The four exiles alluded to in the book of Daniel and elaborated upon by commentaries through the ages are no mere historical regimes but a series of still-extant veils over the perception of G-d, the blinding condition of all we now know, the way the whole world relates to G-d. The Maharal of Prague writes that the number of an exile is significant. Each exile’s number is the divine truth it opposes. This is also an easy way to remember them.

Babylon is the old idolatry, the proliferation of powers and potentates on earth, unencumbered by unifying accounts or the arguments of Abraham. It is deeply spiritual, too spiritual, with experience itself pulling the Babylonians to worship finite realities, to label the diversity of experience ultimate. As such it is the first exile, and oneness it opposes.

Media/Persia opposes the opposite. It is perhaps a dialectical response to Babylon: it has a problem with otherness or the world as an extension of the divine. It is fine with there being one king but he must be locked behind a bureaucracy of intermediaries. This is not a wild idolatry of many powers but systemization as G-d itself. In the book of Esther, the King is an absolute potentate but even he cannot rescind his own decree. The Purim story shows that the Jewish G-d does not work this way, that systems and rules and bureaucrats are no less G-dly than than oneness. It is no coincidence that the Jew who is G-d-in-otherness, G-dliness within the creation, faces his first genocidal threat in Persia, where they refuse to submit Duality to G-d, and call it ultimate.

Greece is the third exile and of a totally different tenor once more. The many gods and one king are here reconciled by rationality. The problem is not that the Jews exist as the presence of God in otherness. The problem is that their revealed mechanism of integration, the Torah, hides the reconciliation from the reach of reason; unaided intellect can’t reach it. The Torah calls itself third—“Blessed is the all-Merciful One, Who gave the threefold Torah to the three-fold nation by means of a third-born on the third day in the third month.” Chanukah is a victory of the Torah over Greek rationalism and its attempt to claim the third reconciling thing for itself.

Edom, Rome, is four and four in Torah is the receiver—the last letter of the tetragrammaton, the four foremothers, the poor receiving alms. Rome is not opposed to the One G-d, the extension of G-d into otherness that is the Jew, or the third thing that reconciles them that is the Torah It just doesn’t want them in its world on a pragmatic level. The Jew is excluded on a technicality rather than on principle. Principle is not Roman; practicality is. The Jewish mission may take place anywhere that the Jew owns, anywhere that is not a physical place at a physical time, anywhere outside of the empire. It is the actualization of God’s kingship in fact and in history that it cannot abide. It claims exteriority, receiving, the pragmatic realm, as ultimate and not belonging to the Jewish G-d.

The order of history was providential and particular, and there are precisely four exiles, in order.

“Every stick has two ends,” goes the old Yiddish saying. All causality in this rational realm is achieved by closeness to the effect; that which moves is moved. This can have surprising consequences. Daniel Dennett famously titled his contribution to the new atheist literature Breaking the Spell, and the titular operation involves explaining religion in terms of science as a natural phenomenon. I agree with Dennett that it is an effective type of argument, if it succeeds. Science is sold as a potentially total explanation of reality, and thus, if it can account for religion in toto, religion can do nothing without science’s permission. (For what it’s worth, science cannot even remotely account for itself yet, never mind religion, but this did not stop the late Dr. Dennett.)

However, by swinging one end of this stick, Dennett risks the other end—religion accounting for the phenomenon of science. By the phenomenon of science, of course, we partially refer to intellectual history. Why, if religion contains the ultimate truth, does science achieve such success precisely when religion seems to have weakened? Why did modernity arise when it did? If it is wrong, then why does it persist, and if it is right, then how can we believe in pre-modern traditions? How can we respect the Rambam if he didn’t know Australia existed? I’d like to outline one way the normative theology of Judaism, that is, Lurianic Kabbalah, answers these questions—how the history, structure, and success of modern science are not anomalous but expected in its framework.

The Commandments Imply a World Like Ours

Even with the unambitious goal of a mere outline, it is hard to know where to begin with such a hefty task. Perhaps, as an apéritif, we can examine how the very basis of scientific inquiry could be considered a side-effect of religious preconditions. After all, G-d looked into the Torah and created the world from the blueprint. Furthermore, on a Chassidic understanding, the actual physical acts of the commandments are G-d’s ultimate intent in creating all worlds. Existence as we know it is a means to the Mitzvos, rather than vice versa. Everything is for the sake of the actual physical enactment of the Law. And in order to have a universe where the Law can be enacted, that universe must possess certain traits and those traits, in turn, give rise to many phenomena considered scientific.

For example, were a truly unbound and limitless Creator seeking a world in which an Oral Law was possible, where creations could fully participate in the unfolding of the law, it would have to be a world where logical deduction and the ability to accept and reject readings of a text are possible. If there were no predictability to nature, then normative rule following, indeed, the persistence of the worshipper from one day to another, would have no standing. Some form of basic mathematical identity seems implicit as well. Because both free choice and repentance are required, beings who can make a mistake, and also can improve on their understanding of the world, are the result. In sum, a world in which something like science is possible–a world of intelligible, predictive, persistent traits–is needed to keep the Torah. Many have noted this; as we mentioned recently, Feyerabend calls rationalism “the secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of G-d.” Plantinga’s famous argument goes that without a Creator, we have no reason to trust the eerie effectiveness of our minds understanding nature. We could just as easily say it in the reverse: Precisely because our minds need to be effective in order to execute on G-d’s commands, the human intellect and its world are created to match each other.

Even these basic realizations partially break a certain spell in the Dennettian fashion. They demonstrate that foundational prerequisites of modern science arise naturally from the internally coherent demands of Torah. With just a bit of imagination, we can extend them substantially.

Without the limits of space and time, all resources would be everywhere maximal, and no charity would be needed or perhaps even possible. (Even in Moshiach’s time, we are taught that people will still be “poor” in some ways, relative to others, and the commandment of Tzedaka will continue.) Rope knots only exist in three dimensions, so to have Tefillin or Tzitzis, the universe must have three spatial dimensions. Were simple Lamarckian inheritance the way of nature, Jews would be born circumcised, and the commandment of circumcision would be impossible. The performance of the profound covenantal rite, practiced generation after generation, already demands life that follows something like Mendelian genetics.

So much for the simple point that the Mitzvos to some extent imply a science-suited world and certain conclusions of modern science. The reader may see these as baubles and trivialities, and even though I think baubles may illuminate eyes dulled by reductionism and disenchantment, a deeper explanation of science’s success is required.

Myths and Methods

The typical narrative of those who believe in science is that its success is attributable to its method. Science is science because it deploys a special technique unlike other forms of knowing, and this in turn explains the efficacy of everything from modern medicine to rocketry to quantum mechanics. The problem, as we have discussed multiple times, is that this account of science is more self-aggrandizing myth than explanation.

Paul Feyerabend was right: there is no scientific method. That is, historically, there is no particular intellectual approach or order of operations that produces “science.” Science is produced in the same way as all other human thought. The various attempts to describe a mechanism that uniquely yields scientific (as opposed to, say, pseudoscientific, or philosophical-Aristotelian, or humanistic) thought do not survive contact with the enemy, i.e., the actual history of science.

History is littered with failed attempts to describe the scientific method. Verificationism, a now-unpopular but once widespread theory which contended that only the empirically verifiable (or the tautological) is meaningful, renders much of science, including every hypothesis, meaningless; meanwhile, in the hands of believers, literally everything is an empirical proof of Marxism, or Freudian psychology, or naturalism. Popper‘s solution, falsificationism, holds that science consists of disprovable claims and that the scientific method is to reject hypotheses in the face of counterevidence. Feyerabend demonstrates thoroughly—Galileo is his main example—that science very rarely follows this rule. What actually happens is that there is always contradicting evidence to literally every theory and no one cares; people stick to their guns; “science” is whatever the best propagandist and mafioso says. Scientists protect their core commitments by positing auxiliary hypotheses, discounting anomalous results, and resisting paradigm shifts until social and institutional pressures force change. This gives rise to Kuhn‘s theory that science mostly changes when the previous generation dies off, not when previously held beliefs are empirically disproven. Historically, there is no procedure that has determined what is and isn’t “science”; it is not a rules-based decision.

The STEM enthusiast tries to reassure himself that science is what works and achieves impressive results, a kind of hard-nosed pragmatic criterion for what is science. This is, of course, completely arbitrary. First, a lot of real science is completely useless. Second, and more importantly, the definition is in many cases circular. Science is useful because utility has been measured by science. While this flies perfectly well for many, it has no particular rational basis. There are merely groups of people calling themselves scientists who decide what is legitimate and what is rejected, usually based on group dynamics, biases and faith commitments.

Perhaps, then, the method is in the flavor of their faith commitment? “Science is when people of a particular skeptical bend of a specific flavor get together and think through the nature of the universe.” The problem (aside from the same circularity) is that this is also false. Scientists exhibit no particular “skeptical” flavor, and working scientists hold surprisingly diverse metaphysical beliefs, despite the fact that few of them ever seem to stand up for those beliefs in popular discourse about science. Worse: science is, upon close observation, full of all the things one expects to find in weird pseudoscientific fields. Terrible ideas are shoved through with bad statistics, while brilliant and true ideas come from dreams, from art, from the bathtub.

Many are so afraid of any commonality between “native knowledge” and what is traditionally taught in universities that they flee to the opposite extreme and build a faith that will inevitably be disappointed (and not just because the wrong people are in charge), a faith that they are doing something special at the university to make their conclusions right. They, on the whole, are not. Their experiments do not replicate, their interpretations are ridiculously biased, their footnotes do not refer to what they say they do; peer review, as we now know more than ever, is a sociological process that filters for consensus, not truth. Scientific empiricism rests on axioms it cannot prove—the reliability of sense perception, the uniformity of nature, the validity of induction, the authority of mathematics, the intelligibility of the universe, the adequacy of human reason to that intelligibility, and that one ought to follow evidence at all.

It thus seems hard to avoid what Feyerabend says is the real rule of science: “Anything goes.” There is a single major problem for anyone who wishes to accept Feyerabend’s account, however, and it is an empirical problem. “Anything goes” leaves nothing beyond a series of historical accidents to explain the wonders of modernity and the genuine success of modern science. (The other objection to Feyerabend is that, on his accounting, there is no rational decision procedure that would accept dark matter and dark energy, for example, but would reject astrology. This objection, however, betrays a lack of imagination. People rejected astrology and superstition long before Carl Sagan thinks. They did this by building rational systems for how the world works and by considering all available data, a much broader data set than is considered tasteful by the popular scientific mind. Sure, they came to many wrong conclusions, but so did Galileo and Newton and everyone working in the sciences today. Dethroning science from the position it earned only through a long con (to paraphrase Feyerabend) does not necessarily mean that all beliefs are equally valid.)

