Kingdom of Priests

I was wondering when this would happen -- to me! I've occasionally donned phylacteries, a/k/a tefillin, en route aboard an airplane to pray in the morning, per Jewish tradition. You don't want to do it on an airplane since it's crowded and more to the point, could alarm passengers. That's what happened today when a US Airways Express flight from LaGuardia was diverted from its course, landing at Philadelphia, after others on the craft, fearing terrorism, became panicked on seeing a 17-year-old Orthodox Jewish male strapping a small leather box to his forehead and another to his arm (see Deuteronomy 6:8). 

Inside the boxes? Leather parchments inscribed with Hebrew Scriptural passages. Thankfully, no fellow passenger has ever freaked out on seeing me do this. At Cross-Currents, my friend Rabbi Adlerstein notes that Philadelphia Police chief inspector Joe Sullivan has assured a worried public in this AP video that the set of "olfactories" in fact posed no threat.

I admit to a fond wish to impute significance to coincidences. Cynics such as Matthew Cobb writing at Jerry Coyne's blog, Why Evolution Is True, explain away such things, like they do absolutely everything, as a function of survival value tucked into our genome from ancient days. In some recent posts, Cobb was full of mockery for people like me:

Uh huh. So the human feel for synchronicity (Carl Jung's term for meaningful coincidence) is nothing more than the continuation of a warning instinct that would alert an animal to possible dangers to life or opportunities to gather food. How such a profound thing would be coded in your DNA -- which is the thing Darwinian natural selection has to work with, DNA which itself codes for constructing proteins -- is always left conveniently vague in such explanations.

Confronted with simplistic views like this that obsessively try to squash human experience as flat as the flattest pancake, I wonder why my own predominant response to synchronicity is not to feel "spooked" as Dr. Cobb says (another way of saying that we feel somehow on alert to danger) but rather to wonder at the hidden orders of existence, underlying our own, of which Judaism and other faiths speak. It's the feeling of endless hidden vistas unfolding before you, of something vast and yawning under your feet. There's an eerie satisfaction in detecting an apparently meaningful coincidence, but I get nothing out of detecting what seems a meaningless coincidence, however unlikely the genuine chance event might be. I fail to see how my capacity for taking delight in such things reflects any evolutionary advantage that might have accrued to my ancient ancestors. Surely there's much more to it.

The Hebrew Bible certainly suggests as much. As my friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin points out, the Bible lacks a concept of "coincidence" to match our familiar idea of what that word means. Yes, you have a case like Balaam, the wicked prophet who hoped for a lucky encounter with God: "Perhaps the LORD will chance upon me and will show me something that I may tell you" (Numbers 23:3). But Balaam's belief in coincidence is held by Biblical tradition to be a mark against him, reflecting his own shame and disgrace. 

So too when God advised Moses on how to address Pharaoh. He should do so in terms of God's having "chanced upon" the Israelites (Exodus 3:18). As a pagan, and much like Matthew Cobb, Pharaoh is committed to a picture of how the world works that misunderstands an encounter with divine reality as nothing more than chance. Samson Raphael Hirsch explains that this is why the Hebrew word for coincidence (mikreh) is related etymologically to the word for calling (kara). Subjectively, what appears to the heathen as chance can be, in reality, a call from outside us -- "the product of divine providence which by this mikreh, this 'chance,' calls us into the direction intended by it."

I'll give you an example, an apt one, from last night. My wife was going to be out for the evening with a girlfriend so I consoled myself by picking up a DVD from our local public library's small selection. The movie I chanced upon was The Squid and the Whale, which was quite good as I can now report. Jeff Daniels (heavily bearded) and Laura Linney (lovely) are highbrow artistic writer types living in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. They are in the process of divorcing, with their two adolescent sons caught in the middle. 

The title comes from the eerie display at New York's Museum of Natural History, in which a giant squid and a sperm whale battle "in near total darkness," in the phrase from the explanation under the display that I myself remember well from visiting many times. In the film, we learn that when he was a little kid and his mother would take him to the museum, the couple's older son had felt scared of the squid and whale depiction. Now, it seems from the way the movie ends, he associates it with his mom and dad's battling each other, and with his own clumsy wrestlings with sexuality.

On the rare occasion it happens, it's inspiring to catch a rabbi in the act of being what a Jewish religious leader should be -- namely a cohen or priest seeking to confront the world with the Torah's image of what we all could be. 

It's possible to kvell over the British chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, for relatively superficial reasons -- his Oxbridge education and manners, the gloss of secular learning and worldliness that comes from being, as he puts it,  "a lapsed heretic" who gave up philosophy in favor of Judaism because philosophy at the time disdained the human need for ultimate meaning. You can also appreciate, as I do, the amazingly beautiful new edition of the Jewish prayer book, the Sacks Siddur, that he translated and commented upon for the Jerusalem publisher Koren.

More important about Rabbi Sacks is his incisive critique of secularism. A case in point would be a major speech he gave recently. I've alluded to it before based on a brief news article but have now read it in full. It's a stunner.

Delivered to a public theology think tank in England, Theos, the 2009 Annual Theos Lecture, "Religion in Twenty-First Century Britain," is not some angry diatribe against modernity. Nor is it only about Britain, or about Europe. Americans may not be as far down the road to nihilism and despair as Europeans are but we are making strides to catch up. Genial, charming yet forthright and unapologetic, Sacks states his case that it is religious culture that stands in defense of civilization from barbarism.

As frequently comes out in his writing, he's a huge admirer of American democracy. Sacks mentions that he has a custom of reading Tocqueville on a yearly basis and quotes the French aristocrat and America-observer on the place of faith in a free society:

Sacks notes that "we would expect any society in which religion declines, in that society, civil society would decline. Families would become fragile, marriages would decline, communities would atrophy, society would cease to have a shared morality. And by those tests, 100 years later, Tocqueville got it exactly right."

In fact I'm working on a project that relates to that subject. Just as you don't have to be a literalist about creation, you may not have to be either about the exodus. Yet just as with the creation there must be some historical reality being alluded to if theism is to be taken seriously, the same must be true of the exodus. If the Jews were not miraculously freed from slavery in Egypt and then led to Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah, that would radically undercut the credibility of Jewish or Christian faith. 

Yet why does it really matter? I mean, it's obvious why the creation matters theologically and personally. If God didn't participate in that process, then we are not his creations and he becomes superfluous, not to mention being presumed nonexistent to begin with. Why it matters that God redeemed Israel from Egypt is suggested by the order of Jewish prayer.

Last night I came across an interesting distinction that Jewish philosophy offered some four centuries ago. The Maharal in Be'er ha-Golah asks about the Talmudic teaching (Makkot 23b-24a) that assigns a correspondence between the number of positive commandments in the Written Torah and the number of parts in a human body. By tradition, the number in both instances is 248. 

But there are many more components to the body than that, just as there are many more commandments -- specifically, rabbinic commandments. The Maharal answers that just as the body parts uncounted by the number 248 serve as appurtenances or accessories, protecting and otherwise ensuring their vital functioning, so too the rabbinic commandments are not found written in the Torah but instead are legislated by the rabbis to protect and serve the Torah's commandments. The parallel goes farther.