Diversity, Wisdom, or Righteousness?

The Torah's Case for Value Pluralism

When the Most High gave nations their homes / And set the divisions of humanity / [God] fixed the boundaries of peoples / In relation to Israel’s numbers. (Deuteronomy 32:8)

And the Rabbis say: The earth stands on twelve pillars, as it is stated: “God set the divisions of the nations according to the number of the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 32:8). Just as the children of Israel, i.e., the sons of Jacob, are twelve in number, so does the world rest on twelve pillars. And some say: There are seven pillars, as it is stated: “She has hewn out her seven pillars” (Proverbs 9:1). Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua says: The earth rests on one pillar and a righteous person is its name, as it is stated: “But a righteous person is the foundation of the world” (Proverbs 10:25). (Talmud Chagiga 12b)

The world stands on three things: on the Torah, on prayer/worship/service and on acts of lovingkindness. (Pirkei Avot 1:2)

On how many pillars does the world stand? 1? 3? 7? 12? 17? 8 billion? Any answer more than one suggests “value pluralism,” the idea that there are many goods, and that they are often in conflict with one another, such that ethical and political life require difficult decisions between competing virtues. Emphasize any one virtue too much and the whole edifice collapses, like a chair whose legs are uneven. The abstract, metaphysical question of how many pillars is really an opportunity to reflect not on a quantitative problem so much as a problem of what the ancients called “the one and the many”—how does the variety of phenomena constitute a unity, how does the diversity of human experience comprise a single thing called “humanity”? Choose too few pillars and you aren’t diversified enough, choose too many and the importance of each becomes diluted.

The sages argue with each other over whether the world stands on 12, 7, or 1 pillar—what is going on? Their commentary takes inspiration from a poetic line in this week’s parasha, Haazinu (Deuteronomy 32:1-52). Each is saying something about metaphysics and ethics, about what is sustaining the world.

The first view is that Israel is a microcosm of the world; just as there are 12 tribes, so there are 12 pillars. Just as there is diversity within Israel, so there is diversity in the world. What keeps the world sturdy is diversity itself, the variety of experiences, perspectives, values, ways of seeing. If we wanted to be anachronistic, we might say something like democracy—the notion that each person (and each group) has an indissoluble ontology, an incommensurate personality that needs to be accounted for. The world doesn’t stand, in short, on the moral excellence of saints or the scientific prowess of inventors and technologists or the creative inspiration of artists, but on the cacophony of all people, of all peoples, the Babel of hoi polloi, the confusion and discord of those whose speech and opinion are different. The first view says that the strength of Israel and the strength of the world are the same strength, and that strength is particularism, the diffident refusal to become absorbed in some flat, monotonous pretense of total agreement, a pollyanna oneness, a letterless spirit.

The second view, taken from Proverbs, suggests that the world rests not on human diversity so much as on wisdom. In some ways, it is the opposite view. If the first view is populist, the second is elitist. Notably, the second view is propounded by a minority of sages (“and some say”). The second view says that the world is not held up by the stubborn and the ignorant, by the malicious and the deceptive, but only by those who follow the wise course. This is not the same kind of elitism as that based on either old-guard WASP hereditarianism or nouveau-meritocracy, for the ability to secure a place at Yale or Harvard is no indication of wisdom. We are talking about spiritual elitism which does not always correspond to social status. Still, the analogy to contemporary debates about the role of “elites” in a democracy is instructive—how much do think the world stands on everybody all together or perhaps just a small number of actors with an outsized influence on everyone else (for better and/or for worse)? Note that wisdom is personified, her pillars do not belong to us humans. So perhaps the point is even stronger—the world is not held up by any people whatsoever, but simply stands on the Platonic ideal of wisdom, the possibility of knowing the truth and applying it, whether we get it right or not. There is something humbling about this idea, especially when we consider the strong possibility that we have been and continue to be deeply ignorant about fundamental questions.

