{"id":105054,"date":"2023-06-28T17:05:43","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T15:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=105054"},"modified":"2023-06-20T06:57:50","modified_gmt":"2023-06-20T04:57:50","slug":"20-05-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=105054","title":{"rendered":"Why Judaism?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Why Judaism?<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

ANTONIO GARC\u00cdA MART\u00cdNEZ<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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On abandoning secular modernity.<\/strong><\/span>
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You will watch your parents die and be buried. You will watch your newborn child emerge in a messy circus of heaving grunts and high-pitched wailing. You will watch your dreams and projects dashed, only to wake the next day and greet the fruits of your failure anew and cobble a life out of them all the same. You will punctuate the cavalcade of events with moments of transcendent meaning that will linger in memory like fading signposts during that final moment: your death.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Navigating that journey without a religious tradition is like trying to cross open country without a path: You can do so, but you\u2019ll do lots of stumbling and very likely lose your way. Trying to get through dense woods\u2014a serious depression, the death of a loved one\u2014without a marked trail requires the most arduous labor for the merest progress. Furthermore, if you tackle these wilds in their raw and uncleared state, you will almost certainly do so alone. Going off-trail means a hard solitary journey, while the marked trail involves communal groups headed in your same direction. What some might describe as a cultural rut\u2014some timeworn lane that limits movement\u2014might just be the only thing that guides you through this daunting wilderness of life whose many paths all end in the same destination.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To DIY your own world of life signifiers, you have to think you can improve on a bar mitzvah as a coming-of-age ritual, on Shabbat as a form of digital detox, and on teshuvah<\/em><\/a> as a way to grapple with your guilt (or analogs in other religious traditions). Many do of course, and every trendy San Franciscan has their personal regimen of special diets, meditation schedules, intermittent fasts, escapes to nature, a canon of mimetic culture usually drawn from their online feeds, a smattering of trendy texts that inform their values, and some slew of Netflix shows that serve as cultural touchpoints with others in their cohort.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is all in keeping with the current liberal project\u2019s moral goal, which is creating lives devoid of any unchosen obligations and absolutely rife with chosen identities of fanciful and recent coinage. The problem is that it\u2019s the unchosen obligations\u2014or the obligations chosen but whose downstream responsibilities cannot<\/em> be unchosen\u2014that will give us the only real meaning in life. Family, children, our hometowns, our childhoods, our ethnic identity (if we have one), or the chosen-but-undoable commitments\u2014marriage, joining the military, that company we start, religious faith\u2014are the defining obligations where our selves really play out.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If I were to go back and say one thing to my younger self as a warning from the future, it\u2019s this: The eventual cost of optionality in life\u2014all the commitments you don\u2019t make to preserve your ability to instantly change course\u2014is usually not worth the upside that optionality eventually produces. And even when that optionality is rich indeed (and I know a thing or two about the exploding value of literal financial options), your commitment to that remunerative course, fully cognizant of your wider obligations, will serve you better than the anxious FOMO-ing of the hyperoptimizer. Which is a long way of saying that at some point you do have to \u201cchoose a hill to die on,\u201d because if you don\u2019t, you won\u2019t really ever have lived at all. Here, I will attempt to lay out why you should also do so, and why I chose the Jewish hill that I did.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Every society needs a metaphysics that allows it to have moral and political conversations with itself. Liberalism\u2019s preferred metaphysical framework of utilitarianism\u2014in effect, ethics by Excel spreadsheet\u2014is at best a simplistic hack that illuminates some trade-off, much as microeconomics can inform the pricing of Starbucks\u2019 various coffee sizes. That\u2019s assuming society can even do the hard math of exchanging one type of human well-being (or even entire lives) against others in a rational way.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s more than a little pathetic watching an avowedly atheist materialist society, whose epistemology ends at empiricism, play at metaphysics. It makes them suck even at empiricism, as reality must be warped to suit whatever nonempirical argument they\u2019re incapable of expressing any other way.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Consider the epistemic chaos in the United States as every side tries to \u201cwin\u201d COVID, and show that their side\u2019s interpretation\u2014vaccine mandates, mask mandates, no mandates, ivermectin, zero COVID, my cousin\u2019s friend\u2019s swollen balls, whatever\u2014aligns with empirical reality, which is the only mode of reasoning about even immaterial questions. Thus the constant citation of half-assed studies (many later corrected or retracted<\/a>) attempting to marshal evidence for what are effectively moral or religious stances.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The questions we should be asking are the ones that secular modernity doesn\u2019t even possess the moral vocabulary to discuss anymore:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Do we sacrifice the old for the sake of educating the young during a pandemic?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What is the duty of the citizen to the state, and does that include collective sacrifice like vaccination?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What is the duty of the state to the citizen in presenting policy as truthfully as possible, rather than as a purportedly noble lie?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To what common good should the state intervene in our lives?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Toward what common good should we all be striving?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The answers to those questions are not to be found in any iffy study those doing online COVID battle could cite, and even our wider political culture is bereft of any coherent philosophical platform. Figures like John Rawls and Robert Nozick once provided something like a cogent political worldview (though it took Rawls several hundred pages of Harvard-level disquisition and \u201cveils of ignorance\u201d analogies to restate Kant\u2019s Categorical Imperative and Matthew 7:12).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But that\u2019s all gone now, and there\u2019s nobody even remotely in the position of a Rawls. For the first time in my life, no political faction in the West has anything like a generative vision of the future. Your point on the current political spectrum is defined by the year to which you\u2019d like to somehow magically return society: 2009 \u2192 Obama-ite; 1952 \u2192 conservative; 1984 \u2192 Reagan nostalgist; and so it goes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It may well be the case that liberalism is unsustainable without a real illiberal antagonist. If none exists, one will be invented. Each political side now perpetually assures us the other side is prepping for tyranny at any moment. The thought that our government, which bungled both a pandemic response and a war against a medieval religious sect, would be capable of iron-fisted autocracy in a modern country of 330 million seems \u2026 almost wishfully ambitious in its fear.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To the extent there\u2019s anything like a forward-looking plotline in our national conversation, it\u2019s the old fallbacks of every (post) Christian society in a tizzy of panicked confusion: millenarian brooding about a coming apocalypse, and revivalist fervor around some utopian project or another. Beyond the latest episode in the political telenovela\u2014Russiagate! QAnon!\u2014what else do we talk about other than the zealous demands of wokeness and the perils of climate change?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For the first time in my life, no political faction in the West has anything like a generative vision of the future. More and more, secular modernity looks like a shaky edifice of convoluted fantasies built over an abyss.<\/span><\/p>\n

Leaving the elevated realm of politics for the more quotidian one of personal morality and rule of law, matters aren\u2019t going much better.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Consider for a moment the Noahide Laws of Judaism<\/a>, the basic moral principles thought to apply to all humanity. In addition to the usual proscriptions around murder, theft, and adultery, we have a very unique one: the requirement to establish courts of justice to adjudicate human behavior. Without that, in the Jewish mind, humanity would live in brutish savagery.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How does our society rate against the Noahide Laws? What are our courts of justice?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nowadays, our judges are mostly narcissistic sociopaths gaming Twitter\u2019s engagement algorithms to get someone fired over some perceived moral lapse (this week, it was over another confused encounter involving dog-walking<\/a>). This week\u2019s online Hester Prynne<\/a> was instantly fired by a corporate management happy to consider an online mob\u2019s verdict as binding as anything from the Supreme Court. Another such duet of mob outrage coupled with corporate cowardice led to my firing from Apple<\/a> (that time via the internal vector for mob mayhem, Slack).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This moral cowardice is ironic in a corporate world suddenly bursting with people with \u201cethics\u201d or \u201cequity\u201d in their job titles. Mostly, they\u2019re charlatans regurgitating the improvised tropes of whatever faddish academic or corporate cult has sprung up to fill the God-sized hole at the center of liberalism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Meanwhile, politicians advocate for more and more public sacrifice around COVID while skirting their own restrictions<\/a>, and the only person sitting in jail for the Afghanistan fiasco is the one officer who dared demand accountability for it<\/a>. There is no real public court of justice or moral code in our modern-day world anymore, and deep down we all know it. Our current society wouldn\u2019t pass the last and arguably most important of Noah\u2019s Seven Laws for minimally civilized behavior.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The core problem here is that at the heart of any real political or moral reasoning, if we\u2019re being honest with ourselves, we\u2019re left pointing at a document or set of principles and arguing by sheer faithful assertion alone: These principles we believe to be true, and we will make decisions of life-and-death import according to these moral foundations. If you disagree, sorry, we don\u2019t have much to talk about as we simply live in different moral universes.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Faced with the secular alternative of bitchy Twitter food fights and \u201ccancel culture,\u201d I choose to believe there are sterner (and wiser) judges in this universe than the blue checks of Twitter and the \u201cPeople\u201d department at companies like Apple. More and more, secular modernity looks like a shaky edifice of convoluted fantasies built over an abyss, and I for one am tired of pretending to take it seriously. Those who reject the modern sham and wish to reason seriously about politics or morality must necessarily strike a pose\u2014half-pointing, half-saluting\u2014toward some set of sacred principles; on the political front, I choose to salute the United States Constitution (so long as we can keep it); on the moral front, I gesture toward the Bible of the Hebrews.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We have arrived at a unique point in history where many Americans love nothing more than themselves, and the only functioning organization that touches their lives is a corporation. That\u2019s all good and well as a single striver sprinting along our treadmill of an economic system; the above realization takes on a more somber tone when confronted with the only form of immortality available to most of us: our children.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Daddy, why is that man living in the bus stop? Daddy, why are you gone working so much? Daddy, can I read this book or watch this show? Daddy, what\u2019s this flag I\u2019m holding?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Suddenly questions like the ones above go from the heated but ultimately vain stuff of Twitter threads to daunting conversations with the one thing left in the world you\u2019d sacrifice yourself to save. Those big, brown eyes staring at you demand an answer to those questions; her absolute receptiveness to your answers yokes you with a responsibility to posterity that hedonistic modernity has distracted you from your entire life. What do you put in that mind that will outlast yours?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nowadays, the exercise seems less one of curating a personal time capsule, and more that of a shipwrecked sailor trying to salvage what\u2019s worth keeping from a vessel (or a society) that\u2019s foundered on a rocky shore. Much like that sailor would, we agonize over what books, and ultimately what stories, we choose to salvage and keep on reading and repeating to one another.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Consider another example drawn from the Jewish world: Most of the planet commemorates the Holocaust on Jan. 27, the day the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Every country considers that Holocaust Remembrance Day, except the Jewish State of Israel itself. They commemorate the Holocaust on the 27th day of the Jewish month of Nisan, the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising<\/a>, when poorly armed Jews fought to the death against the Nazi war machine rather than passively submit to annihilation. The nascent state of Israel thought it important to enshrine that as the nation\u2019s Holocaust narrative (as Yom HaShoah<\/a>), rather than a narrative that had Jews passively saved, much too late, by an outside power.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As frivolous as they sometimes might seem, the stories we tell ourselves are what we ultimately become as people and a civilization. There\u2019s perhaps no more important choice we face as stewards of the present than what we pass on to the future as shared narrative. We all subconsciously realize that, which is why the debates over the 1619 Project<\/a> or critical race theory<\/a> have grown so heated and deafening. With the grim examples of slavery and the Holocaust in mind, let\u2019s revisit the question: What then do we put in our children\u2019s heads?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For me, the choice is very simple. My children are the descendants of Holocaust survivors, refugees from an Islamic revolution, and exiles from two communist revolutions (both Russian and Cuban flavors). The 20th century, in all its turmoil, flows through their veins in the oddest of admixtures. This extended family has seen many a government fall and world implode. Many times in our collective memory, what once seemed like the bedrock firmament of a sane society was soon demolished for a fresh hell of human devising. In a present moment that seems similarly pregnant with change, I will invite my children to open one of humanity\u2019s oldest body of works, and once again read about \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2026 the cunning ruthlessness of Judith willing to do anything to save her tribe; the self-indulgent hubris of David; the righteous guile of Esther; the genocidal wrath of Jacob\u2019s sons avenging the rape of their sister Dinah; the fierce defiance of the Maccabees hellbent on saving their tradition; the murderous envy of Cain; the reluctant, bungling leadership of Moses who somehow managed a spectacular exodus; the smoldering sensuality of the Song of Songs; the evocative verses of Psalms whose catchphrases litter every Western language; the wailing nostalgia of Lamentations; the all-in loyalty of Ruth; the unshakable faith of Job; the dancing, timbrel-playing triumph of Miriam; the castigating tirades of Jeremiah; the comically inept procrastination of Jonah; finally, the existential world-weariness of Ecclesiastes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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All of humanity is there, in all its sublime or squalid expanse: An adult life will be populated by its own personal bible of Cains and Davids and Esthers. But unlike the epic characters in such timeless works as the Odyssey<\/em> or Beowulf<\/em>, or even distant references like Aeschylus or Shakespeare, this gallery of characters populates a still-extant tradition whose adherents sway in collective fervor every holiday.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This very week was Simchat Torah (Hebrew for \u201cjoy of the Torah\u201d), when Jews take the Torah scrolls out of the synagogue\u2019s ark and joyfully parade them outdoors, dancing and singing with their scripture\u2019s heavy burden slung awkwardly on their shoulders. It marks the end of the annual cycle wherein an advancing Torah portion is read aloud every Sabbath, one turn of the scroll at a time until the very end. It is the one Jewish festival not divinely ordained nor the product of some historical event; this the Jews put on for themselves in their obsessive love for their collective story. And when all the singing and dancing is over, they immediately rewind the scroll and start reading again, as they have for millennia: \u201cIn the beginning God created heaven and Earth \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As that scroll is returned to the ark after the reading, the gathered crowd recites: \u201cIt is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it.\u201d Indeed it has been a tree of life to a people who made it the foundation of their civilization, a people that stubbornly persisted in a world that often wanted nothing less than their total extermination; a world that even now begrudges the Jews the tiny state they perilously safeguard.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Stuck in a secular modernity that\u2019s lost the plot, and that no longer knows what it is or where it\u2019s going, I choose to hold fast to that tree of life. I also say, as the loyal convert Ruth once said to Naomi: \u201cWherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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This article was originally published in The Pull Request<\/a> on Oct. 1, 2021.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Antonio Garc\u00eda Mart\u00ednez<\/strong> is a technologist and the author of Chaos Monkeys<\/a>, a memoir of life inside Facebook and other startups. He now mostly writes at The Pull Request<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Why Judaism? ANTONIO GARC\u00cdA MART\u00cdNEZ On abandoning secular modernity. . You will watch your parents die and be buried. You will watch your newborn child emerge in a messy circus of heaving grunts and high-pitched wailing. You will watch your dreams and projects dashed, only to wake the next day and greet the fruits of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105054"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=105054"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105325,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105054\/revisions\/105325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=105054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=105054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=105054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}