I recently came across this clip. It’s from God on Trial, a Masterpiece production based on accounts of a group of concentration camp inmates who convened a beis din and put God on trial.
It’s a powerful clip, and makes some excellent points. I was making similar points ten years ago, but back then I’d yet to have any contact with anyone who agreed with me. (I posted an excerpt of something I had written back then here.)
To be fair, the God of the Bible is nicer than many other gods, like, say, Zeus , or Loki, but He’s not GOOD. At best, when He was in a good mood and we hadn’t done anything lately to tick him off, He was good to us.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Gedolim Stories: Lies or Lunacy?
Yesterday Life in Israel had a post in which he related (and questioned) the following story:
A yeshiva bochur that was not interested in learning torah went to Rav Shteinman. He asked Rav Shteinman if he would like steak or ice cream.
Rav Shteinman asked what those things are, what the words mean. The boy responded that they are the names of very delicious foods. Rav Shteinman than said no, he would not want those foods.
The young man than said that if he is offering the rav food that everybody considers to be delicious, yet the rav does not want any of it, so "I can also not want to learn Torah even though everybody claims torah is very sweet. So why do they force me to learn torah?"
Rav Shteinman responded that if you would give someone honey and he would put it in his mouth and say it is bitter, it is a sign that this person has sores in his mouth. The same thing with Torah - someone who does not want to learn torah, it means that he has lashon ha'ra in his mouth and therefore has no desire to learn torah.
Like many stories meant to show the piety of the Gedolim, it instead makes its protagonist look foolish. It suggests both that R’ Shteinman is ignorant of something as common as ice cream and that he is not intelligent enough to understand that honey and ice cream fill the same niche in the analogies of this discussion.
It was while listening to a similar gadol story years ago that I realized that either these stories are less than accurate or the gedolim were nuts. In that story a group of talmidim were following a rav around while he did bedikas chometz. When he was finished, one of the talmidim said, “Rebbe, this is good, we searched the entire house and didn’t find even a crumb of chometz!” The rav ripped his shirt open, pounded on his chest, and cried out, “There is no chometz in the house, but in here, in here there is still chomtz!”
I think there are three possible origins for such stories.
1) It really happened as described. I can see that there are people who would be inspired by someone so holy that they are so immersed in Torah they don’t even know about common things like ice cream or who is given to effusive, exciting emotional displays of piety. To me, treating as near-divine the words of someone profoundly ignorant of the culture he lives in or of someone given to emotional outbursts seems foolish.
2) The story is based on a real incident, but is exaggerated for effect. There really was a bochur who complained to R’ Shteinman that he didn’t like learning, but there was no mention of ice cream. The rav pointed to his heart and bemoaned the presence of “chometz”, but he didn’t rip open his shirt, pound on his chest, and shout. This to me seems the most likely origin for gadol stories. Most people don’t make up stories, but will often embroider and exaggerate real incidents to make them more exciting.
3) The stories are completely made up.
Given the number of gadol stories circulating, chances are there are some that fall into each of the three categories.
It was crazy gadol stories like those above that started me questioning what I had been taught. For all that exaggerated stories may be inspiring to some, perhaps the frum community should think about the potential harm of such stories, both to people like me who may go from questioning silly stories about gedolim that are portrayed as semi-divine to questioning stories supposedly written by the Divine hand; and to the gedolim that both star in these stories and are made to look foolish by them.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
What was Moshe’s name?
I was thinking about my latest post last night, and it occurred to me that “Moshe” probably was not Moshe’s real name. What follows is purely speculation, as I haven’t yet researched any of this, but:
1) Perhaps “Moshe” was a nickname for people with “Mose” as part of their name, rather like calling someone named McSomething “Mac.”
2) Perhaps Moshe’s name started out like all of the Pharaohs with “Mose” as part of their name, and had a god’s name as a beginning – such as Ramose (born-of-Ra) or Thutmose (born-of-Thoth) - and the name of the idolatrous god was later dropped as incongruous with the man who spoke directly with (the jealous) God and was the greatest monotheistic leader of all time.*
Call me cynical, but I’m leaning towards the second explanation.
