association lambasting the administration for its lack of empathy and sharing a list of demands and uprooting systemic blah blah blah, it doesn’t matter, here’s what matters—finite ideals tended to by animals must all give way to animal tendencies. Animals tend to pull down and away toward death. I may dream of those sunny days with sandals and drums and my little inner petri dish that everyone was too stoned to smash, but the stoners do not seem to dream of them.

They have grown up and become shaved monks, puritanical and terrible-holy, and those who cannot conform will burn. In this sense, we have switched places. I was seen as (and I encouraged this view) a quasi-religious freak, but I gradually grew to appreciate the gentle lightness of being a hippie, the chill, the mellow. It cradled me and raised me and allowed me to become what I was becoming at my own pace. It was patient beyond the point of reason. It thought something beautiful might be emerging if it would just be allowed to emerge and not crushed when it was most brittle. My friends, on the other hand, for reasons understood (being the children of immigrants changed my life more than I realized at the time) and mysterious, were confident hippies doing the cradling, open to the world, open to every new thing as they were to me. But this disposition and environment do not naturally persist; they require maintenance, and even during my time at that school, they shifted and changed. Just as something in human nature tends to self-destruction and self-sabotage, just as those pursuing happiness with the most gusto are the least likely to find it, so, too, are the explicit maintainers of peace and love and lightness and mellowness the least likely to maintain it.

The years since I graduated have not been good to the maintenance crew; they were open, and open, and open until some very talented sociopathic manipulators and people-eating ideas took advantage. Now they say things like ‘police are evil’, which is ironic because if they had psychospiritual or emotional police around their own ideals, they never would have come to say it in this way. They have been looted; their ability to create for me that paradise has been picked over. They are spiritually depleted by the rawest and basest politics and the sickening totalizing tendency of the ideas that have come to dwell in them, who say any mellowness that gives quarter to the enemy is evil and any lightness which allows even the conscientious objectors to exist in our midst is wrong. Our school, that place of accordions and trailers with frozen pipes, is now seen to be detracting from ‘what’s really going on’ by posting updates on student life rather than on solidarity. The alumni (and, I assume, current students still awake) chase moralistically-satisfying ephemera, and the board, in search of the fountain of relative-youth, shall follow.

I, for my part, yearn for the good old days, for a feeling that I now doubt is any mere ideology made manifest but which cannot possibly survive as light and mellow under so much activism. I feel like I have become the most unlikely guardian of this tradition imaginable, a ridiculous reversal of the ex-orthodox writers getting Netflix deals who still, as Bialik did, as Shazar did, defend the homeness of the faith they’ve renounced to those who can’t hope to understand. I am a hippie by education who went off-the-Derech to become an overly-cerebral orthodox Rabbi who now rants about hippie-ness to all who will listen. We must save the hippies from themselves. We must act as beacons pulsing in the dark to call them back to what they were. The light and the mellow were no mere throwaway consequences of other things you were into; they were precious, priceless, and worth defending. Return, my sons, return!

Love and peace are not sustainable in the form of mere affectations. You bore them in your breast and built them into your structures because you were kissed on the forehead by G-d, but that mark has long since worn off in the winds of the world, your innocence lost. The secret is that you did not create it; you cannot create it. You received it and appreciated it. It emanated authentically and spontaneously from a combination of factors so fine they may only be counted by He who knows the sand and knows the stars.

Those, like me, who yearn for innocence, for love, for peace—not in some exalted divine or cosmic sense, even, but in the simplest sense, in the sense that a fourteen-year-old boy was protected in the light and the mellow—are wise to turn from overt attempts to create to covert attempts to foster it. We strengthen and deepen our souls on the individual level, free from any worldly master that wishes to control us, free from the insecurities and guilt others use to ensnare us. We will not be turned outward and downward to foster the superficial and the unreal, to be “for” movements or candidates or cathartic destruction. We will not be tricked into believing that the extension of the ego into a million egos by the collective is a form of sublimation or selflessness. We will not declare our goal to be love and peace and thereby open it up to understanding and subversion when what we mean is a soul experience that is valuable even if it cannot be named and scrawled on a poster. We will not lose our balance and be yanked right and left because our balance is what matters to us, a focus on what is inner and upward, what is real, something that the soul knew, once, for a passing sun-flecked hour. We will not sour into pathological self-seriousness and heaviness.

We will remember that Tikkun Olam grew up not among the activists but the dreamers. They knew that the mere manipulation of the technical state of affairs is not enough, that if the hand and heart and head were not attached to something solid and immovable inside us, they would inevitably come to fail. On the shores of the sea of reeds, before it split and our ancestors went through on dry land (an event I have honest-to-goodness heard described by a Jew as a racism-tinged cutting of our African ties), they saw the Egyptian army approach and began arguing. Some wished to throw themselves into the sea, some wished to wage war, some wished to return peacefully to slavery, and some wished to pray to G-d for salvation. They were all, to a one, wrong.

Their intentions ranged from worthy to unworthy, but they were all functions of heaviness and panic, a desperate need to affirmatively form their answers, to make their passage. The slaves from Egypt had not yet fully worked out the implications of having a G-d, of being able to let go because the bedrock truth of all things is Goodness and Freedom. If they had, they would have been unafraid enough simply to listen, not to have to think but simply to walk at the water in loving surrender.

The concealing sea was then pulled back, and the dry land revealed, a path forward where none, even under the collective, previously existed.

How many friends have you lost to a message or an idea, the person hollowed out to become a mere mouthpiece for some impersonal notion?

In the beginning, G-d creates the human body and the human soul to match, the former the necessary vessel to convey the latter out into a physical reality it must transform.

The body is gnawingly unspecific. It is, more or less, an equal vessel to a life of self-sacrifice and righteousness and a life of debauchery and sin. So even the righteous may be tempted to change that body to make it more specific to their purpose.

The problem is that our purposes are not souls themselves. When G-d creates everything but man, He speaks it into existence by name: “Let there be light!” When G-d creates Adam, on the other hand, it is from dust and the breath of life in his nostrils. As if to say, “Though you have a name, Adam, no name is at the root of your being.”

If the individual is G-d’s message to the world, the message is wordless and conveyed only by His hand. The body is its medium and the soul its meaning, but the word cannot, contrary to appearances, fully be read. The body is significant not for any of its properties we parse or might change, but for its unity with the soul we cannot fully parse and do not completely understand. Then we run it through photoshop.

Our purposes are things we name: people, places, things, ideas. We take our body and conform it to some ideal in a permanent fashion. The transhumanist ‘body modders’ remove or add limbs. Others use their body as a canvas. “No graven images,” G-d told us, and in this sense empowered us, for was He not saying that even though you, human, take a particular form, it is not an “image”? But the choice is in our hands, and some choose to depart from the natural unity of body and soul that only G-d can create to make themselves into a word spoken by some foreign purpose.

The reason Jews are therefore forbidden ever fully to shave their heads is that shaving the head was an idolatrous practice. Why did idolators shave their heads?

The Chasam Sofer gives one of the most profound insights into idol worship you will ever hear. The idolaters would form their gods in their image, giving it human features as much as possible. However, they could never get hair to look real unless they attached to it actual hair that already existed. They found themselves inadequate to the task of creation. So instead, they made their idols bald and shaved themselves to match.

What limitations are we willing to place on ourselves, how much are we ready to turn the body, the word, into our conceptions in a desperate need to match? The infinite potential with which G-d alone has created me is discomforting. It is not the solid mundane streets in which we yearn to wander and create our own little meanings in accordance with our egos. It reflects nothing of what we see to be the appropriate individuality, the thing that actually makes us special. We desperately want to be something. And by this we mean, something we can create, something we can properly understand.

So we remake ourselves in the image of an idea. Is anything more popular? All it costs is the Divine individual.

The madness has won when most people prefer to measure things by water than by people. The Fahrenheit temperature scale sets “96” as the temperature of the human body (it was a little inaccurate when first established). The Celsius or Centigrade scale sets “100” as the temperature at which water boils. At the chillier end of things, Fahrenheit chose “0” as the point at which a particular brine mixture would freeze, and, according to the story, because it was the coldest temperature he measured in Danzig. Celsius, of course, chose “0” to be the point at which water freezes.

But never mind the technicalities. Think of F and C like this: If it’s 0 C or 0 F outside, it’s cold. If it’s 100 F, it’s hot, but if it’s 100 C, you died long ago. So which is the more human scale?

Where the numbers are round in Celsius, where the tens click into hundreds, water can survive but you cannot. And yet, thousands of people with too much time on their hands across the globe are convinced measuring by when water (or steam) survives is the One Right Way, the logical way, the Scientific way. It doesn’t matter that Fahrenheit has smaller degrees (5/9 the size of a degree C) and is thus more precise. It doesn’t matter that those more precise degrees stretch across a vast range of temperatures assignable to mundane human experience It doesn’t matter that it’s possible to qualitatively know the difference between 80 and 85 F for more easily than 80 and 85 C even though the latter are further apart because the degrees are larger. It doesn’t matter that Celsius is a more dishonest Kelvin, pretending for the first 40 degrees or so to be a human-compatible temperature scale and then for the majority of the numbers merely describing cooking temperatures or chemical changes.

No, none of that matters, they insist, because water shouldn’t freeze at 32 and boil at 212.

Water doesn’t even make thermometers.

Okay, maybe water doesn’t make thermometers, but don’t numbers in some sense make thermometers? Because really, the choice of Celsius is a choice of more easily divisible numbers, a selection of more straightforward calculation. Water isn’t even used to define the Celsius scale anymore, the Boltzmann constant is, and the actual melting point of ice is now below 0 C, which just goes to show you, Celsius is for nerds.

I am not trying to insult the nerd community. There is no particular reason that the average human need to comment on the weather (it’s 93 degrees out there!) supersedes the human need to calibrate a thermometer or divide things by ten. However, there is also no reason the latter should replace the former. It’s simply an arbitrary choice of priority. If it insults your sensibility for water to freeze at 32, a seemingly-arbitrary number, then you prioritize Celsius, and you are a quant, generally definable as a person who wants the numbers to fit.

Being a quant is like preferring chocolate ice cream; it’s indefensible because the entire category is arbitrary. Some hugely influential early modern scientist quants such as Johannes Kepler echoed ancient quants like Pythagoras in their literal math worship. An obsessive devotion to numbers inspired their more accurate theories in astronomy. Their madness has been to the great benefit of humankind.

In general.

The path of least resistance is a commonsense rule that does not fit within physics, where it is too general and loses accuracy, but physics fits within it. Physics (the modern version, it goes without saying) is a quant’s paradise, and to be a quant is the path of least resistance.

I wasn’t entirely honest a couple of paragraphs ago when I said choosing to be a quant is just like choosing a favorite ice cream flavor. It’s more like choosing a favorite ice cream flavor in Maoist China, and Mao loves rocky road. Although there is no way to choose a ‘right’ flavor theoretically, there is undoubtedly a particular flavor that’s pragmatic and wise to eat. The rocky road here is quantification, and Mao is power (just like in real life). If power matters to you, if your survival depends on strength, then quantification can be very useful, as everyone from the Apache to the Zulu learned.

And no one, we assume, quantifies better than a quant. You want someone whose whole reality is numbered measuring your gunpowder so your cannon shoots more accurately than the other guy’s. That guy may have a pocket protector or thick glasses, and he probably thinks Celsius is better than Fahrenheit, American military might notwithstanding.

Ceding the decision to the eggheads and their knuckle-dragging overlords may make us mighty and give us a sense of control over nature, but it also makes thermometers less meaningful to the average human being. What to do? The path of least resistance says if we must use force to stay alive anyway and Celsius is leading the charge to conquer nature, why mess with any other way? Let us build a life around this little nugget of power that water boils at 100, you and I!

But paths of least resistance are not the rule in our universe. Just because the quant is useful does not mean he’s always right. Indeed, they have yet to invent (despite attempts drowning vast lands in blood) a quant who lives in a quantified world. So far, all the physicists awaken to an ambient temperature many years before conducting their first lab experiments, and are raised by parents who discuss the weather as just another thing they experience.

Who could possibly pretend that math working is the measure of all things?

I’m not one for conspiracy theories but if there is a “big lie,” then scientism might be it. Scientism is the belief, usually left unsaid because of how silly it sounds, that everything there is to know can be known by science. This belief may be useful just as Celsius is useful, but it cannot be true. Since it is sometimes marketed as true, it is worse than useless, the way marketing rocky road as objectively the best flavor is worse than useless.

We know scientism is false because there is no indication that science can know scientism is true. Science has no experiment and no theory to prove that science can know everything. It has no such things because science doesn’t even understand what the human mind is or what a truth is or what it means for a human mind to know a truth. There is no reason to think it will ever have such things because everything science claims to know now, it knows by ignoring the human mind and the human mind’s ability to know. When you hear ‘science explains why the sky is blue’ it never, ever explains how you, the subjective entity reading these words with your eyes, perceive the blue of that sky. It instead deals with wavelengths and chemicals and all other sorts of things in the causal chain other than what it purports to explain, that is, why the sky is blue. And if there is no scientific explanation why the sky is blue, nor is there any scientific explanation of how I know that 1 + 1 = 2, why should anyone believe there will one day be an explanation of how all perceived truth is scientifically explicable?

On the other hand, to even conduct a scientific experiment or form a scientific theory, one must already take for granted that one knows things. It seems intuitive that while is a subset within everything we can know, the reverse relationship does not hold; we can know things (and must know them in order to ‘do science’) that science will never know.

Yet, science still appeals to the innocent public (not just the popularizers of science, marketers with advanced degrees) as the measure of all things, and it leads to all sorts of madness. An entire populace is taught in high school about Newton’s three laws, which are simple to calculate and make scientists feel strong, but which do not capture the actual reality of the universe any more widely than the ‘path of least resistance’. They are like ‘folk science’ that only works some of the time when things are simple. Things are therefore kept simple for the high school student, for no reason better than the math is easier and (I suspect) because this easier math makes better fodder for science’s propaganda arm.

Relativity, in which Einstein shows that Newton’s laws are valid…in certain contexts, blows apart some of the most comforting math in the world, such as the math describing the earth’s rotation around the sun. Man was once benighted, we are told, for believing the sun revolved around the earth. Then the quants came along, made up stories about how everyone before them for centuries was stumbling around in the dim and dreary ‘dark ages’, and shewed (as they would have spelt it) the earth to pinwheeleth around the sun. But this was not knowledge, as Einstein demonstrated. In truth, when two bodies are in relative motion, either one may be declared the reference frame and said to be still. There is no scientific demonstration that the fly is climbing up the wall rather than the entire universe moving down. We only teach kids that the earth revolves around the sun because the math is easier and it means we’re better than the middle ages with their uncomfortable ideas about actually perceiving the sky to be blue.

For if there is an unquantifiable being that can perceive unquantifiable things, then there is no new method to conquer the blue of the sky. The sky might not, in its passive observation of our rises and falls, its inky sheltering of all our triumphs and horrors, quite belong to us.

The distinction between Fahrenheit and Celsius is what we choose to be the measure of all things. Is it the math fitting more neatly to scientifically-measured phenomena, or is it the human experience? One does not reduce to the other. The number-centric approach to events is part of the human experience but will never expand to encompass the whole thing as some hope it to. To what end, then, are we to use less accurate degrees across a shorter range in our mundane experience? I like the number 32 for water freezing. It reminds us that the world cannot be divided into tens just because it makes us feel powerful. The real power is recognizing which impulses inspire such approaches, so we can control them rather than vice versa.

This led philosophers such as the Rambam/Maimonides to call G-d the ‘metzius bilti metzius nimtza,’ roughly ‘the Existence without an existing existence.’ Or in other words: the Rambam says we cannot affirmatively say He exists (for the reason explained in the previous paragraph). Still, we are forced to say He lacks non-existence, because if He does not at least lack non-existence, how can He lend the existence with which we’re familiar to everything else? One cannot give what one does not possess; if G-d does not exist, how can the universe? So the Creator thus dwells in a third category, sharing the same definition of ‘existence’ with the universe enough to grant its existence, but utterly different enough to not be captured by that word. To creations such as us, the way He is both these things is utterly mysterious.

Since, per philosophy, He must exist at least as much as the universe does, maybe we can reach Him with proof after all. If philosophy was the only path open to us, we would say that a theoretical proof can reach G-d Himself, since G-d Himself is that which lends existence to the entire universe. The existence of the world is where philosophy begins, and the necessary existence of G-d, the source of the world’s being, is where such a proof would end.

The reason I say G-d is beyond the reach of philosophical proof is that there are other paths to reach the Creator, namely revelation. If G-d Himself reveals His own nature to humankind, all bets are off. In particular, if G-d tells us He can somehow cause things to exist the way our universe does, without having to Himself participate in that form of existence at all, it throws off our whole previous calculation. After all, the rule we used to demonstrate that G-d must exist at least as much as the universe, the law that you cannot give what you do not have, is an assumption itself based on how things work within our world. Philosophically, we cannot escape this rule; it seems to be built in the logical fabric of our reality; 0 + 0 cannot equal 1. But since, as even philosophy acknowledges, G-d exists in a categorically different way than everything else, that is, He has no cause, maybe this rule does not apply to Him either. All we need is a good reason to place Him beyond the rule.

Revelation serves this purpose. The Torah tells us G-d creates the universe ex nihilo, something from nothing, that is, not as a direct extension of His own existence, but with some kind of causal gap that by definition is impossible for us to understand. The universe’s being does not have to be some kind of subset or direct result of His being at all, because He can cause the universe while remaining at an infinite causal remove from it. The Torah tells us so.

With this piece of information, we must revise our conclusion: G-d’s existence is unknowable to the creation, and nothing compels Him to have anything in common with the universe whatsoever. Therefore, there cannot ultimately be a philosophical proof of G-d’s existence. At least, no unaided philosophical proof will land on the same G-d we know through revelation. Any given philosophical proof will take some created existence as a prerequisite, work its way back under the laws of logic that bind our reality, and conclude at the very least with a Creator who explains the created things from which we are arguing. By revelation, however, we know that G-d is not, in fact, compelled to explain any creation. He can cause it without being a causal explanation for it. This is what ‘creation’ means as the word is used in the first verse of Genesis, and it is not something even the greatest philosopher can comprehend, for all philosophy is at root a study of explanation.