The wonders of modernity are quite wonderful, and we definitely live in an era profoundly distinct from the world, say, five hundred years ago; our catechism teaches us this has something to do with Kepler, Newton, et al. (Of course, when one actually learns about Francis Bacon, he was obsessed with the occult; Kepler was a literal Pythagorean seeking the Divine mathematics; Newton wrote more on alchemy than on physics; Leibniz considered himself primarily a theologian. The entire era was, by some millions-fold, more spiritual than the corners of the internet most triumphalist about science would have it.) Sure, the bridges mostly do not fall down, and that is really quite important, but on reflection, bridge-building preceded the scientific revolution and may outlive it. Medicines were invented, aqueducts raised, pharmacopeias developed, and vast practical enterprises improved for millennia before anyone articulated “the scientific method.” The Romans and the Egyptians did not, to our knowledge, peer review. Practical success does not validate a philosophical claim about exclusive access to truth, and not everything using math deserves to have its valor stolen by an abstract noun whose adherents believe, with perfect faith, that the math describes everything. What’s more, Galileo and Newton were right about the world only in a limited sense. Their math kind of worked out, a lot of the time. But if one is fair to them, so did Aristotle’s and the Catholic Church’s. If we read Aristotle as describing what he actually watched, that is, bodies moving through air and water, not idealized points in a frictionless void, his physics is a correct, non-intuitive approximation of Newton's in that domain, exactly as Newton's is of Einstein's. But what, then, gets Aristotle an eyeroll and Newton or Galileo veneration? Their methods! the reader cries.

Reader, there were no special methods. Galileo did not simply win his argument with the Church; the evidentiary situation was messy. He was trying to incite an intellectual revolution, which one may respect, and succeeded not because he was especially right but because many very intelligent and influential people had decided it was a new age, and time for the Church, with its closed hierarchical cosmos, to lose its stranglehold on reality. In the same few centuries, one finds the democratic revolution, the philosophical revolution, the aesthetic revolution—all with the same anti-closed-cosmos, anti-hierarchical tenor. An empiricist would note that this makes the early “scientific” era an effect of many things already in the air. What is surprising is that we assume these ideas won out at the time because they were right, rather than because they were in the air. Unfortunately, a scientific theory of what puts things “in the air”—a theory of zeitgeist—remains a desideratum. As such, science does not explain itself, and our question stands: Granted that science works, why does it work?

Michael Strevens, in his superb The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, simply cannot abide the thought that nothing connects “science” with the dramatic transformation of the world in modernity. His alternate explanation is both fascinating and the greatest possible condemnation of the scientific enterprise imaginable. Strevens agrees that there is no scientific “method” as such (and even offers some evidence Feyerabend missed) but proposes a scientific “meta-method” of sorts, which distinguishes the varied methods that produce science from other forms of thought. He says something like: “Science is when people agree to pretend in official discourse that science derives only from empirical testing.” Or, to rephrase: the massive successes of modernity derive from a cultural practice of pretending (even though it is obviously false) in official contexts—papers, conferences, classrooms—that a certain arbitrarily limited set of facts are the only ones that count. Strevens even goes so far as to describe, and in large measure defend, the training of young scientists through what he himself calls a program of “moralizing and miseducation.” They are indoctrinated to treat appeals to philosophy, religion, beauty, and anything but empirical testing as inadmissible to the official playing field of science. I put the question to the reader: Is it preferable, simply on a respecting-science basis, to believe that “science” is not united by any method, or to believe it is united by a specific act of social irrationality and indoctrination? Even if we take Strevens’s offer, there is still no getting around the fact that “science” is at most the institutional commitment of a certain insular group to a narrow and artificial form of public argument whose truth-tracking power it cannot explain from within itself. Science is a way to run a club we stumbled onto four or five centuries ago that will simply make your club better at producing certain things like space telescopes, the polio vaccine, or Zyklon B, and some call this “finding the truth.”

We emerge from the blinding fume of science’s mythology clutching a mystery. Science doesn’t explain itself, and philosophy of science can at best describe the mechanism of its success without ultimately explaining why it should disclose reality rather than merely generate disciplined consensus. Even if we, like Strevens, recognize local rationality and experimental discipline applied piecemeal and arbitrarily, we cannot say why they should be particularly successful. If the Torah could account for the success of science in a way that these two fields cannot, it would go a long way toward disarming the mechanism of scientism.

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The word I keep coming back to when it comes to Chassidic theology is the word “personal. ” Everything about Chassidus is personal; it is the monotheistic religion with the most personal G-d imaginable. This raises the question, however: how is Orthodox Judaism compatible with personal service of God? After all, a lot of my writing recently concerns how Orthodox Judaism is all about the Mitzvos and the keeping of the Law, which cannot be assimilated into the finite human mind. What is expected of the Jew doesn’t arise from within his personality but within G-d (as it were), and the Jewish connection with G-d is possible only through fulfilling this Will. This Will is transcendent of any rational relationship, which implies it cannot be captured by any creative human act. It would seem that in the keeping of the Law there’s no room for crucial aspects of human personhood, like creativity or ownership.

Some would argue that the creativity in Judaism is meant to be in Torah study, and indeed this is the tack taken by most of the yeshiva world. Innovation, cleverness, flair, and even humor can be expressed once one reaches high levels of Torah study, in the way one understands and expounds upon its wisdom. There is no limit to the Torah’s depth or breadth. The Torah is infinite, so there is always room for a personal touch and innovation, a personal discovery of new riches, in the endless storehouse of Truth.

Chassidus, despite its emphasis on the personal, sees the issue of Jewish creativity from a frankly more counterintuitive angle. Torah study is actually all about receiving from G-d without getting in the way. The ultimate Torah study is an act of pure bittul, transcendence of the self in receiving the wisdom of G-d. The entire trick of Torah study is that even when one is innovating and expanding the Torah, as one is obligated to do according to the measure of one’s intellect, one is still doing it in a state of absolute bittul. The blessing on the Torah precedes the Torah and must never be forgotten. Torah is about intellect conforming to the constraints of Torah, transparent to its G-dliness. In effect, locating Jewish creativity in Torah study limits it to a creative receptivity, finding new ways for the finite Jewish mind to hear what’s on G-d’s Mind with absolute clarity. Or to put it a different way: Creative Torah study is like uncovering the source of one’s own mind within G-d’s mind through an act of resonance. The flair and individuality displayed, and the personal “part in Torah” one discovers, is really G-d’s, not ours, and if we do not recognize this, it simply isn’t Torah. The bittul required for Torah study is not like the creative constraint of Yo-Yo Ma’s cello’s timber or the rules of composition for a musician; it is not a limitation on the musician’s imagination driving invention at the interface of dreams and reality. It is the principled rejection of even wanting to make one’s own music, the recognition that music in principle does not belong to us.

But this then reopens the question, and far more powerfully. If Mitzvos are simply fulfilling G-d’s Will, and Torah, even when I am coming up with “new” ideas from my own soul’s constraints, must be permeated with the sense that these ideas are not my ideas and if they are I don’t want them, then what room is there for my own personhood, for bringing something to the table, in Judaism?

I will keep you in suspense no longer. In Chassidus, the personal relationship with G-d is actually meant to be in the least likely and least imaginable place for most Orthodox Jews. It is in prayer. Prayer, davening, tefillah, is the place where we have a personal relationship with G-d, and that personal relationship with G-d is so personal that it cannot really be taught or set to rules.

The very fact that this seems so unthinkable to most of us and even to many Chassidim is itself a profound issue. The part of Judaism where we are supposed to totally open up to G-d and place ourselves upon the altar and our troubles upon Him while delving deeper and deeper into our inner worlds in a way ultimately impossible with another person within the natural order, we see as more rote than many other Mitzvos. It is the part of Judaism set to a nusach, a fixed liturgy, where the sages place words within our mouth. Saying these words, with a vague notion of directing them toward G-d, is often as far as we get, which is a terrible tragedy. In fact, these words are meant to say all that we could wish to say; they provide the tones and orchestration for our creativity; they are like Yo-Yo Ma’s cello. We are meant to live inside them from the inside, to make them sing. Does the cellist resent the luthier, the mathematics of the scale? Why do they feel freed rather than caged by their instrument? Are they tempted to “go instrumentless,” to put the music in their own tones just to feel something?

Until we are able to reclaim the creativity of Jewish prayer, until we realize that in this act it is us that G-d wants—not in conformity, not even in creative receptivity within boundaries like Torah study, but rather us entire, given over to God, deep calling unto deep—until this is reclaimed, my Orthodox Judaism will have a missing piece. I don’t have any magical solutions for the problem either. But I know this is my problem, and that of many taught to pray as I was. We dread davening, instead of seeing it as the great work of the Jewish soul, the place we are most valued, far more than we can hope to be in our ideas.

“רֵאשִׁית הַיְרִידָה, רַחֲמָנָא לִצְלַן, הוּא הֶעְדֵּר הָעֲבוֹדָה בִּתְפִלָּה” — The first stage in a person’s spiritual decline (Heaven forbid) is a lack of effort when serving G‑d in prayer.

I can name the problem. A first step.

Repentance is the most humane idea possible. It says the present can change the past and totally transform its meaning.

For those who believe that something like the scientific definition of matter is all that exists, the past is not real beyond its immediate pushes and pulls on the present, and when these pushes and pulls affect certain brain states, that is the most “meaning” we can ascribe to the past. But even for many who believe in spirit, the deed itself remains irrevocably evil. At best, evil becomes the occasion for good. It was walking on the wrong path that led us to the right one, and perhaps this is a gracious and happy thing.

This, still, to my mind, isn’t quite Reish Lakish’s radicalism on Yoma 86b:

Didn’t Reish Lakish himself say: Great is repentance, as one’s intentional sins are counted for him as merits…and all his deeds, even his transgressions, will become praiseworthy? The Gemara reconciles: This is not difficult: Here, when one repents out of love, his sins become like merits; there, when one repents out of fear, his sins are counted as unwitting transgressions.

The Talmud seems to say that not only is the past real, not only can we reorient ourselves from the wrong path to the right one, not only can we return to love of G-d, but that this act literally transforms intentional sins into merits; one’s transgressions become one’s praise!

I like to take the Talmud at face value when it appears to radically diverge from everything else, on the general principle that Judaism is not meant to be and never has been everything else, and this could even be a good thing. In this case, it is not arbitrary pro-Jewish radicalism (though I enjoy that too), but is connected to universally recognized doctrinal differences, indeed, to the “rabbinic loophole.” The operative distinction is this: if G-d Himself chooses the Divine Commandments with His own free choice, then transgression and merit are not ultimately embedded in a rational teleology. There is a totally transcendent dimension to what appear to be mere worldly acts. This means, per the Chassidic understanding of Judaism, two things that at first appear contradictory:

1. Sins are rejected more absolutely than reason ever could.

2. Yet G-d, transcending even His own choice, can re-receive them in love.

A Jew eating a cheeseburger remains a sin in the Law, and no rational argument or reduction to abstract principle can ever make it not a sin, because the Law is not the instantiation of an abstraction but the actual Will of G-d. This is deeply Jewish. But in the drama of soul and G-d, the act’s place is rewritten. The distance it causes becomes longing for G-d, in love. The longing becomes ascent. The sin itself becomes another step on the path toward G-d. This is no mere psychology or description of the individual’s journey, but an objective spiritual reality, because the “drama of the soul and G-d” is more real than the world, the soul is larger than the universe, and the universe is only real to the extent of its participation in that drama.