*In keeping with the pasuk that says he was named for where the Egyptian princess found him, perhaps he was named for the god of the Nile, in which case his proper name would have been Hapimose – born-of-Hapi, god of the Nile.
1) Perhaps “Moshe” was a nickname for people with “Mose” as part of their name, rather like calling someone named McSomething “Mac.”
2) Perhaps Moshe’s name started out like all of the Pharaohs with “Mose” as part of their name, and had a god’s name as a beginning – such as Ramose (born-of-Ra) or Thutmose (born-of-Thoth) - and the name of the idolatrous god was later dropped as incongruous with the man who spoke directly with (the jealous) God and was the greatest monotheistic leader of all time.*
Call me cynical, but I’m leaning towards the second explanation.
*In keeping with the pasuk that says he was named for where the Egyptian princess found him, perhaps he was named for the god of the Nile, in which case his proper name would have been Hapimose – born-of-Hapi, god of the Nile.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Pahro and Pharaoh
Statue of Hatshepsut, the female Pharaoh
About eight years ago, I went through a phase when I was very interested in researching the historical background of yetzias Mitzrayim. At this point, while I had my questions and doubts, I still mostly believed in what I had been taught in yeshiva. I was also newly interested in history – while I had discovered that I liked reading about history while in high school, I didn’t start reading history books instead of novels until I was in college.
What I found was fascinating.
If the Hebrew and secular calendars are adjusted for an apparent 165 year discrepancy a surprising number of things line up.
The New Kingdom period in Egypt begins at roughly the same time that the Jews were enslaved. The New Kingdom marks the point at which the Hyksos, a Semitic people that had ruled Egypt for a hundred years, were ousted by the Egyptians. It was indeed a new Pharaoh who was now ruling over Egypt, from a new dynasty and a different peoples than the one who was indebted to Yosef. This new ruling class would feel no obligation to the memory of someone who had been a collaborator with their former oppressors. If anything, it would give weight to their concerns related by the Chumash: that the Jews would side with the enemies of Egypt. In the Chumash, this concern seems to come out of the blue. Within its historical context, it makes sense. The Egyptians were concerned that the Semitic Jews would side with the recently deposed Semitic Hyksos, exactly as Yosef had done. The solution was to enslave all the Jews.
The Pharaoh into whose household Moshe is adopted is Ahmose. Mose, an Egyptian word that means “born of,” is both given by the Chumash as Moshe’s name and is the major component of the Pharaoh’s name.
The Chumash says that Pharaoh died, and the work became harder under the new Pharaoh. There is a medrash that says Pharaoh had leprosy, and would bathe in the blood of Jewish children to try to alleviate his condition. The Pharaoh who died was Thutmose II, whose mummy was found to be covered in lesions, evidence of a severe skin disease. He was succeeded by his teenage son Thutmose III, with Hatshepsut, Thutmose III’s mother (and Thutmose II’s wife AND sister) serving as regent. Hatshepsut quickly displaced her son and ruled as Pharaoh in her own right, the only woman ever to do so. To help solidify her rule she erected many monuments to herself which depicted her as male – monuments built by slaves.
The Pharaoh Moshe went to to demand the Jews’ freedom was Hatshepsut. Pharaoh didn’t die during makos bechoros, despite being a firstborn, because only the firstborn males died. Firstborn women did not.
In the early 1800s a document from about the same time as yetzias Mitzrayim was discovered in Memphis, Egypt. Called the Ipuwer Papyrus after its author, an Egyptian named Ipuwer, it described violent upheavals in Egypt: famine, drought, and slaves escaping with the Egyptians’ wealth.
After Hatshepsut’s death, Thutmose III had her monuments destroyed and all mentions of her chiseled off walls and steles. We only know of Hatshepsut because of the accidental discovery of her tomb. The popular theory is that Thutmose III had her memory erased as revenge for her displacing him as pharaoh. Might it also have been to erase the memory of an embarrassing defeat at the hand of the Egyptians’ former slaves? Could this mass erasure program also account for the lack of Egyptian records of the Jews living in Egypt?
