[Avodah] Normal People Don't Care About Those Things

[Jay F. Shachter]

In Avodah v43n70 someone wrote:

>
> Just listened to an interesting podcast interviewing Charles Murray
> author of the recently released "taking religion seriously".
>
> He is an 83-year-old former agnostic who said that he changed his
> mind due to weight of evidence, not that he is convinced but he
> thinks that God has a better than 50% chance of being the
> explanation for our existence.
>
> It's my understanding that post-modern philosophy does not believe
> you can prove with 100% certainty just about anything.  When I read
> modern Jewish philosophy when it often seems grounded in tradition
> or personal feeling which is not easily transferable.  Question how
> would we categorize an orthodox individual who made the same
> statement as Dr Murray?
>

Normal people don't care about beliefs.  Normal people care about
observable behavior.  Reality is that which can be seen and felt.

I was once romantically involved with a woman who believed in
homeopathy.  It wasn't a passive belief; she went to homeopaths and
gave them money.  I didn't care.  She didn't give them so much money
as to be unmarriageable, so what do I care what she believes about
homeopathy, as long as I get to take her clothes off every night?  In
the end she broke up with me (although I'm not exactly sure what "she
broke up with me" means, when you are talking about Torah-observant
Jews) and we married other people.  During all the years when I was
married, I never asked my wife about her political beliefs.  After she
got her citizenship (I married an alien) and she was able to vote, I
never asked her whom or what she voted for.  I didn't care.  I cared
whether she was a good mother and a good wife.  Like all normal Jews.
If you could go back in time, and you told Yehoshua, or Dvorah, or
David, or even Shlomo, the wisest of men, that the only thing he knew
with certainty was the existence of his own consciousness, and that
although he believed he was eating a pastrami sandwich it could all be
an illusion and he was really a brain in a vat, he would have looked
at you like you were crazy, and rightly so.  The part of Judaism that
cares about abstract beliefs that do not manifest themselves in
observable behavior is entirely post-Biblical.  It probably results
from our ancestors' encounters with Greek philosophers (although the
Indian philosophers were just as bad, our ancesters just met the
Greeks first).  We worship the God Who created the world, and Who took
us out of Egypt (and more for the latter reason than the former
reason, judging from the number of Biblical references to it), not
some philosophical abstraction made up by foreign thinkers.  Greeks
made important advances in mathematics, but their philosophers' heads
were twisted into bizarre shapes, and often ended up in the wrong
places.  Weirdos like Plato, with their preference for the noumenon
over the phenomenon (yes, I know I am using anachronistic terminology)
are foreign to Judaism.

When Christianity and Islam arose and spread over the world, they made
things worse.  Christianity and Islam are religions of belief
(actually, they are religions of faith, which is even more messed up).
They define a Christian and a Moslem, respectively, as someone who
believes in certain things.  In contrast, the Bible does not anywhere
contain a list of doctrines in which Jews must believe, and even the
post-Hellenistic Talmuds do not.  However, Jewish sages who lived in
Christian and Muslim societies had to address Jews who were influenced
by them, which is why they formulated articles of faith; but there are
many ehrlikhe yidden who have lived their entire lives without ever
studying any of them.  Normal people know that observable behavior is
the only thing that we have access to.  If Charles Murray's wife was a
Jewess I would be perfectly willing to marry his daughter, and if I
was the gabbai of a synagog in which he worshiped and his mother was a
Jewess, I would be willing not only to give him an `aliyya to the
Torah, but also to ask him to be the shliax tzibbur.

               Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
               6424 North Whipple Street
               Chicago IL  60645-4111
                       +1 773 7613784   landline
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                       jay at m5.chicago.il.us
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               When Martin Buber was a schoolboy, it must have been
               no fun at all playing tag with him during recess.