A very old friend, a former 6th grade schoolmate, having read my latest Chronicle, commented: “I guess I am not convinced that there is a God so I have a problem with the sacred in many ways.” In other words, although my Chronicle avoided asserting that “there is a God,” she found it problematic because it seemed to take God as a valid subject for discussion and therefore implied that the reader must be a “believer.” Such things are no doubt inevitable, although my use of “the sacred” is conceived as a way to avoid the existential question of “the existence of God.” As I have said, I trace this approach to Pascal, who certainly “believed in God,” but wanted to make clear that “believing” without objective evidence, even if one call it “faith,” is really a matter of “taking a chance,” in a word, betting (parier) on God’s reality, which he would show to be implicit in our very existence as thinking beings, obliged to reflect on whether our lives have “meaning,” in the sense of the permanent meaningful status associated with the notion of “going to heaven” or even to “the other place.”
The question of whether one “believes in God” is like no other. It is certainly not a matter of objective judgment, nor is it a moral judgment, since it does not concern our fellow humans. The degree to which whether or not I believe in God correlates with my own moral qualities is a matter for sociology.
What is curious is that my friend, being Jewish like myself, shares the historical privilege of bearing a lesser burden in this problematic situation than others, for the same reason that has made the Jews privileged objects of antipathy—scapegoats, if one likes—as a result of their invention/discovery of monotheism. The underlying cause of the universal resentment that surrounds the Jews is that they alone can have the historical certitude that they were the discoverers/propagators of the One God, and whether one considers that conception a “belief” or an anthropological hypothesis, their historical firstness is irrevocable—such that, as with denying the existence of gas chambers during the Holocaust, an attempt to deny it cannot help revealing itself as a desperate effort to make faith contradict fact: like claiming, as Orwell put it in 1984, that 2+2=5.
The firstness that has aroused such intense and durable hatreds is not merely a chronological privilege. It allows the Jews to conceive HaShem—which is in fact a sort of nickname—in all his transcendentality as nonetheless something like a member of our family. He is to be treated with the greatest respect, but there is no sense in which we cannot address him “man to man,” as occurs, as I understand it, in many passages of the Talmud. And so I feel I can extend this attitude just a bit into a form of “humanistic atheism.”
I have previously discussed the “Pascalian” theme (see, in particular, Chronicle 840) of how the constituents of (our corner of?) the universe, having made our existence real, and in human terms, durable, have thereby demonstrated their ultimate beneficence, providing us with a reason for us to wager on their, or HaShem’s, providence. That is, our faith concerns the matter of whether and to what extent this providence will protect us in the future. But it is not, like the faith that founds Christianity, “absurd,” but rather, amply proven simply by the fact that we are still here and, at least for the moment, the most successful creatures on our planet. If we can argue with HaShem, it’s because we recognize that, however little we know about his identity, we know that as the Master of the Universe, he has not simply allowed us to exist, but to become aware of our existence, and hence, of the necessary foundation of this existence in the world around us and thus, implicitly, in its “designer,” however the latter’s intentionality be understood.
I think the reader will have already understood that the purpose of this little thought experiment is to convince us that our universe’s providential nature is simply demonstrated by humanity’s prolonged existence. Hence in response to my friend’s existential question as to whether “there is a God,” at the most fundamental level, without attributing to this providential figure any particular intention or consciousness, we cannot deny, or as Pascal might have put it, we cannot avoid wagering on, the providential nature of the universe on our behalf. This wager is implicit in the simple fact of living, as we do, with the consciousness of both our individual mortality and the continued existence (so far at least) of our species—along with that of the rest of our life-world.
The relative banality of these reflections on the sacred is given its real interest by the obvious although essentially unexplored parallel between the sacred and language. A point I have previously made in these Chronicles is that language and the sacred, two phenomena that are virtually never put in parallel, were not even in Roy Rappaport’s fundamental intuition of their coevality understood as both emerging from a new and unique motivation—one that Jacques Derrida combined in the profound if sadly unexplored intuition expressed by the French neologism la différance, based on the dual meaning of différer, which means both to defer and to differ. In effect, the element of deferral, postponement (of desire, of instinct) is the simplest one-word definition of the human, expressed on the one hand by what Sartre called the “freedom” with which we think the world—which could only be realized as shared with our fellows through the medium of language, the exchange of signs in the place of the manipulation of things—and on the other, by the moral sense that Hillel called “the whole Torah,” the simple essence of the sacred: the sense of right and wrong, of the imperative to treat our fellow humans as of equal value to ourselves.
The problematic human “fraternity” that exhibits itself in the first place as what René Girard baptized “mimetic desire” is at the same time the source of the ultimate failure of “Pavlovian” non-reflective mechanisms for controlling intraspecific behavior, a failure that could only be resolved through passage to the higher level on which humanity finds itself: that of internalization and reflection, which in turn can only take place by means of the deferral of “instinctive” attempts to appropriate appetitive objects in collective situations. Which makes impossible the regulation of human behavior through reflexes alone, and makes deferral a matter of choice, thus consequently uncertain, as the originary scene in the garden makes evident: the conscious decision to defer appetitive action cannot simply be dictated.