About a century after Thutmose III, Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten, built a new capital city from scratch, and forced Egypt to adopt the monotheistic worship of Aten, the sun-disc. (When he died, Egypt quickly reverted to worshiping its entire pantheon of gods, and Akhenaten’s new city was abandoned.) Was Amenhotep/Akhenaten inspired to monotheism by the recent display of power by a monotheistic god?
What I found made me feel confident that my frumkeit rested on solid ground. Even then, I wondered what an Egyptologist would make of the parallels I found, but it made me feel that my religion was rooted in historical fact.
Yet there were things that didn’t quite fit. According to the same timeline, the pyramids had been built a couple of centuries before the mabul! Some poking around online led me to one article that claimed the Great Sphinx, built about the same time as the pyramids at Giza, had horizontal weathering patterns consistent with flood damage. There was my answer: the pyramids HAD been built before the mabul – and had survived! I speculated that their size and heavy stone construction were what had saved them from the floodwaters. Happily, the same principle could be applied to other ancient monuments.
And yet…
The history of Egypt is not interrupted by a world-changing flood in the centuries after the construction of the Great Pyramids. There is no sudden gap in the record, no rediscovery and adoption of an ancient culture by new people such as would be expected to if nearly all of humanity was wiped out. Instead, Egyptian history flows smoothly, year after year, millennium after millennium, a continuous culture that lasted for some three thousand years.
Even yetzias Mitzrayim, the event for which I’d found plausible evidence, seems to have left no mark on Egyptian history. The reign of Thutmose III was not marked by a period of rebuilding from the devastation of the maakos and the shock of losing a huge number of slaves that must have been essential to a large part of the Egyptian economy. It was instead a period of conquest and increased prosperity.
Worse, if we are to take midrashim at face value, as I had done for many of my points above, we also had to take at face value to medrash that says that Hashem killed four-fifths of the Bnei Yosroel during maakos choshech. That would mean that Hashem killed some twelve million people for the crime of not wanting to leave the only life their families had known for generations and follow an Egyptian prince into the desert.
In the long run, I’m not sure if this particular foray into biblical historicity was a net gain or loss for my religiosity, but this way of relating to biblical stories – expecting them to conform to other known facts about the world – was terribly harmful to my emunah. There is something to be said for the approach that non-Torah knowledge is to be avoided and that the Torah is right and everything that might contradict it, up to and including our own senses, is wrong. Such an epistemology is maddening to anyone who doesn’t already accept it, and is based on circular logic, but it is effective at keeping people within the fold. For me, trying to make the Torah fit with the world we know was what eventually led me to conclude that it is best understood as mythology rather than history.
What I found was fascinating.
If the Hebrew and secular calendars are adjusted for an apparent 165 year discrepancy a surprising number of things line up.
The New Kingdom period in Egypt begins at roughly the same time that the Jews were enslaved. The New Kingdom marks the point at which the Hyksos, a Semitic people that had ruled Egypt for a hundred years, were ousted by the Egyptians. It was indeed a new Pharaoh who was now ruling over Egypt, from a new dynasty and a different peoples than the one who was indebted to Yosef. This new ruling class would feel no obligation to the memory of someone who had been a collaborator with their former oppressors. If anything, it would give weight to their concerns related by the Chumash: that the Jews would side with the enemies of Egypt. In the Chumash, this concern seems to come out of the blue. Within its historical context, it makes sense. The Egyptians were concerned that the Semitic Jews would side with the recently deposed Semitic Hyksos, exactly as Yosef had done. The solution was to enslave all the Jews.
The Pharaoh into whose household Moshe is adopted is Ahmose. Mose, an Egyptian word that means “born of,” is both given by the Chumash as Moshe’s name and is the major component of the Pharaoh’s name.
The Chumash says that Pharaoh died, and the work became harder under the new Pharaoh. There is a medrash that says Pharaoh had leprosy, and would bathe in the blood of Jewish children to try to alleviate his condition. The Pharaoh who died was Thutmose II, whose mummy was found to be covered in lesions, evidence of a severe skin disease. He was succeeded by his teenage son Thutmose III, with Hatshepsut, Thutmose III’s mother (and Thutmose II’s wife AND sister) serving as regent. Hatshepsut quickly displaced her son and ruled as Pharaoh in her own right, the only woman ever to do so. To help solidify her rule she erected many monuments to herself which depicted her as male – monuments built by slaves.
The Pharaoh Moshe went to to demand the Jews’ freedom was Hatshepsut. Pharaoh didn’t die during makos bechoros, despite being a firstborn, because only the firstborn males died. Firstborn women did not.
In the early 1800s a document from about the same time as yetzias Mitzrayim was discovered in Memphis, Egypt. Called the Ipuwer Papyrus after its author, an Egyptian named Ipuwer, it described violent upheavals in Egypt: famine, drought, and slaves escaping with the Egyptians’ wealth.
After Hatshepsut’s death, Thutmose III had her monuments destroyed and all mentions of her chiseled off walls and steles. We only know of Hatshepsut because of the accidental discovery of her tomb. The popular theory is that Thutmose III had her memory erased as revenge for her displacing him as pharaoh. Might it also have been to erase the memory of an embarrassing defeat at the hand of the Egyptians’ former slaves? Could this mass erasure program also account for the lack of Egyptian records of the Jews living in Egypt?
About a century after Thutmose III, Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten, built a new capital city from scratch, and forced Egypt to adopt the monotheistic worship of Aten, the sun-disc. (When he died, Egypt quickly reverted to worshiping its entire pantheon of gods, and Akhenaten’s new city was abandoned.) Was Amenhotep/Akhenaten inspired to monotheism by the recent display of power by a monotheistic god?
What I found made me feel confident that my frumkeit rested on solid ground. Even then, I wondered what an Egyptologist would make of the parallels I found, but it made me feel that my religion was rooted in historical fact.
Yet there were things that didn’t quite fit. According to the same timeline, the pyramids had been built a couple of centuries before the mabul! Some poking around online led me to one article that claimed the Great Sphinx, built about the same time as the pyramids at Giza, had horizontal weathering patterns consistent with flood damage. There was my answer: the pyramids HAD been built before the mabul – and had survived! I speculated that their size and heavy stone construction were what had saved them from the floodwaters. Happily, the same principle could be applied to other ancient monuments.
And yet…
The history of Egypt is not interrupted by a world-changing flood in the centuries after the construction of the Great Pyramids. There is no sudden gap in the record, no rediscovery and adoption of an ancient culture by new people such as would be expected to if nearly all of humanity was wiped out. Instead, Egyptian history flows smoothly, year after year, millennium after millennium, a continuous culture that lasted for some three thousand years.
Even yetzias Mitzrayim, the event for which I’d found plausible evidence, seems to have left no mark on Egyptian history. The reign of Thutmose III was not marked by a period of rebuilding from the devastation of the maakos and the shock of losing a huge number of slaves that must have been essential to a large part of the Egyptian economy. It was instead a period of conquest and increased prosperity.
Worse, if we are to take midrashim at face value, as I had done for many of my points above, we also had to take at face value to medrash that says that Hashem killed four-fifths of the Bnei Yosroel during maakos choshech. That would mean that Hashem killed some twelve million people for the crime of not wanting to leave the only life their families had known for generations and follow an Egyptian prince into the desert.
