The Meaning of Meaning

“There is a heresy that amounts to an affirmation of faith, and an affirmation of faith that amounts to heresy. How so? A person may affirm that the Torah is from “heaven,” but the picture of “heaven” that he envisions is so weird that nothing of true faith remains. And how might heresy amount to affirmation of faith? [When] a person denies [belief in] Torah from heaven, but his denial is based merely on what he has absorbed of the picture of heaven construed by minds filled with ludicrous and nonsensical thoughts. Such a person says: “The Torah must stem from a source higher than this!” and he begins to find its basis in the grandeur of the spirit of man, in the depth of his morality and in the height of his wisdom. Although such a person may not yet have reached the center point of truth, nonetheless this heresy is akin to affirmation of faith and it progresses towards affirmation of belief at its root… and Torah from Heaven is but an example for all the generalities and particulars of religious doctrine, regarding the relationship between their linguistic expression and their inner essence, [the latter being] the true object of faith.”

A.I. Kook, Orot ha-Emunah, 25

To ascribe meaning

Has become for me

An abomination.

As if the words and phrases

The rationalizations and theodicies

The language of suffering

The prosidy of pain,

The construction of a system of meaning

Might have made sense? At one time

Might have made the suffering meaning”ful”

And then what?

Once having ascribed meaning

We go home eased

Close the theology books

Sip our lattes with ease?

Is the pain any less?

Is the sorrow lightened?

Is the anguish diminished?

After years of searching

(since having watched my first movie ever in 1966

“Trial at Nurenberg”.. too young)

tormented by those skeletal images…

stories my father told me…

obsessed during adolescence…

The scholarly articles, read in adulthood

The seminars…Wyschograd, Berkowitz, Rubinstein,

Greenberg, Soloveitchik,

My library brimming with their attempts to make sense

Cohen’s “After the Tremendum”

Elie Wiesel’s polished BU seminars attended,

Read and re read even Hassidic authors’ vain attempts at theodicy,

In a vain effort to make sense of “my life” as well

Child of a “survivor”

These “post-Holocaust” studies…

Filling so many faculty chairs In so many universities

A virtual endowed industry of words

Of teachers instructing their students “Never Forget!”

And “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it”

slogans, images, artifacts, relics from the camps,

then…

A new genocidal mania breaks out in the far east Pol Pot,

Eastern Europe, Serbia, Rawanda,

Endless lists of small atrocities.

And Wiesel warns us like an ancient prophet, and the Pope

And Lord Jonathan Sacks claiming a unique Hebrew contribution

to the history of ethics

That projects its voice today,

Despite the petty injustices the Jewish state ignores

On its own minorities.

This is post modernity.

We have stripped the ancient pagan gods of their mythic power

Then God of the Bible,

Then the Church, the Monarchs, Dukes and kings

Now we are free to kill in ways they never even dreamed of:

Post-modernity: a Descartian demythologized world of rational thinking

Where only the measurable is true.

Of meanings…

I hereby give up!

Not because I am not haunted

Not because it doesn’t still consume me

And drives me to find that very stuff of comfort,

The discourse that somehow finds a web of certainty.

However, I have come to see the quest

As fraudulent,

A false comfort

Since it is founded upon

The optimistic positivist goal

Of eventually finding that very meaning

In other peoples’ tragedy.

It has become ethically problematic for me.

I now see this entire enterprise

Based on the western philosophical

Logical system of thought,

The binary thinking of either /or

as false.

In which our language sets us up for such logical

Argumentation, the rules of syntax grammar and discourse

Represent a game of sorts (thank you ‘Rabbi’ Wittgenstein)

And the rules of that game are arbitrary.

Where we begin with a quest, a question, a proposition

Followed by an inquiry, an exposition, a debate

Testing of theory, the experiment, the poll, the fieldwork

Then examining results:

And proving a new fact.

The use of scientific method in the field of philosophy, theology

and human suffering and anguish.

Meaning is assigned to precisely those facts

we can string together, observe, measure

To form a coherence,

The rhetoric adds to the force for the argument

and we leave with a new theorem.

A new fact, a new truth.

But we forgot in the meantime, that the very rules of the game we entered

decided the very outcome in many ways.

We were seduced by the game not the content!

But what use are these meanings?

What is meant by these new truths?

How do they help?

The victim lies buried,

Tortured or lost,

“Missing in action”

unaccounted for, and

Those of us who have survived

Are left bereft, with a vacuum that emotionally needs to be filled,

With the need to seek answers

To find meaning in the profound loss,

To make sense of the dark heart of man

And his infinite capacity for causing harm

And inflicting Inhumanity on his fellow men

This desire is surely understandable

But futile and ethically problematic, for it serves only the bereaved.

Decades following the Holocaust we are no closer

To solving the darker side of human nature

No fewer genocides have resulted

And the appeal of technology to kill ever more swiftly

And efficiently,

Leave us horrified by the ever greater torture machines.

Our noble religions provide little succor

In their invoking the divine…

We are only digging ourselves ever deeper

By including a silent divinity into this holy debate

A divine that stands by..

As we kill and torture each other

The apologetics of theodicy leave us cold

And the idea of the God remaining silent

(which has plagued the Torah commentators from Genesis on,

albeit unsuccessfully)

Only worsens the argument.

