Origins Are Not Destiny
The Torah's Call For Transformation
[God] found [the people] in a desert region,
In an empty howling waste [tohu y’leyl yishomun].
God engirded them, watched over them,
Guarded them as the pupil of God’s eye. (Deuteronomy 32:10)Now the land was wild and waste…(Genesis 1:3)
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From A Damaged Life
The premise of teshuva (repentance) is that we are not fatalistically determined by our past errors. Because of this counter-intuitive insight, we can rejoice in acknowledging our transgressions, for doing so is the first part of becoming new people.
This week, having just come through the other side of Yom Kippur, we read the Torah’s penultimate parasha, Haazinu (Deut. 32:1-43). In it, Moses tells the people two things. First, that they owe their survival and existence as a people to God. Second, that they have been, for the most part, a source of divine sorrow and disappointment. The people have been saved for a mission and yet have yet to achieve this mission, proving defiant and stubborn. All the same, God isn’t giving up on them. This is Jewish “chosenness” in a nutshell: The people are singled out by the highest expectations and at the same time singled out for their failure to meet them. The critique of Jewish chosenness (“you aren’t special”) is itself an expression of Jewish chosenness.
While a typical person might conclude that “this relationship just isn’t working, it’s time to move on,” God maintains high expectations for Israel even when it sins and disappoints. This aspirational ideal which God holds out, even as it is all too often contravened by reality, reveals God Godself to be a “believer.” Just as we struggle to have faith in God, we might say that God struggles to have faith in us. Just as we wrestle with theodicy (How can God do or allow evil?), God wrestles with anthropodicy (Is human freedom really worth the price?). The mechanism that saves God from being a gullible fool is teshuva.
Nassim Taleb writes that “Black Swans”—extreme, improbable and irreversible events take place in Extremistan, but not in Mediocristan. In Mediocristan, everything follows predictable laws; all patterns follow a bell curve distribution. In Extremistan, outlier events can be orders of magnitude greater than the average. Our predictive and social scientific models work well in Mediocristan, but are useless in Exremistan.
Perhaps teshuva—genuine repentence—does not exist in Mediocristan. Perhaps in Mediocristan, God is a fool to bet on the people of Israel, who, to all appearances seem no different than any other people, and in some ways are more rebellious. Yet, God’s choice of Israel, it seems, is a bet on the black swan, a willingness to look a fool in the eyes of the nations so as to gain outsized creative-moral returns in a new phenomenon.
That phenomenon is not obedience, per se, which God can enforce through intimidation and coercion, but willing obedience. Any God can be a despotic tyrant, but a covenantal God seeks to be a legitimate authority. If God chooses a non-rebellious people, a non-stiff-necked people, God is not choosing relationship, but a bot. The rebelliousness of Israel is a feature, not a bug. Similarly, in the rabbinic tale of the conversion of Reish Lakish, the former bandit does not renounce his strength, but redirects it to become an outstanding Talmudist. Arguing with God is one of those double-edged qualities that can make one either a heretic or a pious servant. But without the risk of heresy and deviance, no piety could ensue.
In describing the people’s origins, Moses says that God finds the people in a state of tohu, formlessness, wilderness. The same word describes the hylic soup out of which God creates the world in Genesis. The Torah makes a parallel between the formation of the world and the formation of a people. It also suggests that the essence of the world, just as the essence of a person, or a people, is not determined by the matter from which it is formed, but the telos—the purpose—for which it is formed. Look at something’s origins and they are unremarkable. Look at a thing’s raison d’être, and its mundane qualities begin to glow.
The distinction between material cause and final cause (or purpose) is Aristotle’s. But we find a version of this distinction in many philosophers, including moderns. Kant distinguishes between the world as it appears (the phenomenal) and the world of freedom (the noumenal). Max Weber distinguishes between the realm of facts and that of values. Heidegger distinguishes between the “ontic” (concrete) and the “ontological” (existential) mode of analysis. In rabbinic thought, the distinction appears as that between this world (olam hazeh) and the coming world (olam haba), things as they are, and things as they might or will be. Scientific method tells us how things work, but not why they exist.
Teshuva, then, is a portal to Extremistan, to a life not circumscribed by scientific method. And Israel is charged with the task of being a people of teshuva, a people not defined by their humble origins. When we rely on the prestige of our lineage we miss the why.
How do we know that teshuva is real? That true change is possible? Occasionally we have examples of it in our own lives, but for the most part it is a kind of principle of faith. In the Book of Jonah, which we just read, Jonah seems unpersuaded that real transformation is possible. In a sense, he’s right. Nineveh defers its destruction, but eventually comes to ruin. In the end, no matter the sincerity of the Assyrians in the moment, their eleventh hour stint proves unsustainable. But this is what makes God’s response to Jonah so compelling. God, who presumably, sees into the future and knows the future sinfulness of the Assyrians, does not judge them on that account. All that matters is the moment itself, and in that moment, they deserve a chance. In the debate between Jonah and God in the final episode of the book, Jonah plays the role of the social scientist while God plays the role of the believer. Both are right and both are wrong. Jonah is right in Mediocristan, God is right in Extremistan. But on a higher level, Jonah is wrong. Because all Jonah can say is “this is how the world works.” But God’s response is “Without the possibility teshuva, there is no reason for the working world to exist.” Jonah cannot refute the world’s why, by pointing to its how.
How is a line like this, which we read in Haazinu, hopeful?
They incensed Me with no-gods…I’ll incense them with a no-people. (32:21)
Adorno gives us a clue. He suggests, much like Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, that redemption can appear to us in a negative light. Every time, we have a sense of injustice, a sense of failure and disappointment, a sense that this ain’t it, we presuppose a future in which we will know what goodness and justice are. His work, subtitled “reflections from a damaged life,” suggests that despair itself can be a way of sketching a redeemed world. In Mediocristan, things simply are. In Extremistan, our disappointment lights the way to joy and freedom.
Realism and idealism both have their dangers. Realism without teshuva is soulless; idealism without consideration of the way of the world is naive. Game theory teaches that when one player is a realist, everyone else loses if they become idealists. But it also teaches us that one person’s choice to be foolish can lead others to become fools, and in so doing, to be wise. In Haazinu, God takes the risk of being a fool so that we might follow.
In accepting the reality of teshuva, we vindicate God’s foolishness, proving God wise. Formed from a formless, howling void, we become: light. The same light about which God says “let there be” (1:3) in Genesis is Isaiah’s “light unto the nations” (42:6). It is none other than the light of the void, repenting. Teshuva is the light of our destiny overcoming our origins.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—Here’s my new essay on Martin Buber and I-Thou.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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