In the long run, I’m not sure if this particular foray into biblical historicity was a net gain or loss for my religiosity, but this way of relating to biblical stories – expecting them to conform to other known facts about the world – was terribly harmful to my emunah. There is something to be said for the approach that non-Torah knowledge is to be avoided and that the Torah is right and everything that might contradict it, up to and including our own senses, is wrong. Such an epistemology is maddening to anyone who doesn’t already accept it, and is based on circular logic, but it is effective at keeping people within the fold. For me, trying to make the Torah fit with the world we know was what eventually led me to conclude that it is best understood as mythology rather than history.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
An Anniversary, an Index, and a Proposal
Here we are again, another year gone by. Tomorrow is two years since I put up the first post on this blog. I looked through the last year’s worth of posts just now, and I found to my surprise that they comprise not even a quarter of the total. A lot has happened in the last year, but day-to-day I haven’t really gotten any busier. Just lazier, I suppose. Or less enthusiastic.
On an unrelated note, I’ve been wondering if it might be useful to create a central index for the blogosphere. There are only a couple of dozen Jewish skeptic blogs at any given time, and the old ones tend to disappear, either because they’re taken down or because no one links to them anymore. What do you think?
Year Two Index
Best of
Bias and Rationality
An exploration of whether biases influence reasoning and whether those biases affect the validity of conclusions.
Corrupting Influences
Which is more dangerous – licentious material or dissenting information, and the use of the fear of the former to ban the latter.
Jewish Music
By far my most popular post. A side-by-side comparison of some mainstream “Jewish” songs and the pop tunes that they copied.
Eisav HaRasha?
A straight reading of the Chumash shows that Eisav wasn’t quite as evil as he’s made out to be, and Yaakov was no paragon of virtue.
Theology/Philosophy
Bias and Rationality
The Force Behind Nature
Just Shoot Him!
Euphemisms, Shema, and Paradigms
“God Himself Couldn’t Sink This Ship”Eisav HaRasha?
With Gratitude to Hashem…
Suicide is Painless…
The Celestial Bank
Response to articles / things read / events
Big Brother is Watching You…
Debugged Kashrus
Tiferes Yisroel Update
When Humans Become Gods
Reminiscing / culture
I Have Met the Other, and He is Me
Corrupting Influences
Jewish Music
Frummer Than God
Holidays
1st Century Spin Doctors
Search Judaism
Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section four I
Unfortunately, the last in the series. Maybe someday I’ll go back to it. Probably not. After a while it went from being fun to being annoying.
For Fun
Shaped Like a BLOGG!
On an unrelated note, I’ve been wondering if it might be useful to create a central index for the blogosphere. There are only a couple of dozen Jewish skeptic blogs at any given time, and the old ones tend to disappear, either because they’re taken down or because no one links to them anymore. What do you think?
Year Two Index
Best of
Bias and Rationality
An exploration of whether biases influence reasoning and whether those biases affect the validity of conclusions.
Corrupting Influences
Which is more dangerous – licentious material or dissenting information, and the use of the fear of the former to ban the latter.
Jewish Music
By far my most popular post. A side-by-side comparison of some mainstream “Jewish” songs and the pop tunes that they copied.
Eisav HaRasha?
A straight reading of the Chumash shows that Eisav wasn’t quite as evil as he’s made out to be, and Yaakov was no paragon of virtue.
Theology/Philosophy
Bias and Rationality
The Force Behind Nature
Just Shoot Him!
Euphemisms, Shema, and Paradigms
“God Himself Couldn’t Sink This Ship”Eisav HaRasha?
With Gratitude to Hashem…
Suicide is Painless…
The Celestial Bank
Response to articles / things read / events
Big Brother is Watching You…
Debugged Kashrus
Tiferes Yisroel Update
When Humans Become Gods
Reminiscing / culture
I Have Met the Other, and He is Me
Corrupting Influences
Jewish Music
Frummer Than God
Holidays
1st Century Spin Doctors
Search Judaism
Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section four I
Unfortunately, the last in the series. Maybe someday I’ll go back to it. Probably not. After a while it went from being fun to being annoying.
For Fun
Shaped Like a BLOGG!
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Frummer Than God
I recently received an invitation to a family wedding. The invitation was unremarkable, except for one interesting coincidence: both of the bride’s grandfathers had married women named “rayuso.”
