Are There Any Secular People in the World? Thoughts in the Wake of the Notre-Dame Fire (Column 212)
The fire at Notre-Dame exposes secular mourning that suppresses the religious dimension
The starting point is the reporting on the fire: the media and the public stressed architecture, history, nationalism, and culture, while barely addressing the cathedral’s religious meaning. The rabbi asks what the pain of nonbelievers means: was a real value damaged here, or only emotion and sentiment? He admits that he also felt a certain satisfaction at seeing the vacuum exposed here—not because the building was a Christian cathedral, but because he sees this mourning as an illustration of the emptiness of secular substitutes for holiness.
When the cathedral becomes the binding of the Talmud: attachment to the shell instead of the substance
To sharpen the point, the rabbi compares the secular attitude toward Notre-Dame to someone who studies the paper, binding, and font of the Talmud while having no connection at all to its content. In his view, people latch onto an object whose source of significance is religious and substantive, but instead of identifying with that substance they develop an intense relation to the shell: architecture, history, aesthetics, and memory. This is how a religious value is secularized: what for the believer was a real injury to the world becomes, for the secular person, an injury to feeling that is presented as a value.
Why it is דווקא the atheist who must explain what “holy” and “valuable” mean
The rabbi reverses the usual burden. Usually the religious person is expected to explain holiness, lulav, kashrut, and the like, while the secular person is treated as self-evident when speaking about human dignity, the sanctity of life, a flag, equality, art, or national memory. But on his account, it is precisely the atheist-materialist who must explain how holiness and values can grow at all in a world of atoms, physics, and evolution. In such a world, he argues, one can at most describe facts, tendencies, and feelings; one cannot derive normative validity from them.
Without a transcendent source, even secular morality rests on psychology or implicit faith
From here the rabbi broadens the claim: not only religious values, but secular morality too lacks real grounding within a materialist framework. He recalls his criticism of talk about the “sovereign individual” who legislates values for himself, Harari’s point about the absence of natural rights, and Dawkins’s description of values as “blessed evolutionary products”—a phrase the rabbi sees as confusing facts with values. So when secular people speak with pathos about rights, equality, LGBT issues, democracy, the flag, or memorial days, they are not merely asking others not to hurt their feelings; they are giving those feelings a normative status that their worldview has no tools to justify.
From Spinoza to Harsagor’s chivalry: the need for prophets, rituals, and aura has not disappeared
The essay also brings anecdotes to show that the need for sacred figures and charged gestures did not disappear with secularization; it merely changed objects. At a conference on Spinoza, he encountered an almost prophetic attitude toward the “first secular Jew,” and when Professor Harsagor presented standing up for a woman as the moral difference between secular people and the religious, the rabbi saw it as an almost caricatural example of producing secular “values” out of social gestures. For him, this does not prove that the secular person lacks feelings, but that he continues to use value-laden, quasi-sacred language without acknowledging its source and assumptions.
Holiness in the object, not only in the subject: in the religious world desecration changes reality
Against psychological reduction, the rabbi presents the halakhic concept of holiness. The Temple is holy not because people are moved by it, but because it has a distinct essence and function in the world, such as the indwelling of the divine presence. Therefore, “desecration of the holy” is not only an injury to the believer’s feelings, but a negative change in reality itself. In halakhic language, holiness is a דין בחפצא, not merely an attitude in the person. That is also the basic difference he wants to draw: in the religious world, emotion may flow from holiness, but it does not create it.
Secularization explains where secular values came from, not why they are binding
Here the rabbi uses Max Weber’s thesis on the Protestant ethic: many secular values may indeed be historical offshoots of religious values that underwent secularization. But even if this explains how capitalist striving, or a sense of sanctity toward art, mourning, the dead, the state, and democracy emerged, it still does not explain why any of these are binding or what gives them validity. Secularization, on his account, describes a sociological-psychological trajectory; it does not provide philosophical justification.
And yet: mourning art and historical sites is not just private sentiment
At the same time, the rabbi refuses to settle for simple dismissal. He asks the secular person what exactly became worse in the world without Notre-Dame or without the Mona Lisa, and shows how hard it is to answer. But in the same breath he argues that reducing this to “just emotion” is also unconvincing: the intensity of mourning, the sense of sublimity, and the pathos surrounding art and creation suggest that this is not merely psychological pleasure—otherwise art would be no different from a drug. So he is willing to recognize that there is here a sense of a real human or aesthetic value; the problem is that such a value cannot be explained within a materialist framework.
The conclusion: repressed religiosity creates secular totems and substitute sanctities
The conclusion is that the modern secular person finds it hard to live without holiness, faith, and objects of numinous awe, and so creates substitutes: the flag, Rabin, democracy, art, memorial days, equality, chivalric gestures, and more. The rabbi reads this not as mere confusion but as an expression of repressed religiosity. He compares it to the public reactions after Rabin’s assassination, and suggests—following an interpretation of Maimonides—that human beings naturally need a relationship with the transcendent; when that relationship loses its traditional form, it returns in secular forms, sometimes even idolatrous ones.
With God’s help
It is the eve of Passover, and I therefore did not have enough time to go over these matters again despite their obvious sensitivity. Still, I thought it worthwhile to write down the reflections that arose in me these days.
A few days ago a huge fire raged in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. The atmosphere emanating from France was one of desolation. The media described people crying, others murmuring various hymns in dejection, and the sense was that Paris was burning and would no longer be as it had been until now. It seemed that genuine mourning prevailed there.
The press descriptions focused on mourning over an architectural treasure and a structure of historical and sentimental value. One woman described a tour her daughter had taken there with a youth group, during which they were told about the cathedral’s importance, and quite casually she noted that not a word had been said there about its religious value and significance. They spoke about architecture, history, and nationality (in France that is still legal tender). This suddenly drew my attention to the fact that even in the press this aspect is not addressed at all. See, for example, the following report in Walla (one of many). In the course of a long article (by Internet standards), half of the following sentence—from the last comma onward—is devoted to the cathedral’s religious value:
The cathedral was completed in the fourteenth century and has since rested on its laurels, drawing cries of wonder from tourists and locals, inspiring awe in the believers who kneel before this vision of God’s power.
That is all. Aside from this hint, you will not find another word in the entire article about any religious aspect of the building or the event. Everything else is history and Gothic architecture, mixed with the feelings of one person or another.
Well, believers mourn because the cathedral presumably has real meaning for them. It plays a role in their religious world. But what is the meaning of secular pain? What does it express? Is there a value here that has been damaged, or is this merely emotional distress? Is there any difference at all between the two?
Preliminary Thoughts
If we ask people about their feelings in such a situation, I assume we will get mixed answers. On the one hand, there is no doubt that there is emotional and sentimental injury here. On the other hand, many will tell you that it is not only that. They see in this structure and others like it a value in some sense. In their view, the world itself is now lacking and damaged compared to its state before the fire. What is missing from it? A beautiful building. Fine, then they will build another one (already on the first day of the fire several of France’s wealthy announced that they would donate some six hundred million euros to reconstruct the tower that burned, a sum that probably could have supported all of Africa for several years). In the end it is hard to see here anything but emotion. People feel attached to this structure. It is part of their culture, and therefore they mourn it, which is understandable. But how does a dimension of value arise here? Seemingly this is a purely emotional matter.
I confess, to my shame, that the reports about the feelings surrounding the fire the Lord kindled in Paris aroused in me a certain sense of satisfaction. Not because it was a cathedral. I respect what is sacred to all religions, including Christianity, and I am sorry for the distress of their believers. Those feelings were aroused in me specifically in light of the architectural-historical-cultural aspect of the mourning. It is neither pleasant nor proper to gloat over the ruin of sad people, and I am certainly not happy that they are sad and that their feelings have been hurt. Moreover, I too regret the loss of a treasure. But this phenomenon once again confirms for me the strangeness of secular thought and culture, which turn such feelings into values. To my mind this expresses the emptiness and shakiness of the empty wagon, and the strange substitutes created for themselves by those riding in it. So permit me to dedicate this column to the elevation of the soul of one of the cathedral towers that burned.
First Thoughts
The unceasing descriptions of the architectural and cultural value of the cathedral strike me like someone who studies the pages used to print the Talmud, or the kinds of bindings and fastenings of the books and the typefaces used in printing it. Some people, for some reason, are attached to the color and material of the pages with no connection whatever to the content. When the Talmud was burned in Paris in the thirteenth century (near Notre-Dame), such a person would at most have mourned a cultural treasure and precious pages that had been lost.
These people are dealing with something that has a very central intrinsic value, but they do not identify with it or understand it, and so they latch onto marginal, purely emotional elements and take them as a substitute for the essence, with no less intensity than the original. This is an example of the transition from a world of values and essence to a world of feelings. In this case, as in many others, the atheist-materialist connects to what believers connect to, but for entirely different reasons. He develops for himself alternative values relating to the same objects while emptying them of their essential content. The religious value undergoes a metamorphosis into a secular value, and in fact into a mere feeling. The believer sees in the cathedral something with religious significance, and for him this fire has done real damage to the world. The injury to his feelings is only a derivative result of the matter. His secular counterpart stands before the same event and experiences an injury to aesthetic and historical feelings, yet he weeps over it no less, and perhaps more. This leads him to speak about it in the language of values (there, you see, we have values too, not only religious people).
What Is Holiness?
In the world of Jewish law, holiness is ascribed to objects, to ideas, to times, to places in space, and the like. For outsiders (especially atheist-materialists; my remarks here are directed mainly at them), it is hard to understand the meaning of all this. What is holy about a certain place or a certain time? Why is some object holy? It is a collection of atoms, or a certain place or time, and that is all. Many wonder at this strange attitude toward things lacking any objective meaning. Therefore the believing person usually has to explain to his secular counterpart the concepts of holiness he uses. He is the eccentric one here, and therefore he is the one who must provide explanations.
But to the best of my judgment, the truth is exactly the opposite. The atheists (and especially those who use the prevalent pseudo-religious terminology) use religious language and apply it to things in which no trace of holiness can be seen. Where all that is really happening is that feelings are being hurt, they speak about values and holiness. In my opinion, it is they who should have to explain their terminology and their attitude, and I suspect it would be difficult for them to do so. But for some reason an atmosphere has arisen among us as though the burden of explanation rests specifically on the religious. Strange.
What Is a Value?
A similar situation prevails with respect to values. Here too many feel that the religious person must supply explanations for his strange values, while the secular person is exempt from doing so. On the contrary, he is the one who demands explanations from his religious counterpart. It is hard to understand what value there is in waving a lulav (the palm-branch bundle used on Sukkot) or eating kosher food, and it seemingly seems easier to understand why there is value in human life or human dignity, or in moral values in general.
But here too the truth is exactly the opposite. In an atheist and materialist world it is impossible truly to ground discourse about values. Not because we lack reasons for them (values, precisely as values, have no reason). Values as such cannot exist in such a world. A clear expression of this phenomenon appears in the third part of the fourth notebook (and in columns 126–131, which dealt with freedom and liberty), where I discussed a statement by Ari Elon, who compares the rabbinic person to the sovereign person. He explains that the secular person is free because he legislates his own values for himself and does not let an external system do so for him. I showed there why this is pure conceptual confusion. In a material worldview there is no possibility whatsoever of speaking about values in the accepted sense (see further below). Collections of molecules cannot be subjects of value, neither as the ones commanded nor as those toward whom I am commanded. The value of life or human dignity cannot be defined in a materialist world, and certainly not the command binding all of us to preserve them, and all the babble about moral postulates will not help. Yuval Noah Harari wrote well that people have no more rights than grasshoppers (in fact neither of them has any rights, except perhaps as a convention. Strip away the pathos of the American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen).
This is sometimes called humanism (values grounded in the human being and not in an external factor). But there, in the fourth notebook, I showed that even Kant could not have proposed a humanistic morality of the sort attributed to him. No such thing exists. Take, for example, Dawkins’s wording, when he writes that values are ‘blessed evolutionary products.’ But evolutionary products are not values; they are facts. Consider this expression of Dawkins’s, ‘blessed evolutionary products’ (I commented on it in my book God Plays Dice). By what standard are they blessed? Are there value-standards that determine what is blessed and what is not? But we are speaking about the standards themselves. The only standard that exists with respect to the products of evolution is feeling alone. I feel that these are positive and worthy things. But those feelings themselves are also evolutionary products. Are they blessed? Yes, by a second-order blessing. And so on, in the form of ‘turtles all the way down.’ The conceptual sphere of value cannot exist in a world consisting entirely of matter and evolution, and no strange regressions can generate it there out of nothing. Therefore, either people ignore the contradiction and continue with pseudo-religious discourse, or they resort to psychological reduction. That is the only way out for someone unwilling to admit (even to himself) that, deep down, this is faith.
All this applies even with respect to moral values. Moral values too cannot exist in a world without God, and certainly not in a materialist world. But values like art, archaeological and architectural sites, civic holidays, and the like are far less intelligible. What value is there in all these? What meaning can the term ‘value’ have in a world consisting entirely of physics? How can values have validity without an external source that grants them validity (see the third part of the fourth notebook)? And despite all this, the secular person in particular feels that he stands on solid ground with respect to his values, whereas the religious person is the one required to provide explanations for his values. I have seen an upside-down world.
Religious people have values dictated to them by God, and now secular people have them too. God may indeed be dead, but the values to which He gives validity have remained with us. Secular people too now know how, and are careful, to take offense when their ‘religious’ feelings are hurt (see LGBT issues, unequal treatment of women, the flag and anthem, memorial days, and the like). It is important for me to stress again: I am not speaking here about injury to feelings. Everyone has feelings, and it is improper to hurt them. A person whose feelings are hurt is offended and wounded, whether secular or religious. That is clear. I am speaking about investing those feelings with value-content.
This reminds me of an episode that happened to me about thirty years ago, when I went to hear lectures at a conference at Tel Aviv University under the title “Spinoza, the First Secular Jew”. The conference was fascinating. Throughout it there was talk of Spinoza as a secular prophet. People from the audience asked what Spinoza would have said about our current situation, and questions of that sort. I thought to myself that people apparently cannot do without all-knowing rebbes and objects of veneration, so they create strange substitutes for themselves. During the intermission I had a bitter argument with Prof. Michael Harsegor and his two faithful attendants. Harsegor was a well-known historian and a prominent anti-religious activist. The crowd gathered around us, and I underwent an experience I had never had (I had only heard about it from my mother): blatant antisemitism. Hatred blazing out of eyes, and other phenomena on which I will not elaborate here. At any rate, when we sat down there to eat, Harsegor suddenly saw a young woman looking for a place to sit. He (who could have been her grandfather) immediately rose and offered her his seat with great pomp and splendor, with a royal wave of the hand and chivalric manners. As he did so he tossed off toward me: You see, this is the difference between us and you. When we see a woman, we rise before her and offer her our place (or, alternatively, send her to the armored corps). I could not help answering him: Indeed. To my mind too, this is the pinnacle and essence of secular values. I chuckled to myself, but this was only one of the first events in a chain that led me to the feelings I am describing here.
In a materialist and atheist world people continue to use value-language without any possible basis for it, and work very hard to create substitutes while ignoring the philosophical impossibility of grounding such a discourse. And of course this does not prevent them from belittling believers and demanding explanations from them regarding their strange concepts of holiness and values. People who live in a world made entirely of subjective imagination talk about believers’ imaginary friends. No wonder that when I see this vacuum appear in all its glory, I feel a trace of satisfaction. What can I do? I too am human…
Secularization of Values and Culture
What I have described here is a transformation of an attitude that was originally religious and underwent secularization (=becoming secular). Religious people have holiness and values, and now secular people have them too. There are many additional examples of this phenomenon in the secular world around us. The shiver of holiness surrounding the dead and their treatment. Respect for mourning. Even the sanctity of human life and the value of the human being, not to mention equality, democracy, art and culture, creativity, and the like. All these are values that evoke a shiver of holiness in a secularized world in which there ought to be no place for talk of values, and certainly not of holiness. A secular person can feel a shiver of holiness even without believing in God. Standing before a great work of art, a unique architectural structure, a historical site or an archaeological site with significance, and perhaps even a special landscape, or rising before a woman (Harsegor-style chivalric manners), and the like. And again, it is hard to accept that this is only feeling. The discourse and its intensity reflect beliefs, not feelings.
But the concepts of holiness used in these contexts seem, on their face, very puzzling. If you ask people what this means, they will probably tell you that the concept of holiness itself has undergone a metamorphosis of secularization. In many cases, the phrases they use are overtly religious. Starting with the image of God (the image of God), continuing with ‘the sanctity of life,’ ‘the sanctity of the flag’ (and of the state, the anthem, the memory of fallen IDF soldiers, Memorial Day and Independence Day, Holocaust remembrance, and other strange secular sanctities). The intensity of the pathos is similar, and at times even exceeds the religious pathos. The excuse, of course, is that this is a borrowed way of speaking. But when one examines it philosophically, one necessarily encounters a vacuum. In truth, this is a feeling that has undergone processing and suddenly become a value. Those who wish to be especially thorough will say that all values are nothing but feelings, and then of course everything is fine.
Holiness in the Object and in the Person
This is a psychological reduction of values. What among religious people was an objective phenomenon is, among secular people, a subjective feeling, yet one no less deserving of consideration (we should take people’s feelings into account). In fact, many assume that among religious people too this is merely a matter of considering feelings. People will tell you that in essence there is no difference between them and a religious person except for the sanctified contents. The attitude of holiness itself is very similar (numinous feelings and feelings of sublimity), except that it is directed toward different contents. For both the secular person and the religious person, they say, it is a matter of feelings and of the duty not to hurt feelings.
But I deny this, not only with respect to the religious world but also with respect to the secular one. When a religious person speaks of holiness, sometimes a feeling is involved (not for me), but that is not the essence of the matter. The Temple is holy not because of the feelings it arouses in people but because of its function in the world and because of its essence. Because the divine Presence rests there (God is present there in a more direct way). The feelings arise, if at all, partly as a result of this. In the halakhic and religious worldview, a holy thing has value in and of itself, even if no one were to feel any emotion toward it. Indeed, the Talmud (Nedarim 2b) distinguishes between laws in the object itself (on the ontic plane, the things themselves) and laws in the person (on the epistemic plane, our relation to things). Interestingly, the clearest example of a law in the object itself (in reality itself) is holiness. This means that holy objects are a different kind of object, and not merely a different kind of attitude toward them. Holiness is perceived in Jewish law as a different kind of reality, and not merely as a specific kind of relation of ours to a thing (which is the essence of a law in the person).[1]
Therefore, as I understand it, when people speak about “offending religious feelings,” that does not exhaust the essence of the religious conception of desecrating the holy. The feelings are only a consequence of the thing. First of all there is a desecration (a trampling of holiness) of the thing itself. The feelings of hurt are only the result of the matter and not its essence. The act is wrong not because it hurts this or that feeling but because of what it does in reality. In the religious-halakhic worldview, ‘desecration of the holy’ is an expression that describes a change in reality itself, and not merely in feelings about it. For religious people holiness is in the object itself and not in the person. In this sense the concept of holiness exists even for cold-blooded fish like me, who usually do not feel such emotions.
The Protestant Thesis
We have seen that the idea of holiness and the religious terminology that accompanies it undergo a metamorphosis from the ontic plane to the psychological one. I should mention here that in columns 7 and 168 I pointed out that many concepts undergo, over the generations, a similar metamorphosis from objects to psychological ideas. Secularization makes constant use of this mechanism.
One of the clearest examples of the secularization of a religious idea is the Protestant thesis of the sociologist Max Weber. In a nutshell, his claim is that American—and Western generally—neuroticism and success-obsession (the spirit of capitalism) are the product of a Protestant religious culture that underwent secularization (see here for a more precise formulation). Among Protestants there is a conception (strange to the point of contradiction) that advocates determinism and at the same time gives religious value to material and economic success-obsession. Whoever succeeds thereby provides retroactive evidence that he is beloved and favored by God. Despite the determinism, they are under an obligation to make an effort (hishtadlut, for purists pronouncing the Hebrew Ashkenazically) to prove that they are God’s favorites. After the loss of religious faith and the religious meaning accompanying success, success-obsession survived as a cultural-social value, and from here come the ambition and the desire to succeed in secular post-Protestant Western culture.
It is important to note that this is a sociological and psychological transformation. Success-obsession in its Protestant source was a religious value and not merely a feeling or a mental tendency. But capitalist success-obsession in a secularized world cannot be grounded in terms of its religious source, for the religious faith on which it was based no longer exists in the group in question. The Protestant thesis belongs to sociology, not ethics. It explains how this arose, not why it is justified. Success-obsession turned from a religious value into a character trait, and from there also into a value-conception (it is not entirely clear, but the sense is that in the post-Protestant West there is also some human value, even if not a moral one, in succeeding). The process of secularization does not provide a foundation for values; it only explains their sociological development. After the emptying-out, it is hard to ground this value, certainly within a materialist worldview. In such a worldview there are no values at all, whether success-obsession or any other value.
My claim is that processes of secularization are usually of this kind. The religious origin of values does not provide a basis that justifies them. Those who are left with nothing then try to build an alternative foundation for something that is originally sociological and psychological. In most cases, at least among those who possess intellectual honesty and understand that the value-alternative is empty of content and meaning, the psychological basis becomes the basis for values. Thus psychology replaces essence. Holiness becomes a psychological phenomenon and moves from the ontic plane to the epistemic-psychological one.
The Problem
Try to explain to me why it is a problem that Notre-Dame Cathedral burned, beyond the psychological problem (the distress of people who for some reason feel connected to it). Has the world become less good in some sense? What has been damaged here? It is clear to me that a believing Christian could provide such explanations. I am asking this question with respect to the secular mourners who concern themselves with the loss of a historical and architectural treasure.
When a religious person tells his secular friend that there is an obligation to wave the lulav, the latter sneers dismissively. What is done to the world as a result of this waving? Does waving the lulav improve the world? Some offer such explanations, but I personally agree that it does not (at least not in the moral sense). Now the secular person presses on and asks: are there values that have no effect on the moral condition of the world? What is their meaning? Where do they come from? Is this not simply an invention? (See column 177 on accepted notions and rational truths.) But when we ask him in return why Notre-Dame has any value at all—has anything in the world become defective after it burned? Or we ask him what would have happened if the Mona Lisa, or any other masterpiece, had never been created. Would the world have been worse? In what sense? We will receive no answer beyond emotional injury. The fellow feels, for some reason, a connection to the Mona Lisa or to Notre-Dame. They arouse certain feelings in him, and for some reason he relates to that as a value.
Seemingly one cannot avoid the conclusion that this is sentiment, that is, a purely psychological phenomenon. But in my opinion that does not explain the feeling of sublimity and of hurt. Therefore I claim that this is not just emotion. The sense is that something in our humanity has been damaged here. Even if the world has not become less good or less moral, there is nevertheless a human value here (see columns 154 and 201, and elsewhere, on aesthetic values). And what about someone who does not feel this? You will not be able to explain it to him. Does that remind you of the lulav?
I do not buy the psychological reduction that underlies processes of secularization, for it does not explain the depth of the feeling and the unmistakably value-laden attitude toward it. Mourning for Notre-Dame expresses not merely personal psychological pain. There is there a feeling that some value has been damaged. That the world has become less good, even if not in the moral sense. If art merely caused us strong feelings, it would be no different from taking a drug. The pathos of those who speak about art and creation reflects discourse on the plane of value and not merely on the psychological plane. Seeing art as a value means that there is something there beyond psychology.
Suppressed Religious Feelings
In my view, even among those who concede, ostensibly honestly, that this is mere psychology, that is an after-the-fact interpretation. I claim that what we have here is an actual religious emotion, not a pseudo-religious metaphor. People who live in a vacuum must somehow express the genuine faith and religious emotion that exists within them. And once the traditional values and modes of expression have lost their power and meaning for them, they use religious terminology while retrospectively assigning it a merely emotional meaning.
Because in a materialist-atheist worldview there is no way to offer an explanation for values and holiness, and because people nevertheless do feel this within themselves, they find themselves forced to explain their values on a psychological basis. They have no other way out. It is hard for them to understand that what is actually throbbing within them is religious faith. At most there is self-deception here. I wrote similar things about a moral atheist-materialist: that his morality is either mere psychology or an expression of latent faith.
With all due respect, one can get over the absence of a few stones or of a central cityscape image. It is hard to see stones as a value that arouses such deep and difficult feelings. (Is this not like the lulav?) Therefore it seems plausible to me that these are expressions of suppressed religiosity. Let me just mention here that a few days ago someone sent me an article by Daniel Dor, in which he (as a secular person, as far as I understand) honestly addresses this phenomenon and explains that many secular people are in fact suppressed religious believers (see on this columns 191, 203–4, and more).
Substitutes
The distress I have described leads people to create substitutes for themselves. Social totems (and taboos too) instead of God, and feelings instead of values, holiness, and faith (thus we arrive at the common and mistaken identification of faith with emotion). Following Rabin’s assassination, the stormy reactions in the public aroused in me a similar feeling. There too suppressed religious emotions burst outward, and people behaved as though some personal disaster had happened to them. Their democracy had been murdered. The candle-lighting in the square by teenagers sobbing bitterly really evoked pity in me, not only for the grief but for the patheticness. Democracy and Rabin himself had become for them a kind of modern idols. I had the sense of idolatry coming into being as a pseudo-religious substitute for holiness in the secular vacuum. A person apparently cannot live without holiness and without idols.
Once I heard from a friend a proposed solution to the contradiction between Maimonides’ words at the end of the laws of Me’ilah (misuse of consecrated property), where he writes that the laws of sacrifices are a decree of Scripture and have no explanation, and his words in the Guide of the Perplexed where he explains that the sacrifices are the Torah’s way of dealing with the impulse toward idolatry. My friend suggested that perhaps Maimonides’ intention was to say that within each of us there is a healthy and proper yearning for the transcendent. There is in us a feeling that there is something or someone up there, and people look for a way to create a connection with it. This feeling seeks a way to break outward and be expressed in practice, and therefore idolaters found for themselves distorted channels through which to express it (as in the calf, These are your gods, O Israel (‘These are your gods, O Israel’)). The Torah, through its laws of sacrifices, offers a more proper and fitting way to answer that same need. Therefore, on the one hand, the laws of sacrifices are indeed a way of coping with the impulse toward idolatry, but at the same time they are also a decree of Scripture (which says that this is how one creates a connection with the Divine).
[1] To be sure, there are also other interpretations of the distinction between the object itself and the person, but in religious thought this is a distinction that does not lie on the emotional plane (feelings and their injury) but on a plane examined in terms of truth and falsehood (a fitting or unfitting relation to a thing in itself. Is this the correct relation or not, and not, factually, what relation exists).
Discussion
I understand that you have no problem with the phenomenon of deep, public pain arising from emotion, injury, or even a kind of mourning: something in the world, as we knew it, has gone never to return. You are only claiming that there are cases (such as here, in Notre Dame, or in Rabin’s murder) in which the reaction is so emotional and so deep that one cannot avoid distinguishing that it involves contact with something religious in the soul. That is, of course, debatable. Someone might say that interpreting another person’s feelings is patronizing (yes, I know you are not frightened by that).
