The Worth of a Sandwich

Our intrepid heroes, inter-planetary explorers, have landed on the Planet of the Week, a Brave New World where No Man Has Gone Before. Before long they meet the native’s leaders and are having a merry old time - until they begin to discover that things aren’t quite right. The idyllic society has a nasty underbelly, and it is their duty as heroes to Right All Wrongs and expose the evil to the commoners.

Before they can, their once-genial hosts catch them. They are told that they cannot leave the planet, because they might report what they have seen to an outside authority; and they cannot stay, because they might tell the commoners the truth about their utopia. But their captors are not so backwards as to execute them, or toss them in a cell and throw away the key. Instead they are to be hooked up to a virtual reality machine, where they can live out the rest of their lives in a fantasy of their choice, while their bodies are kept alive by IV feeding. Our heroes declare that such a solution is unacceptable, as they could never be happy or find meaning in a life they know to be entirely artificial.

I think most people would agree with our heroes that an artificial existence would be meaningless. We would agree that getting married, having children, a career, being active in the community – in short, all the things we value as indicators of a life well spent – would be meaningless if acted out in a virtual fantasy world. Despite having our every desire catered to, such an artificial existence would quickly lose its novelty and become depressing as we realize that nothing we do really matters.

Why we would feel this way is an interesting question.

An even more interesting question is why we don’t feel this way about the “real” world.

If raising children, being active in the community, etc., are not considered meaningful in the virtual world, then we can conclude that it is not the act itself that has value. The actions and experiences of the individual are the same in the real and virtual world. Rather, the value must be the action’s effect on others. Because there are no “others” in the virtual world, only virtual constructs, the actions are not considered to have value.

The question then is why do we think that the impact of our actions on others give the actions value? Do our actions in fact have objective values, or is it merely that we are wired to believe that acts which help others are meaningful? If so, what if the virtual reality machine could be tweaked to make those hooked up to it believe that making turkey sandwiches has intrinsic value, and they happily spent the next sixty years making turkey sandwiches. Is that bad? They would be happy and would believe they led a meaningful life. How is being programmed to believe altruistic acts have intrinsic value any different than being programmed to believe that making turkey sandwiches has intrinsic value?

If there really is no difference, and person in a virtual world programmed to believe making virtual turkey sandwiches has value can find the same fulfillment that an unaltered human in the real world can find in being altruistic, if in the virtual world tombstones read, “expert turkey sandwich maker,” instead of, “loving father, devoted husband, invaluable member of the community,” then our meaningful, productive, altruistic lives really have no more intrinsic value than the virtual world’s inhabitant’s years of sandwich making.

Havael havalim hakol hevel

Wild Mass Guessing

The title is taken from here, and describes what happens when fans of a fictional work try to “fill in the logic holes and rationalize the weird.”

This was the phrase that sprang to mind when I read a short d’var torah on sukkos. The article started by asking, “Why do we sit in sukkos,” and, “Why is Sukkos in the fall?” To which the obvious answer is, ‘because it’s a harvest festival, and people camped out in huts in their fields while they were bringing in the harvest.’ Of course, this isn’t at all spiritual, merely practical. The holiday, canonized in the chumash, has to have connections both to the miraculous past of the Bnei Yisroel and to glorifying God’s name. So various views were quoted, including a discussion of whether the sukkos are a representation of the ananei hakavod or are a remembrance of actual huts which Klal Yisroel lived in while in the midbar; and whether sukkos is in the fall because that is when the Jews camped or because by living outside when it is getting cold we are showing that we are doing so because God commanded it and not because it is fun to camp out.

If one accepts that Sukkos evolved from a harvest festival, the discussions among the meforshim seem kind of silly. They are an attempt to make sukkos fit into a spiritual framework that probably wasn’t in place when the holiday first started, and into which it was never really molded. [Unlike, say, All Hollows Eve, which was a deliberate attempt by the Church to turn a pagan harvest festival involving spirits into a Christian holiday involving the dead.] These rabbonim, fans of the spiritual framework of Rabbinic Judaism, are engaging in wild mass guessing to fill in the holes.

For a long time now, my initial reaction to any unfamiliar religious concept or practice I come across (and any I’m used to that I really start thinking about) is, “How did that get started?” Unfortunately, the traditional answers are often like the above d’var torah’s discussion of Sukkos. Wild Mass Guessing by various people attempting to construct something that makes sense out of various disparate parts, full of retcons and discontinuities, often bending over backwards to explain something that makes perfect sense when approached without preconceptions into which it needs to be made to fit. When it comes to how well these apologetics work, Your Mileage May Vary.

As the Wild Mass Guessing page says,
Warning: Prolonged exposure to these pages will result in them making sense.

Does the Future Matter?

Most of my life I’ve had a “future orientation.” As a kid I always saved things for later. When I got prizes of candy in school I would bring it home instead of eating it right away. I once lost out when I tried to bring home an ices, and it melted in my knapsack. I would carefully ration out the goodies I got on Purim, always worried that if I finished it now, I wouldn’t have any later – never mind that my mother kept a cabinet stocked with cookies and candies. I felt that it was important that I have my own nosh available if I wanted it. I would sometimes put things away for when I got married or had kids. Most of that stuff is still in my parents’ attic.

As I got older planning for the future became more realistic and more important. I had to do well in school so I would get into high school and college. I went to bais medrash because I was told that if I didn’t, I would never find a shidduch. (As it turned out, that wasn’t true.) I went to grad school so I could find a job.

I realized recently that the future I’ve been planning for my whole life is right now. I’m married, I have kids, I’m finished with school and have a job (sort of). And… that’s it.

Sure, I still have plans for the future. Like, I’d like to buy a house someday. But I’m not pushing towards those goals the way I used to. My attitude has changed from sacrificing the present for the sake of the future to enjoying the present and letting the future come when it may.

On a somewhat related note: I was thinking this morning about the conservation movement that’s grown up in the last couple of decades. Save the planet for our children and all that. And I was wondering, why bother?

It seems to be driven by our instinct to preserve our species and based on the premise that it is worthwhile for us to make sacrifices in the present so that future generations will survive and progress. But this presupposes that humanity will be able to survive and progress indefinitely. That’s simply not true. In a few billion years the sun will burn out. Even if we colonize other solar systems, all the stars will eventually burn out, and ultimately humanity will die out. What is the difference, ultimately, if that happens in a hundred years or a trillion? Emotionally, we can’t really process a trillion years, and so tend to dismiss this distant inevitability as unimportant. On the other hand, a hundred years from now is within our grandchildren’s lifetime, maybe even our children’s. Still, emotion aside, humanity is doomed. Does it really matter when?

I’ll leave you now to more cheerful thoughts.

The Virtue of Faith Despite Adversity

A while ago, I wrote a post, “Why Is Faith a Virtue?” Particularly faith in the face of adversity. Why is the greatest tzaddik in the frum world the person who, despite personal tragedy, holds on to their emunah?

I think I have an answer. From conversations that I have had with various frum people I have gotten the impression that many believe that everyone sees the world the same way they do. One person told me outright that “The goyim don’t really believe in their religions the way a frum person has emunah in Hashem.” In their view, everyone really believes in Hashem. The only reason someone wouldn’t believe is if they are pretending. They’ll even say that sometimes a person will pretend so well that he will fool himself into really thinking that he doesn’t believe, but deep down he knows that Hashem in the Borie Olam and Yiddishkeit is the Truth.

As an aside, this might also answer a question I’ve had in Chumash. The meforshim condemn Pharaoh for his answer to Moshe’s demand in the name of Hashem to free the Bnie Yisroel: “Who is this God you speak of?” From Pharaoh’s point of view, this is a perfectly legitimate question. There is even a medrash that says he looked through a book of gods and didn’t find Hashem’s name there. The Egyptians had a whole pantheon of gods, and knew the pantheons of other nations. Why should Pharaoh, the embodiment of Ra on Earth, take orders from a god of slaves, a god whom he had never heard of?

The answer could be in the belief I cited above that everyone really, deep down, knows that Hashem is the Borei Olam. Everyone, even Pharaoh. (Never mind that he had legitimately never heard of Hashem. He just KNEW.) So Pharaoh not bowing to Hashem’s will, and worse, having the audacity to ask who He is, is evil.

In the same way, a person who experiences a tragic event doesn’t go through a logical process where he decides that an omni-benevolent God wouldn’t do such a thing, and therefore decides God doesn’t exist. At best, he knows that God exists, but he’s angry with God, and so refuses to acknowledge Him out of spite. Contrast this with someone who experiences a tragedy and continues to trust in God.

Remember, legitimate disbelief is not a real option. A person either believes and continues to trust in God, or believes and pretends he doesn’t out of anger/spite. Which of these attitudes is the more virtuous? Clearly, the more socially useful (in a non-democratic society anyway), and therefore virtuous attitude, is continued trust in a leader despite an apparently tragic mistake.

Truth in Religion and Science: Working Backwards, Working Forwards

[I know this has been done to death, but I thought I’d write up my own take on it anyway.]

The most basic difference between science and religion, the one that makes them butt heads and complicates any discussion of the two, is their difference in epistemology.

Modern science starts with the assumption that we know nothing, and painstakingly have to establish every assertion as true. There have been studies done to confirm and quantify things that everyone takes for granted, such as that something that is farther away looks smaller than something that is closer. Scientists confirmed that this is true, and more importantly were able to describe the equivalence between distance and size, which has implications for eyewitness testimony. Ideally, research is conducted to confirm or deny and/or measure a specific point. Negative results can be just as informative as positive results. It is a flawed, human process, but one that is self-correcting and that builds on itself. It starts from nothing and, by collecting, investigating, and quantifying data, reaches conclusions. These conclusions are then tested by other scientists to see if they are accurate, and are modified in response to new data. Science works forward, the evidence pointing towards the conclusions.

Religion works in exactly the opposite way. It takes a given premise as a fact, and then looks for evidence to confirm the premise. Most importantly, disconfirming evidence is either devalued or ignored. Since the premise is known to be true, any evidence that shows it is false is de facto flawed. Religion works backwards, with the conclusions determining which evidence is correct.

This is a feature of not just religion but of many non-scientific beliefs, including pseudo-sciences. Disturbingly, I’ve found such belief systems in my own profession. Psychology is one of the soft sciences, and in some places it’s so soft it’s fluffy. Classic Freudian psychoanalysis, which has entered popular culture as the definitive form of psychology, is an example of this. Freud never performed research, and based all of his conclusions on a very limited number of case studies from his own practice. He assumed that he and his patients, all of whom were upper-middle-class Viennese, were representative of humanity. He came up with a lot of clever psychological mechanisms to explain their various disorders. When researchers tried to confirm his theories, they found that he had been right about a surprising number of things, but that he had mostly been wrong. Psychology changed from focusing on the subconscious to focusing on observable behavior and to describing cognitive processes. Yet it took decades for traditional psychoanalysis to be abandoned, and it continues to be used today in a modified form.

Another example I came across is William Glasser’s Choice Theory. I first heard of it in a counseling class in grad school, and I thought that it sounded very interesting. But when I got his books from the library and started reading them, I was dismayed to find that they were mostly conjecture. Worse, he claimed that if only everyone would ascribe to, study, and understand his theory, the world would become a Utopia. It sounded like he was trying to start a religion. I still think that the basic premise of his theory, that everything we do is a choice, can be a useful therapeutic tool. Many people feel that their problems are caused by forces they can’t control, and so rationalize not doing anything about them. I think that Impressing on them that their life is a result of their choices can be a powerful motivator for constructive changes. But I don’t think it is anything more than that.

Both classical Freudians and Glasser operate the same way religions do. They assume that a premise is true – neurosis are caused by subconscious pressures, everyone’s problems could be solved if only they would understand that it is their choices that cause them – and pick their evidence to conform to the premise.

On the other hand, there is research that makes me proud of my field, like forensic psychologists quantifying the size an object appears at a given distance, or findings in social psychology like the classic Milgram experiment. These studies produce evidence that can then be used to form theories. Sometimes they are wrong, but the faulty data is eventually weeded out and the theories are stronger for it.

