Introversion and You?

Last week, standing in a packed crowd at a general admission Ben Folds' concert, my daughter had an epiphany.

"You look uncomfortable, Abba," Avigayil said, "maybe we should move to a less crowded spot. Boy, now I see why you say you're introverted. I'm so charged up by being in this massive crowd, and you just look miserable."

Bingo.

It's one of those classic catch-22s in life. It is difficult to explain what its like feeling safer in your own space, when by definition you are talking to someone outside it. As Tom Lehrer said about alienated people writing literature, "If you have trouble communicating with others, the very least you can do is to shut up."

So it is always a relief to find someone who expresses it well. I recently heard that Emily Dickenson once took herniece into her bedroom, locked the door with an imaginary key, and said, "Ah, Mattie, here's freedom!"

Gut gezukt.

She found the freedom she sought in her own mind, in her own thoughts, in her own creativity. This was expressed by her poetry and in her poetry.

I dwell in Possibility-- 
A fairer House than Prose-- 
More numerous of Windows-- 
Superior--for Doors -
Of Chambers as the Cedars-- 
Impregnable of Eye-- 
And for an Everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky-- 
Of Visitors--the fairest-- 
For Occupation--This-- 
The spreading wide my narrow Hands 
To gather Paradise--

Rav Kook described a very similar existence. As in most things, I find his words to be beyond comfort. Rav Soloveitchik teaches me new ways of looking at things, that deepen and change forever my religious inner life. Rav Kook speaks out of my own soul, telling me things I feel and neve knew that I felt. I don't know how I could be me without him. 

I've been having a few crazy, busy weeks. It is hard to recharge without the time for quiet inner-space.  Reading the quote below gives me strength. 

Orot Hakodesh III – The Ascent to Inner Greatness

There are great righteous persons who are imbued with higher dispositions, who feel oppressed in their inner soul, because they do not penetrate into the inner greatness of their spirit. They do not believe with full faith in the holiness of their aspirations, and therefore they do not recognize sufficiently the enlightenment represented by the wide embrace of their thoughts. They go about bowed because of the secular burden of the world’s folly, the anger of fools, which presses on them. 


For this reason they find themselves in a sea of spiritual afflictions. The narrow thoughts of the masses oppress their spirits, and they lack the strength to raise themselves to think their own thoughts, to affirm the firmness of their own will. 

But they must finally awaken from their slumber. With all their attitude of peace and respect for the behavior of the masses, they will return to God, who always reveals Himself to them through their special windows and lattices. 

If you aspire for the Torah, raise yourself and gird yourself to meet that higher sensibility which stirs inside your spirit. With all your movements, with all your speech, with all your burdens physical and spiritual, that are placed on you, be brave and look straight toward the light that is revealed to you through the lattice.

Emily Dickenson

Soft Atheism III

Frans de Waal keeps it up: 

In reading the nearly 700 reader responses to my Oct. 17 essay for The Stone, (“Morals Without God?“) I notice how many readers are relieved to see that there are shades of gray when it comes to the question whether morality requires God. I believe that such a discussion needs to revolve around both the distant past, in which religion likely played little or no role if we go back far enough, and modern times, in which it is hard to disentangle morality and religion. The latter point seemed obvious to me, yet proved controversial. Even though 90 percent of my text questions the religious origins of human morality, and wonders if we need a God to be good, it is the other 10 percent — in which I tentatively assign a role to religion — that drew most ire. Atheists, it seems (at least those who responded here) don’t like any less than 100 percent agreement with their position...

...Those who wish to remove religion and define morality as the pursuit of scientifically defined well-being (à la Sam Harris) should read up on earlier attempts in this regard, such as the Utopian novel “Walden Two” by B. F. Skinner, who thought that humans could achieve greater happiness and productivity if they just paid better attention to the science of reward and punishment. Skinner’s colleague John Watson even envisioned “baby factories” that would dispense with the “mawkish” emotions humans are prone to, an idea applied with disastrous consequences in Romanian orphanages. And talking of Romania, was not the entire Communist experiment an attempt at a society without God? Apart from the question of how moral these societies turned out to be, I find it intriguing that over time Communism began to look more and more like a religion itself. The singing, marching, reciting of poems and pledges and waving in the air of Little Red Books smacked of holy fervor, hence my remark that any movement that tries to promote a certain moral agenda — even while denying God — will soon look like any old religion. Since people look up to those perceived as more knowledgeable, anyone who wants to promote a certain social agenda, even one based on science, will inevitably come face to face with the human tendency to follow leaders and let them do the thinking.

