Latest / The Podcast of Jewish Ideas / 86. The Meaning of Life | Dr. Alan Mittleman

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86. The Meaning of Life | Dr. Alan Mittleman · The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

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Speaker 1: Meetings, friends, and welcome back to the podcast of Jewish
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Speaker 1: Ideas a Torah in Motion production.
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Speaker 2: I'm jj Kimri.
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Speaker 1: On today's episode, we turn to one of the most
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Speaker 1: enduring questions in both philosophy and religious thought. What does
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Speaker 1: it mean to live a meaningful life, especially in a
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Speaker 1: world marked by contingency, suffering, and.
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Speaker 2: The shadow of absurdity.
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Speaker 1: While the subject of meaning is certainly one of the
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Speaker 1: major questions of contemporary philosophy, it is surprisingly little addressed
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Speaker 1: in the history of Jewish thoughts, at least in the
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Speaker 1: manner that it is addressed in philosophy today, and therefore
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Speaker 1: we will be considering how aspects of the Jewish intellectual tradition,
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Speaker 1: including concepts of creation, revelation, and redemption, confronts these existential challenges,
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Speaker 1: as well as the resources they offer for thinking about
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Speaker 1: meaning in the modern Joining us to discuss this fascinating
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Speaker 1: subject is doctor Alan Mittleman, an emeritus professor of Jewish
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Speaker 1: philosophy and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Among Professor Mittleman's many
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Speaker 1: important works in the field of Jewish thoughts is his
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Speaker 1: twenty twenty three work Absurdity and Meaning in Contemporary Philosophy
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Speaker 1: and Jewish Thoughts, published by Cambridge University Press, which is
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Speaker 1: a powerful and fascinating intervention in this particular topic and
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Speaker 1: shall be forming the basis of our discussion today. It
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Speaker 1: is a pleasure to welcome Professor Mittleman to the Podcast
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Speaker 1: of Jewish Ideas Today.
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Speaker 2: Professor welcome, Thank you so much.
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Speaker 3: It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to
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Speaker 3: the conversation.
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Speaker 2: Excellent, excellent.
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Speaker 1: So let's start with a sort of more general question,
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Speaker 1: let's say a historical question on this particular subject, which
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Speaker 1: goes as follows. Which is that, you know, is the
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Speaker 1: pursuit of meaning or is the question surrounding meaning generally
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Speaker 1: considered within Jewish thoughts to be an urgent or legitimate question,
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Speaker 1: or is or are we coming at it from a
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Speaker 1: very modern advantage point and trying to impose a question
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Speaker 1: of existential meaning onto a tradition that is not really
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Speaker 1: concerned about it. What place does this question have in
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Speaker 1: the history of Jewish ideas?
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Speaker 3: I think I could answer that unambiguously with a kind
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Speaker 3: of fanciful German word. The word is yahin It's a
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Speaker 3: combination of yah, yes and nine no. So let me
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Speaker 3: try to unpack that. Some years ago I wrote a
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Speaker 3: book that is a cousin to this one, called Hope
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Speaker 3: in the Democratic Age, and I wanted to dive into
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Speaker 3: Jewish sources on hope and think about the meaning of
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Speaker 3: hope in philosophy and in Judiasm. This is my mo
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Speaker 3: philosophy and Judiasm. I looked in the online catalog of
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Speaker 3: the Jewish Theological Seminary, and I found about four listings
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Speaker 3: of books on hope in Judaism. I looked in the
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Speaker 3: catalog of Union Theological Seminary across the street. I found
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Speaker 3: about four hundred listings. Judaism, I think is deeply committed
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Speaker 3: to a fundamentally hopeful affirmation of the goodness of this
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Speaker 3: life and the goodness of God, and the future in
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Speaker 3: which those are consummated. But that doesn't equate to a
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Speaker 3: large body of Jewish literature about hope. One has to
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Speaker 3: assume that on some level Jewish teachings about hope are
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Speaker 3: accessible and available. I'd say the same thing about meaning.
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Speaker 3: In some ways, the inquiry into meaning, particularly the meaning
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Speaker 3: of life, is very much a modern inquiry. I can
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Speaker 3: give a little bit of that modern history if you'd like.
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Speaker 3: But the concern for what it is to live a
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Speaker 3: good life, a holy life, a life that is the
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Speaker 3: best that we can make of it, and the most
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Speaker 3: optimum way way to serve God. These are these are
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Speaker 3: ancient questions, not just in the Bible, but in other
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Speaker 3: ancient literatures as well. The trick is they don't use
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Speaker 3: the concept of meaning to raise those questions and provide
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Speaker 3: those presumptive answers. So there's a particular modern story about
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Speaker 3: how we've come to sort of group these concerns under
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Speaker 3: this conception meaning.
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Speaker 1: And I mean, this is sort of almost a try
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Speaker 1: way of putting it. But if you are a Jewish
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Speaker 1: philosopher in the pre modern era, what world or what
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Speaker 1: concept or sort of nexus of ideas would you even
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Speaker 1: use to try and broach it. And if you're trying
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Speaker 1: to read medieval Jewsh philosophy or been I don't or
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Speaker 1: whatever it is. I mean, I'm not even sure what
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Speaker 1: the question would look like given the concepts and terminologies
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Speaker 1: that they have.
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Speaker 3: Well, I think I think you have in earlier periods
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Speaker 3: this Greek concept which comes into Jewish philosophy of the
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Speaker 3: good life, that is, a life that is it's often
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Speaker 3: translated as happy but happy doesn't quite get it, because
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Speaker 3: happy trusts what's sad. It's really a successful life, not
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Speaker 3: in the material sense, but in a sense that reflects virtue,
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Speaker 3: It reflects moral depth and seriousness, It reflects proper convictions,
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Speaker 3: proper discipline. So in terms like the good life, the
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Speaker 3: virtuous life, a life that is conscious, reflective. Give an example,
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Speaker 3: the thirteenth century, or maybe it's the twelfth century. I'm
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Speaker 3: bad with dates. Jewish philosopher Bahia in Pakuda. You know,
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Speaker 3: Bachia inveighs against a Judaism, that is, a Judaism of
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Speaker 3: the limbs, that is a series of idiosyncratic, specifically Jewish
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Speaker 3: behaviors based on commandments to do things, to refrain from
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Speaker 3: doing things. Bachia calls for the duties of the heart.
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Speaker 3: He wants an interior dimension of Judaism that one can possess,
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Speaker 3: one can make it one's own, and thereby live a
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Speaker 3: life of real spiritual depth in Judaism, not just the
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Speaker 3: life of sort of discharging one's superficial obligations. You have
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Speaker 3: something like that, and so you go own too, And
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Speaker 3: definitely something like this in my monodies, and I'd say,
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Speaker 3: even going back to the rabbis, there's a kind of
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Speaker 3: predilection for thinking, what does this mean? That mayhemit's vote?
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Speaker 3: Why are we doing this? What significance can we derive
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Speaker 3: from our commitments and our obligations. So I'd say there
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Speaker 3: is at least in some strait of Judaism, a kind
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Speaker 3: of premium put on interiority. I'd say the most urgent
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Speaker 3: text that corresponds to our modern question of the meaning
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Speaker 3: of life is Cohila, the Book of Ecclesiastes, And there
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Speaker 3: you have, I would say, a kind of thought experiment
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Speaker 3: of what a life without any meaning looks like, a
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Speaker 3: life where a meeting has collapsed for this very restless,
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Speaker 3: very thoughtful, very discontent intellect and a struggle to try
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Speaker 3: to restore some sort of foundation of stability and of
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Speaker 3: significance to his life. It's a very old book and
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Speaker 3: it's a i think, the modern book at the same time.
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Speaker 3: So I kept saying that Judaism as a whole is
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Speaker 3: a response to Cohla or anything like that. But you
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Speaker 3: know it's there and at larges something in the tradition
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Speaker 3: that's deeply discomforting. That's right.
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Speaker 1: So let me ask you actually specifically about this, because
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Speaker 1: you begin your book on the subject of meaning in
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Speaker 1: philosophy and Jewish thoughts with two two splendid works, or
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Speaker 1: two splendid authors, Cohelet and Tolstoi, and use that to
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Speaker 1: sort of frame the question as you're going to as
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Speaker 1: you're going to be asking it. So so let me
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Speaker 1: ask you. You mentioned Cohele, and you mentioned the basic problem.
