Jacob, The Post-Secular Jew

Religion After Intellect

“How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.” (Genesis 28:17)

The Talmud states: “One who has Torah learning but does not have fear of Heaven is like a treasurer who was given the keys to the inner sanctum but lacks the keys to the outer chamber. How will they get in? For 14 years, Jacob studied Torah in the house of Eber. Here on Mount Moriah he opened a new channel of connection with God—the channel of prayer. So Jacob proclaims: ‘Indeed there is God in this place, but I did not know!’ I did not know this secret, that only when learning is joined to prayer can one truly pass through the gate of heaven.” (Maor Vashemesh)

According to the Maor Va’shemesh, Jacob was an intellectual who discovered religion in a foxhole. When Jacob proclaims “God was in this place and I didn’t know it” he is admitting the difference between knowing something theoretically and knowing it with your whole being. In Aristotelian terms, Jacob moves from Epistemē to Phronesis. We already know that Jacob is clever, while his brother Esav is a simpleton. Jacob’s transformative moment—when he dreams of angels ascending and descending a heavenly ladder—teaches him (and us) that cleverness is not enough. The simpleton may have his head in the sand, but the intellectual may be more deceived precisely because he thinks himself superior to the simpleton. Jacob must flee Esav so as to liberate himself from the curse of comparison. Jacob should measure himself against his ownmost potential, not the obviously base level of his brother the hunter.

When reading a book, how often do you ask yourself “How awesome is this!?” Jacob’s amazement, which the ancients understood to be the origin of philosophical reflection, reminds us that perception requires more than just fact-finding. We can only make meaning if we bring a certain mood to the patterns we see. In Jacob’s case that mood is fear and awe. While rationalists view emotion as neutral at best and distorting at worst, Jacob’s spiritual journey demonstrates that emotion can guide us to seeing clearly. A disassociated, purely intellectual Jacob would not be able to experience the holy. Such a Jacob might know that God exists, but would never know themselves to be visiting “the abode of God.”

Sam Harris, following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, makes the argument that religion and religiosity are an enduring source of barbarism in the world. To the extent that religious Judaism is superior to religious Islam and Christianity, Harris might argue. it is because it is a less “religious” religion. Or as the joke goes, Jews believe in one or fewer gods. Liberal expressions of religion, then, aren’t really religious, since religion can be defined categorically by its 1) irrationality and 2) esteem for the afterlife. The problem with Islam as compared to Christianity, for Harris, is that it hasn’t yet had its Protestant Reformation.

The Enlightenment goal as Harris might articulate it is less fear and trembling, more Bayesian updating of one’s priors. You don’t have to be an atheist to align with a version of this claim. René Girard and Martin Buber argue that Judaism and Christianity mark a progress over paganism in subduing and containing human religiosity. Pure religion is human sacrifice, the assumption that myths are true. Thankfully, monotheism questions myth and finds substitutes for human sacrifice, they argue.

But here’s a question for Harris and the New Atheists: Assuming all of your metaphysical assumptions are true (the world is just material, God is merely a human construct), does secularism transmit its values down to the 4th generation? How about the 10th? And if it does not—if the cultural alternatives that present themselves in the vacuum left by secularism’s critique of religion are phenomena like the cult of Andrew Tate, Gwyneth Paltrow, Effective Altruism, hustle culture, or post-colonial woke Tiktokers for Bin Laden—what then? What happens when the well-above-replacement birth rates of the most fervently religious overtake the decelerating birth rates of the most rationalistic? Might the question no longer be is “Judaism true?” But does Judaism work? Might the question no longer be “Is generic religion good or evil?” but “How can a specific version of religion be a winning force for good against competing religious options?” These practical questions are no replacement for religious experience, but they clear a path for a post-secular religious revival. Jacob is the secular Jew who all of a sudden realizes that if the antisemites hate me, perhaps it is for a positive reason. Jacob is the secular Jew who realizes that academic learning which culminates in sympathy for Hamas exposes a fundamental failure of that system of learning. The university is, as it were, “Torah without prayer.” From Moses Mendelssohn to Kafka, from Hannah Arendt to Philip Roth to Sam Harris, the post-Enlightened Jewish intellectual class has largely been a class with Torah (learning), but no prayer (transcendence). They possessed the keys to the inner chamber, but not the outer chamber. They dwelt in the divine abode, but were never able to say “God was in this place and I did not know it.”

Jacob’s dream is a diluted form of prophecy as compared to the bold vision and dialogue of his grandfather, Abraham. But it will have to do. For the skeptical Jacob, religious experience is not a sure path to conversion, but a wedge of doubt at one’s posture of doubt. If Esav embodies the anti-intellectualism of the brute, Jacob displays overly-cerebral intellectualism. The way to defeat Esav is not, in the long-run, just by outsmarting him, but also by finding an authentic connection to God. In the figure of a ladder we find a model of moderate religion that connects heaven and earth—the point is not to escape earth for heaven, nor is it to banish heaven and insist that we are just beasts. Jacob must transcend his intellect without abandoning it. He must turn his intellect into a ladder that eventually reaches its limit.

There is a third way amidst the power struggle between brain and brawn, it is the way of thinking that is also heartfelt, of ideas that are also prayerful, of analysis that is concerned not just with what is correct, but what is sustaining. Amazement at our existence won’t convince us one way or the other of the doctrinal truth of our religion, but it will enable us to affirm that there is more here than we can know. Our life education is incomplete if we can’t say “God was in this place and I didn’t know it.”

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh