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Shabbat Parah and Ash Wednesday?
I think it is a reasonable observation that Purity does not have the resonance for modern Jews as, to use other “P” words, Peoplehood or Prophecy[1]. We are comfortable with self-definitions that emphasize national structure or revealed ethical norms, but describing Judaism as the struggle to separate oneself from impure forces sounds, well, a little too religious to be Jewish. And while most of the Torah, beginning midway through Exodus and running almost all the way through Numbers is a narrative of the struggle that flows from the requirement of purity, these passages in our times have nothing close to the cache of those from Genesis, Deuteronomy, or the first half of the book of Exodus.
The tradition seems aware of our preference for other matters and goes out of its way to emphasize the Torah’s teachings of purity. The very first page of the Talmud is a consideration of the temporal parameters for reciting the Shema, the Shema being one of those prophetic/national statements that we cherish and with which we are comfortable. Like any question of timing in antiquity, an astronomical answer would suffice – we know it is evening when a certain number of stars are out or when darkness attains a given level. But the Talmud goes out of its way to teach the timing of the evening Shema in terms of the purification ritual of the Kohanim (which itself has a diurnal component) in order that considerations of purity be taught alongside those of revelation and peoplehood. In the Talmud, and as is the case of the Exodus narrative of the aseret ha-dibrot, purity precedes prophecy.
This week our journey toward redemption takes up the importance of purification as we read the third of the four special readings which precede Pesach. The order of these parshiyot is given in Mishnah Megilla 3:4:
ראש חדש אדר שחל להיות בשבת קורין בפרשת שקלים חל להיות בתוך השבת מקדימין לשעבר ומפסיקין לשבת אחרת בשניה זכור בשלישית פרה אדומה ברביעית החדש הזה לכם בחמישית חוזרין לכסדרן לכל מפסיקין בראשי חדשים בחנוכה ובפורים בתעניות ובמעמדות וביום הכפורים
On Rosh Hodesh Adar which falls on Shabbat we read the section Shekalim. If it falls in the middle of the week we advance [Shekalim] to the previous Shabbat and skip ahead to the next Shabbat when we read Zakhor for the second [of the four special Shabbatot]. We read Parah Adumah for the third and HaHodesh Hazeh Lakhem for the fourth. [2]
This week’s reading, Parashat Parah (Numbers 19), describes the fulcrum of our ancient purification rituals, which is the production of cleansing water formed from the addition of ashes from an unblemished red cow which is sacrificed and burnt “outside the camp”. The water is mixed with the ashes and sprinkled (by means of hyssop) on those who have contracted the impurity which arises from the contact or encounter with a dead body. This section is read in preparation for Pesach so that those who have contracted such impurity can participate in the Pesach ritual in a pure state.
In the journey to Pesach we note some obvious calendric parallels between Judaism and Christianity. The nexus between Passover and Easter is well-known. The connections between Purim (which we introduce with Zakhor) and Carnival/Mardi Gras stand out at least enough to make us uncomfortable, and to make “Purim is not Mardi Gras” a robust sermonic maneuver. But is Shabbat Parah our Ash Wednesday?
There are at least some superficial similarities. There is the trajectory (Purim/Parah/Pesach versus Carnival/Ash Wednesday/Easter). Shabbat Parah is typically read on the Shabbat immediately following Purim – it is postponed this year because Rosh Hodesh Nisan falls on Shabbat, but usually the admonishment for purity follows on the heels of the purge. There are as well the ashes of each tradition, which besides being outward signs of mourning and repentance are momento mori – reminders of mortality which is the primal impurity to which the ritual of the red cow comes to address. As we are along our respective journeys to national redemption or personal salvation, we are called to confront our individual natures as mortal beings. And there is also the parallel of nullification – just as the Lenten season requires abstention and moderation so Jews begin the cleaning and putting aside of leaven which will culminate in the bitul hametz on the eve of Pesach. For one who wanted to make a connection between Ash Wednesday and this Shabbat’s Torah reading, there would seem on what to stand.