So, the philosophical proofs are not proofs for G-d. What, then, are they proofs for? After all, for reason to so insistently converge on something that so many have called G-d, a necessary first cause for all that exists, cannot just be an accident! And it isn’t. The proofs reach the first cause of all that exists, the necessary first existence that causes all other existence. If this is not G-d Himself, the G-d known with the help of revelation to exceed all logic and all proof, it can be G-d as He descends to exist before creating, as it were. In other words, what the philosophical proofs point to is not G-d per se, but rather G-d-in-the-act-of-creation.

***

G-d-in-the-act-of-creation is more readily understood under the Kabbalistic doctrine of divine emanation than under the philosophical rubric. This fits perfectly. The emanated G-d-as-first-cause is anterior to all of philosophy’s tools (which all deal with existence under existence’s rules). Philosophy, per the Torah, cannot understand how its own cause comes into being; that realm is shut to the eyes of the mind, existing beyond all the rules we know to rule the created world.

This divine act of descending to create satisfies all of the philosophical characteristics of G-d when viewed by philosophy from the bottom up. That is, there is nothing about it that breaks the classical proofs. For example, everything that exists depends on it, and it depends on nothing that exists. It is absolutely simple and uncaused. The only sense in which it is complex and caused is the sense in which it relates to G-d per se who precedes it, and this relationship is itself ungoverned by the laws of logic or the usual definition of the words. Everything traditionally said about G-d is correctly ascribed to G-d-as-He-descends-to-create.

One can see why Kabbalah, to the unstudied, may seem to introduce multiplicity, G-d forbid, to the Creator. But in fact, what is here described is not a multiplicity at all, but a unity. It is merely not a unity that may be precisely philosophically described. This is why Kabbalah is not a violation of the codified theology in the Rambam’s Mishne Torah, which describes G-d Himself in all the familiar terms, the Being Who Brings All Other Beings Into Being, the Knower, Knowledge, and Known, etc. All of these terms indeed describe G-d Himself, for the ‘two G-ds’ described in this essay are not two G-ds, G-d forbid, but absolutely One G-d. ‘Hashem and Elokim are all One.’

The main reason this makes some Jews nervous is that it sounds to them, on the surface, like a Christian doctrine, G-d forbid. Further study, however, reveals not only that the Jewish notion of the Divine emanation is substantially different from the Christianity l’havdil, but also that Judaism does not reject Christianity for any theological doctrine per se but rather for its abrogation of the Law. Since it is the Law itself that opens up for us the nerve-wracking ‘non-rational’ notion of G-d, the Jews who still today irrationally oppose the Kabbalah may sleep easy. Those who reject the eternality of Moses’ prophecy have no justification, Judaically, to go tampering with G-d’s unity.

***

So, nu, what is the best philosophical proof for G-d-in-the-act-of-creation? Good question. First of all, the classical proofs are better than many assume and deserving of study, though given our lengthy introduction, they will not lead to the satisfaction of catching G-d by the toe (so to speak). They are especially useful as contemplations of the way the Creator is implicit in His Creation, or more accurately, the way the apparent independence of creation really, upon some thought, gives way to inner structures of dependence and, ultimately, nothingness. Really, to the Jew, proofs for G-d are proofs for the creation, demonstrations of the relationship with the creator inherent to the creation’s logic.

To this end, if you’re really serious, you should check out some modern scholarship on the proofs of the medieval or scholastic philosophers. My personal favorite (the one I find most intellectually intuitive and easiest to explain) is the Neoplatonic proof based on unity, but as the astute reader will find, almost all these proofs are variations on one another and work much the same. It is worth investigating why many of these are widely considered today to be philosophically irrelevant, and why, according to the latest and strongest arguments, they aren’t.

If by ‘best’, you mean the one most central to Judaism, it is worth noting that Abraham, the first Jew, discovered G-d’s existence after being raised by idolators through something very much like a teleological proof. As the sages teach us:

G-d said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your land…’ (Genesis 12:1)

Rabbi Yitzchak opened and said: ‘Listen, daughter, look, and incline your ear, and forget your people and your father’s house.’ (Psalms 45:11)

 

Rabbi Yitzchak said: this may be compared to a man who was traveling from place to place when he saw a a castle aglow. He said, ‘Is it possible that this castle lacks a person to look after it?’ The owner of the building looked at him and said to him, ‘I am the master of the castle.’ What happened with Abraham our father was similar. He said, “Is it possible that this universe lacks a person to look after it?’ The Holy Blessed One looked at him and said to him, ‘I am the Master of the Universe.’

That is, Abraham recognized in the purpose inherent to the creation that the purpose must point to Someone beyond the creation. The Tzemach Tzedek writes that in this brief Midrash from the sages are implicit the lengthy teleological proofs of the Rambam and the Ralbag. For Jews to understand their own father, Abraham, they may need to rediscover the lost doctrine known as ‘telos’ (or ‘tachlis’), the inherent purposes of things, which has been banished from the modern world. Do not believe too quickly the claim that science has ‘disproved’ this ancient wisdom…

***

None of these proofs, however, speak to my heart. My life has played out differently—I arrived at the G-d of the Torah first, and only then became interested in proofs. To my heart, there is only one ‘proof’. Someone has summarized it nicely:

The major premise of the argument is that ‘every natural or innate desire in us bespeaks a corresponsing real object that can satisfy the desire.’ The minor premise is that ‘there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature, can satisfy.’ The conclusion is that ‘there exists something outside of time, earth, and creatures which can satisfy this desire.’

Just so.

***

There is a reason the biblical story of Abraham does not include his early philosophical discovery, but rather begins with G-d’s revelation and the command, ‘Go forth.’ Judaism is not a philosophical religion, but rather a religion that may find some use for philosophy. The last time Judaism was truly philosophical was before the Torah was given, when a young boy in Sumeria decided the smash his father’s idols and invent something he thought was new, the worship of an ultimate G-d, a necessary G-d. The Torah, speaking to his descendants, does not need to prove anything, nor could such philosophizing even point to G-d.