I think that in religion, in science, in every field, we should try to move from evidence to conclusion rather than from conclusion to confirmation. It is the best way we have of knowing what is.

Ellul, the Month of the Storm God

Here we are in Ellul, the month when we try to convince God to judge us favorably for the coming year. I thought I’d post a few questions about this month I’ve never found decent answers for.

1) I’ll start with my oldest question. In first grade at the beginning of the year I learned that we blow shofer every day during Ellul, except the day before Rosh HaShanah. On Erev Rosh HaShanah we don’t blow the shofer in order to confuse the Satan. Apparently by blowing the shofer we have warned him that Rosh HaShanah is coming, and he has been preparing his case against us. When we stop for a day he thinks he has missed Rosh HaShanah and is confused, which ruins his prosecution of us.

How does this work year after year? Maybe the first time we did this the Satan would be confused, but the hundredth? The thousandth? This is the same being who we are always being warned is super-clever, who is able to lead us astray while making us think that we are being pious, then going to the Heavenly Court with perfect arguments against us. Is he really so dense that after three and a half millennia he hasn’t figured this out?

And once he does figure it out, omitting shofer on Erev Rosh HaShanah is a heads-up that tomorrow is the big day. Kind of counter-productive.

2) I understand that being judged can inspire one to try to better himself. And I can understand that being more careful than usual for a limited time (a month) is easier than doing the same thing indefinitely. But what do people think they gain by adopting extra-pious practices just for Elul? Do they think that God will be fooled into thinking they are better than they really are? Or is it supposed to work like a bribe? “Hey God, I’ll do a little something extra for You, and come Rosh HaShanah You do a little something extra for me.” *Wink*

3) Perhaps the least serious, but the one I find the most annoying, are the cute vorts that darshan the name of the month of Ellul. It is undisputed that we adopted the names we use for the months from the Babylonians. The Babylonians named their months after their gods. So anyone who makes a drasha from the name “Ellul” is finding deeper Jewish meaning in the name of a Babylonian god. I know that most of these vorts are just meant to be cute, but it smacks of historical revisionism to try to find hidden Jewish meaning in the name of a pagan god. Especially since so much of Judaism is designed to be specifically anti-pagan.

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A quick Google search turns up a Babylonian god named Enlil, who was a weather god. Wikipedia says that it was “sometimes rendered in translations as Ellil in later Akkadian, Hittite, and Canaanite literature.” I don’t know if this is actually where we get Ellul, but seems to be a good possibility. So let’s all try to be better servants of God during this month of the God of Storms.

Fences of Tissue Paper

I had an interesting conversation this past Shabbos with one of my wife’s friends. She’s a fairly typical frum girl, went to a somewhat liberal bais-yaakov type school, and is well-educated (master’s degree). She came to visit us Shabbos afternoon, and I’m afraid that the conversation turned to religion. As the conversation moved from minhagim to halachah she realized that I think most of it is nonsense.

It was fascinating how she brought up the typical arguments in favor of Judaism, no doubt gleaned from high-school and seminary hashkafa classes, and how easily I was able to brush them aside with counter-arguments. It was like walking through a security fence made of tissue paper. Of course I didn’t change her mind, but to her credit she readily admitted that I had some good points.

The conversation brought home to me again that most frum Jews (and I imagine most other religious people too) never give much thought to why they believe what they do, and accept the “proofs” they are taught as children without ever evaluating these ideas as adults. Worse, this girl is probably somewhat smarter than average, yet her ignorance of history (even Jewish history), theology, and logic was appalling. Granted, theology isn’t a particular interest of hers, and most of us are ignorant of subjects which don’t interest us, so perhaps she can be excused. But the fact remains that she is going through life with an unexamined belief system, relying on flimsy arguments she was taught as a teenager.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that many of the points that came up I’ve seen around the blog-sphere or have discussed here. I realized that as I write, ideas that have been floating around inside my head for years coalesce into coherent points. It also (unfortunately?) makes them more prominent. For the most part, I’ve managed to compartmentalize. There’s what I believe (or don’t), and there’s what I do. As the ideas become more prominent, it becomes harder to perform the actions without thinking about them. Why bother? Well, that’s another post.