The recent practice of omitting women’s names is ostensibly because printing a woman’s name is untznius. Yet even if we take it as a given that tznius is a legitimate concern, this practice makes no sense.
1) In regards to this particular case, it seems that it would be far more tznius to write “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” than it is to write “Mr. Smith and his beloved.”
2) The stated rationale of tznius rules is to avoid anything erotic. It follows that anything avoided due to tznius concerns is (at least somewhat) erotic. I find it hard to believe that even the most sex-crazed guy would find the name of a grandmother printed on a wedding invitation arousing. Yet it seems there are people in the Chareidi world who believe that even mentioning a woman by name is erotic. (Either that, or they never thought through the implications.) Which brings us to:
3) There are women’s names all through tanach. Here is a community that sincerely believes that God wrote every word in the Torah. God clearly thought there was no problem with referring to women by name. And yet, they have the chutzpah to try to be FRUMMER THAN GOD!
Go figure.
The recent practice of omitting women’s names is ostensibly because printing a woman’s name is untznius. Yet even if we take it as a given that tznius is a legitimate concern, this practice makes no sense.
1) In regards to this particular case, it seems that it would be far more tznius to write “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” than it is to write “Mr. Smith and his beloved.”
2) The stated rationale of tznius rules is to avoid anything erotic. It follows that anything avoided due to tznius concerns is (at least somewhat) erotic. I find it hard to believe that even the most sex-crazed guy would find the name of a grandmother printed on a wedding invitation arousing. Yet it seems there are people in the Chareidi world who believe that even mentioning a woman by name is erotic. (Either that, or they never thought through the implications.) Which brings us to:
3) There are women’s names all through tanach. Here is a community that sincerely believes that God wrote every word in the Torah. God clearly thought there was no problem with referring to women by name. And yet, they have the chutzpah to try to be FRUMMER THAN GOD!
Go figure.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Suicide is Painless…
I sat at one of the long tables in the dining room, idly munching on potato chips while I listened to the bearded man at the front of the room. It was motzei Shabbos, and like every week when Shabbos ended early enough, the yeshiva had a melave malka after night seder. The man at the front of the room was a guest speaker, a rebbe at one of the other high schools in the city.
I’ve long since forgotten most of his drasha, but one story that he told stuck with me. A couple had bought a house and discovered that part of the floor in the attic was broken. They called a contractor, he came the next day, and after a few hours of work it was repaired. A few days later, they went up to the attic to put some boxes away and found that the floor was broken again in the same spot. They called the contractor back. This time he spent an entire day reinforcing the floor. A week later it was broken again.
A few days later the couple was discussing the problem with a neighbor. “I’m surprised you bought the house at all.” he said. “After that boy hung himself in the attic, the house was vacant for years.”
“That was why the floor was breaking.” The rebbe declared. “The neshama of this boy was barred from gan eden, and even from gehenom. With no place to go, he kept returning to the place where he had killed himself. And every time his neshama visited, the floor broke. If he had only known what would happen, he would never have killed himself!”
In retrospect, it sounds like the kind of ghost story ten year olds tell around a campfire to scare each other. For some reason, though, it brought the afterlife into sharp focus for me. This boy, who had killed himself hoping to end it all, was instead living on and suffering for his misdeed. I, too, would live on after I died in this world. I too would be judged. I no longer saw Olam Haboh as a fairytale, but as a real place that I would one day go to. I, not a character in a story called “my neshama.” For years, I would periodically have dreams in which I stood before the Heavenly court.
It’s the association with that sudden insight, rather than any inherent quality of the story, which made me remember it.
When I took Abnormal Psychology in college and learned about major depression and suicide I was reminded of the story. This time, instead of bringing a religious concept into focus, it raised some disturbing questions. Nearly everyone who commits suicide does so because they are clinically depressed. The only exceptions are terminally ill patients who wish to end their pain and religiously-motivated people such as suicide bombers or the Jonestown Massacre. A clinically depressed person who dies by suicide was killed by his illness no less than someone who dies of cancer. Could a person be held morally responsible for dying of an illness, condemned because of it to exist in limbo for all eternity?