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Speaker 1: What is it about those two authors and the text
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Speaker 1: they produce that helpfully frames the subject. In other words,
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Speaker 1: what let's say, is the message or the methods or
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Speaker 1: the outcomes let's say, of these texts and these particular
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Speaker 1: authors that frame the question of meaning, especially within a
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Speaker 1: religious context, in a good way or a useful way.
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Speaker 3: Yes, Tolstoy was a reader Cohala, so to an extent,
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Speaker 3: one of the Tolstoy texts that I deal with his Confessions,
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Speaker 3: was modeled after Cohala, although it was rooted in his
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Speaker 3: own experience. But before I say something about Tolstoy and
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Speaker 3: about Cohala, let me step back yet another little bit
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Speaker 3: and talk about modernity, because Tolstoy in particular is responding
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Speaker 3: to a modern problem. So nobody talked about life as
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Speaker 3: meaningful before the late eighteenth century. It's mostly a nineteenth
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Speaker 3: century problem. I use these other or other kinds of expressions,
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Speaker 3: like the good life, the virtuous life, satisfying life, and
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Speaker 3: so on. But the juxtaposition of the term meaning or
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Speaker 3: sense with life is actually a product of German Romanticism,
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Speaker 3: that movement that's in some ways reaction to the Enlightenment
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Speaker 3: and to the Napoleonic Wars. And the idea here is
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Speaker 3: that meaning heretofore meant, the meaning of a text, the
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Speaker 3: meaning of a word, the meaning of a symbol. All
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Speaker 3: of these things are events or phenomena within life. It
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Speaker 3: didn't make any sense to step back from life as
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Speaker 3: if there was some standpoint other than life in which
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Speaker 3: to ask what's the meaning of this object, namely life.
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Speaker 3: That didn't seem to be a rational thing to do,
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Speaker 3: but it came into use among German authors and the
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Speaker 3: English authors and then French. There's as a way of
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Speaker 3: talking about something that's been lost. There's a sense that
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Speaker 3: there were ways of feeling at home in the world,
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Speaker 3: particularly in Christianity and traditional Judaism, of fitting into a scheme,
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Speaker 3: a divine scheme, an understanding of nature as a sort
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Speaker 3: of hierarchy of being with the divine and its pinnacle.
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Speaker 3: Everything's suffused with mind or purpose. Nature was teleological, all
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Speaker 3: kinds of mechanisms that made the world our home. All
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Speaker 3: that starts to go to the dogs with the Enlightenment
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Speaker 3: and the romantic reaction to it, and so this possibility
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Speaker 3: of asking, how can we feel at home in the
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Speaker 3: world again, how do we humanize this? I mean, someone
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Speaker 3: like Pascal in this seventeenth century talks about these immensities
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Speaker 3: that terrify him. I mean, this very pious man, but
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Speaker 3: he's deeply connected to the modern scientific project, of which
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Speaker 3: he's one of the founders. And from a high scientific
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Speaker 3: point of view, it just seems, you know, after Copernicus
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Speaker 3: and Kepler, like the universe is infinite. We are a
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Speaker 3: spec our solar system as a spec there's no significance
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Speaker 3: to our lives. The universe is indifferent to us. What
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Speaker 3: can this possibly mean? That's how it enters the door.
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Speaker 3: So to an extent, it's a modern thing that reflects,
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Speaker 3: if not the death of God, to use Nietzsche's phrase,
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Speaker 3: but a very distant God or a very disconnected God.
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Speaker 3: The attempts by the German thinkers in the late eighteenth
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Speaker 3: early nineteenth century to make sense of this question, the
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Speaker 3: meaning of life comes in for a reaction from more
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Speaker 3: conservative thinkers, and the term that is paired chronologically historically
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Speaker 3: with the meaning of life is nilism. They accuse these
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Speaker 3: people of basically producing philosophies that deepened our problem and
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Speaker 3: made it more hopeless, rather than returning to tradition. So
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Speaker 3: they called this this sort of turn against tradition, which
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Speaker 3: they thought was feudal nialism. This is the immediate background
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Speaker 3: of tul Stoy. Tol Stoy himself uses the term nialism,
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Speaker 3: so he is not only aware of this problem at
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Speaker 3: a semantic level, his life models it. Tolstoy is rich,
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Speaker 3: he's successful, he's brilliant, he's famous, he produces immortal novel
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Speaker 3: and he wants to kill himself. And he writes about
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Speaker 3: this very eloquently in a short story of novella well
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Speaker 3: the death of ivanne Ilitch that I discussed in the book,
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Speaker 3: and then more extensively in his confessions. And tel Stoy
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Speaker 3: is acutely aware that something is broken in this world,
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Speaker 3: this modern world, and his life in particular, and that
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Speaker 3: the people who are most resistant to living in the
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Speaker 3: modern world serfs, you know, these poor feudal peasants on
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Speaker 3: the Russian Aristocrats estates they have an immensely hard life,
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Speaker 3: but they're very well adjusted. They don't you know, they
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Speaker 3: don't think of suicide as a real possibility. Whereas Telstoy
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Speaker 3: in his class, they throw themselves into hedonism, they throw
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Speaker 3: themselves into escapism, they find life intolerable. They're nominally but
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Speaker 3: Christianity has no real force for them, so that's not
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Speaker 3: a source of meaning. That's what Tolstoy is trying to
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Speaker 3: work out, and he has a way of working it out.
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Speaker 3: He has a place where he comes down. I would
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Speaker 3: say Cohelea is doing this, you know, two thousand years earlier,
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Speaker 3: and then some Cohella, I think exemplifies the human being
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Speaker 3: who had wealth, who had success, who had fame, who
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Speaker 3: had respect. At least that's his fictional character, Solomon the
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Speaker 3: tradition says uh, and it all, it all collapses for him.
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Speaker 3: So it becomes what sometimes literary scholars use the term defamiliarization.
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Speaker 3: The world that we've known, the world of meanings of significance,
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Speaker 3: in which we find challenges and activities and satisfaction. It
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Speaker 3: all gets hollowed out, becomes sort of shaky for us
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Speaker 3: becomes alien, no longer familiar. That is what's being depicted
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Speaker 3: in Cohella. In my book, I have a kind of
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Speaker 3: philosophical analysis of why that's so. And my claim is
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Speaker 3: that that particular journey of Cohella or told Stoy is
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Speaker 3: replicated in many thoughtful people these days and for the
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Speaker 3: past few centuries, and I think even longer before that,
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Speaker 3: and it comes out of a kind of capacity for
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Speaker 3: thinking and reflection which introduces disquiet. I think it's Camus,
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Speaker 3: the French author who says the beginning of thinking is
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Speaker 3: the beginning of being undone.
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Speaker 1: So let me I won't actually touch on one point
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Speaker 1: that you mentioned that I think quite important point, specifically
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Speaker 1: with kilt And and Tolstoi, because question of meaning is
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Speaker 1: one of these interesting questions, because on the one hand,
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Speaker 1: it is a philosophical question. It's it's a it's a
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Speaker 1: rational conundrum. Let's say, what is it in life that
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Speaker 1: we can cling onto that gives us unmistakable significance to
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Speaker 1: our own lives? But it's also, in the real sense,
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Speaker 1: an existential question, in the sense that it touches on
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Speaker 1: our living. It's a question that's supposed to be able
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Speaker 1: to give us the capacity to live, to keep on going,
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Speaker 1: to wake up in the morning. It's not just a
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Speaker 1: philosophical question. And so why is it the case that
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Speaker 1: an adequate treatment of meaning must be livable rather than
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Speaker 1: simply conceptually consistent. Is this Is this an important distinction?
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Speaker 3: I don't think it is. I don't think it's an
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Speaker 3: important distinction. Well, maybe I'll come back with another robust yine,
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Speaker 3: yes and no.