Since the Jewish soul (and certainly the collective Jewish soul)’s subjective relationship with G-d is not merely subjective at all but the deepest objectivity and most verifiable truth, “sins becoming merits” is not freedom from judgment but the freedom to be judged anew. The closer you get to G-d, the more you care about not eating cheeseburgers the way He cares about it. The mission becomes even more absolute and radical.

This is why the Zohar says that even the righteous must repent, because it’s not merely turning from the wrong path to the right one, but a radical recontextualization of reality limited only by the depth of closeness to G-d, which is, of course, limitless. In the end, the whole concept loses all semblance of the inhumane, even the impersonal “objective standard.” Repentance re-grounds objectivity in the G-d who is beyond the distinction of objectivity and subjectivity. Human beings also, mysteriously and without good excuse, bridge this distinction–we exist both inwardly/privately/unshareably and also externally/communicably/factually. Therefore, only repentance addresses us in our wholeness. It is the most humane idea possible.

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The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

Matthew Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 1869

There is a pervasive thesis, advanced in many forms, that the “self” is a modern invention. By “self,” proponents tend to mean our capacity for reflection, a turn inward rather than outward for meaning, often offered as the grounds for society’s atomization in modernity and also for immanent “ordinary” meaning or “disenchantment.”

These ideas are usually traced back through the Renaissance to Augustine, who is the inheritor of the Greeks’ sophisticated introspection. The Delphic quote “know thyself,” as much as Lucretian atomism or Paracelsian occultism, could be blamed for modernity. This is a nice story. It reflects a total failure to read Psalms.

The more one reads Psalms, the more one is amazed. Like all art, it transcends any description and must be experienced firsthand. The psalms are more than mere art, however. They are a mystic’s mirror, an intense concentration of human subjectivity calling out to our own from three thousand years ago.

On the internet, more people have read the customer service complaint to Ea-Nasir. The remarkable familiarity of that ancient text renders it less challenging than the Psalms because it doesn’t discuss G-d and is unencumbered by religious baggage. The customer complaint resonates with us because the commercial self, the shopper, is a role and form of selfhood that is immediately familiar. The claims the Psalms make about who and what we are remain more unsettling, despite allegedly being part of the fabric of worship in the religion of the West for millennia. Their “religion” is not the organized structure often built around scripture to contain it. The Psalms are so ancient and so real that if you actually sit and read them with something like an open mind, you will find someone much more familiar and something much more free than piety. The Psalms are, in a word, subversive.

Firstly, the Psalms argue with G-d. “Thou hast cast off, and put us to shame…yet we have not forgotten Thee.” Psalm 44 would probably get the psalmist thrown out of yeshiva today. He claims that the people have been loyal and faithful, but G-d has not. Of course, this is an expression of profound covenantal consciousness. What binds Jew to G-d and G-d to Jew is not the current exchange rate but a pact and commitment deeper than behavior. Indeed, it because G-d’s commitment is indestructible that it hurts so much when He seems to be asleep at the cosmic wheel. The scandal is that this is part of the canonized scripture and liturgy of Judaism. This is what, in other words, a G-dly soul may sometimes cry out to its creator. It is the same dichotomy as Psalm 22’s famous, “My G-d, My G-d, why have you forsaken me?” Somehow, He is both “mine” and has forsaken. We have such confidence in our covenant that we can accuse G-d of forsaking that connection.

The perfect grateful acceptance of the believer, the simple reception of everything G-d does with love, because He knows better and we must deserve it, seems lost to the authors of these Psalms. Not only did ancient Israel have a conception of the self willing to accuse G-d of infidelity (itself a huge wrench in the alleged collective-minded sociological function of G-d in ancient society), but it was a remarkably complete, multi-tiered self. The psalmist writes as if he is both utterly dependent on G-d and yet independently morally confident, simultaneously. He is neither an atomized modern nor a mere well-behaved subject of an ancient king. So many of our simple theories are exploded upon contact with the enemy, that is, holiness.

The Psalms also embrace darkness without instinctively reframing it into positivity or optimism. Psalm 88 ends on the word “darkness,” and that is its pervasive mood. The psalmist suffers under G-d and conveys it. There is no relief, no upside, no immediate contextualization into a pleasant relationship. The suffering and despair are not obviously a stage. Nor is there an overt “religious” or therapeutic message in its content. If Psalms is philosophy, the questions should yield answers. If it is piety, the suffering should give way to faith. Even if it is a mysticism, the darkness should be transfigured or cast in a light relative to some truth. The only “lesson” here seems to be that this psalm is part of scripture. From the nether-most pit, we still talk. Perhaps therapy could end the crisis, but we would be poorer for it. The Psalm makes it holy.

But the strangest and most remarkable thing is that the Psalms presuppose a form of selfhood that is neither of the ancient nor the modern schools as popularly conceived. The ancients, we are told, lacked reflexivity, were collective thinkers, grounded the self in greater terms, whereas the modern self is always inward-turning, atomized, if not entirely self-justifying.

What then are we to make of Psalm 139 in which the psalmist says, “You have searched me and known me... Such knowing is too wonderful for men”? The psalmist who speaks this way is necessarily psychologically complex, with one layer of his soul praying to G-d about another layer from which he is not speaking. The object of knowledge, that is, himself, is fully known only by G-d, but is beyond the psalmist’s own knowledge. This is neither the “know thyself” of the Delphic Oracle nor the authentic self-declaration of the modern. The deepest self-knowledge is that which only G-d knows. The psalmist speaks in the singular, but the Jewish singular, as we have already learned from the Ten Commandments, can also describe the most total collective. “I am the Lord your G-d” was spoken to every Jew who would ever live, yet it used the second-person singular in the holy tongue. Similarly, when David speaks as the king of Israel and as himself, there is no contradiction, for the people—certainly, as they are addressed by G-d at Sinai—constitute one singular self. And indeed, as the Psalms seem to indicate as often as they do anything else, it is through G-d’s address that the self is constituted. Emotions and ideas and joy and suffering and even righteousness and transgression come and go, but the matter of keeping a line open to G-d and vice versa is eternal. “But I am all prayer.”

Many theorists of the self trace Western reflexivity to Augustine, who wrote that G-d is “more intimate than the inmost thing.” As Arnold and many historians of ideas contend, this is an inheritance of the Greeks. Even a cursory examination of the Psalms explodes this simple straight line. Psalmists speak with a spontaneity of consciousness that can still burn the modern reader (as, by the way, it did Augustine) across the millennia. It has been under-recognized by thinkers, I think, because thinking and philosophy are a stubbornly solitudinous affair. The Psalms indicate that the most intense subjectivity in the ancient world was being known at depth by a personal Other. This dependence, however, did not curtail, modulate, or officialize the deeply personal nature of prayer.

The Psalms, remarkably, are “deep calling unto deep” in darkness, pain, and even blame, even as they are holy. As we discussed recently in connection with the famous “Trial of G-d” in the holocaust, you can only argue with G-d within covenantal standing; you can only address G-d from the dark if the selfhood is independent of the result. Both are only possible if the self is addressed by an all-knowing “You” who knows it better than it knows itself from beyond.

The Psalms understand that the self does not constitute itself from within but is called into its fullest reality by being known at a depth beyond its own self-knowledge. This is why the possessive holds even in abandonment. “My G-d” is not a claim staked from strength but a self declaring how it’s structured, addressed from outside, and therefore not dependent on any particular inner state for its coherence. When the psalmist speaks into darkness and receives nothing back, this is not (as the modern would have it) willpower overcoming despair, but the Psalmic self remaining what it always was, the kind of being that constitutively exists in relation to an Other whose knowing precedes and exceeds its own. In this, the Psalms sketch something close to the architecture of Jewish existence itself, a self that is singular and collective at once, radically dependent and morally sovereign, and constituted by an address it did not initiate and cannot terminate.

The psalmist is thus more powerfully an individual than the modern, because he is actually risking layers of himself by addressing a very real and constitutive G-d, and more assuredly a member of a collective than our typical vision of the ancients, because no aspect of that risk undermines his place of belonging or fixed deepest identity. He explodes simple notions of each side of the dichotomy simultaneously. The Psalms refuse Arnold’s own distinction, being at once more spontaneous in consciousness and more rigorous in conscience than either of the traditions he contrasts. They leave us in a place where no individual can claim ultimate existential freedom from the beholding Other, but no collective or ideology can claim the constitutive ground of the individual. For this reason, simple orthodoxies (religious or otherwise) focused on security, boundary-setting and ideological or institutional self-perpetuation find the Psalmic self threatening. Why would they read this book?

I love fantasy novels for the same reason I hate sci-fi; fantasy novels give us a world that makes sense, while sci-fi simply layers more alienation on the world we have. I am already lost and disoriented in real life, thank you very much, and I blame some of it on our culture’s persistent efforts to pretend sci-fi is real life. What is a sci-fi novel meant to do for me? Tell me what will happen next when people read too many sci-fi novels? But these are general complaints. Of late, I have a more specific issue: why don’t the sci-fi writers seem to ever say anything about natural theology?

Natural theology is the idea that the One G-d can be discovered through a mind’s consideration of nature alone. It is the genre of thought that gives us the “proofs of G-d” one finds in, say, Moreh Nevuchim or Chovos HaLevavos. Unlike most philosophy professors today, the decisive majority of philosophers in history were not atheists, and a significant number of our most decorated thinkers were monotheists of one kind or another. But the aliens (or other strange creatures) we encounter in sci-fi books or TV shows never seem to have heard of the One G-d. Everyone in space is a pagan at most; their gods (if they exist) are almost always finite beings with a contingent form, and often a physical body. The advanced spacefaring civilization of the novel and the film has no Aristotle or Ramanuja or Averroes or Origen or Leibniz or Kant. Uploading minds to computers is so common in science fiction that half of America probably believes Anthropic will be raising prices on it in the next five years. But I’ve never seen a sci-fi flick imply an idea that far more serious and brilliant people from diverse civilizations and time periods have, after long consideration, considered demonstrable—that the inherent rational structure of minds points them toward G-d. That any mind, in our universe, will, by its own nature, have to encounter the notion of the Uncaused Cause.

Frank Herbert in Dune is a fine example of how monotheism fares in sci-fi; one could argue his books are primarily about religion, and they contend that the human mind is infinitely malleable and fundamentally manipulable, that the masses are ignorant and stupid far beyond the power of anyone to control, that all religions are socially constructed, and that power is the only thing that’s real. Even when Jews eventually appear in the story, possibly as Herbert’s most positive depiction of religion, Judaism is still, for him, a technology, and his praise is that it’s a successful technology. The classic Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke, absorbs religion into cosmic-naturalistic explanation from a different angle, explaining ancient human mythology with no mention of widespread commonsense reasons to believe in G-d. A Canticle for Leibowitz and the sci-fi novels of CS Lewis show how traditional earthly monotheism can persist in the genre, but they still don’t seem to depict it as universal rational destination for minds.

Now, in fantasy stories, pagan gods make a lot of sense. Even Tolkien has them. Rationality, after all, is tuned for idolatry; the “gods” are a profound existential comfort (even their demands for sacrifice are a comfort) and primary exemplars of a world that makes sense. But sci-fi is supposed to alienate us, as a rule. Why so many “gods” then? We are no more alienated by bug monsters having a bug god-king than Daniel Dennett is troubled by bees having a queen. Everyone understands that extraterrestrials will prefer alien forms for deities.

What would really be a nasty shock for readers would be a first-contact story in which the aliens are fervent monotheistic followers of a loving G-d, and instead of proving our sentience across a language barrier using geometry (as one finds, for example, in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem), we did it with a deductive argument from contingency. Due to influential sleight of hand from the 17th century, the former is now considered basic universal thought for any advanced civilization, while the latter is considered a fancy from something called philosophy that never reaches the universality of math. (Denial that one has a philosophy is, in a way, the holy grail of modern thought.) That the authors of most sci-fi might believe math is the ultimate truth and this type of philosophy disproved, need have no bearing on fiction whatever.

Perhaps the alien societies are meant to have moved past all this nonsense. Maybe the sci-fi authors believe something about advanced civilizations makes them atheistic. But the US did not particularly land on the moon due to a sense of atheism, and the atheist Soviet state did not last long enough to become a galaxy-conquerer. The conclusion is non-obvious and creatively stultifying. As cyberpunk has shown us, there is nothing so comforting about monotheism as to render a work of fiction retrograde or medieval. The alien society could have precisely the same corruptions of the One G-d as human society does, while still being generally monotheistic. That it’s more appealing to always make them pagan is a tell.

I begin to suspect that there is something about this rational monotheistic story that sci-fi as a genre, even one seeking to give us the horrors or make us feel alienated, is not equipped to tell, at least not in a way that becomes popular. Perhaps somehow if logic itself leads to such a conclusion for aliens we’ve never met, the universe must make sense, the aliens are too familiar, and the story becomes a fantasy. Why this does not occur if we and ET share a geometry or a physics captures something important about modernity, an exercise left for the reader.

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You aren’t to regularly give more than a fifth of your income to charity, according to halacha. The question is: Why? Judaism seems less ambitious in this than the modern selflessness, wired for total self-sacrifice for causes far less than feeding a beggar, like saving all life on earth. Acts of kindness support the world, tzedaka is the mitzvah, central to Judaism. Yet somehow, even in this, bourgeois moderation appears to prevail. The noble argument that the money in your pocket could save lives through malaria nets in Africa, and it is thus immoral to have any extra money in your pocket, does not seem to rise to the level of Pikuach Nefesh (abrogating the usual law to save a life) required to waive the limit. How could we ever practically talk about 20% when lives hang in the balance somewhere in the world?

We’ve discussed how so much contemporary “altruism” is in fact sociopathic, how rational commitment to good causes is a type of self-extension, a reflection of our insecure need for immortalization:

“Caring for others” has become an activist, collective, and ideological pursuit…a cudgel and a crowbar, accusing the uncaring and demanding that they abandon their complacency. At the extremes, the officially caring can be cruel, cold, and rageful…[But] they care much more than we do. Their whole being is caring. So how are we to live with them?…

…All these cheap knockoffs of altruism define the other person in ever-more-narrow and comfortable terms, then congratulate themselves for their external commitments. In truth, their commitment is only ever an extension of their worldview…their “other” is only ever that aspect…willing to receive from and subjugate itself to that ideology…These are conditions ripe for the birth of ideology-in-itself…for people to become mouthpieces for ideas that move behind their eyes, their selfhood exiled, a human sacrifice.

That’s not the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch’s reasoning, however:

The commandment is fulfilled in its excellence when you give a fifth in the first year from the principal, and every year after that, a fifth of the profits. You should not give away more than a fifth, so that you will not become dependent on others.

It says that a person who gives more than a fifth is placing themselves at risk of needing charity in the future. Avoiding becoming a burden, it says a few laws later, is a great virtue: “He should suffer hardship rather than depend on people.” When thinking of others, one must also consider those who may one day need to support us because of our magnanimity.

We can read this as the same point about altruism. To properly commit to others, we must first think about ourselves. Crucially, “ourselves” doesn’t mean our theories or understanding of the world or how to act as a “good person.” The law teaches us to think of ourselves as dependent beings who may very well become contingent on others’ monetary donations if we aren’t careful. This may be why in Tanya (Iggeres HaKodesh, Chapter 10), the Alter Rebbe writes that in repentance, a Jew can go above and beyond and give away more than a fifth. He should give more specifically because he is contrite and realizes that he requires mercy beyond the natural order, and so must give of his possessions beyond the natural order as well.

Tanya’s encouragement to give more isn’t contrary to the law at all, but its continuation. The law asks us to see ourselves not as crusaders or givers of any kind, but as a receiver. “Think of the others implicit in your own finitude and lack of self-sufficiency.” Tanya echoes what the Kitzur says at the beginning of the chapter:

A person should consider that he continually requests his sustenance from the Holy One blessed is He; and just as he requests that the Holy One blessed is He, listen to his cry and prayer, so should he listen to the cry of the poor. A person should also consider that [fortune] is a wheel that revolves in the world, and in the end, he or his children or his children’s children might [have to] accept charity.

This is perhaps the simplest way to avoid becoming a sociopathic altruist. Our deepest self, beyond our own conceptions, is one with the people. No idea from my own head can be total or all-consuming, for my head emerged from a womb, and my being emerged from my people, and my body shall be washed by my family before it is returned to the dust of Jerusalem.

The Rebbe’s techno-optimism and his unending demand for more, for better, for progress, are two sides of the same coin. We work to be “always happy, never satisfied,” because there is no one form that satisfaction takes.

If form had ultimacy, responsibility would distribute itself across the entire causal chain. Jews, in fact, live in immense extenuating circumstances. Because we are a post-apocalyptic civilization, a generation of orphans who generally fall under the category of Tinok Shenishba, we have every excuse to no longer care about Judaism. By any fair measure, we have done enough simply by existing. Yet somehow it is precisely in the generation when we are not culpable, and have every excuse, that the Lubavitcher Rebbe demands infinite supra-rational change and growth. In virtually every sicha for forty years, the Rebbe speaks to how Jews can perform contradictions, or are not given over to the dominion of nature, or can accomplish infinite transformation. It is after the Holocaust that the Rebbe tells the Jew to be strengthened and grow!

But this should not surprise us, because, as we’ve been discussing, Judaism is orthogonal to form in the Rebbe’s view. No mere state of affairs will bring redemption. Redemption is an impossibility accomplished by an utterly contradictory creature. The Jew is still needed, will always be needed. Our accountability derives from that same covenant at which our pessimism itself despairs. Someone in this world who is not defined by its lowliness, its darkness, its travails must commit to ending them, to making them into vessels of the Divine, to reveal what they really are, which is mere speech of the Speaker.

G-d needs someone who can carry on an unbreakable covenant across all forms and reveal precisely within the conditions of these forms that they do not define covenant but vice versa. The Jew must lose the temple, write a Talmud, pass through fire and water, even suffer a world where no one reads and boomers post AI slop to each other on WhatsApp. These indignities, these sufferings, are why we’re here, each in our own personal way. One does not forge a covenant that can ride four totally transformative exiles just for survival; we are here to do what cannot, in exile terms, be done. If no holocaust can destroy it, no action in the positive can satisfy it.

Never has a generation been more justified in laziness and never has its leader called for more endless, impossible work. This is precisely the Jewish optimism, which is nothing like the religious romantics looking for a mythical past or technologist progressives escaping to a radically different, “freer” future. It is the optimism of learning to breathe underwater. It is the conviction that exile will eventually despair of itself.

Part I: The Mirror

Peering into the mirror is much maligned as a symbol of vanity and narcissism in our society. I blame Snow White. We assume, quite fairly, that if a certain society is obsessed with superficial appearance, like, say, Southern California, then they are shallow, vapid, and blindingly self-involved. In this metaphor the mirror is a simple set of blinkers, an imposer of tunnel vision. When I see myself, I, like Narcissus, cannot look away, for what could be more beautiful, more worthy of attention?

This sells mirrors short, however. They are not just shiny baubles for the self-obsessed. They are, in this writer’s opinion, objects of great mystical import.

The mirror presents us with a startling view on a physical object, our body, that most of the time we experience from the inside as a subject. This is extremely weird. The face in the reflection returns our gaze from within our own eyes, a fact that is so remarkable and strange that we adults often forget to even find it interesting. Perhaps it is because we are so worried about the malformed and dreadful contemporary notion of “selflessness,” and so fear to think of ourselves as Southern Californians, that we let the mirror pass us by.

Long-time readers know that there is at least one other path aside from vain mirror-staring narcissism and the ideological/idolatrous narcissism that reviles it. This path has to start with a substantial sense of self. Indeed, it must know that self precedes existence and that we are larger than the cosmos. For this path, the mirror is a well of wisdom, a mystic’s textbook.

The person in the mirror is not another person, and also isn’t me. The mirror simulates what it is like to be looking at me from the outside, but never from anyone else’s perspective. This has to do with the mirror itself being an object. Light is always reflecting off that silver surface; the substance does its job even when I’m not around. My reflection, including those startling green eyes, never exists without me standing in the room. But even when I’m here, it’s not me, just an expression of my presence. What is “presence”? With no beholder or receiver, it is arguably nothing at all. All presence would seem to be presence-to. On the other hand, what the mirror captures is not something I can consciously mediate. What’s there on the outer surface of my body will, to the enduring frustration of millions, show up in the image, no matter how much I wish it wouldn’t. The mirror provides disturbingly immediate insight into how I am present to others, which is both something I cannot escape and something utterly foreign to my inner world; we can sometimes totally forget we even have an appearance! Far from magnifying my narcissism, the mirror shrinks my world down to the bandwidth of physical appearance, makes me tiny by visually presenting a vast inwardness knitted from love and fear and dreams as a physical object sharing space-time with a tube of toothpaste. It is not the mystic’s fault, nor the mirror’s, that Southern California seeks to make a fascinating indignity into a great engine of the world.

This “indignity” is crucial to the mystic’s development, however, when it leads to the most wondrous conclusion of all, that anyone else standing there red-eyed in their bathroom is also a whole universe. This world of illuminated surfaces has millions of windows called eyes, and those eyes can face themselves, probe themselves, just as we probe ours. We are inner worlds who walk around, work, and enjoy a coffee while overlapping through the narrowest wisps of light, beholding each others’ superficial surfaces and even then only when we really bother to look. The mirror reveals the diaphanous presence-to, the insubstantial appearing-to, across which my entire relationship with others passes. The entire relational world is built on the insubstantial thing the mirror sometimes captures. The mirror reminds us that the objective world is merely a communicative medium, a telegraph stretched between dark continents. I have reason to believe and much faith besides that what is deepest in me is deepest in the other, that they have an inside too, that the mirror spotlights only their borders. We are separated by oceans of nothingness as surely as space chaperones the stars and our physical interactions never get past the shore. We must never reduce others to their mere appearing; the mirror teaches just how deep another human soul goes beyond the peering of our eyes.

