Judaism: A Religion of Trust

From Red Heifers to Hedge Funds

This is the statute (chok) that the Lord has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid. (Numbers 19:2)

“This is the statute of the Torah which ‎the Lord had commanded, saying;”
We subscribe to ‎the rule that God did not reveal to us the innermost reasons for ‎the individual commandments of the Torah. Nonetheless, by ‎giving the Torah to us He also encouraged us to try and ‎understand as much as we could, as the better we understand the ‎meaning of the commandments the greater the love with which ‎we perform them. By introducing this portion with the words: “this is the statute of the Torah‎,” G’d hinted that we must remember that basically ‎the entire Torah consists of a string of commandments and that ‎all that has been revealed to us is what is needed to enable us to ‎perform these commandments in the proper manner. One reason ‎why the rationale for the commandments has not been revealed is ‎to ensure that we observe them because G’d has so commanded ‎us and not because we agree with G’d’s reasons. This principle enables us to understand that the ashes of ‎the red heifer have been chosen to be the vehicle whereby we can ‎cleanse ourselves ritually after having become contaminated in ‎one way or another through contact with a dead human body. ‎We have to remember also, that, due to the origin of our souls ‎being immediately below G’d’s throne in heaven, the soul is ‎naturally anxious to carry out all of G’d’s desires. The body, being ‎a product of the earth, opposes the urgings of the soul as a ‎matter of principle. Whenever we succeed in defeating the ‎opposition of our bodies to perform G’d’s commandments we ‎accumulate merits for ourselves.‎
The reason why the body opposes performance of the Torah’s ‎commandments is simply that it cannot fathom the reason for ‎these commandments. Had the body known the reasons for the ‎commandments it would certainly have cooperated with the soul ‎every step of the way.‎ In view of the above, when a person dies and his soul has ‎departed on its way to rejoin its Maker in the celestial regions, the ‎body has been bereft of every spiritual stimulus and becomes ‎ritually contaminated. This is also the reason why, according to ‎our sages, the bodies of the righteous do not confer ritual ‎impurity on people who contact them, as these bodies have ‎become refined already while the souls inhabited them, so that ‎they had become willing partners in performing the ‎commandments of the Torah. An allusion to this is contained in ‎the words: “this is the statute of the Torah‎”, i.e. “on account of the Torah being a ‎statute containing laws whose meaning has not been revealed, as ‎a result of which most bodies refused to cooperate with their ‎souls, these bodies are now ‘punished’ by becoming a source of ‎ritual contamination for people that come in contact with them.‎ (Kedushat Levi)

It’s clear that the way Brown and Mercer approached programming was fundamentally different from the way other hedge-fund programmers thought about it. At Tudor, for example, Sushil Wadhwani trained a machine to approach markets in a way that made sense for human traders. By contrast, Brown and Mercer trained themselves to approach problems in a manner that made sense for computers. … Presented with apparently random data and no further clues, they sift it repeatedly for patterns, exploiting the power of computers to hunt for ghosts that to the human eye would be invisible. …

It’s clear that the way Brown and Mercer approached programming was fundamentally different from the way other hedge-fund programmers thought about it. At Tudor, for example, Sushil Wadhwani trained a machine to approach markets in a way that made sense for human traders. By contrast, Brown and Mercer trained themselves to approach problems in a manner that made sense for computers. … Presented with apparently random data and no further clues, they sift it repeatedly for patterns, exploiting the power of computers to hunt for ghosts that to the human eye would be invisible. …Robert Mercer … [says]: “If somebody came up with a theory about how the phases of Venus influence markets, we would want a lot of evidence.” But he adds that “some signals that make no intuitive sense do indeed work.” Indeed, it is the nonintuitive signals that often prove the most lucrative for Renaissance. “The signals that we have been trading without interruption for fifteen years make no sense,” Mercer explains. “Otherwise someone else would have found them.” (Matt Levine, “Gamestop is Back?!”)

When a person becomes ritually impure through contact with a corpse, the Torah instructs him to place the ashes of an unblemished red heifer (parah adumah) upon himself as a a means of purification. This particular case is paradigmatic of a more a general question: Why do the ashes of an unblemished red heifer, specifically, purify, and why does God give us laws that seem so idiosyncratic as to be unreasonable? A classic answer is that the idiosyncratic laws known as chukim are only apparently without reason. Search hard enough and you will find the reason. And you should. Not all that is unreasonable is irrational. The chok exists to lead you closer into God’s mind, a rare view for those philosophers bright enough to achieve it.

But Kedushat Levi argues that chok is not simply a way-station to mishpat (intelligible law); rather, it exists to enable and enjoin submission, ensuring that we devote ourselves to something higher than ourselves and not merely something higher than ourselves on condition that we agree with it or understand it. The law of the red heifer—which is a law only on the books, and a law that even in its own time would not have been a regularly fulfilled one (unblemished red heifers are hard to come by)—purifies us whether or not we understand it. It works independent of our need to be correct or in control. The law of the red heifer is consistent with a rabbinic principle that the reward for a mitzvah is greater when one obeys out of a sense of commandedness rather than out of a sense of “this is a good deed.”

Kedushat Levi ironically turns the chok into a mishpat by explaining its allegorical teaching: most of us live in a state of inner conflict between body and soul. Our beastly dimension seeks to do only what it can validate, while our soul is willing to trust. The chok exists to elicit trust, bitachon. As animals, we don’t trust; seeing is believing. We will not believe we’ll enter the promised land until we are there. The Israelites of the desert have a trust issue—they spend their lives pining for Egypt because they do not trust they’ll make it to Israel. Righteous people, i.e., those who serve God not just with soul but with body, those who have trained themselves to serve without resisting the chok, do not contaminate, because their bodies, as it were, have alchemized into something other than bodies. This is the argument of Kedushat Levi—not halachic advice. (In Brothers Karamazov, there is a profound scene in which the town saint, Father Zossima, dies, and, his body putrefies, raising questions for his devotees about whether he was, indeed, a saint. Alyosha defends the view that he is a zaddik irrespective of his human stench.)

While the Torah offers many chukim—and while Jewish thinkers debate which laws are which—the red heifer stands out as representative of chok as a category. It is notable that what appears to be arbitrary or random is a law that helps people move forward. The chok here is not a method for ostracism, but integration. The law singled out as the chok of the Torah includes. Pure reason—the law of thermodynamics—might have left the impure in a state of impurity. (Today, without a Temple, we are bereft of this chok in practice and thus remain in a state of collective, ambient impurity). The Enlightenment can be defined as a world without red heifers.

You might think that chok and red heifers represent archaic and vestigial aspects of human civilization that we’ve thankfully moved on from. I would argue that they represent the enduring and humbling fact that the universe remains mysterious and beyond our fathom. Chok doesn’t mean that science doesn’t exist, it means that science is sometimes weird, and that being a true scientist requires open mindedness even when that puts you in conflict with institutional science. Were Isaac Newton’s attempts to predict the End Times or engage in numerological Biblical analysis valid? Not necessarily. But we should think carefully about separating out the mishpat Newton from the chok Newton. Perhaps Newton understood that not all truths are fully intelligible. That doesn’t make them less true.

The hedge fund manager Robert Mercer teaches that the job of a mathematician investor is not to explain correlations, but simply to find them and trust them. If it turns out that the implied volatility on wheat futures correlates to the number of Google search enquiries for “Indian Restaurant” it’s not my job to explain it. I just have to trust the math. One reason to avoid Ta’amei ha’Mitzvot—giving reasons for commandments—is that you will throw out the commandment when the reason no longer applies, and be wrong. Is handwashing before bread really only about sanitation? The world of the mitzvot is too complex to start tinkering with individual ones simply because you think they’re inoperative. A successful hedge fund manager told me that in previous generations, alpha accrued to those with the best data sets and data analytics tools. Today all those things have been commoditized. Everyone is analyzing the same stuff. The spreads have become smaller. You rarely win by having a chiddush, an insight; rather, you win by trusting in the insight even when you can’t explain it. Victory goes to those who can resist the urge to cancel the algorithm when it appears wrong—or appears to be malfunctioning. Bitachon (trust), not intelligence, wins. This lesson pairs strongly with the stories of the spies and Korach, both of whom over-index on rationality to the detriment of hope, faith, and the courage of one’s convictions.

The existence of the Jewish people, like the parah adumah, are a kind of chok: our idiosyncratic nature and our cultural and national survival makes little rational sense. That we have maintained our identity and customs through times when we were explicitly pressured to assimilate and adapt universalism means that we have come to be representatives of chok; we have been preserved by chok. Hermann Cohen sought to define Judaism as a “religion of reason,” proving our Kantian bona fides to his fellow German compatriots, at the very moment when Europe was embracing its own chok: “blood and soil” style- anti-semitism. He was tragically wrong. We are a religion of trust. We trust that the Torah is reasonable; and we trust that there is an elegance to chok and to the system of law even when we are baffled. But Cohen was also right. For we are not a religion of anti-reason, either. We are believers that chok as such is rational. It is a more expansive view of reason and a more humble attitude to a world we were gifted, but not did not create.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh