New frontiers! The world is gearing up for a Summer like no other. The birds are chirping, the sun bakes the sidewalk, and slowly battered and tentative humanity sticks its nose forth from quarantine and eases back into the rhythm of life.

I want to contribute to this new wealth of experiences in the best way possible – by writing about G-d and Judaism. Writing worth a price. For the first time ever, I am offering a whole slate of new essays — at least 18, one for each Thursday of the Summer, one for each number of “Chai,” “Life” — on my Substack.

Until now, my Substack has been used only for occasional little free podcasts, which is typical of my approach to life, as that platform is built for consistent, high-quality paid newsletters. As the ancient hipster said to his friends who were skeptical of that newfangled invention, the wheel, it is time to get on the bandwagon. 5 of those 18 Substack essays will be available for free to the public like all past online “Not A Jungle” essays. The rest will be offered only to paid subscribers at the rate of $5 (“Five Big Ones”) a month.

Subscribe today to make sure your inbox is blessed with the glory of these topics from 5/27:

-How Good is Caused by Evil (and How to Escape)

-Leibniz and the Kabbalah

-Religious Hypocrisy

-Daniel Dennett and Nudity

-Political Idolatry – A Practical Guide

-The Pardes/Orchard of Antisemitism

-Cancel Culture as Preparation for Moshiach

-The Rebbe’s Holy Doubt

-The Maharal’s Lost Continent

-Aristry and Chassidus

…and More!

I can’t wait to share this with you. I love you all, and as always, thanks for reading.

Yours,

Tzvi

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.

If Pharaoh was my rebbe, G-d forbid, he’d say I was perfect just the way I am. I should not be passive or quell the dissatisfaction or the rage or greet each thing with stoic equanimity. That is not “freedom.” The true freedom is to bellow and rally against all restraints because they are not to our taste. As long as we are the masters of our destiny, we have his blessing. Pharaoh is the rebbe of all self-made men.

If Pharaoh was a rebbe (and we trapped forever), he would remind every Jewish boy and girl that they are kings and queens, empowered rulers over their own lives. He wouldn’t just say it; he would make it so: he would order his sorcerors to render unto the flock the secrets of dominion over nature. “Go out and embrace the world,” he would encourage. “And if the world needs remaking, do not hesitate.”

He does not demand wholehearted devotion from his followers. He is far more reasonable. “You are in control,” he tells them on the first day they arrive to build the cities that will guard the borders of their prison. “You decide, just like me.” Pharaoh is a man of the people, and the first day you meet him, you’ll find him in working-class denim, hard hat on, ready to set to the task. It is impossible, you are reassured, to become a slave when you are in control.

Pharaoh encourages all forms of expression. Words are the concretization of thought, and Pharaoh loves concrete as he loves brick and mortar; these are the media from which pyramids and cities and tombs are formed. When the idea hasn’t yet been put into words, it’s still personal and ephemeral and shifts in the light. The concept without words is alive like we are alive, like our skin is alive, an external interface of our soul with the world. But since it is just us, it can’t change the world; it is trapped within our soul.

“This is selfish,” says Pharaoh, with a twinkle in his eye. “We must free the world!” Pharaoh hates entrapment and demands freedom. His Torah says no idea of yours is undeserving of expression; no thought should remain naked, without a theory. Pharaoh adores theories. In the system of thought, we manifest and concretize our souls and leave monuments to eternity that explorers shall excavate millennia hence!

Do not, Pharaoh reassures us, worry at the way the walls close in. Do not fret that the cities we have chosen to build with our own hands mark where we cannot pass. Ignore the discomfort of living within the skin we have shed, dwelling within childhood towns that are now too small for us. Ignore the distinction between the living and the dead.

Pharaoh’s organization promotes from within. Those elder “Chassidim” (and he ages them quickly) deep in Pharaoh’s service thrive among the theories of Judaism they have pronounced. Inside the systems they have built with their own hands, they live like kings. Pharaoh is the king of kings, he teaches. He ensures that nothing upsets his followers’ kingdoms.

That they’re never allowed to taste the taste of matza.

Matza, lowly and broken, tastes of tastelessness, of humility and miracles and faith. “Miracles are hubris,” Pharaoh warns us. “They break down the cities you chose to build! And what will you be when the cities are gone? Certainly no king.”

Thus humility, therefore faith. For what is faith if not the inner point of divestment where all we know is known only by knowing ourselves? Faith is where ideas cannot slough off to become prisons because our thoughts are us, and we cannot imprison ourselves. Faith is where you can’t hide from the truth because the truth is all there is.

Passover reveals the subtle truth of Pharaoh’s machination. He offers freedom and choice and, in the end, brings us only to apathy, depression, and death.

Apathy, for what cares the king of a petty kingdom whose stability is outsourced to Pharaoh about what occurs beyond his borders? Depression, for there is no self-definition outside of the realm we have, with Pharaoh’s encouragement, chosen to build. Though we nominally manipulate stones, we would be nothing without them, so why try? And death, for if we can’t see beyond our words/theories/definitions, and we are nothing without them, we are not really here at all; only the walls of brick are here, the draft stirring the dust across their faces for eternity.

Pharaoh enjoys the entire Jewish year until the Spring, where things go to be reborn. He is uneasy with the supposed humility and miracles and faith. Pharaoh declares that every act of becoming must occur step by step, a chain traceable back to what you once were. He cannot conscience the leaping.

“Judaism isn’t like that fairy tale,” he claims. “Judaism is just like me. Look at the rules and regulations. Look at the controls on your behavior. By choosing ‘freedom,’ you, too, will find yourself controlled!” If Pharaoh was a rebbe, the commandments and the Torah describing them would remain some kind of system, some sort of theory. You would never hear another side to the story, a side that threatened to knock over the blocks. You would never hear that G-d does not manipulate external criteria to make them fit because He is G-d and doesn’t have to. You would never learn that the entire Egyptian exile existed to contextualize the giving of the Torah as a breaking free of the finite bonds of our own choices.

Pharaoh will never teach you that Judaism is wrapping a Jew’s arm in Tefillin or giving them Shabbos candles. He will never admit that the Torah is just what it is, with no shed skin, no shell of dead theories. He will never know, for it lies on the opposite side of the sea that drowned his army, that the Torah is no palace of bricks in which the Jew is king. That the Torah is a truth offered to take or leave, and it is taken by leaving oneself behind, in doing and then listening.

Pharaoh had no inkling of the nation that would survive for millennia alongside his buried tomb and the ruins. The palaces were broken, and the people, humble, joyous, and faithful, let free. They taste the tasteless matza and are reborn.

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.”