Q&A: Is an Agnostic Religious Consciousness Really Possible?
Is an Agnostic Religious Consciousness Really Possible?
Question
Have a good week.
First, let me say that my goal is not polemics or arguing, but again—as last time—to point out an issue that bothers me in your worldview.
In your very interesting book Truth and Stable, you addressed many points. I don’t remember all of them in detail, but the things that bothered me and disturbed me are the following:
1. The main danger, and the root from which religious fundamentalism and acts of violence in the name of religion develop, is not a mistaken and simplistic interpretation of the sacred texts, but rather the perception that all truth is with me and I am certainly right.
2. The root of postmodernism is the assumption that certainty cannot be attained, and therefore everyone has his own truth, and in practice there is no objective truth at all.
3. The conclusion—and this is what bothers me—is that there is no certainty, and yet there is truth that one should aim toward.
Can a Jew who observes all 613 commandments and dedicates his life to Torah really live מתוך a consciousness of religious agnosticism? In such a consciousness, I in fact do not know at all what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants. Does He want me to observe the commandments fully or not? I don’t know whether I will receive reward and so on. In fact, I don’t even know whether the Holy One, blessed be He, exists at all.
This approach, in practice, asserts—and leads to—a relation to the Holy One, blessed be He, not as an entity with whom we have a definite relationship, and whom we serve, and from whose service we also expect that we will thereby repair the world, receive reward, or repair some flaw in behavior in the world and crown ourselves as His servants—but rather it creates a situation in which we are basically fulfilling some categorical imperative, where we say: if the Holy One, blessed be He, exists, it is reasonable to assume that He wants us to observe the commandments. If so, it turns out that we are not really living with the consciousness of servants of God—of the Holy One, blessed be He, as an existing, real entity, with desires and demands—but rather we are serving “the truth,” or fulfilling the aspiration to aim toward the truth. In my humble opinion, this approach also leads to a kind of light or watered-down religiosity—if I’m not sure that the Holy One, blessed be He, really expects me to observe all 613 commandments, and on the other hand I am much more certain about other obligations—to volunteer, help the weak, be loyal to my people, take care of my mental health—why, as an ordinary layman, shouldn’t I just go out to a bar on Saturday nights and during the week, and devote the rest of my time to volunteering in hospitals, while leaving Torah study in a small corner as a fixed schedule of three hours a week, together with Sabbath observance, basic prayers, and keeping kosher?
Wouldn’t it be difficult, from within such an approach, to cultivate great Torah scholars, a generation steeped in fear of Heaven and love of Torah?
Of course, none of this is directed personally against you. You do manage to be great in Torah and to devote your whole life to the search for truth even while living with doubts. I’m talking about average cases.
And one more question: why do you reject the approach that says that faith in the Holy One, blessed be He, does indeed begin with intellect, rationality, and uncertainty, but afterward, through acquiring fear of Heaven and deepening oneself in Torah, a person merits that his soul be filled with fear of Heaven and with a deep emotional bond with the Master of the Universe? There is a great deal of testimony to knowledge—not experience; there is a difference—on the part of Kabbalists and towering spiritual figures, whose souls were simply bound to the Master of the Universe. If the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah and commanded obligations, is it not reasonable to assume that He would also give us a way to reach certainty of His existence?
Answer
I understood almost nothing here (and I also don’t know what “the previous time” was). I’ll address a few points that maybe I did understand.
- When I say there is no certainty, I am not talking about skepticism. Skepticism means complete non-knowledge (every alternative is equal to its opposite). Uncertainty only means that the truth, in my view, is not certain in my eyes (90% and not 50%).
- You are mixing up arguments on the merits with educational questions (how we will succeed in serving God, or growing in Torah). Those questions do not touch on the truth.
- I cannot reject a claim that I do not understand. Soul-connections and forms of knowledge possessed by Kabbalists that are not intellectual—these are terms I do not understand.
Discussion on Answer
The question is how uncertain you are. People give their lives for all kinds of things, even when they are not certain about them. So I don’t see a difficulty here. It is indeed reasonable that with such a consciousness there will be fewer great Torah scholars. So what? Does that mean this view is incorrect? Or should we lie to ourselves that certainty can be attained in order to produce great Torah scholars?
I don’t understand this discussion.
At first you say you didn’t understand anything, but from the answers I see that you did understand more or less.
1. If in your opinion Jewish law is binding and the Holy One, blessed be He, exists with 90 percent certainty, then there isn’t a big disagreement between us.
2. I’m not speaking specifically about an educational question, but rather about what expectations one can demand of a person once he adopts a non-certain consciousness in the service of God.
3. If so, why declare that one cannot reach certainty in faith, instead of just saying that I have not succeeded in reaching certainty in faith, or more precisely that most people do not succeed in reaching certainty? (There are testimonies about Sartre in this context, that in the end he supposedly said that he lived with an atheistic consciousness but knew that the Torah is true.)
You wrote an entire scroll, out of which I understood a few sentence fragments. And if you think I understood, you could have spared most of what you wrote and tried to be clearer.
1–2. See my reply to K.
3. Surprisingly and unexpectedly, I write that certainty in faith cannot be attained because in my opinion certainty in faith cannot be attained (or in anything else).
3. Meaning that in your opinion, even the Ari and Rabbi Kook, who claimed they experienced prophetic illumination, did not fully experience it?
And no, this is not an appeal to authority as an argument from great figures, nor a rebuke that you do not accept their testimony; it’s genuinely a question.
And one more thing:
People give their lives for a country, society, family, spouses—that is, for certain emotional loves, not for metaphysical values, so that’s different.
I’m not at all sure there are such testimonies from the Ari and Rabbi Kook, and even if there are—what exactly they mean. But I tend to see such phenomena as subjective experiences of various kinds (including hallucinations). Of course I cannot rule out a priori things I don’t know. Anything is possible, but I’m very skeptical.
As for the last distinction, I don’t see why it matters. A person who develops love for the Holy One, blessed be He, will give his life even without certainty. And besides, people give their lives for communism, black rights, national rights—all of these are not emotional loves.
It seems to me we’ve exhausted the topic.
Rabbi, I’ll ask the annoying question, but I’d be glad if you have a systematic answer: what seems to you to be the correct way to make practical commitments—in terms of the level of conviction, the intellectual level of religion, the difficulty and pragmatic significance, doing the truth for the sake of truth, disinterestedly, and all that—
for subjective religious certainty in a world that has no objective certainty.
I don’t.
Rabbi, I’m not the questioner, but I’d be glad if you could address the continuation of his remarks, which also still aren’t clear to me according to your approach. Obviously the question is about the degree of certainty and how a person wants to conduct himself, but still:
How, in your opinion, does this fit together:
“A consciousness of light or watered-down religiosity—if I’m not sure that the Holy One, blessed be He, really expects me to observe all 613 commandments, and on the other hand I’m much more certain about other obligations… and I’ll leave Torah study in a small corner as a fixed schedule of three hours a week, together with Sabbath observance, basic prayers, and keeping kosher.
Wouldn’t it be difficult, from within such an approach, to cultivate great Torah scholars, a generation steeped in fear of Heaven and love of Torah?”
That is, how does a feeling of striving for “one hundred percent” religiosity fit with doubt, in the sense of uncertainty, about the very truth of religion?