Yet as today’s “postmodern” autocracies demonstrate, it can indeed be compelled by the coercive force which, as in 1984, can force us to “believe” that 2+2=5. Which poses the question of whether “free” market-oriented polities are fated to give way to those in which this force comes to take the place of conscience.
The above description of the “degree-zero” Jewish context prepares us for my understanding of Tertullian’s semi-apocryphal line Credo quia absurdum est, “I believe because it is absurd,” as the essence of the Christian “completion” of Judaism. The “absurd” idea of HaShem becoming mortal and dying for humanity’s sake is the special distinction of Christianity that guarantees by faith God’s love for humanity and that bridges the gap between the Old Testament’s notion of the “people of HaShem” and humanity in general, making Christianity the West’s first “universal religion.”
It is really with Christianity that faith becomes a crucial element of religion—faith in the sense of belief against reason, as demonstrated by the uneasy relationship to Tertullian’s point of the Church itself. For although the Old Testament does not lack for miracles, these are not as such foundational elements of Hebrew “belief,” whereas Jesus’ death as a sacrifice to humanity, followed by his miraculous resurrection and return to immortality, is the central dogma of the Catholic Church and most of its derivatives.
Tertullian’s quip may oversimplify this process, but it points to its core: obliging us to believe that in our time, such a miracle could take place, and the Messiah, normally understood as coming at the “end of history,” be revealed. I need not point out that this belief is not founded on the instrumental/”Darwinian” notion of Providence as “the survival of the fittest,” but one whose salvific power is founded on the “absurd” singularity of the divinity’s appearance in the temporal world.
The Koran presents Islam as the culmination of the “Abrahamic” series. There are many references to Abraham and his son Ishmael who is the proto-Islamic brother of the proto-Jewish Isaac, to the Exodus and later elements of the Old Testament/Tanach history, as well as the New Testament story of Jesus. But these books are not themselves integrated into the Koran, which presents itself as the definitive version of the whole historical series, sent via Gabriel to Muhammad as a final “correction” to the fragmentary and inconsistent writings of the Jews and Christians. The Hadiths may contain denigrations of these “elder brothers,” but the Koran itself treats them as respected but not as yet fully informed bearers of what will now be the final revelation.
The language of the Koran prepares and explains but does not contain the shameless historical distortions of a Mahmoud Abbas, who is unafraid to declare as a simple fact that, for example, there was never a Hebrew temple on the Temple Mount, which the Jews dare not defile with their “filthy feet.” But although the Koran itself does not contain such texts, the subsequent history of Islam clearly permits this kind of interpretation.
Nonetheless, this summary presentation suggests that there is plenty of room within the Abrahamic tradition for compromise and a sentiment of fraternity. The current “post-colonial” spate of jihad should not be taken as a demonstration that the Abraham Accords are incompatible with the three Abrahamic religions taken as a whole. This was the grain of truth in George Bush’s naïve claim that “Islam is a religion of peace”; taken simply as the religion of the Koran, there is plenty of ammunition for such a view. Islam may be the source of jihad, just as Christianity gave birth to antisemitism, but a more optimistic view of the outcome of the current “time of troubles” is certainly possible, beginning with the hoped-for resolution of the current Gaza conflict. For the very horrors of the 10/7 massacre suggest that the current dominance of its antisemitic/anti-Zionist interpretation cannot be indefinitely sustained, being grounded on palpable falsities emanating from biased sources, beginning (let us say) from the fake photo of Gaza’s “bombed hospital” on the front page of the New York Times on October 17, 2023 (see Chronicle 786), a hospital which was soon discovered to have been struck by a misfired Palestinian missile, and only in its parking lot!
What has empowered the recent spate of jihadism is the revelation of the continuing power of the epistemology of resentment, which has encouraged Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and the US to find allies among disaffected Western youth happy to identify with the enemies of Israel—the conservative wing of which embodies today’s only truly unabashed “Western” nation. It is this shared epistemology that permits the “green-red” alliance between the Western left and the jihadists, not some deep affinity between Marxism’s derivatives and Islam.
That the Judeo-Christian world’s external enemies have formed an alliance with its internal hommes révoltés is not tantamount to a demonstration that its downfall is preordained. But the defense of Western civilization today has become increasingly dependent on Jewish Israel’s ability to demonstrate, after centuries of passivity, its readiness to repel the aggressions of its enemies, and thereby increasingly to serve as an example to both Christian and Muslim nations of resistance to its persecutors.
Israel was founded as the reincarnation of the eternal Jewish hope to exemplify the values of the Western civilization whose roots lie in the Old Testament. The current test of this hope may well be crucial for the survival of this civilization in the face of its atavistic enemies.