Introducing a guest post series! I reached out to authors who have mentioned a topic that I wanted to hear more about, one that’s not necessarily their typical content. These posts are often on questions of metaphysics, philosophy, religion, and their intersection with materialist frameworks, including sciences like physics or biology.
Ari Shtein is a writer and student with an interest across policy, culture, philosophy, and religion. You can find his Substack here.
[content warning: careless synonyms]
One thing you will notice if you read the Torah is that it’s really stupid. Most of it makes no sense, and even the understandable parts tend to be crazy and wrong.
That’s not to say there’s no wisdom to be found there—“thou shalt not kill” is solid advice—just that it’s often sandwiched between ridiculous things like “don't boil a goat in its mother’s milk” and “stone the gays.”
For the early Jews, this was a real problem. Sure, their Pentateuch had plenty of reasonable and discernible instructions for performing sacrifices in the temple, and for a while they could just mostly focus on those bits and ignore the rest—but when the Romans put an end to their Temple worship in the 70 CE Siege of Jerusalem, the Jews were really shit out of luck.
Worse, a growing splinter movement was proselytizing among Jews and Romans alike. These renegades had a pretty great strategy for deflecting Torahic looniness,1 and it was two-pronged:
First, they were, in essence, a cult of personality. Decades earlier, a certain prolific and popular preacher named Josh had come along, pointed out that even the semi-smoothly-functioning Temple Judaism of the time was pretty bad and crazy, and started talking more sensibly about values like “being nice” and “drinking fun alcohol things instead of boring water things.”
Second, they were rewriting the whole damn thing. Not really rewriting—they still considered themselves good observant Jews; people of the Book or the Law or Whatever—but the Old Testament sucked and they knew it and so they were writing a New one. Backwards-compatibility was a concern, but only a marginal one—the splinterers mostly just wrote up their own new moral doctrines, and based them on what they’d heard Jesus preaching about.
This was a great new way to do religion, and it worked well—it continues to work well now. The New Testament is simply way less crazy than its precursor—it contains a bunch of good stories that make sense, a very clear philosophical vision,2 and a compelling, well-attested, coherent central narrative. A lot of people liked the New Testament; they liked its protagonist and its updated morals. Even today, it’s not uncommon to find someone who seriously asks themselves “what would Jesus do?” when faced with any sort of moral dilemma.
But the Jews had no such luxuries; we still don’t.
No one asks “what would Moses do?” because Moses was super cool and great only for a little while, and then he was too mean to a rock one time, and God said “fuck you, guy” and he and his brother got killed off. All the earlier patriarchs had their own weird imperfections too: Abraham was very much a polygamist; Isaac got tricked into his own near-sacrifice at the ripe old age of 37, and then grew older and went blind and got tricked again by his son right before he actually died; that son, Jacob, was actually a pretty sweet guy and we tend to like him, but he just didn't do all that much moral instructing beyond “please don't kill your brother, even if he's kind of a dick (because he’s my favorite).” From there, especially in all the canonical texts beyond the Torah—Nevi'im (Prophets) and K’tuvim (Writings), making the Hebrew Bible in whole “TNK” or “Tanakh”—everyone only gets more and more impure and stupid and eaten by whales.
So the Jews didn’t have any great role models, or even useful parables. Just crazy old stories about red heifers with dubious “ew, women on their periods are gross” morals.
So what to do but reinterpret the stories!
Over a few hundred years, the early non-Christian Jews wrote a Mishnah and a Tosefta and a couple of Talmuds; hundreds of rabbis studied and trained and debated each other into the grave, trying to turn our bronze age traditions into something good and interesting and moral.
Where God had prescribed the death penalty for various crimes, one rabbi would comment, “Ok, fine, we have a death penalty, but oh my goodness, how gross is that, a truly just court wouldn't possibly condemn a man to death more than once every seven years.” And then another rabbi would reply, “No no, it’s grosser even than you say! A court which kills a man once every seventy years is barbaric.” And then a couple smartasses would come along and they'd say, “Y’know, if we were in charge, there would never be a death penalty for anything,” to which all the other rabbis would respond, “Nah, shut up, that’s too far in the other direction now, we need some deterrent to murder, after all!”
All the rabbinic texts are full of this kind of thoughtful bickering. God says something crazy or difficult to parse, then the rabbis make clearer moral statements, go back and forth for a little while, and the Law is twisted and distorted until it makes some kind of sense.
It's a good system.
You may be wondering: how was this allowed? Did the Jews even believe that their Holy Book was a holy book anymore?
Well, it sure seems like they did—even today, every time we read Torah in synagogue, we sing, “This is the Torah that Moses gave us; it came from the mouth of God through Moses’ hand.” So do the rabbis consider themselves divine, or something? Have they all become prophetic? How could they possibly be permitted to rewrite and reinterpret the Lord's Law?
As it turns out, God gave us permission!
Right before Moses dies—before the Israelites enter their Promised Land and the story ends—in Deuteronomy 30:11-12, God speaks through Moses and he says:
Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach.
It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?”
God washed his hands of it all! Once the Torah came down from heaven, and once Moses brought it before the Israelites, it became our Torah. So long as you respected its most basic structures—so long as you acted to interpret it in earnest and good faith, and you didn’t worship any idols or boil any goats in their mothers’ milk—the halakha—the Law in practice—could be whatever you wanted it to be.
Or, at least, the Talmudic scholars interpreted the passage as meaning that. From the Baba Metzi'a 59b:
It has been taught: On that day R. Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument, but they [the other rabbis] did not accept them. Said he to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it!’ Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place — others affirm, four hundred cubits. ‘No proof can be brought from a carob-tree,’ they retorted.3
Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it!’ Whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards — ‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water,’ they rejoined.
Again he urged: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it,’ whereupon the walls inclined to fall. But R. Joshua rebuked them, saying: ‘When scholars are engaged in a halachic dispute, what have ye to interfere?’ [sic] Hence they did not fall, in honour of R. Joshua, nor did they resume the upright, in honour of R. Eliezer; and they are still standing thus inclined.4
Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!’ Whereupon a Heavenly Voice cried out: ‘Why do ye dispute with R. Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halachah agrees with him!’ But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘It is not in heaven.’ What did he mean by this? — Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, After the majority must one incline.
R. Nathan met Elijah [a supposedly-still-living-ish prophet] and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour? — He laughed [with joy], he replied, saying, ‘My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.’
Like all good traditions, rabbinic Judaism is entirely circular, arbitrary, and beautiful.
You know what else is circular, arbitrary, and beautiful?
Life, man. Life.
The form of Talmudic inquiry underlies most of what we care about in the world. Just as the sages have to deal with crazy things like “this guy got swallowed whole by a whale, the inside of the whale looked just like a synagogue, and then he hung out in there for three days” that are the ABSOLUTELY TRUE AND INCONTESTABLE WORD OF GOD—we have to deal with irritating authoritarian bosses, or weird and inconvenient regulations, or a big heavy pendulum that keeps mysteriously twisting throughout the year.5
Nobody tells us why or how any of this came to be—why God wants us to know Jonah's story, why your boss is such a dick, why that goddamn pendulum keeps twisting itself. But we've gotta deal anyway.
Maybe there's no great explanation—maybe the craziness of the Book of Jonah just goes to show that the “experiences of all the prophets but Moses were visions, not actualities.” Maybe your boss is just going through a rough divorce.
Or maybe there’s room to get a little cleverer with it! We can try to fit the story into our broader understanding of the world, try to make it work, try to derive some kind of lesson. Maybe Jonah could've survived three days in the whale's belly—“after all, fetuses live nine months without access to fresh air.” Maybe the pendulum is twisting because we're all twisting all the time, whoaaaa.
Sometimes these clever answers will be silly or wrong. We know a lot more now about how fetuses survive nine months without air (hint: they get their blood pre-oxygenated)—but for a 15th century scholar, this was a solid stab at reconciling Jonah's craziness with contemporary science! Fudge it like this enough times—exercise the creative and interpretive muscles associated, argue with other smart and creative people, and eventually incline after the majority—and you’re bound to discover something true and useful from time to time.
Judaism as a faith and as a culture is doing this, over and over again, to every question about everything.6 The point is to build, bit by bit, a sensible world-model within the bizarre, unavoidable, nonsensical constraints we’re under.
They also had a great strategy for deflecting pagan looniness, but that’s unfortunately a bit outside our scope…
I am always saying this.
Now is maybe a good time to point out that this is all the Talmud is. There are no secret Jewish space laser plans or whatever—it's just a bunch of crazy old men telling stories about how much the walls respect them.
I wish I knew the history of science more better. This is such a bad example; I'm so ashamed...I only even thought of the Foucault Pendulum because the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has one, and I found it so freaking cool when I was younger.
Statement not vetted by rabbinical authorities; this is just how I like to think about it!
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I appreciate that you were willing to say up front that some of this is careless. It’s also inflammatory. I understand that drives views and builds a certain kind of sense of community, but it can also hollow it out.
This is playing with fire. I don’t feel remotely welcome here any longer after reading this. I’m not sure what to do about that, but I’ll just register explicitly: this was aggressive and insulting.
We are in the dream and we dream together or alone it is factual when you are in the dream how would you prove this to isn’t a dream - we receive input through nerve endings as a matter of fact the way we think that we are separate from the environment is a fallacy just like galaxy we are an entity individually each person is a galaxy of some uniform shape that coalesced into a singularity for some the link is still there and fully conceivable the major singularity can address each its components god communicating to prophets they have the wired linkages intact you forgot to have that ability as well .
As I read the initial reference I posted earlier @Alan Dershowitz the openings sentence of the god doesn’t exist but only God does is a dichotomy or is it Label exists that is the wire to connect to the source the burning letters seen in the bush outward manifestation of the circuitry for an instant to show the the reality @Dr. Zachary Rubin reading about the bacteria almost invisible making up the 2 -8 % of our DNA is mind blowing and they are living organisms @Steven Drucker so the bickering of rabbis is finding that point in which all is in a temporary balance of insightful efficacy in the most efficient way possible manipulating the vocal cords to utter the choices words of goats milk in the cauldron and riled goat jumped into the pot reflection @Sam Stein