What I would love to see is a debate among moderates. Perhaps it is an illusion that this can be achieved on the Internet, given how it magnifies disagreements, but I do think that most people will be open to a debate that respects both the beliefs held by many and the triumphs of science. There is no obligation for non-religious people to hate religion, and many believers are open to interrogating their own convictions. If the radicals on both ends are unable to talk with each other, this should not keep the rest of us from doing so.

My favorite home-made signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity

Soft Atheism II

My previous post was (renamed) a defense of soft atheism. By that I mean a not religious thinker who sees the value of religion and what it has to offer society. This is the type of thinking that engages me. I wanted to present another example, this time from a Jewish perspective. (In the future, I intend to post examples of the same approach from the opposite perspective)

Below is part of an essay by Aaron David Gordon. Making Aliya at age 47, he was a relatively ancient chalutz. (pioneer) His thoughts on Jewish labor defined the zeitgeist of the second aliya. Below is from an essay where he argues that Judaism has value, even to the "new" to secular Jews of modern Israel. Are his comments less relevant today?

Yom Kippur (1920)

I ask myself, and I wonder whether I am alone in this question: What is Yom Kippur to us, to those who do not observe the forms of religion? Facing me are a fact and a possibility. It is a fact that for many generations it was a day which the entire people dedicated to repentance, prayer, and the service of the heart. It presented a possibility to spiritually sensitive people to make their inner reckoning on the loftiest plane.

I ask: Is this day for us merely a heritage from the past, a remnant of antiquity? Do we really need such a day, especially as part of the national culture we are creating? If this day ceases to be what it has been- if it becomes an ordinary day like all others- will this not represent a great national and human loss, a spiritual disaster from which none of us, neither the people as a whole, nor we, its individual children, can ever recover?

…During all our long exile we existed by the by the strength of our religion. Is sustained us in our grave and prolonged suffering and inspired us to live- often to live heroically. Is it possible, can the mind entertain the possibility, that such a force is the mere figment of the imagination, of the ramblings of an ignorant soul, and that it possesses no elemental and lasting core? Has the accepted idea been sufficiently examined and analyzed critically- is it sufficiently founded in logic and the human spirit- that with the loss of the basis for blind faith the basis for religion has also been destroyed?

A.D. Gordon

In Defense of Soft Atheism

You can read the entire article, but this is the part that caught my interest the most. It is reasonable and balanced. It reminded me of the wisdom of Stephen Jay Gould, OB"M, on the subject. I think it articulates his idea of Non-Overlapping Majesteria, and argues against the pugnacious atheism of Hitchens and Dawkins. Below is the section of the article by Frans de Waal. 

The Atheist Dilemma

Over the past few years, we have gotten used to a strident atheism arguing that God is not great (Christopher Hitchens) or a delusion (Richard Dawkins). The new atheists call themselves “brights,” thus hinting that believers are not so bright. They urge trust in science, and want to root ethics in a naturalistic worldview.

While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.

Bosch struggled with the same issue — not with being an atheist, which was not an option — but science’s place in society. The little figures in his paintings with inverted funnels on their heads or the buildings in the form of flasks, distillation bottles, and furnaces reference chemical equipment.[4] Alchemy was gaining ground yet mixed with the occult and full of charlatans and quacks, which Bosch depicted with great humor in front of gullible audiences. Alchemy turned into science when it liberated itself from these influences and developed self-correcting procedures to deal with flawed or fabricated data. But science’s contribution to a moral society, if any, remains a question mark.

Other primates have of course none of these problems, but even they strive for a certain kind of society. For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males towards each other to make up after a fight, removing weapons from their hands, and high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concern as yet another sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and that we do not need God to explain how we got where we are today. On the other hand, what would happen if we were able to excise religion from society? I doubt that science and the naturalistic worldview could fill the void and become an inspiration for the good. Any framework we develop to advocate a certain moral outlook is bound to produce its own list of principles, its own prophets, and attract its own devoted followers, so that it will soon look like any old religion.

Unintentially Hilarious Press Conference

 Check out the great coverage of a crazy press conference in the Times.

What are the odds that this won't be on The Daily Show?

My two favorite parts are the "folded like a cheap camera" (?!) line, and the miracle where a bite of kosher pastrami became kosher salami when lodged in the throat.

As for the former: Don't these guys run 47th street photo? What kind of weird folding cameras do they sell there?

As for the latter: Is that some kind of weird Jewish version of transubstantiation? (link provided - nothing's better than a joke that needs explanation)

Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the veal.

And hey, you stay classy San Diego.