An interesting liturgical point of contact is the use of Psalm 51 [3] as a reading in the Christian Ash Wednesday service and as a suggested recitation for Jews on Shabbat Parah (at least by the Artscroll Tehillim). It opens with the David being confronted by Natan on his sin with Batsheva and the relevant verses are:
Psalm 51:4-9 4 Wash me thoroughly of my iniquity, and purify me of my sin; 5 for I recognize my transgressions, and am ever conscious of my sin. 6 Against You alone have I sinned, and done what is evil in Your sight; so You are just in Your sentence, and right in Your judgment. 7 Indeed I was born with iniquity; with sin my mother conceived me. 8 Indeed You desire truth about that which is hidden; teach me wisdom about secret things. 9 Purge me with hyssop till I am pure; wash me till I am whiter than snow. (NJPS)
This point of contact between the traditions raises the very problematic issue of the relationship between impurity and sin, and the differing resolutions to that tension which are found across and between Christianity and Judaism [4]. But at the very least our short exploration should make us appreciate Shabbat Parah’s important role among the four special Shabbatot which lead us to Pesach. Even if we naturally groove to the exhilaration of escape which we experience on Purim and to the anticipation of redemption, it is well that we are reminded that we go through our liturgical program as flesh and blood individuals who were born, can give birth, will experience sickness and will die. And that confrontation of physical beings who are subject to generation and corruption with a God who is eternal requires a sophisticated theological response, which is happily one to which the center and bulk of Torah is devoted.
[1] The frequent uses of [p] are for alliterative purposes only, and should not be taken as an endorsement of Wellhausen-style higher criticism. (Though I do endorse it).
[2] The Mishnah goes on to say that on the fifth Shabbat “we return to the order” i.e., we either revert to the regular practice of reading the maftir from the parasha of the week or we resume the reading of the parasha of the week which was disrupted by the reading of the special parshiyot. This is a controversy in the Talmud (TB Megilla 30b) and its implications for our understanding of the historical development of the public Torah reading is explored in R. Sperber’s Minhagei Yisrael, Vol. 1 p. 88.
[3] It is Psalm 50 in the Christian order.
[4] A comprehensive overview can be found in my friend Jonathan Klawans’ Purity and Sin in Ancient Judaism
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Ham Sandwiches and Tennis Nets: Plantinga takes on Dennett
Continued from here.
I’m starting to worry that Plantinga is going to chase me decisively into the atheist camp before I get to the end. Maybe I will try out for Hitchen’s old spot in The Four Horsemen.
Plantinga begins the second section of his book with a consideration of Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which I (as with The Blind Watchmaker) liked quite a bit and which Plantinga (as with The Blind Watchmaker) holds in low esteem. The NYT Review of Where the Conflict Really Lies has a little back and forth between Dennett and Plantinga, which one hopes will be good for sales. His first criticism of Dennett is that Darwin’s Dangerous Idea reprises Dawkins’ assertion that natural selection can account for complexity without recourse to the supernatural. Plantinga is still not impressed but he does have a new version of his joke:
You’ve always thought Mother Teresa was a moral hero; someone wanders by and tells you that we don’t know it’s astronomically impossible that she was a complete hypocrite. Would you be impressed? So far theism doesn’t seem much threatened by Darwin’s dangerous idea.
Plantinga then turns to his second criticism which is of Dennett’s treatment of theological arguments. I will mention as an aside that by now I am starting to wonder to whom Plantinga’s book is addressed. In the course of critiquing Dennett, Plantinga writes:
Dennett mentions only one of the theistic arguments, the design argument, and even there he ignores the work of Richard Swinburne, the preeminent contemporary exponent of that argument, who over a period of at least thirty years or so has produced a powerfully impressive, and highly developed version of this argument. (Plantinga, p. 42)
Dr. Swinburne seems to be an extremely accomplished philosopher and there is a very good Wikipedia entry on his work, but I’m not sure how many those not au courant in analytic philosophy are going to be nodding along with Plantinga at barbs such as that. I was in graduate school for the better part of a decade and have never (until today) heard of him. My loss I’m sure, but I hope for the sake of his finances that Plantinga has stuff in his book for those of us who could not pick Swinburne out of a line-up of post-war intellectuals. Anyway, Plantinga takes on a very memorable passage in DDI, so memorable in fact it was floating before my eyes as I was writing in the last post. Here is Dennett’s passage:
The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as “intellectual tennis without a net,” and I readily allow that I have been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. We can lower it if you really want to. It’s your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I rudely return as follows: “What you say implies God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That’s not much of a God to worship.”