I’d like to quote here a beautiful passage by Shimko Ben-Ami, a Facebook friend, who quoted Bialik and wrote as follows:
“The Cologne ‘Dom,’ the Milanese ‘Duomo,’ ‘Notre Dame’ in Paris, were perfected in their splendor and became what they were through the mighty efforts of world artists over several hundred years, each of whom in his own time gave his life and the best of his creative power to the sacred work that was sacred to him alone. And there is no doubt that only because they all subjected themselves to one central idea, very exalted in their eyes, did this ‘heavenly craft’ succeed in their hands to such a degree.” (Bialik, Halakhah and Aggadah)
Our world is diminishing at this moment.
End quote. I assume that דווקא the religious emphasis in Bialik’s words, the focus on ‘heavenly craft,’ supports your point. But I דווקא want to linger over the ending as he himself phrased it, about the world diminishing. It seems to me that this is the feeling of mourning: the blow dealt to a work so complex, magnificent, beautiful, familiar. Perhaps there is even a kind of dread in it—the world, as we knew it, is transient.
Indeed. And all this is psychology, as I wrote. The question is whether there is also a dimension of value here, and if so—what its basis is.
I do not belittle aesthetics, nor do I think it necessarily belongs to the outer shell. I am discussing only the question whether this is just emotion, or whether values are involved as well. The pathos points to values. Thank you. To you as well.
What does the rabbi think of the claim that the supreme value of secular people is increasing their own happiness?
Can increasing happiness be called a value? Or is it only an emotion? Because at least the motivation for it is very clear.
Some treat hedonism as a kind of moral doctrine, but in my opinion that is only homonymy. Increasing happiness is an interest, not a value. But in a secular world (I mean a materialist-atheist one), values do not belong at all—even genuine values.
In my humble opinion, the argument is not factually grounded. The entire article is based on the assumption that most of those who define themselves as secular are pure secularists also in their philosophical outlook, but as far as I understand (and this too is not based on fact), most of those called secular are religious in one sense or another (for example, “You shall rise before the aged”), so it is hard to understand toward which group the claims in the article are directed. The points are close to Daniel Mor’s remarks mentioned in the section “With all due respect,” only in my opinion he is quite explicit about it.
In honor of philosophy
I wrote whom the remarks were directed at. What does that have to do with facts?
In practice, if your claim about value is something that can be measured by some standard external to us, whatever it may be, and not a decision or convention within some human collective, then I do not understand why the rabbi has to go that far. After all, in a deterministic world there is no free choice, so there cannot be values that are upheld through decision.
Why is a value like divine inspiration and repairing the world something you do understand, while a value like human life and respect for others is something you do not understand?
There is no rational explanation for either one; after all, why should I care whether there is divine inspiration in the world or not?
To Rabbi Michi,
On the one hand, “facts are not the object of values,” and on the other hand, “among religious people, values are an objective phenomenon,” “in the object itself.” If it is an objective phenomenon in the object itself, then it is a fact, and facts are not the object of values (according to your view). Isn’t that so?!
And why should I care that the finger of God touched some ark and now it contains an “objective value of holiness”? Does that mean I suddenly have to relate to it differently?!
And where is the argument in the statement, “Unlike secular people, for us religious people the value is in the object itself”? If you have not defined the concept “objective value in the object itself” (what is that?), what prevents secular people from claiming that for them too the value is in the object itself?
According to your view, when something is declared a “value,” it requires no explanation; the necessary conclusion is that for a value to be called a value, a person has to grant it the title “value” (that is, it is something subjective). For some reason you see value in God, and others do not.
[And since you mentioned totems and taboos, in his book Freud describes several cases of “holy” objects in certain tribes, and when one of the tribe members touched them by mistake—he died immediately from psychological distress. It is frighteningly similar to the story of Uzzah’s breach. Would it not be reasonable to say that this is the same phenomenon?]
You wrote that you respect the sacred objects of all religions. Why respect them? After all, some religions are outright idolatry.
I really didn’t understand: why is it not enough for you to say that the burning of the cathedral is only a psychological issue? It isn’t clear to me why you insist that this is not merely emotion. Could you substantiate this claim of yours?
One cannot escape the religious ‘emotion,’ as Alterman wrote:
It is good that your hand still grips our heart
Do not pity it in its weariness to run
Do not let it darken like a room
Without the stars that remained outside
I did not understand the connection between the first part and the second. Indeed, that too is an argument, although there is a materialist position that is not deterministic.
I understand both values. Where in my words did you see otherwise? My problem is with values in a materialist world. I am not dealing with the content of the values but with their very existence.
If someone is mistaken, that does not mean he is unworthy of respect.
I wrote that this is an impression based on things people say.
For years now, I’ve actually been wondering what “a butcheress’s kiss” is.
It seems to me this is a chain reaction of copy-paste. Someone says it is terrible and awful, and everyone else repeats it after him without thinking at all. The importance of the place was as a symbol of the sanctification of France as a holy kingdom for Catholics (there is historical testimony of how the French believed that the touch of the king’s hand healed miraculously). Since France has been a secular state for over 200 years, since Napoleon’s concordat with the Catholic Church, the place has become merely a historical site.
In this context, what place does art have in your view? Is it an interest or a value?
The butcheress’s kiss, of course. The genius Alterman kneaded Hebrew as he pleased so that it would fit the meter and rhyme (tabachat—mitpachat, “butcheress”/“kerchief”).
But… how can one prove that this existential / repressed / whatever need really testifies to the existence of God? Maybe it is indeed just a psychological need from a deeper and more primordial layer, nothing more?
But it is an established dictum that all mockery is forbidden except mockery of idolatry. No?
That’s what I suspected, and that’s also what Dan Laor thought when I spoke with him.
But the context isn’t clear. Why a butcheress? Some warm, maternal woman who hugs and kisses?
It is part of the development of every culture, and even a value.
By the way, France is a fairly religious country, except that there is separation of religion and state (which is why the renovation was done only with private money). Therefore the religious value of Notre Dame remains intact.
It cannot be proven. These are two interpretive possibilities.
Mockery is permitted, but there is no commandment to do it. It is a halakhic permission and a moral prohibition.
In my opinion—it represents the ultimate femininity in his eyes. Precisely her, and not some poster model.
By divine providence, the song is playing on the radio right now.
I wrote several times in the past about ethical facts to which the naturalistic fallacy does not apply (because they are not part of physical nature). The concept of value implicitly assumes some objective reality; otherwise relativism follows necessarily. I believe I discussed this in the fourth notebook in volume 3 and in my book Truth and Stability.
And so too regarding the finger of God. It seems to me similar to someone who says: fine, the Idea of the Good says that murder is forbidden. So what? Anyone who says that does not understand what the Idea of the Good is. It is a fact from which actions are obligated or forbidden.
What prevents materialist-atheists from claiming this is that, for them, there is no object in reality apart from physical facts, and there is no source of validity for such values other than God.
I would not draw many conclusions from Freud’s stories. But even without him it is known that there are psychophysical effects. And indeed, as I wrote, there are two possible atheist interpretations of values: psychological reduction or repressed belief. Choose whichever of them you think is correct.
As for Uzzah’s breach, it seems to me that the immediacy points to something non-subjective. But of course anything is possible.
Shlomi, at the moment you were reading, or at the moment I was writing? That’s how miracles and stories of divine providence are born… 🙂
Hayuta, in short: women to the kitchen. 🙂 [Only after you finish our matters, of course.]
At the moment I wrote, don’t take away my miracle-working wonder.
Art, in my view, is a human-aesthetic value (non-moral).
Indeed, the butcheress—or the barmaid—is a fixed figure in Alterman’s poetry. I tend to suppose that this is the ‘temporary’ woman, the inviting, warm woman of adventure, as opposed to the permanent one waiting at home [see his private life, and I won’t elaborate here]. And as for the question of computer or kitchen, the matter will be discussed later. For now, definitely kitchen.
Eliyahu, I think the argument you raise is a skeptical one.
It is like a person who feels that there is a moral truth that murdering a human being for pleasure is indeed a bad thing. And you tell him that this is not correct, because the species from which you came developed communally and implanted in you a feeling of disgust toward anti-social acts.
Why should he adopt such interpretations? If he feels it is true, there is no reason to contradict that.
Aside from that, usually one who argues against materialism attacks it on several additional points—free choice and consciousness.
And even according to the rabbi’s own view, it is altogether much easier to believe in moral truths when he holds that Ideas exist in the world. (For grounding the analogy and the whole range of non-analytic inferences.)
Eliyahu, to assume that the feeling of holiness (religious emotion or metaphysical thirst) represents something real does not require proof; that very relation is itself the evidence for this dimension that exists in man. The burden of refutation lies on the opposing side, which claims that this is sublimation. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote a book about this called The Unconscious God, in which he argues that religious faith is implicit in man even if he denies it.
Agreed.
Does the fact that it is impossible to offer an explanation for values and for holiness require that within all atheists “a religious faith throbs deep inside them”?
Is it not possible to argue that religious feeling exists even if God does not?
Is it not possible to argue that values have no justification, and that the secular person makes a value decision whether to be moral even if there is no rational justification here at all? Morality is embedded in the human being, and the human being decides whether to uphold it or not.
It is true that respecting the dead and the sanctity of man, and claiming that the burning of Notre Dame Church harmed the universe, is problematic, and probably really is an imitation of religious values.
But to claim that there is no basis for secular values is false. What is correct to claim is that perhaps there are not many secular values. There is a basic human morality of not causing pain to any creature whatsoever that can experience pain.
I strongly recommend that you read Rabbi Michi’s column 212; all the answers are there.
Religious feeling without God is what I called psychology. Therefore I wrote that there are two possibilities: psychological reduction or repressed belief.
When I say there is no secular morality, I do not mean that secular people do not behave morally, but that their morality is inconsistent (lacks a foundation). This has nothing at all to do with the contents of morality or with specific values. My claim is that values cannot exist at all in atheist thought. See the fourth notebook, volume 3.
In fact, Victor Hugo’s message in the story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame echoes exactly what Rabbi Michi says.
Salvatora loves Quasimodo the hunchback because of his good heart, his innocent character, his loyalty, and his integrity. The hunchback and his repulsive appearance do not enter into the calculus…
Meaning, aesthetics is not a value.
In light of this, how ridiculous is the analogy made by a French cartoonist whose moving cartoon was published in Le Figaro the day after the fire (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/16/world/notre-dame-hunchback-art-trnd/index.html). He chose to depict Quasimodo the hunchback crying over the cathedral that burned.
But in the original illustration (http://basementrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/hunchback-of-notre-dame-1996-movie-review-esmeralda-dead-quasimodo-ending-review-walt-disney-picture-film.jpg), he is crying over the love he found inside the cathedral—the corpse of Salvatora.
As for Quasimodo’s crying, whether over his beloved or over the cathedral, see column 120 for two explanations of Jonah’s qalahomer:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%94%D7%90%D7%9D-%D7%99%D7%A9-%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%94-%D7%9C%D7%9C%D7%90-%D7%9E%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%A2-%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A8-120/
And in greater detail in column 170.
“Everything for Notre Dame, nothing for the wretched”: over 100 arrested in the Yellow Vests protest in Paris:
https://www.calcalist.co.il/world/articles/0,7340,L-3760775,00.html
It would be interesting to examine whether there is a correlation between people who believed in the past and those who were born without any connection or feeling for religion, regarding identification with the burning of the building (there could be differences in either direction). Because to the best of my knowledge, there were many people even in France itself who were indifferent to the matter.
I saw this article in Haaretz and thought it resonates with what the rabbi wrote in column 212. Ostensibly, it sounds from the writer as though he is not speaking here only about a psychological phenomenon but actually “believes” there is something transcendent here:
/It is like watching God Himself go up in flames/
The newspaper was thrown in the trash and the feed was flooded with jokes, but Notre Dame was supposed to remain. Its destruction is a symbol of an era shrugging off every sign of stable meaning
Ofri Ilany
16.04.2019
When the unbelievable occurs, there is sometimes a gap of several hours in which many remain confused and speechless. That is what happened yesterday too, when Notre Dame Cathedral went up in flames in Paris. Faced with the orange flames that burst from one of the most famous buildings in the world, the huge column of smoke, and the collapsing spire, the first response was simply shock. Only after a few hours did the silence become covered with words: explanations, jokes, hollow responses from politicians. Calculations of the economic damage were thrown into the air, as though Notre Dame Cathedral were merely a “tourist site,” like the water park or the Mamilla complex. With incredible speed, the unbelievable becomes a fact in reality, and within a short time turns trivial.
But before the chatter dulls the pain, one must pause for a moment before the disaster. Paradoxically, destruction reminds us of what has been destroyed. Most of the Gothic cathedral, which had come to be regarded as a self-evident element in the Paris skyline, was ruined in a single night, like a limb severed from the body. Precisely Europe’s classical heritage, which has supposedly lain from time immemorial at the geographic heart of Western culture, is easier to forget than innovative or exotic structures that entered consciousness at later times, even if their honor is duly acknowledged. Now one can suddenly remember what a wonder was embodied in this creation, assembled through the antlike labor of thousands of stonecutters and builders some 800 years ago. One can only acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Catholic Christianity, which unlike other churches and other religions has always ascribed significance to the tangible and the beautiful, and saw in it an embodiment of the divine. “In everything that arouses in us a pure and authentic feeling of beauty there is a real presence of God. There is a kind of incarnation of God in the world, and its sign is beauty,” wrote the Catholic philosopher Simone Weil in her book Gravity and Grace (translation: Uzi Bahar, Carmel Publishing, 1994).
Before long, sarcastic remarks were also heard, together with supposedly humanistic sermons in the style of “They are only stones, not human beings.” That is indeed true: thousands of people are killed in fires around the world every day, and do not receive such broad media attention. But these are sanctimonious reactions. Even without being Catholic, or even religious, one can recognize that buildings like Notre Dame are perhaps the closest thing to immortality that exists in the earthly world of human beings. “The task of mortals, and their potential greatness, lies in their ability to produce things—works and deeds and words—that may deserve to dwell in the realm of what exists forever,” wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt. “By virtue of their capacity to leave behind them imperishable traces, human beings attain an immortality of their own despite being mortal as individuals, and thereby prove themselves to be of a godlike nature” (translation: Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir).
It is permissible to mourn Notre Dame Cathedral; it is indeed only a building and nothing more, but it endured for close to a thousand years. The reason it endured, while countless other things created in the twelfth century decayed and passed away, is that human beings attributed meaning to it. In return, those stones gave meaning to the lives of millions, enabling them to transcend the cycle of birth and daily survival.
Notre Dame is saturated with countless layers of meaning that settled into it over the hundreds of years of its existence. According to Arendt, the role of solid things in the world is to stabilize human life, and thanks to them human beings can restore the continuity of the self—that is, their identity. In this respect, the destruction of Notre Dame is a symbol of the current era, marked by the extinction and evaporation of every layer of stable meaning.
For one of the significant differences between European culture and American culture is that Europe exists within historical depth. Even the Twin Towers, whose collapse was one of the most important events in history, were erected only in 1972. Notre Dame began to be built in 1163. “Europeans encounter truth within a dialogue with the past,” said the philosopher Giorgio Agamben. “Europe has a special relationship with its cities, with its artistic treasures, and with its landscapes. That is what Europe is made of… When the Allies bombed the German cities, they knew they might be destroying German identity. In the same way, speculators destroy the Italian landscape with concrete and roads. This is not merely plunder of property, but of identity itself.”
The newspaper is thrown in the trash, the news edition ends, the Facebook feed is washed away and disappears. But Notre Dame was supposed to remain. Its destruction leaves us empty, detached, fragmented into short spans of immediate messages. Notre Dame in flames is like a god going up in flames, suffering and collapsing in the heart of history.
Indeed, typical. By the way, Simone Weil was Jewish, not Catholic. Though she hated Judaism and inclined toward Christianity.
Art, music, aesthetics—they are indeed borrowed from Greek teaching, and they express a religious feeling of wonder at the outer shell; yet divinity has touched that shell as well. Symmetry, architecture—these are phenomena touched by stardust. Notre Dame is a national symbol, and I would estimate that if a fire had broken out at the Arc de Triomphe or the Louvre, the pain and astonishment would have been the same.
Is this not the hallmark of Greek thought? The beauty of Japheth? The “sanctification” of the vessels rather than the lights? Thank you for the profound post, and have a kosher and joyous holiday. Regards to the family.