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 3: That is, these are what Germans are called Laban's philosophy
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Speaker 3: philosophy of life, so type of philosophy of life that
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Speaker 3: is more like a philosophy of mathematics, you know, strictly conceptual,
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Speaker 3: and it has to work at the level of understanding
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Speaker 3: these strange symbolic systems in their dynamics. It's not just physics,
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Speaker 3: so to speak. It's also a biology in psychology. That is,
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Speaker 3: it has to be intelligible. A philosophy of meaning has
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Speaker 3: to be meaningful to the one's who's struggling to achieve
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Speaker 3: it and to live it. It's a problem of life,
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Speaker 3: so it has to be proven in life. It's in
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Speaker 3: a way a practical problem in the philosophical sense. It's
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Speaker 3: a problem having to do with the way we live.
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Speaker 3: So I think it's not like you can't have a
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Speaker 3: set of beliefs, say religious beliefs that you just say
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Speaker 3: to believe are true, and run your life according to
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Speaker 3: those beliefs, and have those beliefs sort of be at
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Speaker 3: arm's length. It would make for a very formal and
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Speaker 3: unsatisfying religion. I think. I mean a way, I've seen
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Speaker 3: this in my own life of people who compartmentalize Judaism
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Speaker 3: and the modern thought in which they're engaged as modern people,
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Speaker 3: and they don't want to run their Jewish commitments. They
19:32
Speaker 3: may even be quite from They don't want to run
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Speaker 3: their Jewish commitments into a sort of cohalic space of
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Speaker 3: questioning because they think it might all fall apart. So
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Speaker 3: in a way, whatever counts as Jewish belief for them
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Speaker 3: is sort of insulated from I would say serious wrestling
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Speaker 3: at depth with the problems of life. To my mind,
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Speaker 3: not safe, but it's not good. I think we ought
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Speaker 3: to be working toward much more integration, and that takes
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Speaker 3: certain kutzpah, and you know, also I think a certain
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Speaker 3: willingness to get lost. But I think the I think
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Speaker 3: these problems of life come out of the matrix of
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Speaker 3: life and need to resonate within life question of what
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Speaker 3: what is meaning? Really? I'm not saying I'm going to
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Speaker 3: give you the meaning of life, No, I'm just exploring
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Speaker 3: the question, the question what what do we mean when
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Speaker 3: we say what is the meaning of life? I try
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Speaker 3: to provide an answer. That is, I try to provide
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Speaker 3: an analysis of what meaning means here, and that is
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Speaker 3: I think meaning is a way of fixing the significance
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Speaker 3: of what we care about, or to put another way
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Speaker 3: of value. We're committed to commit to values like liberty, truth, honesty, fidelity, loyalty.
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Speaker 3: If we take these things seriously, they matter to us?
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Speaker 3: Why do they matter to us? How do they relate
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Speaker 3: to one another? What sense can we make of them?
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Speaker 3: How do we effectuate them in our own lives? How
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Speaker 3: have they shaped us? All of those are questions of meaning.
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Speaker 3: So meaning is you know, it's a low to the
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Speaker 3: ground here. It has to do with making sense of
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Speaker 3: the dimension of value. And for the nihilists that's a
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Speaker 3: non starter because the universe is sheer fact, there's no
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Speaker 3: value in it. Any value that's in there is just
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Speaker 3: human beings wishfully, you know, laminating the surface of physical
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Speaker 3: reality with their own projections, and therefore all our values
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Speaker 3: are contingent. All our norms, our rules, our projects are
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Speaker 3: just inventions within social space. They're not grounded in anything.
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Speaker 3: I think that Cohela has an experience somewhere along those lines,
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Speaker 3: that the world is accident and it all ends in death,
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Speaker 3: and the universe is indifferent to our striving in the
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Speaker 3: sense and doesn't requite us according to our worth we die,
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Speaker 3: the death of dogs and cats and sheep and goats
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Speaker 3: doesn't matter.
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Speaker 1: Well, with that very cheerful sort of a gloss on it,
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Speaker 1: let's turn to the So that is, but that is
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Speaker 1: the meat of the question. So then you turn to
22:47
Speaker 1: various let's say, arenas or areas of thought that might
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Speaker 1: help orient us towards an answer, at least as it
22:53
Speaker 1: is presented within the Jewish sources, within Jewish generally. So
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Speaker 1: the first of these is creation. And you read the
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Speaker 1: Biblical creation not as let's say, a scientific or historical cosmology,
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Speaker 1: but rather what you call genealogy of value. So can
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Speaker 1: you elaborate this for us? To what degree is the
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Speaker 1: creation story and the development of creation as understood in
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Speaker 1: the Jewish tradition? How does that bear on this question?
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Speaker 1: Trying to find meaning with it and not just sort
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Speaker 1: of brute fact or description of physical reality and nothing else.
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Speaker 1: How does how is creation an arena in which this
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Speaker 1: question can be discussed?
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Speaker 3: Yeah? Okay, So my basic view is that meaning when
23:36
Speaker 3: it comes to life is our way of construing the
23:43
Speaker 3: significance of value. And it takes significance to mean intelligibility
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Speaker 3: and importance. So we're up to our eyeballs in trying
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Speaker 3: to make sense of our commitments. Our values are convictions,
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Speaker 3: and we're doing this in a secular world that tends
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Speaker 3: to look at nature in physicalist terms. By physicalists, I
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Speaker 3: mean nothing. Supernatural nature is a web of cause and effect.
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Speaker 3: All the causes are physical, there's no outside, nothing comes in.
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Speaker 3: How do you anchor value these dimensions of our lives
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Speaker 3: which we care about we're committed to within this? So
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Speaker 3: I seek the creation stories in the Bible as a
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Speaker 3: way of thinking about the natural world and trying to
24:56
Speaker 3: the term genealogy it really just means sort of origin
25:01
Speaker 3: story that is not meant to be simply reportage, but
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Speaker 3: a sort of narrative, a story about how institutions, practices,
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Speaker 3: values come in to being. I'll give you an example,
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Speaker 3: in the Western tradition around the seventeenth eighteenth centuries, there's
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Speaker 3: a lot of number of writers who use this notion
25:33
Speaker 3: of a social contract as the origin story of society,
25:39
Speaker 3: people like Thomas Hobbes, for example. People get together because
25:44
Speaker 3: life in nature is nasty, British and short, and they
25:48
Speaker 3: pool their resources and they erect the sovereign for themselves,
25:52
Speaker 3: who take some of their freedom away and in return
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Speaker 3: they get protection. That's a genealogy of social institution, so
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Speaker 3: called social contract. I think genesis gives us genealogies of language,
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Speaker 3: of murder, of sexuality, but at a deeper level, it
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Speaker 3: gives us a genealogy in origin story for our intuition
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Speaker 3: that life is of fundamental value. And when God says
26:22
Speaker 3: repeatedly keytve and ultimately toved, this is good, This is good,
26:27
Speaker 3: this is good, this is very good, it says that
26:30
Speaker 3: creation is not value neutral. There is in what another
26:35
Speaker 3: culture Greece, Rome and Western culture calls nature and we
26:40
Speaker 3: call creation, there is no distinction between fact and value,
26:45
Speaker 3: so to speak. The values that were committed to reflect
26:49
Speaker 3: in our own lives and try to live by our laws,
26:52
Speaker 3: protect and empower, those are somehow related to the way
26:56
Speaker 3: of things, to the way the world is to me
27:00
Speaker 3: is very I looked at philosophically, it's a very interesting story,
27:06
Speaker 3: perhaps the beginnings of an argument about how fact and
27:10
Speaker 3: value do not come apart to the extent that many
27:15
Speaker 3: moderns and scientifically minded people think that they do. So
27:20
Speaker 3: I see meaning both in very personal terms of something
27:25
Speaker 3: we have to struggle for in an individual basis that
27:28
Speaker 3: resonates in our own lives, but also something quite collective,
27:33
Speaker 3: namely the bibe on our tradition give us great stories
27:38
Speaker 3: that address in a very fundamental way, these challenging issues
27:44
Speaker 3: of human life. So I take the creation story to
27:47
Speaker 3: be an increy into the natural world and its significance
27:52
Speaker 3: for us as beings who depend on it.
27:55
Speaker 1: So one of these points of significance would you join out?