Having now explained the sublime function of the mirror, it seems almost cruel to reflect on what we’ve done with it. We have become enthralled, seduced, somehow captured by mirrors. We have somehow learned from mirrors the false lesson that I am a “me,” not an “I,” an object and not a subject. As objects we are tiny fractions of all objects, small, manipulable, nigh powerless. We are told that any sense of being an “I” is egoism. We are told that we are not alone because we are a shard of some great whole and the more reconciled we become to that whole, the better we will feel. We become more and more certain that our reflection ultimately tells us everything about who we are.

Imagine, for a moment, a society that spends all day looking into small handheld flat reflective surfaces to find out who they are. This would not be a total departure from reflection but its corruption. We would be lured always away from confronting ourselves, from seeing the unknowable depth of self and other, to perceiving the soul as merely a fiction invented to explain appearance.

Rather than feeling the distance between my eyes and my sight, my face and my facing, a distance that would allow the latter to then master and drive the former, we would feel only the reality of reflection, selves forgotten to ourselves. While mirrors seem a simple technology, it is counterintuitively the complex structure of the surface that gives it the illusion of perfect simple reflection. The small handheld flat surfaces of contemporary society are yet more complex, and the effect more pronounced. We find ourselves more and more prepared to treat performance as identity, mask as face. At just this moment when our selves have disappeared into their reflections, we are told that there are now mirrors that speak.

ChatGPT writes like us, codes like us, draws like us, seems to think like us. The more sophisticated it gets, the more the question burns. If AI can do everything that makes you you, if the mirror can display your image when you’re not in the room, then what are you in the first place? The question “is the AI conscious?” is the wrong question.

We must first ask, “Who’s asking?” What is our standard for consciousness?

AI may or may not have something we eventually call consciousness. But the fact that we find the question plausible already proves that our definition of selfhood has shifted toward external performance. We are comfortable building a telegraph line and positing a continent it reaches beyond the sea, because we already believe deep down that telegraphs are all there are. We made the LLMs in our image, the image that we have been training ourselves to be.

Part II: The Self Factory

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When we call the Rebbe an optimist about technology, we risk misunderstanding the term “optimist.” An acquaintance recently shared on Twitter that he heard an Israeli say that “Jewish optimism is pessimism that despaired.” Truer words have never been spoken.

When we say “optimism,” some imagine mere positivity or a kind of faith commitment in the face of evidence. While the Jewish optimism is full of faith, it’s not faith that withstands, but faith in what precedes all testing and remains when trying is done. The Jew, if anything, is an inveterate tester, a measuring instrument. It’s so core to our nature that we test even when we don’t want to, against our will. We like to think of ourselves scientists of a sort, but in Judaism it is more accurate to call G-d the one taking the measurement and us His perennially disgruntled thermometers. We don’t want to find out what percentage of American or European society will still believe Jews are the puppetmasters of global politics, but we were chucked by the Hand of G-d into the beaker of history and like our grandparents and great-grandparents get to observe what from the abysm froths forth. Our faith is that there was, indeed, a Hand that placed us, who (we hope from not too far away) is also watching the bubbles, and has a plan.

The world fails our tests so often and so consistently that pessimism suffuses our very sanity. However, once this pessimism reaches the bottom, we are surprised (dismayed?) to find that it cannot seal the deal, cannot close, cannot make a final pronouncement. Our pessimism doesn’t conclude— doesn’t gain a beatific smile of gentle despair—but neither is it refuted at its own level. Its refutation is rather contextual; it is non-total. The experiment in which the Jew is a tool is an experiment; what it is allowed to define is curtailed in advance. The world’s formal brokenness despairs at swallowing the Jew himself, but not because there is anything it finds that it cannot swallow. When Golda Meir says she believes in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in G-d, and this conditions her personal atheism, it mirrors the Jew believing in G-d and G-d believing in the world, which conditions the Jew’s total pessimism.

So when we say that the Jew “de-apocalypses apocalypses,” we don’t mean returning to a status quo ante and forgetting the whole catastrophe ever happened. The victory is not and doesn’t have to be a triumph over the form of darkness. Rather, darkness can remain in its place and shine.

The Beis Hamikdash was actually destroyed; Babylon genuinely was a profound exile. Things have been lost, and everything we do is conditioned by that loss. The Jew doesn’t become an optimist by denying these things. The Jew becomes an optimist by delving to their depth, by understanding the immensity of the loss, yet still being a Jew. We should say the exact same thing about the world after the printing press. Or Claude. The Jew’s optimism about technology is not a prediction about technology. It is the Jew seeing himself for what he is, in the dark.

The non-ultimacy of form means that LLMs cannot and will not end the Rebbe’s world. In the Rebbe’s view, even the civilization that built LLMs has already conceded that no form is ultimate, which is why using them for G-dly purposes is possible.

The alleged AI apocalypse is particularly poorly timed for the Jews, as we’re still in the middle of our post-Holocaust “apocalypse” (it didn’t take). If anyone has reason to revile modern technology, it is the Jew who survives the 20th century. Many have argued that the very same demolition of fixed forms, the same move away from Aristotelian disunity, that enables the Rebbe’s tech optimism also produced the holocaust. It was the very turn to quantity that eventually allowed us to unite the electromagnetic and nuclear forces, which also produced industrialized society, relativized ethics, and, combined, enabled the industrial extermination of Jews in their millions. The Rebbe celebrates the demolition of a building that refused to see the actual and operative unity of the world generating its empirical experiences, but there have been countless murders in the resulting vacant lot. The shattering of the closed cosmos was one event; it produced both the vacancy that enables building and the vacancy in which atrocities occurred. The Rebbe’s techno-optimism is a herculean commitment to seeing what can be built from within the darkest and most perilous ruins.

In this sense, the Holocaust is the greatest test of a non-formal Judaism. If the covenant is orthogonal to formal arrangements, if the gold and the shape are not what offended about the golden calf, then the covenant should also be orthogonal to what the Nazis, Yimach Shemam, did to us. And they did quite a lot. Our Judaism today really is post-apocalyptic, but it is precisely because of its orthogonality, its G-d who speaks without becoming defined by his speech, that Judaism regularly de-apocalypses apocalypses. What the Rebbe did in the face of the industrialized holocaust, we can do with AI, whatever it brings. The Jew is called to make the lowest a dwelling place for G-d. It does not become transcended or bypassed but transformed even as it remains lowest. This casts the religious pessimist’s tale of woe, in which history and civilization are always reaching new nadirs, in quite a different light. These new depths are the Jews’ stage.

The Rebbe’s techno-optimism is not a prediction that things will simply turn out well. It is not a cost-benefit analysis. It is not even faith that G-d will necessarily intervene, although a Jew is obligated to trust that G-d will bless him with open and revealed good. The Rebbe’s “optimism” is the existential-level certainty that no technology, catastrophe, or civilization-level transformation possesses the sovereignty to sever the covenant. The pessimist’s deepest fear is that some rupture will finally swallow everything without possibility of return. Some of them believe this has already happened. The Holocaust was, I think we can agree, sufficiently “bad” to justify every single fear in this vein. And yet, here the Jews still are, in a pact with G-d. The covenant is not a formal arrangement that formal destruction can reach. There is no naive expectation that says the vacant lot will be pleasant or even safe, but there is an absolute certainty that the vacant lot cannot define everything, that nothing Jewish will ever be entirely of this vacancy. And this, in turn, means that we will always be able to build something from the ruins. There is always a Speaker who exceeds every medium, including the medium of history itself.

Indeed, those who believe in history, that the Jew is defined entirely by history, have ample all-swallowing, all-defining past events to choose from that irreversibly could be said to have “corrupted” “true” Judaism. The media of exile, they can plainly see, have shaped our message. Babylon called forth the men of the Great Assembly. Rome called forth Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Judah the Prince. The destruction of the Temple conditions every page of the Talmud. The Islamic exile gave rise to Jewish philosophy. Khmelnytsky called forth the Baal Shem Tov.

Say we take the possibility of an LLM apocalypse seriously. Say we face the possibility of global economic collapse, the obsolescence of human jobs, a new form of war, and ultimately slavery to an all-serving digital potentate. There are also spiritual risks, including the nadir of the long Roman exile in truly speechless speech, humans further molding themselves to match and starting new nihilistic faiths, and doubtless further “man-made horrors beyond comprehension.”

Yet the Rebbe is a techno-optimist. The Jew doesn’t survive apocalypses by serenely transcending them or by denying their severity. The Jew survives because the covenant was never a formal arrangement, and no destruction of forms can reach it. We can put G-d on trial, find Him guilty, and adjourn for afternoon prayers.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe is surprisingly optimistic, some might argue even blasé, about using technology for holy purposes. The Rebbe approving of Tanya on the radio seemed rather banal to me in my youth. The technology can be used for a positive purpose, so why not choose to use it to that end? The same went for cartoons, international broadcasting, and the early internet. However, for the past fifteen years or so, certainly since the earliest anti-social-media fervors, the popularizing of the word “dopamine” and concerns about the “algorithm”, the vast majority of religious writers and thinkers seem worried about technology, to put it mildly.

In fact, it’s quite common to find a sophisticated philosophical edifice built around tech’s inherent dangers. Postman, McLuhan, and even the Nazi Heidegger gave tech criticism a firm basis. In some ways, it is a stream of Western thought going back to Plato. I’d summarize the contemporary controversy as follows:

The liberal, enlightened view coheres around the free individual who, in a self-contained agency, can use any tool equally to his purposes. Technology is what we make of it because, to a large extent, everything is. Natures are real primarily in the minds thinking about them and the sovereign individual is thus ultimately not subject to the limitations of his tools.

Enter the religious pessimists who quite reasonably say this whole idea of technology is a fantasy. Every medium or tool has an inherent nature that shapes its use. Our way of being human is molding itself to our technologies, rather than the other way around. Our thick traditions, indeed our whole way of relating to ourselves and to our creator, are necessarily constrained by the ways in which we express them. Allow all religious teaching to be conveyed only by the newspaper, and you will undoubtedly get newspaper religion. It may be impossible to salvage anything like “pure human existence” as G-d intends it (which is to some extent pre-technological and emerges from His hand) under the technological constraints present in contemporary society. Indeed, it may be too late, save from a great de-teching, to ever get human existence back on track. And good luck de-teching when the tech sector and its philosophers are so successful and influential in society.

This debate is not ultimately about technology, at least not at a pragmatic level. The disagreement is about what technology is, what a human being is, and how the two interact. Therefore, it would be extremely surprising if the Rebbe’s optimism derived from a liberal, enlightened view. But what, then, drives his embrace of technology? As on many other issues, fully understanding the Rebbe’s view requires understanding the Rebbe’s metaphysics as grounded in Chassidus, for the Rebbe and Chassidus are inseparable.

The point of divergence between Chassidus and the typical religious pessimist concerns form. The term appears in Chassidus (as tzurah), though as with other philosophical language it finds different definition on a Chassidic view. The religious pessimist, on the other hand, is an instinctual essentialist. He holds that in a world ordered by G-d, each creation is ultimately defined by its form.

Chassidus, of course, believes there is a lot of truth to this, and on firmer ground than the typical essentialist, since it is the constantly spoken word of G-d that is each creature’s soul and inherent indwelling nature. However, as the Rebbe points out, Maimonides writes in his work of Jewish Law that the four elements convert. This implies that the foundational formal differences in the world derive from and point to a fundamental unity; no element stands alone to the deepest level.