Good thing we were there at Sinai, you and I…

But if it is no longer a “Facebook comment per se,” if Korach ceases to be Korach by becoming Moshe’s man, then true greatness is possible, the greatness of the inifite. All finite things hold an emptiness at the center called bittul, a negative space that may contain the infinite. Through bittul, the non-great may become great. When we talk about a great FB comment, we’re talking about one that’s becoming nothing inside and out.

Here’s what it looks like: I met a severe Yeshiva student on one of my wanderings. He was of European slimness, shorter and younger than average in the study hall, and brilliant. He pursued Judaism with the dangerous fanaticism of a broken-hearted youth.

The ‘danger,’ such as it is, lies in the multi-layered nature of the pit, the hole inside that Judaism will fill, because Judaism must, because if it doesn’t, what am I? Many souls contain a Machpelah, a cave within a cave, a cave above a cave. Only Judaism fills the most bottomless hole, the cavity closer to us than our very being. We can plug smaller, more superficial spiritual needs with worldly pleasures, therapy, art, friends and family, secular knowledge, political activism, or a gratifying job. Sometimes the upper chamber may even be filled by time, the spiritual agonies of adolescence calloused over by the 20s.

The trick of the hole-filling Baal Teshuva, the returnee to Judaism looking to satisfy a need, is to realize that beneath the sinkholes opening along our contingent path through circumstance lies a broader existential tale tied to our very being. We possess emptiness born not of the path chosen for us but of we who walk it, that deep inner vacuum to which Judaism speaks, the infinite desolation that only G-d can make whole. Torah and Mitzvos will contextualize the other problems, the ones of nature and nurture, and may repair them at the level of what they are. They will transform us from biological beings dealing with problems into G-dly souls wrestling with them. But all direct changes to the form of our questions do not require Judaism. Self-discipline and a regimented life come from the army; self-help books and gurus can transform your attitude; medication and diet help depression and anxiety; friends and family give us love.

One of Chassidus’s penetrating insights is that to live a G-dly life is different from conquering the form of your troubles. To heal the animal soul—the path of Mussar/Ethical teachings—may be a prerequisite to the work of the G-dly soul, but it is not that work. The Baal Shem Tov revealed that a commandment performed for a reward demotes the commandment to below the reward. So, too, if the point of the commandment is self-improvement, it elevates the animal traits above the mitzvah. A Korach cannot become a Moses from the outside, by slowly improving his Korach-itude, because Moses is not merely a more ethical Korach. Korach becomes Moshe by first becoming nothing, by finding the infinite emptiness within and introducing it into his life. He does this no matter which contingent foibles and character flaws lie in his way.

It should not surprise us that many a young Baal Teshuva, thinking it’s Chassidus they seek, join a yeshiva and start studying the Tanya. They soon discover the Tanya addresses only a single problem, the union of the souls with the divine. They then remain in a frustrating stalemate until something else shows up to solve their problem. Occasionally it is Mussar that saves the day. More often, it’s one of the other hole fillers, and, their itch scratched and their issue resolved, they stop seeking G-d. My acquaintance, the young zealot, seems to have done just that. He now often posts pictures of himself, bare-headed and often bare-chested, luxuriating in an exotic locale, to Facebook.

There was another student in that same yeshiva where I met the first. Where the first was young, this second was older than the yeshiva average. Where the former was fanatical, the latter was disinterested. The first was hungry, seeking satisfaction from every page of the Talmud, every letter of each Chassidic discourse. The latter seemed to hate everyone and everything about our little school, often missing classes, arriving at strange hours with odd friends to study the talks of the Previous Rebbe of Lubavitch in Russian-accented Hebrew. The only things the two students had in common were their distinctive approaches to yeshiva life apart from the established order, tormented spirits, and a penchant for cigarettes.

The Russian (let’s call him) was, without doubt, the most abrasive person I met in perhaps my entire yeshiva career. He had no air of glory about him whatsoever, no sense that, by participating in Judaism, he was doing something noble or extraordinary. He spoke with all the tact of a Moscoloid street rat and had physically assaulted a non-zero number of his fellow students. He had studied philology in university back in the Motherland and spat out the names of philosophers like curses. He liked the Kuzari and alcohol. I think he is an orphan, but he found no loving family amongst us; if he has a void in that sense, it’s hard to imagine we were filling it with our constant exasperation at his moods. He was no Moses (lacking the piety) and no Korach (lacking the delusions of grandeur and the pictured path to fulfillment). He was more a Dasan or Aviram, kicking over blocks for fun, and you wanted to ask him, “Why are you here?” However, in retrospect, it is clear he possessed the knack of every successful fulfillment-seeking Baal Teshuva. He could be here because he was here. Dogged, senseless, persistence without reason or clear reward is the trick of the Baal Teshuva, and you can’t teach it. It appears in other areas of life aglimmer with the sheen of the infinite. The advice for writers, I have learned, is to write. The ingredient of cake, when G-d makes it, is cake. That which is created from nothing has no explanation. Moses can be Moses only because he is, and this mystery the Russian embodies.

Today, checking my Facebook feed, I see two truly great words, words that ring with the full hollowness of a Chassidic story. You must recognize those involved, read the words in an irritated Russian accent written to an old non-friend, a youth from yeshiva. The Russian was never there when the youth slaved over the holy books, was not around when he sculpted a shining new face for himself in the night, was not awake when he closed the book, picked up his jacket, and quit. But beneath the latest in a string of frivolous photos of a new life, the Russian has commented,

with the mournful triumph of the eternally satisfied,

with the confident disregard of those who cannot break free from the bundle of life even if they wished,

with the greatness of those who are empty and thus are Moses,

with the longing of an inner cave so long-buried the explorers have stopped looking for it,

with the laconic, mystified bemusement of those who have suffered worse yet never managed to leave:

“תחזור כבר”;

“Come back already.”

Would we be able to tell an Ezekiel or a Jeremiah from a false prophet today? Judgment and intellectual objectivity are necessary factors in a moral life, as Rabbi Dessler explains so well. Upon further reflection, intellectual integrity is no mere moral tenet or a prerequisite for sitting on beis din. Intellectual honesty is also vital for identifying prophets.

Consider a person claiming to be a Jewish prophet approaching the constant online fray, the dust in which to secure victory many of us have chosen the desired reality and gone on to interpret all words to fit as necessary, processing everything through a Bed of Sodom. The only way to determine a true prophet is, as the Rambam writes in his Introduction to the Mishna, to test their prophecy against the future. If every single word the prophet says (apart from predicted punishments) comes to pass in every detail, we are obligated by the Torah of Moshe to listen to them. If even one particular turns out to be false, we know they are no true prophet, and do unto them as the Torah prescribes.

Once, this test for prophecy may have been reasonable. Today, the president says a sentence on video, and one half of the country decides his words erupt from a wellspring of genius that has never been wrong. At the same time, the other half finds them flowing from a pit of foolishness that has only ever poisoned minds. The actual words he says have no bearing on these conclusions. How could we ever find a prophet with such a mindset? The exact half-and-half split would prevail. We would be stuck.

Of course, the same question applies to the law of Moses itself. If we can reread any of the prospective prophets’ statements, we can reread those of the Greatest of Prophets for the same price. The difference is that Moses enjoys the safety of ancient words with an unbroken interpretive tradition. By definition, we must file any new prophet under ‘current events.’ We set a reminder on our phones to check whether the prediction has come through, and judge it with the same mind that posts novel interpretations of the latest safety briefing on Facebook.

Why The Future Is His Alone

The test for prophets may also reflect a difference between G-d and idols. Prophecy of G-d is unlike deep spiritual intuition, astrology, or other forms of ‘spiritual prognostication’ at a pragmatic level. Per the Rambam, true prophecy is correct in every detail, whereas all other ways of predicting the future are always wrong in some detail. This contrast makes sense in light of the metaphysical difference between G-d and mere gods, between creation ex nihilo and creation from something.

Creation ex nihilo is the result of a single cause. All other “creation” (really, per the Ramban, the term properly applies to creation from nothing) is just the actualization of some preexisting potential, the meeting of formal and material causes that the Alter Rebbe calls the “צורף כלי,” the smithing of a vessel. Furthermore, no form of magic or mystical power can create from nothing; this ability, the Alter Rebbe explains, is in the domain of G-d alone, since He alone is a necessary being.

It follows that prophets whose insights derive from lesser powers or beings and the perception of their natures, as astrologers understand the stars or the spiritual forces that the stars express, only ever have a partial picture of reality. The subject of their insight is necessarily only one of the multiple parties bringing about the future. Their predictions must be imperfect because they stem from mere partial contributions to the reality of tomorrow. The prophet of G-d, by contrast, with a hotline to the Sole Creator of All, can authoritatively say what will happen tomorrow, for only he has insight into a single cause of everything today. (Of course, the Jew believes that since no finite being has any power to bring about any future, and that all of reality is in the hands of the Creator alone, that the astrologer’s predictions are also insights into G-dliness, of a sort.  However, the astrologer may not know this, and their knowledge is limited to G-dliness as it has already concealed itself within the workings of nature.)

Infinite Test

Just as our judgment, even when unrestrained by bribery or preconception, cannot bootstrap morality, it alone can serve as no basis for accepting an individual as a messenger of G-d. The infinite regress of doubt must stop somewhere. We must follow Moses not because we have tested him against an intellectual standard but because of our faith in him and our direct experience of G-d at Sinai. Only this will allow us to check for prophets in our own time with any sense of certainty.

The Torah is no medical text but by dint of faith lends more authority to doctors than doctors could claim even by reason alone, allowing them to abrogate temporarily (by declaring a situation life-threatening) certain commandments of G-d. So, too, is the Torah of Moses no tested prophecy but a faith-reality lending authority to a test of future prophets. And just like doctors, those prophets may, too, abrogate certain commandments of G-d temporarily, as Elijah did when offering sacrifices on Mount Carmel.

The Sinatic Event made from every Jew a prophet, and so broke the cycle of prophet-tested-by-test-of-another-prophet. We knew Him, at that time, much as we know ourselves, and saw His presence with our own eyes. It is only this that lends a rational test for prophets of G-d any force.

It is not (just) a particular disdain for human beings that motivates these arguments. We can hardly blame the contemporary thinker for denying human beings in particular if he denies all non-reductive essences in general; in fairness, he also says a frog is something else plus details, water is just two other things combination, and so on. The denial of human beings per se is just the subset of denying anything per se, of denying anything has essential characteristics making it what it is. This is, in most cases, called nominalism and may or may not be the scourge of modernity.

Whether there’s a particular ire for humanity or merely no apparent reason to exclude them from the illusory appearance of essences, the result is the same. In essence, the human being is a concept that needs defense, demonstration, proof. It would be extremely helpful to discover or rediscover arguments that point to something like the “essential nature” of the human being, something very much akin to a soul, as we shall see. Such an argument would preferably be logically sound, easily-conveyed, and rooted in easily-acceptable premises.

One such argument is dropped like a bomb in a short paragraph by David Berlinski on p.116 of his outstanding collection of essays, Human Nature:

A simple modal argument is sometimes of use in this argument; and if not of use, then carelessly neglected. If human beings are largely insignificant in the cosmos, then surely they are not necessary either. Krauss says as much explicitly. “You could get rid of us and all the galaxies and everything we see in the universe and it will be largely the same.” But if human beings are not necessary to the universe, then it follows that the universe is not sufficient for human beings. If ∼(∼Q⊃∼P) then ∼(P⊃Q). If this is so, anything that might reasonably be called a naturalistic explanation for the emergence of human life is beside the point. There could not be any such thing.

This “carelessly neglected” line of reasoning is directed toward those who would offer a “naturalistic explanation for the emergence of human life.” That is, it speaks to those who view humanity as something like a cosmic accident, a meaningless complication thrown out by impersonal universal forces for some infinitesimally short slice of time, preceded (in time or in importance) by eons and likely followed by infinity. This view is a subset of those who deny humanity per se; in this case, the human being is reduced to forces of nature plus details.