A third view suggests that wisdom itself is insufficient. Neither the fact of diversity and particularism (which can be mad or foolish if not accompanied by wisdom) nor nor the possibility of wisdom (which may become distorted or corrupted if not restrained by the needs and beliefs of non-elites) can save us. We need righteous people, saints. Wisdom and righteousness differ in that wisdom is biased towards contemplation. Righteousness is biased towards action. Of course, there is overlap between the two, but consider the difference between a thinker whose studiousness is a way of life and a person whose mission is to go around “doing mitzvas”—visiting the sick, accompanying mourners, attending weddings, practicing hospitality. The wise person looks at reality and understands it; but the righteous person looks at reality and sees the person who needs help, and helps. There is a classical teaching that the world is upheld by the righteous, by a few saints. But there is an addendum to this idea, espoused by Maimonides, which democratizes it—whenever we act righteously we tip the scales in ourselves and in the world towards righteousness. Every single righteous act that we do, in the moment we do it, is world saving. The world does not stand on diversity or wisdom—why? Because they are static, just facts. The world rests on deeds. We can’t rest on our laurels, the world can’t rest on any pillar. It has to be secured each day, each moment. Although we don’t know it, each moment is a moment of spiritual warfare between the forces of good and evil and we have the power to help the forces of good win.

One of the hallmarks of mystical thinking is nondualism, the insight that good and evil come together, are intermixed, codependent. And a common criticism of mystical thinking is that it eviscerates ethics—if everything is both good and evil, why should I choose good? Isn’t there good no matter what I do? And evil no matter what I do? Don’t I need to get “beyond good and evil” if I am to be enlightened, stop caring about conventional morality? This is the way of the wise, but not the way of the righteous. For the wise know that life, per Blake, is a “marriage of heaven and hell”; but the righteous know that their job is not to explain Satan, but to defeat him. By Satan I mean “the accuser”—the force that tells the divine and us that the world shouldn’t exist, that nothing is better than something, that life is an illusion and therefore pointless. It may be that the self is an illusion, that life is an illusion, and that nothing is better than something—but it’s not the task of the righteous to assent to this “wisdom”; it’s the task of the righteous to defeat it. God is considered wise, yet calls on Moses, Jonah, and other prophets to persuade God not to enact God’s severe decrees upon humanity. God’s real wisdom is knowing when to put the breaks on God’s wisdom.

Now, on a meta-level we could read the three opinions as conflicting or agreeing. Either, diversity, wisdom, or righteousness or, diversity, wisdom, and righteousness. Perhaps the point of diversity is to give us wisdom, and the point of wisdom to enable righteousness, etc. Yet it’s also possible that diversity is really most foundational, after all it’s the verse quoted in Deuteronomy—the world can only stand if it stands on many things; the world as such can only survive if, paradoxically, it enables disagreement. The Torah comes to an end as a bookend to the story of the Tower of Babel—the result of a failed imperial project is a new order in which peoples are required to humbly go their own ways. Israel is presented as the model of anti-Babel, because it does not tell its 12 tribes to become the same. Both wisdom and righteousness must be taken down a peg, for they are just two values within an array of values, but diversity stands, paradoxically, as the highest value, for it is what allows the proliferation of values rather than the tyranny by any single one. The wise and the righteous can get it wrong. Not that the many get it right. But their manifold wrongness is somehow part of the blessing of human proliferation. On Yom Kippur, we asked permission to pray with sinners (we being among them), because the power of diverse voices, even unrighteous and unwise, is preferable to the saintly soloist.

As you can tell, I have not settled myself on an answer to my own question—does the world stand on diversity, wisdom and/or righteousness? Agnes Callard puts the problem in the following way:

There is a philosophical conundrum at the root of all this: morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane—but we also need an aspirational target at the top, so as to inspire us to excellence, creativity and accomplishment. In other words, we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable. And no philosopher—not Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has yet figured out how to construct a moral theory that allows us to say both of those things.

Diversity secures the “safety net at the bottom,” wisdom and righteousness ensure an “aspirational target at the top.”

Perhaps we can’t solve this problem philosophically, but simply have to live it. If so, whatever we decide, we see that Moses offers us, with his parting speech, a blessing and an homage to difference.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh