A Culture of Narcissism

A Lament for Our Secular Age

“The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”

― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

Alas!
Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow;
The princess among states
Is become a thrall. (Lamentations 1:1)

If she should become someone’s [wife] while her vow or the commitment to which she bound herself is still in force, and her husband learns of it and offers no objection on the day he finds out, her vows shall stand and her self-imposed obligations shall stand. But if her husband restrains her on the day that he learns of it, he thereby annuls her vow which was in force or the commitment which she bound herself; and God will forgive her. The vow of a widow or of a divorced woman, however, whatever she has imposed on herself, shall be binding upon her. (Numbers 30:7-10)

I.

My thesis today is simple: The greatest moral and spiritual sin is narcissism, and all sins are downstream of self-absorption. I am created with an ego, blessed with an ego, gifted with an ego, but not so that I can admire myself, but so that I can be secure enough in myself to give and receive love; so that I can be humble enough in myself that I can seek wisdom in the perspective and company of others; so that I can be vulnerable enough in myself that I can receive help and understand the vulnerability of others.

Today begins the month of Av, a month associated with loss and destruction, as well as with contemplation—what can we do to repair? The Talmud imagines the destruction of both First and Second Temple as a breakdown in relations between spouses and friends, as well as in the relationship between God and the people (the stories of the destruction of the Temple, which is called a house, bayit, appear in Gittin, the tractate dealing with divorce law).

II.

The Written Torah is plainly set in a patriarchal context—which is not to say that it sees patriarchy as a moral or political ideal (this is a question for the living interpreters and practitioners of Jewish tradition to work through, in consideration of the fact that significant parts of the non-Western and Western world remain deeply patriarchal, and in consideration of the fact that great minds disagree about both the tactics and ends required to end patriarchy.)

In the context of the time in which the written Torah is set, the man of the house is sovereign and his wife is both his subject and his responsibility. This week’s Torah reading, Mattot-Masei (Numbers 30:2-36:13) offers us an obvious example of patriarchy at work—a woman’s vows are subject to her husband’s approval and can be retroactively nullified, provided the man nullifies them in the instant that he first hears of them. In all sorts of ways, material and symbolic, we are reading of an asymmetrical relationship, not a relationship modeled on the kind of egalitarianism espoused by the French Revolutionaries (which, if we are being honest, is modeled on fraternity, not eros).

And yet, as I’ve written elsewhere, even asymmetric relationships involve interdependency. And so, I believe, the best way to read about relationships in the Torah, be they between husband and wife or between God and Israel, is to focus on what they teach about interdependency and collaboration, even in the face of power difference. The core teaching of the Torah is not that God is more powerful than us, but that God chooses to be in relationship with us. Likewise, the Torah’s moral teaching on marriage and romantic relationship is not that one partner should be more powerful than the other, but that it is not good to be alone. God’s recognition that it is not good to be alone leads to his creation of an ezer k’nedo (an antagonistic helper) for the human being, Adam. And though this particular story is gendered in one direction, the point I take from it is that inherent in real relationship is the feature of ezer k’negdo cutting in both ways. The reason it’s the woman who gets emphasized is that we might presume her only to be an ezer, only a helper, only a yay-sayer. But the k’negdo part means that she helps by opposing, by being different; inherent to a loving relationship is conflict, and this conflict, born of the fact that my other is not my clone, is part of the great mystery.

The Torah describes not a formal egalitarianism in which couples split chores 50-50, but an existential reciprocity in which we are challenged to get outside of our own default egotism and feel compassion for and connection to someone other than ourselves. In theological terms, God creates the world because God cannot stand to be self-enclosed. What Greeks call perfection—total autonomy, total self-engrossment—the Torah finds morally and spiritually flawed. The headline is not that God wants to be worshipped, but that God wants to be lovingly opposed (which is why Abraham’s crowning moment comes when he bargains with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorra and why the test of every prophet is his ability to move God from judgment to mercy.)

III.

The book of Lamentations likens Jerusalem to a widow (almana). This week’s parashah says that a widow’s vows stand and cannot be annulled. Try to understand the metaphor without the baggage of a modern. The Torah offers us two images: one is the image of a person whose vows cannot be annulled (yay, independence!). Another is an image of a widow in mourning, personifying a city that only wishes it could be dependent.

Consider another shocking point. If Jerusalem is a widow, where is God, her husband? Lamentations says that “God is dead” two millennia before Nietzsche.