This fundamental physical unity was not broadly accepted in the time of Maimonides, when the differences between, say, the heat and dryness of fire and the coolness and wetness of water were seen as practically irreducible. The elements may interact, may even transform, but they are fundamentally plural; even the unifying role of G-d is a unity at the top of the world, transcending but not disturbing each operative nature. An oak tree possesses a very distinct, stable, inherent nature that derives from G-d’s. In the physical world, the medieval philosophers held, there is an operative manyness.

Modern science vindicated the unity implicit in the Rambam by demolishing formal essentialism from within nature itself. The elements convert. Matter and energy are one. When we say that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are unified, we mean not only that one thing can become another but that the diversity of things is a surface manifestation of a single operative unity. Unity is what’s physically real, while apparent diversity is derivative. In other words, the dominant intellectual framework of our age has stopped treating natural forces as independently real; our habit of mind has become unity-seeking.

The radio really does, on the Rebbe’s view, have a nature that shapes what passes through it–on this, the religious pessimist is correct. However, what makes them pessimists is that they believe such forms are operationally sovereign, that the medium of teaching through radio extends “all the way down” and can totally transform the message being taught. The Rebbe disagrees. Tanya on the radio is neither the liberal’s triumph (forms don’t matter) nor the pessimist’s nightmare (the form will devour the message). It is a demonstration that the operative reality, that is, the Torah, the message of ultimate unity, passes through forms without being captured by them.

When the Rebbe was challenged on this point, he did not argue that radio is neutral, but that it was created by G-d for holy purposes. He cited the Midrash that gold was created for the Mishkan, even though in the world it was first used for idolatry. The form’s misuse does not overwrite its created purpose. It is, in fact, quite common on a Jewish basis to have the correct form that is nevertheless preventing G-d’s mission from being accomplished. The medium is real. But the Speaker is not the medium. The covenantal religion of Judaism is about conveying the Speaker rather than His meaning. All meanings of words are equally incommensurate to the Speaker who knows his own speech from the inside. The “technology of the golden calf” is abhorrent not because it is gold or a calf, which is neither here nor there, but because it is a unilateral attempt from within human understanding to make the gold and the calf into the container for G-d.

The contours of the technology matter less than the speaker/speech valence. Is it emerging from G-dliness from the “inside” or are we applying it to G-dliness from the “outside”? Are we witnessing in prophecy the form of the face of the ox of the divine chariot, or are we building a calf with which we hope to pin down G-d?

In other words, the Lubavitcher Rebbe only appears to hold the liberal position because the liberal happens to capture something of the truth that the religious traditionalist never did. There is a quality to a thing that runs deeper than what makes it its distinct self; intrinsic differences only convey a deeper unity. Forms are real and can influence how we use them, but they are not ultimate, even on practical matters. “He alone has it in His power and ability to create something out of an absolute naught and nothingness.” “All that the Holy One, blessed be He, created in His world, He created solely for His glory.” No medium can exist without accepting this message.

“The beginning of wisdom is the fear of heaven.” While I’m normally inclined to think of this verse in personal spiritual terms, it occurs to me that it’s good advice for many of our public intellectuals. Not that they and their ideas shouldn’t be trusted if their actions betray brazen denial of G-d, though this is also true. No, I mean that they are all focused on easy answers. The real quandary is practical lived “fear of heaven”–in other words, in the synagogue.

Jewish holiness, you will recall, is different from the word’s typical connotations. It implies togetherness, the collective, and, ultimately, the soul-unity of all Jews. In a way, Judaism says that getting Jews to love one another and be at peace is the biggest ask in the whole universe. This has a logical cause: it’s easy to unite people, at least superficially and accidentally, under a banner or for a purpose. Jews are stiff-necked, opinionated, and, preserve us, often quite intelligent, which means they have substantial sympathy with their own points of view. Running a synagogue of people whose spiritual affinities are non-obvious and who are all in this community for seemingly accidental physical reasons is the most difficult problem in the world.

It is also a problem ill-suited to our latter-day philosophers, who often deliver pronouncements that make it obvious they’ve never had to run a functioning community, even of well-behaved gentiles. Adults have no friends these days, so any philosophy worth talking about must have a better view of living mammals coming together than the ever-ready and unimaginative “everyone will always be united by the abstract principle I favor.” The world is not a monastery, and few wish to live in one; ideas so compelling that they solve the irreducible human problem of community remain a desideratum.

The average Twitter intellectual, in fact, seems millennia behind the state of the art on questions like “getting along with everyone at the synagogue.” They think that religious similarity and cultural roots are sufficient. The Jews, as with so many theories, love this idea but disprove it by existing. “We need to return to integrated high-trust societies.” Let’s see if you can get through this luncheon without hating your neighbor, hotshot. “We need initiation rituals to reweave the social fabric.” Let’s see if you still volunteer for minyan at Sheldon’s house at 7 am with the nine smelly boomers who just fell out of bed, Rousseau. “Life without hierarchy is chaos.” Good, I expect major kowtowing to anyone who donates more to the building fund than you do for the size of their mitzvos. No one on the internet who says “masculinity begins with daily discipline” will set aside the barbells and running shoes to let Shirley talk their ear off for half an hour about how all men are evil because of how her traditional Orthodox father raised her (she’s 94, by the way). “Return to monarchy.” Congrats! You’ve been roped into the King’s mincha against your will; surely so small a display of fealty is nothing before your virtu. “Without solid metaphysical commitments, there can be no polis.” Fascinating, yet you RSVP’d “maybe” to the shul kiddush clean-up rotation.

These are the real problems of life and we can only ultimately solve them by solving ourselves. In other words, show up in a place and truly live there, and you’ll quickly learn the fear of heaven. Philosophy can come later. Time to suit up and start delivering.

We cannot change the structure of our communication without altering its content. For example, in the written word, the Ancient Greeks held that there were three modes of knowing, which answer the three fundamental questions a man can ask, and that these three modes comprise the three structural components of the logical syllogism, which in language correspond to word, sentence, and paragraph.

When you ask, “What is it?” the answer is a term, naming the thing without describing it, accepting a given like “man,” or “triangle,” or “justice. When you ask, “Is it so?” the answer is a proposition like “Triangles have three sides,” in which something is predicated on a term, and whose natural form is the sentence. While the relationships within a term are implicit at best, a proposition is nothing other than a stated relationship. When you then ask, “Why is it so?” you draw a syllogism which charts the relationship between propositions, like, “Since all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal.” In plain prose, this is the function of a paragraph.

Therefore, when we write in the new style popular on LinkedIn, setting down staccato, declarative sentences, each separated by a line break—when we refuse to use paragraphs—we simply cannot communicate thoughts in the same way. The structural feature we call the paragraph, a set of propositions driving toward a single purpose, reflects the inherent logical form of communication.

Whether the Greeks had the right of it, this is a remarkable claim, worth investigating before we ever read anything in the new Internet style. What we’d expect on a Socratic basis to lose when we write in LinkedInese, this sort of endless stream of short propositions, is the ordering and grouping of syllogism, how propositions and their conclusions are linked. It is the written form of streaming content; we are instead obligated to keep the channel open and receive the ideas bit by bit; no one knows where they are going and the only sign of motion is that we are now chewing on different words than we were a moment ago. Nothing is really explained. It’s just predication after predication, fact after fact, the reader left to their own devices to make all the propositions answerable to each other, and if the reader isn’t trained to read in paragraphs, then there simply will be no telos, no unifier of motion, nothing that begins, has a middle, or ends.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people raised on writing like this begin to view coherence as a sort of coercion. This way of writing is the natural outcome of the modern love of the brute fact, of the narrowness of our whys, a demand for freedom from obligatory structure. There is no way to work yourself into a corner if you never write a paragraph, no earlier sentences to answer to, really. We relate not over time but in a series of atomized motions. Isn’t the LLM the ultimate example of this? Don’t we think everything can be built from a simple jackhammer succession of facts, that facts (rather than meta-structure or syllogism) are the bedrock of reality, that somehow the paragraph is emergent, maybe even illusory? That we need no special attachment to hold us together over time?

Writing in paragraphs online, especially in the context of confrontation or even dialogue, feels weak, even though it is only through attachment and risk that we truly create. Paragraphs are legible, and to be truly understood, in sincerity, is dangerous. It has always been a form of vulnerability, but now our vulnerability is a public gate for all to enter. This disincentivizes the form. The paragraph is bad for clicks and easily dismissed, so we’re afraid to even put one across. Instead, the series of declarations, with plausible deniability of argument, development, or directedness, becomes our shield. With any luck, the contemporary reader is so distracted and forgetful that the window of their awareness illuminates only our call to action and subscribe button!

The culture that fears paragraphs also fears persons, because the humble paragraph is a public declaration of responsibility for how one’s thoughts hang together. Fewer and fewer people ever encounter a paragraph in the wild, and so fewer and fewer can describe why we are growing further away from rich and meaningful relationships, why we are getting locked in individual slices of time, why our minds seem less and less capable of following the through-line of purpose to ultimate culmination. The ever-mounting arms-race of pure assertion will destroy us all. We must put ourselves across as coherent beings over time. We must gamble for love.

In David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, a marvelous account of the fall of the Soviet Union from the Washington Post’s man on the ground in Moscow, we learn about the life and views of one Yuri Afanasyev, the rector of the Historical Archives Institute and a leading documenter of victims of Soviet repression. Remnick captures the emblematic complexity of his character. Afanasyev is a bit tortured, a complicit party intellectual, a true believer and insider who never becomes an outsider dissident like Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn. His double consciousness is one instance of a general late Soviet phenomenon, the split identity of living a life entirely defined by the system one also believes is false. Though Afanasyev is an expert dismantler of the mythology of the Soviet system from the inside, one gets the impression he does not sleep well at night.

In my favorite passage from the book, Afanasyev discusses how the first dissonance, the first break from the all-encompassing dream of the Soviet narrative, was connected with an event we’ve discussed here previously, Stalin’s death. The emphasis is mine:

On the night before Stalin’s funeral in March 1953, Afanasyev wandered the streets near the Kremlin. Tens of thousands of people jammed the streets headed for the Hall of Columns, where Stalin lay in his coffin. People were hysterical, wracked with fear after the death of their living god. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people suffocated to death in the mad crush to get to the hall. Afanasyev broke free of the crowd. As he walked, he could hear some drunks singing in an alleyway. He had never heard such joyous singing. The drunks were celebrating the death of Stalin.

“I suppose once or twice in a lifetime you have those moments when you see something or hear something that tilts your life just slightly in another direction. When I heard those men, well, suddenly the purity of my political consciousness was stained,” Afanasyev said. “I felt the first moment of doubt. It wasn’t until Khrushchev’s speech three years later that I really started to rethink things more thoroughly, but it was this drunken celebration in the dark corners of Moscow that made me start to doubt. I was never quite the same.”