With reference to Plantinga’s assertion that theism is preferable to nontheism because it is less constrained (see the last post), I think that Dennett’s vivid picture can be brought with devastating effect: nontheists insist on having the net up at all times. Theists insist in keeping the net up when materialists are trying to move the ball across but reserve the right to lower it for their advantage. Plantinga will call all faults. The fact that theists have the capacity to selectively ignore the constraints that non-theists work under is not, in my eyes, a positive. In response to Dennett, Plantinga drops some more names:
That’s a memorable description, all right, particularly if you call to mind the work of such classical philosophical theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and Jonathan Edwards, or such contemporary theologians as Robert Adams, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, Richard Swinburne [!], Peter van Inwagen, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, all of whose work, in terms of intellectual rigor and cogency, compares very favorably with that of Dennett (or, for that matter, de Sousa). (p. 43-44).
This does bring to mind Einstein’s observation that a really good argument does not need a list of authorities. And while I don’t care for Dennett’s (or Dawkins’) tone at times, as best as I can recall they did not at any point attempt to overwhelm me with a catalogue of important people I had never heard of before. But I would point out that Dennett’s paragraph, vulgar though it may be, is the distillation of a routine Enlightenment argument against incorporating the claims of revelation within a rational consideration of the possibility of God. It memorably captures the essence of Rousseau’s Profession of Faith of the Savoy Vicar, which illustrates the impossibility of even briefly “lowering the net” of argument to admit revelation as in the method of Pascal (don’t deprive yourself of reading Rousseau!). Dennett’s rendition is not an exact descendant of Rousseau’s which is (on the surface at least) concerned with revelation and not the general existence of the Deity, but my point is that Dennett has on what to stand on in his critique of philosophical theology. (Later on Plantinga will dismiss the entire Enlightenment critique of supernaturalism: “[It] has little to be said for it, the various strands of this case have been examined at length and have been found wanting” (p 62). So there you go.)
I will close this section with a note of where I come from in all this. I am an observant Jew with training in both the sciences and philosophy. I am not a hardened atheist and I don’t find persuasive what Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens et. al. write about religion: I think their understanding is deficient in many respects. However, I find their writings about science compelling and I think that books such as The Blind Watchmaker and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea make persuasive cases for the plausibility of a complicated universe with complex life forms that have arisen without a designer. That even a plausible secular origin of life can be sketched in this manner is an awesome achievement, and Plantinga’s dismissal of this accomplishment leaves me cold. I’m hoping that the later chapters will demonstrate the positive contributions of philosophical theology to our understanding of the world, rather than continuing to tear down the trendy new atheists as tedious as they may be at times.
In the next installment I will agree with Plantinga about some stuff.
Torat HaMoadim: The War against Amalek, and Monarchy in Israel (Part Two)
In honor of Purim, notes from מלחמת עמלק ומלכות ישראל by Rav Shlomo Goren zt”l
“You Shall Blot Out” – The Kingship of Israel, “I Will Blot Out” – The Messianic Age
Continued from here.
Rav Goren brings a different approach from Midrash Ha-Hefetz, which is a fifteenth century commentary on the Torah and Haftarot by R. Zechariah ben Shlomo Ha-Rofe. According to Midrash Ha-Hefetz, as long as Israel has the ability to destroy Amalek, the obligation is upon her as stated in the book of Deuteronomy. But if Israel loses the capacity, then God will carry out the destruction, as indicated in the Exodus passage.
There is an undeniable logic to the point of view of the midrash, Rav Goren notes, in that the passage in Exodus and its exclamation כי יד על כס י”ה (“Hand upon the throne!”) has messianic overtones. In Midrash Pesikta Rabbati (Siman 9) there is:
Levi said in the name of R. Hamma son of R. Hanina: As long as the seed of Amalek is extant, the Holy Name is not complete and the throne is not complete; when the seed of Amalek is uprooted, then the throne is complete and the Holy Name is complete.
This places the verse in the context of the messianic era and Rashi glosses it similarly in his commentary on the Torah. So we have an explanation which holds that the passage in Exodus (“I will blot out”) refers to the ultimate heavenly destruction of Amalek – which cannot be in the hands of creatures of flesh and blood – but beforehand the obligation (“You shall blot out”) is on Israel to destroy Amalek.