This sort of naturalist inevitably believes that human beings are not necessary to the universe. After all, if human beings were necessary, a built-in outcome of all those universal forces, then the forces would not be impersonal at all, but rather inherently geared toward producing not just life, but human life! They could do nothing else but result in human beings; humanity was baked into the universe from the beginning!

No, per the naturalist, human beings must be unnecessary, or merely possible, to the universe. The difference between being necessary to a prior state of affairs and being merely possible to it can be illustrated by two different recipes for cake. The baker for whom the cake is necessary to the recipe writes the following:

Chocolate Cake Recipe:
1 x Chocolate Cake

There is no outcome from these ingredients other than cake, and no other ingredients are required to produce the cake as an outcome. These ingredients inevitably yield cake, to the extent that the baker doesn’t even have to do anything. If we have the ingredients, we actually already have cake, just as when humans are necessary to the universe, they already exist in a certain sense from the moment time begins; we are truly inevitable.

The naturalist baker views the human cake as having a recipe more like:

Chocolate Cake Recipe:
2 x Eggs
4 Tbsp. Baking Chocolate
2 Cups Flour

None of these ingredients on their own is cake, and on the contrary, they must come together in a specific way under specific conditions (e.g., mixed together and then baked in a pan at 350 °) to yield cake as their outcome. The cake is not a necessary result of this recipe; if we forget the eggs or fail to mix the ingredients properly or don’t place them in a warm enough oven, there will be no cake. The naturalist claims, at the very least, that the ‘starting ingredients’ of the universe (e.g., matter, energy, forces) necessitate no human beings, that human beings could have or could not have existed just as easily as far as those starting ingredients care.

In truth, the naturalist claims the ingredients are not even ingredients except in retrospect when they happen to have created a cake. Ingredients imply that there is a purposive process intended to produce a certain result. The naturalist, as explained above, won’t have it. To them, the ordering “recipe” is an imposition of the human mind rather than an expression of qualities inherent to the ingredients. But to make this claim of purposelessness, one must already have concluded that human beings are not necessary to the universe, or in other words, that it could have turned out differently, with no human beings emerging on the scene at all.

Berlinski then makes a rather straightforward argument: If human beings are not necessary to the universe, then the universe is insufficient to produce human beings. In the language of our metaphor, if the resultant cake is not necessary to the second cake recipe, then the ingredients of the recipe are not sufficient to produce the cake.

In other words, the first recipe plus nothing equals its result. The second recipe, however, being a normal recipe, requires additional things to produce the result.^** The ingredients alone are insufficient to produce the cake because if they alone were sufficient, we would have the cake already! Since we do not necessarily have the cake just because we have the ingredients, the ingredients are not enough to produce the cake on their own (without mixing, baking, etc.).

This leaves our friend the naturalist in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, the naturalist cannot say that human beings are necessary to the universe, like the first recipe, because that would imply human beings are as important as the entire universe; after all, the universe must produce humankind the way the first recipe must produce a cake. On the other hand, the naturalist cannot say that human beings are not necessary to the universe, like the second recipe, because that would imply the universe is insufficient to produce humankind, that the universe needs mysterious outside help to create a human being. Either we are a totally predetermined inherent reality to the universe, or the universe alone cannot create us at all.***

The naturalist’s description of us as insignificant accidents of nature seems, well, half-baked.

While Berlinski has not demonstrated the human essence or soul, exactly, he has given us a nudge in the right direction. He shows that understanding the recipe for a thing tells us a lot about it. When we say ‘recipe,’ we mean not only the material components but what it means for something to have a recipe, what it means for something to have a necessary or unnecessary effect, for its components to be sufficient or insufficient grounds.

As my teacher, Rabbi Yitzchak Kaufmann, points out, a similar argument to Berlinski’s is found in the Discourses of the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Rebbe of Lubavitch. This argument does speak directly to the human essence and the human soul. It is found in Torah Ohr, Bereishis, Hosafos p.434, and in Sefer HaChakira, p.63, and it starts like this:

In Midrash Rabbah, Parshas Bereishis, ch. 8, on the words (Genesis 5:2), “male and female He created them”:

Rabbi Yehoshua bar Nechemya says in the name of Rabbi Chanina bar Yitzchak, and the Rabbanan say in the name of Rabbi Eliezer: G-d created in humankind four qualities from above and four qualities from below. They eat and drink like an animal, reproduce and multiply like an animal, leave waste like an animal, and die like an animal. From above: They stand like attending angels, speak like attending angels, have knowledge like attending angels, and see [both to the front and to the sides] like attending angels.

In my opinion, we learn from this a demonstration of the soul’s persistence [after the body’s death], for Maimonides writes in his Guide for the Perplexed, pt. II, ch. 1, in the second argument, that when we see the composite of two components, and then we also discover one of these components alone, then certainly the other component exists on its own. For example, there is a honey/vinegar mixture, and when we know that honey also exists without vinegar, we may deduce from seeing honey alone that the mixture of honey and vinegar is not necessary. And therefore, we know that vinegar exists apart from honey. Even if we’ve never seen pure honeyless vinegar, we know it exists from the fact that we’ve seen honey alone.

What happens if we buy a cake made of eggs, flour, and chocolate, then later see eggs by themselves, without the other ingredients? This would prove to us, beyond a doubt, that our cake is not made with the first type of recipe mentioned above. The recipe for cake is not simply cake. Rather, it’s made with the second type of recipe. By seeing that eggs can exist on their own, we show that the cake is an unnecessary composite. If the recipe for cake is just cake, its ingredients always come together; you will never find an ingredient apart from the whole. Since we’ve discovered the eggs on their own, the cake’s ingredients must come together only sometimes, but not always. And if they don’t always come together, that means there must be chocolate out there, too. Even if I’ve only ever seen a cake and the eggs that are one of its ingredients, I know that these ingredients don’t always occur together, and so, at least sometimes, chocolate must exist without eggs.

So, if we knew that a human being was just such an unnecessary composite, we would know that a human being’s component parts must, at least sometimes, occur independently of one another.