The problem of theodicy remains insoluble

Despite the protestations of wise theologians.

There is no meaning

In the sense of a rationale

A reason, a cause, an explanation,

There is only paradox…

A paradox so deep it remains the essential flaw in creation

And the dualistic faceoff between good and evil

Ever present and locked in battle like Jacob and his dark night angel

Is as true today as in the sacred text.

I know, this is heresy (it doesn’t come cheap)

Of the silent divine…

(granted he may even be suffering impotently alongside us

out of His own choice)

as the only comfort…He is so inscrutable

He defies our ethical system of right or wrong

in His omnipotence and apparent absence

signifying

the absence of meaning

the absent divine

the absent self.

We are thus left alone to work it out

Figure out that which cannot be

Using the bicameral rational mind.

In a post Holocaust world of genocide and killing fields

Of mass casualties, of blowing up planes in the skies

“making sense” philosophically, theologically, spiritually is an anathema

to those who died senselessly,

(let the CNN and Fox pundits argue incessantly their drivel)

we see a senseless theology

a capricious god

who stands by idly laughing at mankind

that is the only sense here.

(This is the holy heresy Reb Nachman speaks of in Torah 64)1

In these dark moments

When the true reality and implication of an unredeemed world looms large

When the full impact of my patients’ deep suffering hits home

And my impotence in providing meaning in the face of their despair, poverty

And hopelessness, stares me in the face…

I take comfort in the resistance to find easy meaning

Trite truisms and theological justifications

So as not to do injustice to the memory of all those who did

and still suffer and cry. For any intellectual meaning falls short

of the direct brutality of the experience

And allows for a rationale which betrays their memory and sanctity.

I must find a path that doesn’t allow me

to so easily slide back into the rational mind

And avoid the addictive desire to seek meaning

But rather confront the pain and suffering head on

Allowing it to percolate through me

Like a shaman

Listening to the pain of others

Bearing their suffering alongside them

Reading the story of their suffering and feeling the pain

Without the neat theological categories that dehumanize them into statistics.

Offering no easy answers to my suffering patients, no supernatural ideologies

(How could one tell a patient locked in their motor neuron diseased body

Or a Parkinsonian shaking like a leaf

There is meaning? How cruel, how perverse!)

All I can do is be present

Be fully present

Listen intently

Frame the narrative and mirror their pain

And validating their anguish.

And as I begin to refuse these easy solutions

Preferring the brutality of the real

The acceptance of human nature to do evil

The acceptance of the Darwinian natural order of violence

The evolutionary necessity of the survival of the fittest

The Tsunami’s quakes, floods, tornados and lightning strikes

As inherent in the world order of things…

I can safely put away the kabbalistic appropriation

Of “Tikkun Olam” and the new age theologically melted down

Notion that we can make the world a “better place”

That Disneyesque ride that now looks so arcane,

Modernity’s lie that through technology and industry,

We will “progress” as humanity

Whereas in fact under this guise we have almost destroyed the planet

In the name of Protestant values and capitalism.

The world did just fine without us for millennia

Animals killed each other for food

Killing is built in to the very fabric of nature

However disturbing the NatGEO documentaries

of the natural animal world seem!

Then along came technical industrial production,

Of goods materials medicines and warfare.

And accompanying this new industrial age

came our tailor made theology and philosophy

Alongside this evolution in brain complexity

To justify and rationalize our dark behaviors

Projecting onto the divine some plan for it all.

In my heresy I reject all this

The Aristotelian set of rules

If A caused B etc.

A and non A cannot coexist etc.

And in the non rational appeal of some natural mysticism

I once again surrender to a pagan order of things

Allowing the darker side of nature, its divine and the self

To participate equally at the board meeting.

Release from the tyranny of meaning

I am able to embody reality as is

And begin from the beginning

Face the darkness without the layers of cultural lens

Without the supernatural explanations

And expose human/divine behavior/cruelty (mine included)

Without justification.

And having jettisoned meaning

We have the Herculean task of confronting ethics

Looking back our texts of terror

Our cultures of violence

Our system of statehood and jingoism

Our petty politicians who pander to xenophobia

Our media who are complicit

The medical- industrial- military complex and its pollution

Of good governance in the halls of power, Washington Brussels etc

That really pander to the capitalists of Wall St.

the hedge managing system that serves only self…

These cruel institutions

And the cruelty of poverty it evokes and causes

All the while the rich getting richer…

The ethics needs to be directed right here.

Now, if we look at all this

Stripped of self-justification

Of political justification

Of theological structures that rationalize the status quo

Of the incessant preachers/pastors asked to say a prayer and invocation

Prior to business as usual

The “Heavenly Father”

beginning the halls of violence with a prayer

To the sky god

If we expose the human cruelty in this

Avoiding “meaning”

We might have taken one small step towards

And evolutionary move away from annihilation.

[1] See my essay Quantum Chassidut: Hitbodedut in a Quantum Key: Contending with the Silence of the Vacated Space & the Holocaust http://www.tzaddikmag.com/guest-features.html (LKS Tsfat Development Corporation Ltd) editor Sharon Marson