This strange, almost mythic episode immediately suggests an ethic. No sobriety in the world could pierce this student of the regime’s world. The Soviet state’s capture of the mind was total. What reached him, in that formative moment, was not skepticism, not even dissidence as such, but defiant warmth and joy. You cannot argue with the drunks of Moscow, nor can they convince you, because they are drunk. Yet somehow, they leave a mark that cannot be washed away, a wound that can never be made whole…

The Jew survives all doubt but not with answers. Our war on exile is one of stained exile consciousness. Tanya doesn’t need everyone to be a pure dissident; these are extremely rare, special souls. But what every Jew can become, what the beinoni might be, is a drunk singing in the freezing alleys of Moscow who is warm from the inside as the night is from the outside, who laughs at foxes, because to disturb a peaceful Stalinist slumber is the purpose of all worlds. Stalin died on Purim; on that night, the King’s sleep was disturbed. With this bottle, all of Moscow is mine.

The Rebbe Rashab puts forth a klal gadol of Chassidus:

This is the great principle: that all experience of self is concealment to the other, while self-concealment is experience to the other.

Sefer HaMaamarim 5657, p.47

Take speech, for example: We live in an externally defined culture, where something is only real if it moves the needle for the other, if it crosses the line from subjectivity to objectivity, where others can experience it. Therefore, in our culture, speech is called self-expression. This is even, to an extent, codified in our laws.

But speech, in a very real sense, is not self-expression at all. When I read The Old Man and the Sea, I use Hemingway’s words to determine their coherence, furnish them with experience, and live with them from within myself. The words have no effect on the illiterate or people who do not read English. It isn’t even attached to his person. My copy was printed long after he died and is no more or less his expression than the copy of the book issued when he was alive. It is simply and only in his arrangement of the letters that something of Hemingway comes through.

And of course that’s not Hemingway at all. Hemingway, from the inside, knows what it feels like to write the characters, recall the experience he wishes to convey, hold his pen in his hand at his desk (even if I sat there, they wouldn’t be mine at all,) to feel his own heart beating as he writes the closing lines, and to never meet the finished work for the first time from the outside. I, reading the book, know none of these things. Were I able to know any of this, I would be inside Hemingway’s head. And the only way to really be inside his head, to know him as he knows himself, is to be him. The real experience of Hemingway’s self, with all its recursions and feedback loops and inherent valence, is opaque to the other; a lifetime of trying to express it in words will fail. It is only by setting himself aside, by hiding it away from us, in fact by not at all truly attempting to convey what it is to be Hemingway, that we can grasp him at all. This is what the artists call the “lie that tells the truth.” It’s not only a lie in fiction writing; it is a lie inherent to all communication. When Hemingway says, “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” he is describing a veil, a self-concealment, an artful masquerade.

In theology, this really is a Klal Gadol, a great principle. It grounds arguably the most foundational Chassidic discourse about Divine Unity. If we were willing to posit, as Chassidus accepts axiomatically, that G-d is at least as much a self as we are, it would change everything. These short stories where he seems to be communicating most clearly, the works we call “The Sunset”, “The Promenade des Anglais in the light of an August Morning,” “The Rockies Giving Way to the High Plateau as the Interstate Breaks Free From the Frost Like the First Shoots of Spring”—these are merely the veils we currently appreciate. If we wish to truly know Him, rather than merely our own tastes, we should be aiming higher. If He wants us to know Him, why are we languishing here, inside His book? And if we really contain the ability to know Him, doesn’t that mean that our selves must be like His Self, that we, in principle, must not be a construction of the work, but something far older and stranger that cannot be reduced to any rule?

A vort has reached us from the Chassidim of the Alter Rebbe concerning the Chassidic discourses in Torah Ohr and Likkutei Torah. They asked at farbrengen why these discourses, week in and week out, parsha after parsha, ask the same question: “In order to understand this, we must first understand why the soul must descend into this world...” Why are we asking this question anew this week if last week’s discourse already answered it?

The Chassidim of the Alter Rebbe concluded that this is a question that is constantly bothering the Rebbe. And it should bother us as well. We should be struggling with this question.

Reflecting on this vort, it strikes me that the purpose of the answer in each discourse is not necessarily to make us comfortable, or to quell our question once and for all. Sometimes the answers are only there to sharpen and deepen the question. To discomfit us.

In this spirit, I don’t wish to talk about an answer at all, but only a question. The Mitteler Rebbe asks an astounding one near the beginning of Lehavin Inyan Lekichas Anshei Chayil.

Seemingly, it is exceedingly strange that for transgressing God’s commandments and nullifying His commandments, the punishment should be missing out on and nullifying the commandments. It would have been more appropriate to punish them in body and finances, to induce them to repent, without modifying any commandments. They should remain whole and be strengthened. Even the punishment of subjugation to earthly kings could have occurred while the Beis HaMikdash was in existence and the commandments in their wholeness.

In other words, the current state of Jewish being, millennia into the fourth of our nested exiles, is not just abnormal, but its abnormality itself has become abnormal. The logic of taking away the Jews’ temple because we don’t deserve it, and in the process rendering many of the Torah’s commands inapplicable, makes some sense to us. Serving God in the temple, we figure, is a privilege, not a right.

But this line of thought itself, says the Rebbe, is an artifact of exile. The whole logic makes no sense on its face. There is nothing higher than the Mitzvos. They are not a privilege Jews might earn if they are good. The Mitzvos and Beis HaMikdash are the purpose of all reality, the reason to have Jews, just as the Jews are the reason to have the Mitzvos. The Jews did not upset God by failing to live up to some perfection whereby Mitzvos are earned. They upset God because they didn’t keep the commandments. They didn’t value that which is truly valuable. And G-d responds with exile, by making it harder to appreciate His commandments, by making it impossible to keep a large number of them.

We should find this strange. This question should be our question: If God really wants us to be close, why has He hidden away the unique and ultimate expression of our closeness? Why has He removed His dwelling place, the Temple, where His presence could be felt and miracles witnessed by the whole people? If He wants us to be more G-dly, why has He made being G-dly almost impossible?

And ultimately, where does our conception of Jews as strangers who must earn a relationship come from? Why do we think that G-d wanting to have the deepest possible relationship with us is some kind of latter-day cop-out, that “real men” accept exile as God not wanting us close, period? What religion does this idea come from, if it doesn't make sense to the Mitteler Rebbe?

For the elevation of the soul of Dalya Davida bas Yisrael.

The biblical command to wipe out an entire people is indeed incomprehensible, but so is the Jew, and to be Jewish is to have a G-d who is like this.

I. Will we ever understand the Holocaust?

In a celebrated letter from 1956 to Israel’s president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, The Lubavitcher Rebbe describes a vision that preceded his leadership, his adulthood, and even the beginning of his formal education:

From the time I was a child attending cheder, and even before, a picture of the future redemption began to take form in my mind—the redemption of Israel from its final exile, a redemption such that through it will be understood the sufferings of exile, the decrees and the massacres...

It’s tempting to read in this letter the Rebbe’s hope that one day the redeemer will come and explain the sufferings of exile. The Creator and Ruler of the world will show us His design, the higher vantage from which the Holocaust was not only explicable but logical, even necessary. The final redemption will be a coming of age. The mature Israel will glimpse the levers behind the veil at last, a loving G-d explaining why He behaved as He did. We are holding on, the Rebbe seems to imply. Answers are coming.

But not in the Rebbe’s letter from 1984.

28 years later, the Rebbe receives a letter from a child of Holocaust survivors born in a DP camp asking directly, “Why did G-d permit the Holocaust?” Every sentence of his reply demands study. The Rebbe’s remarkable letter begins with an extensive preface. The Rebbe establishes, almost from first principles, that the world has a purpose:

Jews—including you and me—are “believers, the children of believers,” our Sages declare. Deep in one’s heart every Jew believes there is a G‑d Who is the Creator and Master of the world, and that the world has a purpose. Any thinking person who contemplates the solar system, for example, or the complexities of an atom, must come to the conclusion and conviction that our universe did not come about by some “freak accident.” Wherever you turn, you see design and purpose.

and so do human beings:

It follows that a human being “also” has a purpose, certainly where millions of human beings are concerned.

and that the purposes are not graspable by unaided human intellect:

Since the Creator created the world with a purpose, it is also logical to assume that He wished the purpose to be realized, and therefore, would reveal to the only “creature” on earth who has an intelligence to understand such matters, namely, humankind, what this purpose is, and how to go about realizing it. This, indeed, is the ultimate purpose of every human being, namely, to do his or her share in the realization of the Divine design and purpose of Creation. It is also common sense that without such “Divine revelation,” a human being would not, of his own accord, have known what exactly is that purpose and how to achieve it, any more than a minuscule part or component in a highly complex system could comprehend the whole system, much less the creator of the system.

The illustration often given in this connection is the case of an infant, whose lack of ability to understand an intricate theory of a mature scientist would not surprise anyone, although both the infant and the scientist are created beings, and the difference between them is only relative, in terms of age and knowledge, etc. Indeed, it is possible that the infant may some day surpass the scientist in knowledge and insight. Should it, then, be surprising that a created human being cannot understand the ways of the Creator?

Every person is given the ability to carry out their G-d-given purpose, to which they must exclusively apply themselves:

It is also understandable that since every person has a G‑d-given purpose in life, he or she is provided with the capacity to carry out that purpose fully.

A further important point to remember is that since G‑d created everything with a purpose, there is nothing lacking or superfluous in the world. This includes also the human capacity.

It follows that a person’s capacity in terms of knowledge, time, energy, etc., must fully be applied to carrying out his, or her, purpose in life. If any of these resources is diverted to something that is extraneous to carrying out the Divine purpose, it would not only be misused and wasteful, but would detract to that extent from the real purpose.

This is why G-d has given the Jew the Torah, including the Noahide Laws, that everyone can choose to fulfill G-d’s Will:

In the Torah, called Toras Chaim (“instruction of living”), G‑d has revealed what the purpose of Creation is, and provided all the knowledge necessary for a human being, particularly a Jew, to carry it out in life. Having designated the Jewish people as a “Kingdom of Kohanim [priests] and a holy nation,” a Jew is required to live up to all the Divine precepts in the Torah. Gentiles are required to keep only the Seven Basic Moral Laws—the so-called Seven Noachide Laws with all their ramifications—which must be the basis of any and every human society, if it is to be human in accordance with the will and design of the Creator.

One of the basic elements of the Divine Design, as revealed in the Torah, is that G‑d desires it to be carried out by choice and not out of compulsion. Every human being has, therefore, the free will to live in accordance with G‑d’s Will, or in defiance of it.

Only after all of this does the Rebbe finally return to the question and provide his response:

With all the above in mind, let us return to your question, which is one that has been on the minds of many: Why did G‑d permit the Holocaust?

The only answer we can give is: only G‑d knows.

The Rebbe doesn’t say, “I don’t know.” He also doesn’t say, “We don’t understand yet.” In fact, the possibility of the infant growing up to be wiser than the scientist was specifically claimed, in the Rebbe’s prefatory metaphor, to be inapplicable to the relationship between man and G-d. “Only G-d knows,” especially in this context, sounds like it locates the answer permanently in a category distant from human cognition. Rather than a scholar admitting the current state of the art in Holocaust explanation, it sounds like the kind of thing we will never know.

Where has the vision from the Rebbe’s childhood gone? What of Moshiach, the final redemption, in light of which suffering will be understood?

The Rebbe’s next paragraph only serves to further preclude understanding the Holocaust:

However, the very fact that there is no answer to this question is, in itself, proof that one is not required to know the answer, or understand it, in order to fulfill one’s purpose in life. Despite the lack of satisfactory answer to the awesome and tremendous “Why?”—one can, and must, carry on a meaningful and productive life, promote justice and kindness in one’s surroundings, and indeed, help create a world where there should be no room for any Holocaust, or for any kind of man’s inhumanity to man.

Imagine that one day Moshiach will hand the architect’s blueprints for human suffering to the Jew who is finally ready to comprehend. This would render the Rebbe’s “G-d only knows” in 1984, while we are still in exile, temporary. There would be a very real but provisional gap in knowledge. The Rebbe instead treats this gap as probative. Our inability to understand demonstrates that understanding is not our purpose.

If the current absence of understanding will eventually be fixed when Moshiach comes, then its absence would not prove this at all. It would simply mean we are finite and waiting. Devoting time to this question might help us prepare for Moshiach’s eventual disclosure. Instead, the Rebbe says that the question not having an answer in 1984 is “proof” that understanding is not required to fulfill our purpose. We are simultaneously, the Rebbe argues, absolved from intellectual responsibility and thereby strengthened in our moral responsibility. Pursuing the answer to this question is thus a categorical misallocation of resources. Apparently, no explanation is coming. Instead, the Holocaust challenges us in a way that goes beyond questions and answers:

As a matter of fact, in the above there is an answer to an unspoken question: “What should my reaction be?” The answer to this question is certain: It must be seen as a challenge to every Jew—because Jews were the principal victims of the Holocaust—a challenge that should be met head-on, with all resolve and determination, namely, that regardless how long it will take the world to repent for the Holocaust and make the world a fitting place to live in for all human beings—I, for one, will not slacken in my determination to carry out my purpose in life, which is to serve G‑d, wholeheartedly and with joy, and make this world a fitting abode—not only for humans, but also for the Shechina, the Divine Presence itself.

Of course, much more could be said on the subject, but why dwell on such a painful matter, when there is so much good to be done?

The Holocaust, unanswered and unanswerable, somehow redounds to strengthen the Jew’s commitment. The tenor of the commitment elicited by the Holocaust is not patience or stoic endurance but “wholeheartedly and with joy.” Joy is not typically the posture of someone without answers to horrors beyond comprehension. The Rebbe seems to be saying that our lack of information is a call to enter deeper into something beyond information. Serving G-d precedes all frameworks of understanding. The demand for answers is legitimate for a creature with a mind, but it simply doesn’t reach as deep as the Jew’s commitment to serve with joy. The Jew is not a Jew because the world repents from the Holocaust (for which the Rebbe was still waiting in 1984). The Jew somehow is called to joy even amidst man’s inhumanity to man. In short: the question is unanswerable, which proves that it is non-ultimate, which points the Jew to his ultimate commitment to Judaism, which should reinvigorate the covenant with G-d in joy.

Then comes the postscript:

P.S. Needless to say, the above may be accepted intellectually, and it may ease the mind, but it cannot assuage the pain and upheaval, especially of one who has been directly victimized by the Holocaust.

Thus, in this day and age of rampant suspicion, etc., especially when one is not known personally, one may perhaps say—“Well, it is easy for one who is not emotionally involved to give an ‘intellectual’ explanation . . .”

So, I ought perhaps, to add that I, too, lost in the Holocaust very close and dear relatives such as a grandmother, brother, cousins and others (G‑d should avenge their blood). But, life according to G‑d’s command must go on, and the sign of life is in growth and creativity.

Here, the Rebbe explicitly separates intellectual acceptance from the resolution of suffering and seems to depart from the 1956 letter entirely. No answer can “answer” the Holocaust. Even if the future understanding eases the mind, the Rebbe here concedes that intellectual acceptance, explanation of any kind, cannot reach the level where the wound lives.

What we have in this letter is a succinct and clear statement of the Rebbe’s anti-theodicy, his refusal to explain the Holocaust on the grounds that it is indeed fundamentally inexplicable. Unlike the child who one day might understand the scientist, we will never understand why G-d permitted the Holocaust. The Rebbe cannot even “prove” his right to say that he has no answer! He does not argue against the “rampant suspicion.” He simply says that he, too, lost. Somehow, the covenant holds even as the grief and suffering exceed theology, and the Rebbe’s position is both.

But what of the 1956 letter and the dream of redemption that will explain the sufferings?

I think in light of 1984, we must read 1956 more carefully. The Rebbe says that the sufferings “will become understood,” in the passive form. In other words, it is not that Moshiach will come, tell us a crucial piece of information, and thereby justify G-d’s behavior during the Holocaust. On the contrary, Moshiach will be like a new light on an old landscape. The sunrise doesn’t place new hills. It just lets us see what has always surrounded us. The unintelligible will become intelligible as a feature of redemption itself.

The 1984 letter tells us that the trying to understand the Holocaust is a misallocation of our G-d-given capacities and against our purpose because it is incomprehensible. The type of knowledge that can be pursued, transferred, and expanded has its limits and the Holocaust lies beyond them. But there is a redemption-knowledge, a Moshiach-understanding, that has nothing to do with information or transferable content and is inseparable from the condition of living in the Messianic Age, whereby the Holocaust will be understood, but not explained. This type of understanding does not yet exist as a human capacity and once it does exist will not be “informational” at all.

The Rebbe’s childhood vision and his letter to the survivor’s child reflect the same theology. The refusal to explain—indeed, the refusal of explicability—in exile is the insistence that the future understanding is real. Only a G-d whose silence is impenetrable is a G-d whose redemption can transform the conditions of understanding itself. Only the G-d who does not have an answer for our exile question can cast a large enough light in Moshiach’s time that the unanswerable question of Auschwitz becomes “understood.”

What can we know about this G-d? What kind of relationship with G-d produces this paradox? Well, there is an old Jewish tradition of putting G-d on trial...

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The first step, as it was in Liadi, is to know that G-d is everywhere. G-d is the only true reality, and all other realities are lesser and real only inasmuch as they depend on G-d. In a real sense, dependence on G-d is all there is other than G-d Himself. The world is a function of Him rather than vice versa. Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere. This was once more difficult to accept, mostly because other intellectual commitments limited G-d, made of him an idea, and excluded that idea from the world.

But the Jew meeting the Rebbe on the streets of Brooklyn doesn’t have as much of a philosophical problem with G-d’s omnipresence. Yes, he says, but where is He? In other words, sure, He’s everywhere, but that doesn’t satisfy me. If He’s everywhere, why is this world what it is? Why is my life what it is? Why am I who I am? If He’s everywhere, and I even accept that, then why do I feel like I’ve never met Him?

Reader, I think this is the question to which the whole Chassidus is an answer, a question from the depths of the Jew’s being, a question to which the Alter Rebbe writes the Tanya as an answer. I think this because the Rebbe’s answer is the first chapters of Tanya: If this is how you’re asking, then G-d is already inside your own heart. Your question is itself His signature. You need more than G-d being everywhere because even more than He is everywhere, He is inside you. You’re a Jew. You didn’t choose it and can’t escape it.

Perhaps this is the entire Tanya on one foot. If we are a Jew not as a function of history or accident but as our constitutive identity, if everything can be explained in terms of it, then we can meet G-d. We can truly know that He is everywhere. It will take a lot of work, but with this in hand, the rest is commentary. To his credit, Elliot Lasky went and learned.

The story goes that with Copernicus and Galileo, the spiritual narcissism of placing the earth and humankind at the center of the universe was banished in favor of a more objective view of reality. Many details (ranging from Galileo’s failure to defend his theory to the church on purely empirical grounds to whether declaring all human beings insignificant is the greatest narcissism of all) are left out of this founding mythos modernity. The detail that most interests me today is how this story contradicts one of the key modern stereotypes of the Middle Ages, which is their fear before the transcendent unknown.

True, the earth was located at the center of the Ptolemaic universe, but a medieval peasant was certain of their smallness and insignificance in a way that we are certain of almost nothing in 2026. Our instinct is to say that they salved their insignificance with religion, but this, also, is untrue. There’s a reason Renaissance humanism marked such a cultural shift. On the contrary, in the Middle Ages, the earth’s centrality reflected only its lowliness; the angels were real and so much loftier and smarter than we are; the best you could hope for was to live well and die well. You had no illusions of significance.

We have built our own angels of late, automata who may not have free choice but certainly do what no man can do and, in some sense, obviate our significance. The difference is that the sense of self-worth they’re interfering with is modern-empirical rather than medieval-religious. Both tiers exist in the contemporary Yeshiva.

Many students of the Yeshivos, being intelligent and honest Jews, realize that we are nothing like our ancestors, that we are an orphaned and re-orphaned generation. While we may not have many advantages in ethics, piety, or spirituality, they figure, we can at least express our generation’s profligate talent for business, where the rules are simpler, and the fungible dollar can solve many problems, both secular and religious. The sense of low self-worth in Yeshiva is often compensated for by donation plaques and the ability to support and help other Jews.

If we get to a point where a lot of the value creation in business is threatened by AI’s tireless abilities, we will have a two-fold self-worth crisis: first, the angels (or the previous generations, who are like angels to us) make our contributions to G-d’s ends seem minuscule. Then the machines obviate our business seichel. It almost doesn’t matter whether it will ever happen. The entire notion that it could happen is rather alarming.

Of course, this trend was not invented with the LLM. It is an extension of the general post-war shift among many Jews, especially in America, from the tests of poverty to the tests of wealth. Persecutions in Europe brought out inner resolve and strength from people who, upon arriving in America, became comfortable and unremarkable. Tzedakah was the great American engine for turning the comfortable and unremarkable into spiritual giants of a sort. But the tzedakah often came with an implication that there is something special one is doing that allows one to be a supporter; after all, if wealth is handed out for reasons only G-d knows that, for all practical purposes, we could call sheer dumb luck, the culture of tzedakah, at least as a pillar of self-worth, would lose much of its shine.

No, the LLM is just the last in a long line of increasingly convincing proofs that the last mile is all we have left. G-d is lovingly, through wealth and riches, cutting away our illusions, our sense of what we bring to the table. We have wandered and assailed the notion of self-made men in the golden land, only, after witnessing wonders and wealth beyond imagining, to return to the farm. The old comparisons with angels had it right all along. We are insignificant if we try to compete with them in intelligence or any other affirmative quality. We will never have as much love and fear of G-d as our souls did before we were born.

Why, then, was the Torah given to man? Because affirmative quality is not the mark of significance before G-d. Because He cares infinitely about that last mile problem we’re here to solve. Because all we really have to contribute, in the end, even if we’re rich and at ease, are the inner problems we are created with that no one else can solve. The only things that the machines providing us with vast wealth and repose cannot obsolesce or outpace are our flaws, the blockage before our own eyes. Rather than pining for alleged golden ages of the past and smashing the machines, we could, if we wish, simply accept the lesson we were meant to learn from the angels all along.