Continues the Tzemach Tzedek:

That is, the “animal” [in man must be just] the physical body of flesh and blood receiving life, and therefore say that the four aforementioned heavenly traits of knowledge, speech, etc., exist without a physical body in abstract intelligences [e.g., angels]. And this is demonstrated through the above demonstration. And now, since the soul of man contains aspects from intelligences abstracted from matter, even if the animal soul does not persist [after the destruction of its physical matter], the human soul certainly does.

And even though we believe in this according to the Torah without any philosophical investigation or [need for] human intellect, as the verse says (Shmuel 25:29), “the soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of life” and (Zecharia 3:7), “I will permit you to move about,” nevertheless, nothing is lost by supporting it with this demonstration as well. And even though the philosophers bring other demonstrations for the soul’s persistence, this demonstration is supported by the above Midrash.

The Ephodi and ReSheT question our principle and say we indeed to find composites and one of their components alone without discovering the other component alone. [For example, a] man contained both life and speech, and life is found without speech, but speech is never found without life.

But according to what was said above in the name of the Midrash, on the contrary, this is proof for our point. Speech is found in man from above, i.e., in speech, he is like the attending angels, and it is about this that the verse says, “man is created in the image of G-d.” And if so, speech is found apart from life, that is, apart from bodily life, in the abstract intelligences.****

The human being is made of multiple components, multiple ingredients. These components do not exist as a necessary composite; that is, they can exist apart from each other, just as the eggs can exist apart from the cake. Just as man eats and drinks, for example, so does an animal. This shows that the various faculties of the human being do not have to coincide. But if the human being is not a necessary composite, this means that those aspects of man which do not occur in animals, like his abstract intellect or his ability to speak, must occur separately from the animal faculties of man as well. If the egg exists in a pure form unmixed with any other ingredient, so much the chocolate.

Not only are we either necessary to the universe or beyond its sufficiency, as Berlinski would have it. We are also human beings. We are not an ape plus details, or an artificial intelligence minus details, or any other being plus or minus a few incidental traits. All of these beings’ traits are bodily. In us, bodily traits exist in addition to unique human traits. Since the composite is not a necessary one, our unique human traits also must exist alone, apart from any bodily traits, persisting beyond (chronologically and spiritually) our body, the way a piece of chocolate persists beyond a chocolate cake.

This persistent collection of human traits constitutes human life and human identity, and may comfortably be called the human soul. If we have not found G-d, we have at least found ourselves. And that is a large part of finding G-d as well, if our holy teachers are to be believed.

^* It has especially been the role of Darwinism to displace this essential distinction; other modern philosophies like transhumanism have merely rushed to fill the gap left by evolution’s assertion that species are infinitely malleable. This is what Darwin means when he writes (quoted in Berlinski p.109), “[W]e will have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience.” Since species can change into other species by a series of piecewise steps, the species themselves cannot be essentially fixed. Each species becomes like a genus, that is, a group of species. Philosophically, there is nothing below the genera in this system, which to this essentialist sounds almost like an infinite regress, a tower built on air, a bunch of zeros summed to produce not just one but all known numbers. Darwin, of course, did not invent the philosophical aspects of evolution in his theory; earlier, more coherent versions trace all the way back to the essentialist Plato. His influential theory of forms implies an order of being such that differentiating essences may be appended to shared common denominators. Aristotle’s definition of man as the ‘rational’ animal is a prime example. To him, animality is a true shared essence and rationality the distinguishing factor, such that man and animal are metaphysically “related.” The Talmud (in law) and Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah (in metaphysics) repeatedly deny this ‘accretion of forms,’ particularly due to their commitment to creation ex nihilo.

^**In fact, this is what makes the second recipe a normal recipe; “normal” for finite beings like us means “something from something,” the creation of a new thing by multiple parties in agreement. When G-d makes the universe ex nihilo, from nothing, He does so as the sole party to the creation (and He does not and cannot count as a “something,” hence, “from nothing”). He says, “Let there be light,” and there was light, and what was the cause? G-d alone. Nothing in our reality works like this; when we make something, it is by actualizing an already-existent potential, by attaching form to matter. Thus, there can, in principle, be no recipe (in the cookbooks of the finite universe) with only a single ingredient and no further instructions; this is not a “recipe” but just a food ready to eat. When we say G-d creates ex nihilo, then, we are saying He creates with no ingredients and no process. It is not just impossible for us to understand because we’ve never seen it, but impossible to understand in principle; there is no answer to the questions of “how” or “by what process” or “by what means” or “on what basis.” Creation ex nihilo is, by human standards, very not-normal.

***There is a third option, which is that the universe does not necessitate human beings but rather wills human beings to exist. Will has the advantage of being free, rather than necessary, and so ‘the universe’ can be sufficient to produce humankind without having to do so. For some reason, naturalists don’t seem comfortable saying an infinite intelligence willed humanity into being. If I had to predict, I’d say they’re far more likely to take the first option, that human beings are necessary to the universe, and downplay this concession by saying everything else in the universe is necessary to it, too. But this merely elevates all creatures to a position of literal cosmic significance, rather than returning humanity to the desired(?) position of insignificance.

****The conclusion of the discourse, moved to this footnote so as not to confuse the reader, is as follows:

And this that they ask based upon essence and accident, the ReSheT already answers there, that accident is not its own existence and exists only with an essence. Thus, it is not true that when you find the essence without the accident, you will also find the accident without the essence.

An example of this question and answer in the ReSheT, as I understand them:

(Q) You say if I run into a composite and one of its parts I will know with certainty that the other parts exist apart from the composite, but that seems to imply if I see a brown cake and then the same cake colored white, that “being brown” exists in a pure state apart from any cake! And this seems absurd.

(A) “Being brown” is the sort of thing that exists only as a quality of another thing, but is not a thing in-and-of-itself; it is an accident, not an essence. Accidents are exceptions to the rule outlined by the Rambam and with which we have learned the persistence of the soul from the Midrash. They cannot, by definition, exist alone, apart from any composite. This is in contrast with speech or eggs or eating, which are substantial.