Liberals may look at a law that says a man can annul his wife’s vows and just throw the verse away or hide it under the rug. But understood psychologically and spiritually, the Torah is teaching a different point—that the price of admission is interdependence, and that in some sense, we can no longer make our own vows, for we are now “flesh of one flesh” with another person. The state of widowhood or divorce, likewise, should be read psychologically rather than literally. A person who does not belong to another person’s house is free to vow for him or herself.

Now, the kicker. What we moderns celebrate as Enlightenment values, Lamentations describes as a setting of despair and heartache. What we celebrate as independence of mind and body—the ability of a person to think for herself and speak her truth—the Torah validates only as a last resort, a lesser measure.

We live in the time where God cannot nullify our vows. We are, per Lamentations, living in a time of the destroyed house, a secular age, a time where we experience ourselves and design our political expectations around the assumption that God is dead. The destroyed house means we are free—free to be liberals, free to give every person a vote, free to let all (or at least, many more) opinions have a platform; we are free to let people desecrate themselves and others provided it is with consent. God will not speak through a megaphone and say “I forbid it.” We are free to make our own vows, to choose our own adventure, to construct reality in our image and use our constructions to build palaces on Mars and customize our avatars in the Metaverse. We, as a human race, worked hard for this freedom. Hundreds of years of religious wars, capped off by a bloody century of world wars, peak colonialism, and much of the globe under totalitarian rule. And we’re still a far away from being able to “proclaim liberty throughout the land.”

And we Jews have paid a heavy price, having been a global-historical scapegoat since at least the year 70, when the Temple last stood. We know better than many groups how much better it is to be a religious and ethnic minority in a liberal society than in an illiberal one.

And yet, we are mournful. For the death of God isn’t just a spiritual loss, a loss of faith. It is the death of relationship itself.

That is what we mourn in the month of Av, the failure of true relationship in the world. The loss of the Temple is not the loss of a building or an institution only or primarily; it is the loss of the conduit that brought humanity and God together as loving helpmates to one another, ezrei k’negdam.

IV.

The loss of the Temple is caused by, but is also an expression of narcissism. The fact that we look at a text about vow annulment and immediately think “wow this is terrible,” is testament to the reality that ours is an age of resentment. And, I agree that the law, as written, seems unfair, even unjust, in its essentialist presentation of the sovereign husband. But what we should be mourning in this month of Av is that we have come to see our relationship to the world in terms of rights rather than desires, desert rather than generosity, scarcity rather than abundance. If a relationship is something that you have to litigate before the law it is likely already broken. God and Israel have a covenant, but the moment either party points to it and says before a Beit Din (a court) “you’re not fulfilling it,” the relationship is over. God and Israel can chastise one another, enjoin one another, argue with one another—but they cannot do it before a neutral third party without jeopardizing their bond. For the sake of the Midrash, let’s just say that this is how we can understand the Romans: Israel complains about God to Rome and God complains about Israel to Rome, and in so doing Rome destroys them both. For the death of the Temple is the death of God, the God who dwells with God’s ezer k’negdo, and the return of God to the solipsistic existence that the Graeco-Roman philosophers consider ideal.

V.

The death of God—secularism—began with the destruction of the Temple, which was itself caused by the death of good human relationships. The source of our inability to forge good relationships is narcissism.

Why did social critic, Christopher Lasch think that therapeutic, self-help culture is a form of narcissism? Because it presumes that the self to be helped is self-enclosed, rather than fundamentally in need of relationship. Our goal in life not silent, solitary Enlightenment, but to make one good, true relationship. When we do that, we solve in a microcosmic way, the problem of relationship itself, and we contribute the repurposing of the Destroyed Home.

But isn’t life great with nobody to correct us or challenge us? Well, it’s better than being subject to authoritarian rule. But authoritarianism is not the right way to think about relationship, even if it’s a structural risk; authoritarianism is not the concept that’s modeled in the meaning of ezer k’negdo. But the fact that we tend to take our relationship with God for authoritarianism — and then go on to accept or reject it — is something worth mourning. Why is the choice between liberty without interdependence and interdependence with domination and oppression?

Al eleh ani bochyia (Lamentations 1:16).

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

P.S.—Fittingly, I had the pleasure of chatting with Jamal Greene, a Columbia Law Professor and author of How Rights Went Wrong? Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing Us Apart. You can listen here.