While acknowledging the strength of this solution, Rav Goren concludes that we nevertheless cannot accept it:
“It is very difficult to assume that the promise in Exodus [“I will blot out”] was given with the understanding that Israel wouldn’t or couldn’t fulfill the mitzvah on her own. Why would God command Moshe: “Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua”? As Rashi notes on that verse: “[Joshua] was the one who would bring Israel into the Land, who would command Israel to deal out recompense.” The point is that Joshua will command thus to Israel at the time they enter the Land which means that the verse is not about the messianic age. Moreover, it would be appropriate for the Torah to first command Israel on her obligation, and only after she was shown unable to do it would the promise “I will blot out” be necessary for some future time, rather than starting at once with the assumption that it is impossible as if Israel has no ability.”
To be continued.
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Tagged Amalek, Purim, Rav Goren, Torat HaMoadim
Dawkins and Plantinga
I’ve been looking forward to reading closely Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism and was going to wait until I was deeper into the work before writing a post on it. I think I will continue to read the book and hope to write more, but I was inspired by arguments in the early chapter which deal with Richard Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker to make a few notes. In short, while not an admirer or supporter of Dawkin’s crusade for atheism and its associated dog and pony show, I was taken aback at Plantinga’s dismissal of Dawkin’s book.
The Blind Watchmaker is a meditation on the power of impersonal forces to generate complexity in general and intricate life forms in particular. It seeks to show that where teleological arguments once had to summon exterior guides or designers to account for complexity, Darwinism can plausibly explain it all with principles that do not require outside direction. (It, and The Selfish Gene are still great reads, though for The Selfish Gene you should try to find a copy of the first edition. It reads better without all the ostentation). Plantinga makes a great deal of mere “plausibility” in his review of Dawkin’s argument while recycling some of the standard objections to natural selection such as Michael Behe (who holds that there are structures which are allegedly impossible to create in stepwise evolution) and our inability to calculate with certainty that there has been sufficient time for gradual natural selection to produce a given complex feature. It is beyond the ability of Dawkins or any scientist to deal with these objections comprehensively, but The Blind Watchmaker is a sustained and smart argument for the plausibility of natural selection as the sufficient cause of complex life forms.
Plantinga is not impressed and he concludes that Dawkins has “[a]t best [shown], given a couple of assumptions, that it is not astronomically improbable that the living world was produced by unguided evolution and hence without design.” (WTCL p. 24). He goes on to make fun:
But the argument form
p is not astronomically improbable
therefore
p
is a bit unprepossessing. I announce to my wife, “I’m getting a $50,000 raise for next year!” Naturally she asks me why I think so. “Because the arguments for its being astronomically improbable fail! For all we know, it’s not astronomically improbable.” (p. 25).
This is dense. The argument can go this way as well:
p (a given level of spontaneous complexity) is not astronomically improbable
when given astronomical timescales
p (a given level of spontaneous complexity) is plausible
And a plausible, sufficient description of human origins without resort to divine intervention is a profound accomplishment. A strong defense of theism would acknowledge such and demonstrate what it (theism) has to bring to the table. Plantinga gives an early (and distressing) indication of what he thinks the strength of theism is in this argument:
For the nontheist, undirected evolution is the only game in town, and natural selection seems to be the most plausible mechanism to drive the process. Here is this stunningly intricate world with its enormous diversity and its apparent design; from the perspective of naturalism or nontheism, the only way it could have happened is by way of unguided Darwinian evolution, hence it must have happened that way; hence there must be such a Darwinian series for each current life form. The theist, on the other hand, has a little more freedom here: maybe there is such a series and maybe there isn’t; God has created the world and could have done it in any number of different ways; there doesn’t have to be any such series. In this way the theist is freer to follow the evidence where it leads. (p. 23).
Any scientist still reading will find in this a devastating takedown of theism. The nontheist has to defend her worldview within a certain framework; she has the responsibility to account for the data. When she comes short or the data is lacking, she (and nontheism) will be held strictly accountable (as Plantinga holds Dawkins responsible throughout the chapter). Not everything will be explained, and critics will highlight every failure. The theist is freer in a sense, but this freedom is rooted in a lack of responsibility. Evoking a force beyond nature that does not have to follow rules, there is no set of facts that can make the theist look bad. She has a bulletproof defense against the sort of scrutiny that will draw blood at times when applied to Dawkins.
Again, I don’t endorse Dawkin’s promotion of atheism, but I think that his brief is an example of an effective argument for materialism that theism (hate the word) has to face forthrightly. I obviously don’t think that Plantinga’s dismissal of Dawkins does that, but I am going ahead with the book and hope to write more. For other bloggers’ takes on Plantinga, check out Prosblogion and Maverick Philosopher.