27:58
Speaker 1: Which is interesting is that there is a sort of
28:00
Speaker 1: a dual affirmation in the Bible when it comes to creating.
28:03
Speaker 1: So on the one hand, you said, yes, you know,
28:04
Speaker 1: it is tough, it is good, it is declared over
28:07
Speaker 1: and over again to be good. But also it unravels
28:11
Speaker 1: fairly quickly and it broken in fact. You know later on,
28:14
Speaker 1: within Jewish theology you have various notions of creation being
28:17
Speaker 1: in some way broken or in some way created in
28:21
Speaker 1: or suffering some kind of catastrophe as well. And so
28:24
Speaker 1: I don't know if you could speak to that a
28:26
Speaker 1: little bit. I mean, how do you understand this, this
28:28
Speaker 1: dual affirmation within creation that on the one hand is good,
28:32
Speaker 1: but on the other hand is sorely lacking.
28:34
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, one of the figures I deal with in
28:37
Speaker 3: my book a little bit is Menacha Mendel of Kutsk,
28:42
Speaker 3: the Kotsker Rebbi manaka Mendel is sort of to dude
28:46
Speaker 3: what Yermiahu is to prophecy. You know, he's very dire,
28:52
Speaker 3: he's very gloomy, he's existentially very you know, broken and distressed. Man,
29:00
Speaker 3: he's almost gnostic and seeing creation is not good. I mean,
29:06
Speaker 3: there's this wonderful midrash from Bray sheet Rabba talking about God,
29:11
Speaker 3: you know, creating human beings. There's several of these midrashim.
29:15
Speaker 3: And when God announces, you know, let us make man
29:19
Speaker 3: in our image, Well, who's the us? Well, it's it's
29:22
Speaker 3: the It's it's the Malachim, right, it's the angels and
29:25
Speaker 3: the angels they all try to talk God out of it,
29:29
Speaker 3: you know, not all of them, but some of them
29:31
Speaker 3: try to talk God out of it. It's a terrible idea.
29:34
Speaker 3: So in one of these midrashim, God takes the angel
29:38
Speaker 3: that represents truth, Emma, and he throws it to the
29:42
Speaker 3: ground and knocks him out. And then God, you know,
29:47
Speaker 3: invents the human So the human beings only come about
29:52
Speaker 3: because God can tolerate constant laws. He had to take
29:56
Speaker 3: truth off the scene. The kutzker Rebbe work with this
30:00
Speaker 3: to sort of expose a deep flaw in creation. He
30:05
Speaker 3: really seems to wrestle with, you know, whether life is
30:09
Speaker 3: worth it in a sense, whether God wouldn't have been
30:12
Speaker 3: better off not throwing truth to the ground. He is open,
30:19
Speaker 3: I would say, to more doubt and sort of rueful
30:23
Speaker 3: rumination than any Jews since Cohelea. So I think that
30:31
Speaker 3: you can. It seems right to me to affirm the
30:37
Speaker 3: goodness of creation as a fundamental principle. I think the
30:41
Speaker 3: way we have to do that because if we want
30:46
Speaker 3: to believe, you know, as Jews in this way that
30:49
Speaker 3: God is the creator and God is a good God
30:54
Speaker 3: and there's no sort of deep trag in creation as such.
31:05
Speaker 3: If you are a polytheist, you can endorse tragedy like
31:11
Speaker 3: the Greeks. The art form tragedy comes out of Greece,
31:18
Speaker 3: and basically it shows a fundamentally disordered world in which
31:24
Speaker 3: the representative of the good of virtue is unjustly undone
31:32
Speaker 3: by primordial expressions of negativity. I'd say Judaism is full
31:41
Speaker 3: of awareness of suffering and tries to make sense of suffering,
31:44
Speaker 3: but it seldom goes toward deep tragedy because it can't
31:49
Speaker 3: endorse deep polytheism. It can't endorse any polytheists. If you're
31:54
Speaker 3: a polytheists, you believe that reality itself, the cosmos is
31:59
Speaker 3: a constant war of gods against God's We don't have that.
32:04
Speaker 3: We can't do that, so we locate the disorder of
32:08
Speaker 3: creation in other places. I'm very taken with the view
32:16
Speaker 3: of my friend John Levinson, the Bible scholar, in his
32:22
Speaker 3: really wonderful book. I think it's one of the best
32:26
Speaker 3: books ever written about anything. It's called Creation and the
32:29
Speaker 3: Persistence of Evil.
32:32
Speaker 2: Quite an endorsement, I'd say, yes.
32:34
Speaker 3: Well, of the other best books written about anything is
32:37
Speaker 3: Edward Schill's book on Tradition, but it's a very different
32:41
Speaker 3: book anyway. With Levinson's book, he shows yeah, I mean, okay,
32:48
Speaker 3: people who are consistently from are not going to buy this.
32:52
Speaker 3: But as an academic Bible scholar, he shows that the
32:59
Speaker 3: affirmations Genesis one, with all of those ketovs and toved,
33:06
Speaker 3: that's like the latest development of the Biblical literature, that
33:11
Speaker 3: kind of triumphant endorsement of the divine fully in control
33:17
Speaker 3: and creating without opposition. That's like the cherry on the
33:23
Speaker 3: cake of a longer history of ancient Israelites taking on
33:28
Speaker 3: board polytheistic, ancient Near Eastern creation stories which all have
33:35
Speaker 3: to do with divine struggle against leviaton to home all
33:42
Speaker 3: kinds of divinized forces of opposition. And the evidence for
33:47
Speaker 3: that for him is in the psalms in Isaiah, in
33:53
Speaker 3: parts of job where there are fragments of these older
33:58
Speaker 3: creation stories. So he sees Genesis One as a kind
34:03
Speaker 3: of achievement of ancient Israeli thought in reaching a point
34:10
Speaker 3: where this universe, this creation is fundamentally good. But what
34:16
Speaker 3: keeps it from disintegrating into chaos again is human effort,
34:23
Speaker 3: particularly the human worship of God in the Temple through sacrifice.
34:29
Speaker 3: So human beings have a major role to play in
34:33
Speaker 3: the stability of creation. It's not so to speak, physical,
34:37
Speaker 3: it's metaphysical. In that sense, the instability is always a threat,
34:44
Speaker 3: even to the perspective of Genesis one. So there's a
34:48
Speaker 3: sort of dialectic of the good and the not good.
34:53
Speaker 3: But nonetheless, I think we have to believe that the
34:55
Speaker 3: good is more fundamental.
34:58
Speaker 2: And let me ask you.
35:00
Speaker 1: Then, if one believes that, and let's say Levinson and
35:03
Speaker 1: you are correct, this is sort of a culminating a
35:06
Speaker 1: crowning achievement, let's say, of biblical thoughts and later developed
35:09
Speaker 1: in Judaism. What benefit does that have for the question
35:14
Speaker 1: of meaning? Or put other waywise, if you believe that, ultimately,
35:18
Speaker 1: despite all its great lackings and deficiencies, creation is fundamentally good,
35:24
Speaker 1: so what conclusions might then be drawn regarding meaning? Because
35:29
Speaker 1: as you said, even if you say creation is excellent,
35:32
Speaker 1: you could just be referred referring to brute facts inherent
35:36
Speaker 1: within the physical world. So so what can be drawn
35:39
Speaker 1: out of a recognition of the fundamental goodness that creation?
35:42
Speaker 3: I think at least two things. So my claim is
35:49
Speaker 3: that the search for meaning takes place against the background
35:56
Speaker 3: of lost meaning. I don't think meaning illness is an
36:01
Speaker 3: imposition on a more primordial meaninglessness. I think meaningfulness is
36:08
Speaker 3: the condition into which we are born, so to speak,
36:11
Speaker 3: both as cultures and as persons. And when the world
36:16
Speaker 3: is defamiliarized, that's for a told Stoy or a Cohlad,
36:23
Speaker 3: what we have to do is restore it to its
36:27
Speaker 3: being a home for us, a place of significance and meaning.
36:31
Speaker 3: I think that the notion that there's a fundamental floor
36:36
Speaker 3: floor not flaw My Rhode Island origins are turning up
36:41
Speaker 3: here with.
36:42
Speaker 1: It's not as bad as my English in English in
36:44
Speaker 1: English English, it's exactly the same.
36:46
Speaker 3: But yes, New England and England. Yeah, so there's a
36:51
Speaker 3: there's a floor under us that supports the fundamental meaningfulness,
36:57
Speaker 3: which is to say, significance, intelligence, ability, importance, value of
37:02
Speaker 3: life about which we tell stories that fix that significance
37:08
Speaker 3: and help us to live in it. I think that's
37:11
Speaker 3: what the belief in goodness does. I have a kind
37:16
Speaker 3: of philosophical argument to sort of show that, you know,
37:22
Speaker 3: in miniature, which is, if I want to say that
37:26
Speaker 3: there are certain inherent goods, and one of the greatest
37:30
Speaker 3: inherent goods is knowledge, and if someone says, well, what's
37:36
Speaker 3: so good about knowledge? You know, why is knowledge good?
37:40
Speaker 3: That's self impeaching, because that person is asking about knowledge
37:45
Speaker 3: to defeat what he thinks is a flawed point of view.
37:50
Speaker 3: That sort of performative contradiction, in a way underscores the
37:55
Speaker 3: fundamental goodness of knowledge. If you want to secure knowledge
37:59
Speaker 3: about why not, isn't good? Yourself impeaching. So I think
38:03
Speaker 3: it's the same with discussions of goodness. We launch our
38:10
Speaker 3: critique of reality. We try to convince ourselves that maybe
38:14
Speaker 3: nihilism is the higher truth. The universe is really valueless
38:20
Speaker 3: and absolutely indifferent to us, and therefore anything that any
38:25
Speaker 3: significance that we find in our lives is somehow metaphysically
38:29
Speaker 3: self aggrandized and the real truth. The real fact of
38:33
Speaker 3: the matter is that there's nothing but fact, and fact
38:37
Speaker 3: means nothing. I deal with a philosophical nihilist in the
38:41
Speaker 3: last chapter of my book, who makes that case? I
38:46
Speaker 3: try to show why that's a self impeaching case. So
38:50
Speaker 3: I think this notion of the goodness of creation is
38:56
Speaker 3: very important for being able to make those kind of arguments.
39:00
Speaker 3: But I don't think that I'm simply endorsing a dogma here.
39:04
Speaker 3: I think that I'm making the best sense, using the
39:08
Speaker 3: creation story of intuitions that we have about the fundamental
39:13
Speaker 3: value of life. If we come to hate life, if
39:17
Speaker 3: we have so called Laban Schmiltz or el Schmidtz. You know,
39:21
Speaker 3: life is a pain for us. The world is a
39:23
Speaker 3: pain for us. We want to get over it like
39:27
Speaker 3: Cohla did. We didn't start out that way, and we
39:32
Speaker 3: don't need to see the achievement of that view is
39:35
Speaker 3: somehow the most sober mature wisdom we can gain. I
39:40
Speaker 3: think we need to see it basically as something that's
39:42
Speaker 3: gone terribly wrong, and that's what that floor of what
39:48
Speaker 3: I would call the goodness of being. I think that's
39:52
Speaker 3: the difference that makes I mean, I think about people
39:55
Speaker 3: worry about these sorts of things. There's an argument going
39:59
Speaker 3: on between those who think tragedy is the greatest wisdom.
40:04
Speaker 3: An example of that view would be Martha Nusbaum. You know,
40:09
Speaker 3: Martha Nusbaum is a very acute student of Greek philosophy
40:14
Speaker 3: and a really fine philosopher for herself. She has a
40:18
Speaker 3: book called The Fragility of Goodness. I agree in the
40:21
Speaker 3: sense goodness is fragile because the world is also flawed,
40:26
Speaker 3: and we're a big part of the flaw in the world.
40:29
Speaker 3: But she wants to go in a tragedy all the
40:33
Speaker 3: way down to the bottom direction. I don't think we
40:37
Speaker 3: should do that. I think neither our experience nor our
40:42
Speaker 3: best intuitions about life bear that out.
40:46
Speaker 2: Okay, this is fast thing.
40:48
Speaker 1: I want to move on to the other sections of
40:50
Speaker 1: your argument because I think you know, we want to
40:52
Speaker 1: get the whole picture. So the other the second section
40:54
Speaker 1: is on revelation, and typically as revelations understood within Jewish
41:00
Speaker 1: and with the Jewish tradition, you know, God imparting divine
41:04
Speaker 1: wisdom or commandments or information, let's say, to human beings.
41:10
Speaker 1: But you complicate this picture a little bit in your
41:12
Speaker 1: treatment of revelation and speak of Jewish law of the
41:16
Speaker 1: divine revelation as neither entirely divine command nor entirely human construction,
41:21
Speaker 1: but at some kind of hybrid model or some kind
41:24
Speaker 1: of intertwining or intersection between divine and human effort. And
41:28
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could speak to this and again
41:30
Speaker 1: elaborate on this why this is important for your arguments
41:34
Speaker 1: regarding meaning.
41:35
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think the issues so much whether it
41:38
Speaker 3: is a stenographic deliverance from God recorded by Moses, or
41:44
Speaker 3: if it has a different origin story. My Judaism is
41:51
Speaker 3: in a place where I don't need empirical findings from history,
41:58
Speaker 3: or I don't need to believe the story is historically
42:01
Speaker 3: as it says it is, or my not to be intact.
42:06
Speaker 3: I'm less concerned about biblical criticism or how to take
42:11
Speaker 3: with you know, mamad ARSINAI I think it's a I
42:15
Speaker 3: think it's a question of the nature of authority rather
42:18
Speaker 3: than a question of the origin of texts, because I
42:22
Speaker 3: think that's what the upshot of of those worries about
42:26
Speaker 3: origin amount to. What the authority of these texts are.
42:32
Speaker 3: And uh, there's a long story to be told here
42:38
Speaker 3: about why Israel accepts the Torah, what that acceptance entails,
42:47
Speaker 3: whether that acceptance is once and done or perpetually renewed
42:54
Speaker 3: pefolam tamide, let's say again to go to a phrase
42:59
Speaker 3: of John Evanson's In one of his books, he talks
43:03
Speaker 3: about the daily recitation of Shamah of Kabbala ol Malfad
43:09
Speaker 3: Shimayam of taking on oneself the yoke of the Kingdom
43:14
Speaker 3: of Heaven. He calls the saying Shama the Rabbinic covenant
43:19
Speaker 3: renewal ceremony like in the Bible itself, and then post
43:24
Speaker 3: biblical antiquity like Atkumaran there were covenant renewal ceremonies. I mean,
43:29
Speaker 3: SINAI wasn't enough. You had to like assemble as a
43:32
Speaker 3: nation or a sectarian group and sort of make a
43:36
Speaker 3: pledge to God to follow his law. Once again, we
43:40
Speaker 3: sort of know this from the problems of political philosophy.
43:46
Speaker 3: You know, why should my ancestors agreement to a social
43:49
Speaker 3: contract bind me? Why isn't anarchism the default position of politics?
43:56
Speaker 3: Why does this you know, alien governmental tradition have authority
44:02
Speaker 3: over me? What did I do?
44:04
Speaker 2: So?
44:05
Speaker 3: I think you have analogs for that in Judaism. So
44:09
Speaker 3: I think there's this very important questions about authority. A
44:14
Speaker 3: quote from Sam Fleishack or another fine philosopher from my book,
44:19
Speaker 3: he says, revelation is not given until it is received.
44:24
Speaker 3: I'm interested in the human role in these matters because
44:29
Speaker 3: it has to do with decision, choice, and action, and
44:37
Speaker 3: those are clearly places let's just call it using the
44:43
Speaker 3: philosophical umbrella term human agency. Our lives are meaningful or
44:49
Speaker 3: not to the extent to which we're capable of human
44:53
Speaker 3: agency and in the ways that we make sense out
44:57
Speaker 3: of our human agency. So I think our response to
45:01
Speaker 3: authority as agents who have choice is very much part
45:06
Speaker 3: of the story of meaning.
45:07
Speaker 2: Okay, fair enough. I was wondering.
