The Meaning of Meaning

The meaning of meaning December 2015

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

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

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.