Question

I happened to watch a fascinating episode yesterday of the series “Question Answer” (a series that brings together people who became religiously observant and people who left religion, around the weekly Torah portion), featuring Sha’anan Streett (lead singer of Hadag Nahash) and Dr. Baruch Kahane (a clinical psychologist who specializes in Jewish psychology, one of the founders of the Rotenberg Institute). They spoke about dreams, inspired by the Torah portion of Vayetze (the weekly portion at the time the episode was recorded), and along the way they talked about faith and meaning. Sha’anan said that he is an atheist, and nevertheless, in his view, it is incumbent upon us to be good and make the world better. By contrast, Dr. Baruch Kahane said that his path to becoming religiously observant began when he realized that he had to ground the moral relationship between human beings on firm validity, and so he decided to believe in God. At that point he brings a beautiful dialogue from 1984 that expresses the conflict sharply:
“Winston Smith: ‘I don’t care. In the end they’ll beat you. Sooner or later they’ll see you for what you are, and then they’ll tear you to pieces.’
 
O’Brien: ‘Do you see any sign that that is going to happen? Or do you know any reason why it should happen?’
 
Winston Smith: ‘No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe—I don’t know, some spirit, some principle—that you will never overcome.’
 
O’Brien: ‘Do you believe in God, Winston?’
 
Winston Smith: ‘No.’
 
O’Brien: ‘Then what is this principle that will defeat us?’
 
Winston Smith: ‘I don’t know. The spirit of man.’
 
O’Brien: ‘And do you see yourself as a man?’
 
Winston Smith: ‘Yes.’
 
O’Brien:
‘If you are a man, Winston,
then you are the last man.'”
 
At that point Dr. Baruch Kahane says that in the end Winston loses, because belief in the human spirit is not enough. If there is nothing that gives validity to the human spirit (God), then in the end it will fail. Sha’anan, by contrast, disagrees with him and continues in the direction of thinking that the human spirit is a sufficiently stable basis for morality in a world without God. After that, their lines of thought continue on two different planes regarding Jacob’s dream: Dr. Baruch Kahane relates to it as prophecy that establishes a destiny for Jacob, while Sha’anan Streett disagrees and relates to it as a personal message to Jacob, the product of his own spirit, telling him that even if there are ups and downs (angels ascending and descending), he must keep going.
 
Their dialogue made me realize something deeper about the nature of discourse between religious and secular people. A lot of the time the conversation between them is deaf, because they are speaking on different planes and are not participating in the same discourse. The religious person looks for metaphysical principles in order to ground his conduct, and the secular person looks for naturalistic principles in order to ground his conduct.
 
It reminds me of another interesting video I saw this week. In that video, Avitar Banai says that Aviv Geffen asked him, “Tell me, why do all the losers become religiously observant?” And then Avitar answered that the moment a person understands that the solution to the questions of his life does not depend only on himself, that is the definition of being a loser—and in that sense he is proud to be a loser. This connects to what I said above, that this “loser-ness” is a certain kind of self-nullification meant to search for metaphysical principles on which the religious person tries to ground his behavior.