It turns out that the rabbonim today agree that a clinically depressed person is not responsible for committing suicide. The family sits shiva for them, and they may be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But what, then, of all of the suicide victims of the millennia between matan Torah and advent of modern psychology? How many families of clinically depressed suicide victims were denied the opportunity to mourn their loss and to give their loved ones a Jewish burial (something that I assume would have caused them pain). And why would Hashem dictate a halachah that He knew would be improperly applied until the modern rise of psychology?
It would be a long time before I came to the obvious answer: He didn’t. The severe condemnation of suicide reflects a time when there was no recognition of mental illness. Perhaps it was a way of punishing someone who murdered himself: after all, he couldn’t be executed for his crime, so denying him a proper burial and condemning him in the afterlife was the next best thing. Perhaps the knowledge that they would be denied mourning and burial in a Jewish cemetery served to dissuade some people from committing suicide. But the divine mandate of an all-knowing God it was not.
[Inspired by this post from Onionsoupmix]
The title, of course, comes from this:
I’ve long since forgotten most of his drasha, but one story that he told stuck with me. A couple had bought a house and discovered that part of the floor in the attic was broken. They called a contractor, he came the next day, and after a few hours of work it was repaired. A few days later, they went up to the attic to put some boxes away and found that the floor was broken again in the same spot. They called the contractor back. This time he spent an entire day reinforcing the floor. A week later it was broken again.
A few days later the couple was discussing the problem with a neighbor. “I’m surprised you bought the house at all.” he said. “After that boy hung himself in the attic, the house was vacant for years.”
“That was why the floor was breaking.” The rebbe declared. “The neshama of this boy was barred from gan eden, and even from gehenom. With no place to go, he kept returning to the place where he had killed himself. And every time his neshama visited, the floor broke. If he had only known what would happen, he would never have killed himself!”
In retrospect, it sounds like the kind of ghost story ten year olds tell around a campfire to scare each other. For some reason, though, it brought the afterlife into sharp focus for me. This boy, who had killed himself hoping to end it all, was instead living on and suffering for his misdeed. I, too, would live on after I died in this world. I too would be judged. I no longer saw Olam Haboh as a fairytale, but as a real place that I would one day go to. I, not a character in a story called “my neshama.” For years, I would periodically have dreams in which I stood before the Heavenly court.
It’s the association with that sudden insight, rather than any inherent quality of the story, which made me remember it.
When I took Abnormal Psychology in college and learned about major depression and suicide I was reminded of the story. This time, instead of bringing a religious concept into focus, it raised some disturbing questions. Nearly everyone who commits suicide does so because they are clinically depressed. The only exceptions are terminally ill patients who wish to end their pain and religiously-motivated people such as suicide bombers or the Jonestown Massacre. A clinically depressed person who dies by suicide was killed by his illness no less than someone who dies of cancer. Could a person be held morally responsible for dying of an illness, condemned because of it to exist in limbo for all eternity?
It turns out that the rabbonim today agree that a clinically depressed person is not responsible for committing suicide. The family sits shiva for them, and they may be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But what, then, of all of the suicide victims of the millennia between matan Torah and advent of modern psychology? How many families of clinically depressed suicide victims were denied the opportunity to mourn their loss and to give their loved ones a Jewish burial (something that I assume would have caused them pain). And why would Hashem dictate a halachah that He knew would be improperly applied until the modern rise of psychology?
It would be a long time before I came to the obvious answer: He didn’t. The severe condemnation of suicide reflects a time when there was no recognition of mental illness. Perhaps it was a way of punishing someone who murdered himself: after all, he couldn’t be executed for his crime, so denying him a proper burial and condemning him in the afterlife was the next best thing. Perhaps the knowledge that they would be denied mourning and burial in a Jewish cemetery served to dissuade some people from committing suicide. But the divine mandate of an all-knowing God it was not.
[Inspired by this post from Onionsoupmix]
The title, of course, comes from this:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)