45:09
Speaker 1: There's one philosophical aspect of your treatment of revelation which
45:15
Speaker 1: I found to be instructive, which is that you say
45:18
Speaker 1: that it cannot be justified or the authority of revelation,
45:22
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, not quite human, etcetera. It cannot be
45:26
Speaker 1: justified either on a fully objectivist or subjectivist.
45:29
Speaker 2: Account of meaning.
45:30
Speaker 1: And I spoke, maybe we should have done this towards
45:32
Speaker 1: the beginning, but those actually quite important terms over here,
45:35
Speaker 1: and if you could you clarify what you mean by
45:38
Speaker 1: this and how those two different models of meaning bear
45:43
Speaker 1: on this question, especially when it comes to revelation or
45:46
Speaker 1: the acceptance of revelation, or the living out of revelation
45:49
Speaker 1: within a life and trying to construct meaning from it.
45:52
Speaker 3: Oh. Sure. So the way my book is set up
45:56
Speaker 3: has this dual title absurdity and meaning in a contemporary
46:00
Speaker 3: philosophy and be Jewish thought. And the way I generally
46:05
Speaker 3: work is to kind of go through a Jewish intellectual history.
46:10
Speaker 3: I try to create a sort of Jewish philosophical thesis,
46:15
Speaker 3: but I run it in parallel to similar work I
46:19
Speaker 3: see going on in philosophy, in this case contemporary philosophy,
46:24
Speaker 3: and I sort of hybridize them into a conversation. So
46:30
Speaker 3: these terms subjectivists and objectivists come from that philosophical side
46:35
Speaker 3: of the conversation. I take in the chapter that addresses
46:41
Speaker 3: revelation and the human role in it. What I think
46:44
Speaker 3: it's comparable on the purely philosophical side, That is, you
46:47
Speaker 3: have contemporary philosophers of meaning who say that ultimately meaning
46:54
Speaker 3: as a matter of individual life satisfaction, and its criterion
47:01
Speaker 3: is subjective. I'll give you an example. The paradigm of
47:06
Speaker 3: a meaningless life is Pamu's book Sisiphus and Sisyphus. You know,
47:16
Speaker 3: is punished by the Greek gods, and his punishment is
47:21
Speaker 3: to roll a big stone up the hill, and when
47:25
Speaker 3: he gets it just near the top, it rolls down again.
47:28
Speaker 3: He has to do the whole thing over again, and
47:31
Speaker 3: he has to do that for eternity. What could be
47:35
Speaker 3: more self defeating, more futile, more empty than that as
47:40
Speaker 3: a life? A modern philosopher, American philosopher named Richard Taylor
47:45
Speaker 3: proposes a thought experiment where Sisyphus is given a pill
47:51
Speaker 3: and the pill is let's say it's a neurochemical, and
47:56
Speaker 3: it brings about the belief in Sisyphus that there's nothing
47:59
Speaker 3: more meaningful and satisfying in life than rolling big stones
48:03
Speaker 3: up the hill. On the subjectivist criterion, wouldn't you have
48:07
Speaker 3: to say, Well, from sissifus point of view, he's leading
48:10
Speaker 3: an exquisitely meaningful life and he gets to do it forever.
48:13
Speaker 3: What could be better than that? So if you want
48:16
Speaker 3: to be a subjectivist, you'd better have something that defeats
48:22
Speaker 3: that Richard Taylor thought experiment. So you have to say
48:27
Speaker 3: something along the lines of Harry Frankfort, who's my subjectivist here,
48:33
Speaker 3: which is that the most meaningful life is a life
48:36
Speaker 3: of love for the matters, the things, the persons that
48:42
Speaker 3: we care about. Okay, so far, so good, But there's
48:46
Speaker 3: no general criterion that is objective of what we should
48:51
Speaker 3: care about. Any place from which we start caring is
48:57
Speaker 3: already tinged with subjectivity. We can't get beyond that. So
49:03
Speaker 3: Frankfort thinks that we have to give a lot of
49:06
Speaker 3: deference to what individuals find meaningful in their lives. There's
49:11
Speaker 3: no master narrative talk here about the meaning of a life.
49:15
Speaker 3: It's purely meaning in life, and that is construed from
49:19
Speaker 3: a subjective point of view. Another philosopher, Susan Wolf, talks
49:26
Speaker 3: about an objective point of view. So Susan Wolf is convinced,
49:32
Speaker 3: I think, like many of us, aren't that a life
49:36
Speaker 3: loving and helping other people, working to cure cancer or whatever.
49:41
Speaker 3: It's more meaningful life than a life squandered on video
49:46
Speaker 3: games and pornography. Your side, I mean, okay, if you're
49:51
Speaker 3: a nihilist, you'd say not so fast. But from sort
49:55
Speaker 3: of within the life world of you know, people like us,
49:59
Speaker 3: we want to say, well, clearly, what is better than
50:01
Speaker 3: the other, and that sort of broad agreement that their
50:05
Speaker 3: lives better spent and worse spent on. The objectivist view
50:11
Speaker 3: is secured by consensus, the sort of rough consensus among
50:17
Speaker 3: people trying to live good lives lives of value that
50:22
Speaker 3: this is in what they consist and that militates against
50:27
Speaker 3: purely syncratic views. The problem with that view is that
50:33
Speaker 3: Susan Wolf admits beyond the sort of shared consensus within
50:37
Speaker 3: the given culture or society, she can't secure objectivity at
50:43
Speaker 3: a deeper level than that, she doesn't want to be metaphysical.
50:47
Speaker 3: I think that's a problem. But if you kind of
50:51
Speaker 3: calibrate what meaning is to meaning in life within the
50:56
Speaker 3: standards of your cultural society or the very person a
51:00
Speaker 3: level it, you know it sort of works. So the
51:06
Speaker 3: relation of objectivity and subjectivity there to revelation is that
51:13
Speaker 3: if revelation only gets traction because the Jews not only
51:21
Speaker 3: accept it but continue to affirm it, and of course
51:25
Speaker 3: many don't, if revelation only gets traction because God sits,
51:34
Speaker 3: as the seer says it all to he Luckiesrael on
51:38
Speaker 3: the praises of Israel. If Israel stops giving God to
51:42
Speaker 3: he looked, God has no home in this world. There's
51:48
Speaker 3: this dimension of human agency that is contingent on our
51:53
Speaker 3: continuing to find it meaningful, and our contingent on it
51:57
Speaker 3: are continuing to want to do it. I have a
52:02
Speaker 3: friend who's Jewish, but he was raised in every way
52:06
Speaker 3: to discourage him from thinking of himself as Jewish by
52:11
Speaker 3: Jewish parents because they felt that after the Holocaust, we
52:19
Speaker 3: really can't afford to be Jews anymore. Okay, that's a view.
52:24
Speaker 3: If everyone were to have that view, if the affirmation
52:32
Speaker 3: of the unity of God were to suffer the death
52:37
Speaker 3: of the problem of evil on account of Auschwitz, then
52:42
Speaker 3: you know, the last Jew can turn off the lights.
52:46
Speaker 3: There's nothing to I mean, that's a I don't think
52:50
Speaker 3: that's very likely, but it's not like it's impossible. So
52:54
Speaker 3: the role of human agency, of the nature of our
52:58
Speaker 3: decision to accept up a kind of authority that becomes
53:04
Speaker 3: that becomes crucial, and it straddles the subject of analysis
53:09
Speaker 3: and the object of analysis.
53:11
Speaker 2: It's interesting, okay.
53:12
Speaker 1: The final arena in which you address or bring to
53:18
Speaker 1: bear on the particular question is that of redemption, and
53:21
Speaker 1: you discussed redemption.
53:22
Speaker 2: One of the interesting things that you do is note
53:24
Speaker 2: that within.
53:25
Speaker 1: The history of Jewish thought there are it's quite a
53:28
Speaker 1: diversity of images, of models, of ideas of what the
53:33
Speaker 1: redemption might look like. And and this, in your mind,
53:37
Speaker 1: is significant. It's significant that there is a conceptual range here,
53:42
Speaker 1: and that is something that must be brought to bear
53:46
Speaker 1: and addressing the question of meaning. So, I mean, could
53:48
Speaker 1: you could you reflect on that for a moment?
53:50
Speaker 2: Why? Why is that the case?
53:52
Speaker 1: What is the significance of this kind of fundamental uncertainty plurality.
53:58
Speaker 1: You might even say, of visions of of.
54:01
Speaker 2: Redemption, how does that play in here?
54:05
Speaker 3: For me, the critical thing was, I'd say two axes.
54:11
Speaker 3: One is whether redemption is a natural event or a
54:16
Speaker 3: supernatural event, so to speak, should we think of redemption?
54:22
Speaker 3: You know, Christians have this, at least have aangelical Christians,
54:26
Speaker 3: you know in your part of the world, they have
54:28
Speaker 3: this notion of rapture that the saints among us will
54:33
Speaker 3: somehow be they'll just be sort of taken up before
54:38
Speaker 3: the great tribulations and travails of the prior to the
54:43
Speaker 3: return of Jesus take place. They'll be spirital that suffer.
54:47
Speaker 3: That's a very supernatural scenario. It's not like you can't
54:51
Speaker 3: find very supernatural scenarios in Jewish thought. But the other hand,
54:59
Speaker 3: you haven't a couple sources that have very realistic, very
55:03
Speaker 3: historical sounding scenarios. The sort of high water mark of
55:07
Speaker 3: that is my moonodes. But my mind is based himself
55:12
Speaker 3: on a Talmudic sage who says that the only difference
55:18
Speaker 3: between this world and the redemption, the redeemed world is
55:27
Speaker 3: shi budlah malfu. Yet I think it's the phrase subjugation
55:31
Speaker 3: to the gentile powers. Otherwise, you know, in the Messiatic age,
55:38
Speaker 3: people will continue to die, They'll I mean, they'll continue
55:43
Speaker 3: to do all kinds of things. So it's not a
55:48
Speaker 3: break with the laws of physics, so to speak. That's
55:51
Speaker 3: the Mimandian view. And where the miman Indian view goes
55:55
Speaker 3: is into a very realistic Messianism that Jewish thought picks
56:02
Speaker 3: up and modern Jewish thought in thinkers like him On
56:09
Speaker 3: Cohen and some near contemporaries like Stephen Schwarzchil and my
56:16
Speaker 3: friend Kenneth Siskin who writes a book on It's called
56:18
Speaker 3: Messianic Hope in an Age of Despair. They really asked
56:22
Speaker 3: the question, can human beings bring about a Messianic age?
56:27
Speaker 3: Does human agency, properly directed with the best political will
56:32
Speaker 3: in the world, point us toward this kind of hoped
56:37
Speaker 3: for consummation of history and end of history or at
56:41
Speaker 3: the end of the day, something supernatural needed. And modern Jews,
56:47
Speaker 3: you know, particularly progressive Jews, they want to sort of
56:52
Speaker 3: imminentize the whole thing, put it within the so called
56:55
Speaker 3: imminent frame. So I think this is where meaning comes
56:59
Speaker 3: in because in that last chapter of my book, what
57:03
Speaker 3: I want to do is really evaluate when what we
57:08
Speaker 3: have to believe in order to believe that human agency
57:10
Speaker 3: is meaningful. And I subjected to this thought experiment where
57:19
Speaker 3: a philosopher at NYU, Samuel Scheffler, says, well, think about
57:24
Speaker 3: this a person. People learn that within three weeks an
57:30
Speaker 3: asteroid will hit the earth and all life will come
57:34
Speaker 3: to an end. Your own situation is dodragid that you're
57:40
Speaker 3: about to die and you're not going to live another
57:45
Speaker 3: three weeks. So one course response would be I don't care,
57:52
Speaker 3: it's not going to happen to me. I'm going for
57:56
Speaker 3: some other reason. The better response, of course, would be
58:00
Speaker 3: my loved ones, everyone whom I've cared about, everything I
58:05
Speaker 3: know to be valuable in this world that's coming to
58:10
Speaker 3: an end. The question is to what extent is that
58:15
Speaker 3: certain future sort of leech back and undermine the meaningfulness
58:20
Speaker 3: of the life you've lived. If you've lived your life
58:24
Speaker 3: by doing something typically meaningful, like working for a cure
58:29
Speaker 3: to cancer, is the fact that there aren't going to
58:32
Speaker 3: be any human beings left in three weeks undermine the
58:36
Speaker 3: meaningfulness of the life you've lived and thought you've lived.
58:41
Speaker 3: It's so it's a way of tying the future in
58:48
Speaker 3: its more typically uncertainty to the meaning of our action,
58:54
Speaker 3: that is, our self constitution as beings who understand themselves
58:59
Speaker 3: to have agents and exercise it, to the meaningfulness of
59:04
Speaker 3: such lives. That's the point of getting into this discussion
59:08
Speaker 3: about Messianism in its varieties.
59:12
Speaker 2: Interesting and.
59:14
Speaker 1: Okay, I suppose you know the the idea. This is
59:18
Speaker 1: one of the interesting things about Messianism and Judaism is
59:20
Speaker 1: that it is to some degree deferred or at least
59:24
Speaker 1: kept vague enough that it can be it's not.
59:29
Speaker 2: It's precise details are not an immediate concern.
59:31
Speaker 1: Let's say, would you say that that's an advantage to
59:34
Speaker 1: living a present life that has that can be infused
59:38
Speaker 1: with meaning or well, you know me, let me actually
59:40
Speaker 1: ask a slightly different parallel question which just as follows,
59:43
Speaker 1: which is that would it be fair to say that
59:46
Speaker 1: Judaism might have some or might with in its traditions
59:49
Speaker 1: have some speculations regarding the meaning of life, but ultimately
59:53
Speaker 1: it is focused on praxis, and that the things that
59:56
Speaker 1: you do or the way of life that is prescribed
59:59
Speaker 1: by Josh tradition, by Jewish lar, etcetera, is seen Maybe
1:00:03
Speaker 1: as I don't know, a replacement for meaning or as
1:00:05
Speaker 1: a as the correct sort of object of focus and
1:00:11
Speaker 1: activity in order to gain meaning into one's life. Would
1:00:14
Speaker 1: that be a fair assessment? And and therefore messianism and
1:00:18
Speaker 1: even high level speculation about meaning is somewhat pushed away
1:00:23
Speaker 1: or deferred or replaced by an immediate, presentest set of
1:00:28
Speaker 1: concerns about how to live right now.
1:00:30
Speaker 3: Well, sure, I mean for many people who feel well
1:00:36
Speaker 3: embedded within what Jacob Bloser I call a judaic system,
1:00:41
Speaker 3: they would not be troubled by these kinds of questions,
1:00:45
Speaker 3: or I suppose in certain very traditional enclaves, they'd be
1:00:50
Speaker 3: embarrassed to say that they were. Whether that is a
1:00:54
Speaker 3: good thing or not, you know, I'll leave it to
1:00:57
Speaker 3: your listeners and yourself to decide. I don't want to
1:01:02
Speaker 3: shake people's trees too much. And as a friend of
1:01:07
Speaker 3: mine already from junior high school in junior high school
1:01:10
Speaker 3: used to say, the over examined life is not worth living.
1:01:15
Speaker 3: So you know, I think if these kind of ruminations
1:01:17
Speaker 3: are not what you're built for, by all means, don't
1:01:22
Speaker 3: go there. But I don't think that I think the
1:01:27
Speaker 3: view that you describe as sort of what Theodore Herzel
1:01:31
Speaker 3: had to say about Uganda, you know you called it
1:01:35
Speaker 3: a nachta seal, an asylum for the night. It wasn't
1:01:40
Speaker 3: the ultimate goal. So I think these questions of meaning, yeah,
1:01:45
Speaker 3: they have to come from a place of restlessness and
1:01:47
Speaker 3: questioning and searching and defamiliarization. But if you're not in
1:01:53
Speaker 3: that place. I'm not paternalistic. I'm not going to push
1:01:57
Speaker 3: anybody to go to that place. But I do think
1:02:00
Speaker 3: that it's hard to live in the modern world and
1:02:03
Speaker 3: not at least pick up the corner of the blanket
1:02:07
Speaker 3: that hides that place. One test might be the Cohlet test,
1:02:12
Speaker 3: with that answer of staying embedded in your life world,
1:02:18
Speaker 3: not exposing the values of your life world to a
1:02:23
Speaker 3: sort of acid wash from a more transcendent perspective so
1:02:28
Speaker 3: called views from Nowhere. Cohella, I'm not sure he wanted
1:02:35
Speaker 3: to be shaken out of the values and meanings of
1:02:39
Speaker 3: his life world, but for whatever reason he was, and
1:02:43
Speaker 3: would the answer, don't rock the boat. Just go along,
1:02:49
Speaker 3: be happy doing your you know, your Jewish things every
1:02:53
Speaker 3: day and particularly on Saturdays, without satisfying Cohelet. Well, the
1:02:58
Speaker 3: editor of the book wants to make it satisfied. Co
1:03:01
Speaker 3: he I mean, the last few lines are basically he
1:03:06
Speaker 3: basically says, you know, the making of books, there is
1:03:10
Speaker 3: no end. It wearies the mind. So in other words, okay,
1:03:14
Speaker 3: stop asking these questions. Apparently he's telling himself. And then
1:03:18
Speaker 3: it says, in the end of the matter, you know,
1:03:21
Speaker 3: worship God and do his midst of Hotah, you know
1:03:24
Speaker 3: his commandments, a word that nowhere appears in the book.
1:03:27
Speaker 3: I mean, co Helet gives no indication in the book,
1:03:31
Speaker 3: even if they're being revelation. It's all his own experience,
1:03:35
Speaker 3: working out of his own reasoning about what this can mean.
1:03:39
Speaker 3: That's i'd say why it's a kind of affable book
1:03:43
Speaker 3: from modernity. We have an affiliation with it.
1:03:48
Speaker 1: And I've also very much appreciated these last lines of
1:03:53
Speaker 1: Colle I think the magnificent, especially because they are the
1:03:56
Speaker 1: lines that allow co Hell to be put into the Tamach.
1:03:59
Speaker 3: More.
1:04:00
Speaker 1: Without those lines, it seems very difficult to imagine that
1:04:03
Speaker 1: that book would have eventually become canonized, because this is
1:04:06
Speaker 1: so much in it, and this is already been noticed
1:04:07
Speaker 1: in the Gamara and other places. There's so much in
1:04:09
Speaker 1: it that seems objectionable. But but the editor, the gloss
1:04:13
Speaker 1: over there seems to at least be able to assimilate
1:04:17
Speaker 1: Cohelet's difficulties and existential wanderings into a you know he's
1:04:23
Speaker 1: aid was in fact a wise personally did you know
1:04:27
Speaker 1: he is a part of the cannel ought to be just?
1:04:31
Speaker 1: You know, remember also do God's commandments and and and
1:04:35
Speaker 1: fear God.
1:04:35
Speaker 2: Et cetera.
1:04:36
Speaker 1: And that seems to be or let me ask you
1:04:38
Speaker 1: another way, are you prescribing the same medicine that the
1:04:44
Speaker 1: editor of Cohelea there, or the glossar of co heele
1:04:46
Speaker 1: There is prescribing.
1:04:48
Speaker 2: I'm not.
1:04:50
Speaker 3: I'm I think in the conclusion of my book, I'm
1:04:54
Speaker 3: prescribing medicine that puts co HeLa to this place, as
1:05:00
Speaker 3: say that the view that Gohela achieved, which a philosopher
1:05:07
Speaker 3: I lean on a lot in the book is a
1:05:10
Speaker 3: philosopher named Thomas Nagel, retired from NYU, who wrote a
1:05:16
Speaker 3: book I think in the eighties. It's called a View
1:05:18
Speaker 3: from Nowhere. And this view from nowhere is this sort
1:05:22
Speaker 3: of the mind soaring up to the outer reaches of
1:05:25
Speaker 3: the universe and looking down and saying it's all so insignificant.
1:05:30
Speaker 3: They're nothing more than ants. You know, that's a possible view,
1:05:33
Speaker 3: and in a way it's the view of science, and
1:05:37
Speaker 3: in a way it's the view that thought leads to
1:05:40
Speaker 3: to depersonalize the def meteorize, to say that the most
1:05:45
Speaker 3: real nuts and bolts furniture of the universe is that stuff.
1:05:50
Speaker 3: And it kind of inflects our commitments to stay with
1:05:55
Speaker 3: what we know and what we believe in with absurdity.
1:06:00
Speaker 3: We know they're problematized by the view from nowhere, but
1:06:04
Speaker 3: we can't live in nowhere. We have to live here,
1:06:07
Speaker 3: but we know that our choice to live here always
1:06:09
Speaker 3: sort of has some question marks above it. That's the
1:06:13
Speaker 3: theme of absurdity I bring in from the title through
1:06:16
Speaker 3: the book. I think we do need to live with absurdity,
1:06:19
Speaker 3: and I think that the ending of Cohella is a
1:06:25
Speaker 3: little too brusque with the absurdity. You need a really
1:06:29
Speaker 3: absurdist thinker like Manocamendel of Kutsk to remind you that
1:06:33
Speaker 3: there's still absurdity in Judaism. Not in the sense of
1:06:38
Speaker 3: something laughable. That's not what I mean. It's a kind
1:06:40
Speaker 3: of paradoxicality that attends our commitments, the inability to justify
1:06:47
Speaker 3: what we feel must be justified. We can't quite get there,
1:06:52
Speaker 3: but we have to stick with it anyway. I think
1:06:55
Speaker 3: that's where the end of Cohella sort of leads you.
1:06:58
Speaker 3: But the pious shouldn't kind of glasses that over.
1:07:03
Speaker 2: But fair enough.
1:07:03
Speaker 1: And the final question that I want to ask, which
1:07:06
Speaker 1: is uh, you know, which is a question that I
1:07:09
Speaker 1: asked it to many of my guests, something as follows.
1:07:12
Speaker 2: You know, we've been talking quite a bit about Cohelette
1:07:14
Speaker 2: as a forefather of this.
1:07:16
Speaker 1: If you could meet Cohelet, if you could sit down
1:07:18
Speaker 1: with him for for dinner and uh and ask him
1:07:22
Speaker 1: something or bridge conversation with him, what would you what
1:07:26
Speaker 1: would you want to say and what would you want
1:07:27
Speaker 1: to hear from him?
1:07:31
Speaker 3: Well? I think I guess I I put it to him. Look, Cohella. Uh.
1:07:40
Speaker 3: I know writers and scholars who think that your book
1:07:45
Speaker 3: reaches a resolution that ultimately you come down in a
1:07:49
Speaker 3: sort of happy place. I frankly don't see it. It's
1:07:54
Speaker 3: true that you have an endorsement of some of the
1:07:59
Speaker 3: best things in life, like light itself and a kind
1:08:05
Speaker 3: of joy that we feel in living, but you also
1:08:11
Speaker 3: have retractions of that. And there's no final word there
1:08:16
Speaker 3: so how do you leave it and whether you think
1:08:23
Speaker 3: of that editor.
1:08:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's actually a really really good question.
1:08:29
Speaker 1: I'd be very curious, obviously it seems that unlikely, but
1:08:33
Speaker 1: be very curious to hear Cohilet say what he thinks
1:08:36
Speaker 1: about the person who wrote those final six book him
1:08:39
Speaker 1: both his endorsement of Cohela's ideas but also his reframing
1:08:43
Speaker 1: them or you know, redirecting.
1:08:46
Speaker 2: Our attention to fear God and keeping his commandments. Okay,
1:08:48
Speaker 2: that is tantilizing indeed.
1:08:50
Speaker 1: Professor Alan Littleman, thank you so very much for joining
1:08:53
Speaker 1: us today on the Podcast of Jewish Ideas. This has
1:08:55
Speaker 1: been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to reading
1:08:58
Speaker 1: your future works in this subject and uh and welcoming
1:09:01
Speaker 1: you back.
1:09:01
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
1:09:03
Speaker 3: You're very welcome.
1:09:05
Speaker 1: This has been the Podcast of Jewish Ideas by Tora
1:09:08
Speaker 1: in Motion, produced by Alisha Kellman and myself JJ Kimbri,
1:09:12
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