From Fire by Water, page 14
At my progressive law school, I won notoriety as some sort of “neocon”. I took it as a compliment. The original neoconservatives’ journey, from the radical fringes in the 1930s to the American mainstream by the ‘60s, rhymed with my own. Around the same time, I read Natural Right and History (1953), by Leo Strauss, a figure often identified with neoconservatism. The German American thinker contrasted the ancient conception of rights with the modern, and he made a convincing case that the moderns were in the wrong in crucial respects.
What stood out especially was his critique of modern relativism. That there are many opinions about the truth, and about right and wrong, he argued, doesn’t mean that there is no truth or no right and wrong. Otherwise, “the principles of cannibalism are as defensible or sound as those of civilized life”, and “nothing except dull and stale habit could prevent us from placidly accepting a change in the direction of cannibalism.” Downstream from relativism (and positivism and historicism) was the unraveling of civilization itself.
This line of argument proved enormously useful to me as I navigated a law school where it was an article of faith, for example, that a poor black woman couldn’t be held fully responsible for her crimes (because she was poor, African American, and therefore a victim of oppression). Though these claims were issued in the name of anti-racism, they struck me as racist. They also epitomized the anticivilizational denial of moral truth and responsibility that Strauss had critiqued. If thinking this way made me a “neocon”, then I was proud to be one.
Cutting against the ideological grain at my law school sharpened my polemical skills. I seemed to have a knack for formulating conservative arguments in such a way that even liberals or leftists felt compelled to listen, even if they didn’t agree with my view. (Not that I was always above staking out contrarian positions and enraging polite liberal opinion for the kicks.) I also developed a healthy addiction to seeing my byline in print and to making the occasional television appearance. In short, I found my true vocation: opinion journalism.
As my final year of law school came to a close, I faced a fork in the road: I had an offer to join a large law firm in Boston, or I could work as an intern at the right-of-center opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal in New York. I went with the Journal. Once I had my foot in the door, I hustled harder than I ever had, editing op-eds in daytime and writing my own articles on nights and weekends. I churned out book reviews, columns on foreign and domestic policy, cultural commentary, interviews, and reportage. I even subbed in for the Journal’s television critic.
On a balmy August day in 2012, the Journal hired me as a book review editor. That evening, I met a young Asian American architect named Ting at a mutual friend’s apartment in the West Village. She was boisterous and charming, with long, raven-black hair, high cheekbones, and delicate features. She had none of the flighty, decadent airs of many women her age. She was serious but not self-serious. It didn’t take me long to figure out why.
Ting had been born in Xi’an, China, to parents who already had a son, which meant that her very existence ran afoul of the country’s one-child policy. To circumvent the law, her mother and father had fudged her birthdate and entrusted her to an aunt. It wasn’t until she was thirteen years old that she was reunited with her parents, in America, where her father had found work as a professor. There was no doubt in my mind that the vitality and seriousness I observed in her, and that I found so alluring, had to do with this miraculous survival odyssey.
I had had it with random hookups and meaningless relationships. I was desperate for the stable, essentially bourgeois family life my own parents had never had. “I’m probably going to marry this woman,” I told myself that night at the party. I moved swiftly to make my resolution a reality. Ting and I were engaged within the year. We tied the knot on March 14, 2014, at the New York City Town Hall. Two days later, I flew to London to take up a new post as an editorial writer for the Journal’s European edition. My new wife would join me a few months later.
* * * * *
Finding work that didn’t feel like work calmed my inner turmoil somewhat. Ditto for getting married. But a dishonest little split still divided my mind when it came to religion. I appreciated Christianity as a socially useful doctrine. The highest achievements of Western art, architecture, and music, I knew, all bore the stamp of the Gospels. And I personally needed the occasional visit to a church to restore my balance after my passions threw me for a spin. Yet I refused to submit to the truths of the Christian faith.
“This Christianity stuff is very beautiful, isn’t it?” I would say to friends. “It’s been a civilizing force, no?” But I was always careful to add: “You know, not that I take any of it to be true.” I divided the truth and its worldly consequences. I preferred to have God without God. What was holding me back?
I had already overcome one of my main objections to belief. I used to fret about how the adherents of different religions could all be equally fervent about their respective dogmas. The Hindu believed passionately in his deities. The Muslim was equally fervent about Allah, and the Christian likewise about the Trinity. And so on. That these irreconcilable accounts of the divine could inspire equal devotion, I thought, showed either that the same Supreme Being had revealed himself in different guises to the various peoples or, more likely, that there was no divine.
But then I came across Strauss’ critique of relativism and extended it to religious questions. There are many divergent accounts of divinity with equally fervent believers, I reasoned, but it could well be that one account is true while the rest are false (or half-true).
Nor was I all that exercised by “scientific” refutations of religious belief. From the Jewish bioethicist Leon Kass, I learned to distinguish science from scientism. Kass defined scientism as “a quasi-religious faith that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worthy of the name; that scientific knowledge gives you an exhaustive account of the way things are; and that science will transcend all the limitations of our human condition, all of our miseries”, as he told me in an interview for the Journal in 2013.
Scientists could paint a detailed picture of the origins of the cosmos, the galaxies, and our solar system. But they couldn’t answer the why questions, the ones posed by “the fear of God and the fear of death”, as Kass put it: Why did the universe explode out of an infinitely dense point some 13.8 billion years ago? Why did life emerge 10 billion years later, on a planet that orbits an unremarkable star surfing the outer edges of an unremarkable spiral galaxy? Why was there something at all instead of nothing?
These questions properly belonged to the realm of philosophy and religion, Kass insisted, yet scientism constantly tried to hijack them. It substituted facts, the product of empirical inquiry, for the truth, which was greater than any collection of facts. It was truth that allowed us to order facts into a cohesive view of the cosmos and of humanity’s place in it. Some things could be true—spiritually true, morally true, even mystically true—yet inaccessible by empirical methods.
Scientists could describe falling in love as a biophysical event, for example, in the flow of certain hormones in the brain. But asked to define the thing itself—love—or to describe the subjective experience of it, they would come up short. For that we needed the novel and poetry and music and, yes, revealed religion. Likewise, I couldn’t fully explain the healing that I experienced at the Mass in empirical terms; no one could. Yet it was real, in a mysterious way.
Then there was the force, or energy, that animated my deepest loves and longings. This force was more than my personality, and yet my personality and all of my most intuitive understandings depended upon it. It used my senses to observe the world, and yet it was more than my senses, too. It carried my happiest recollections and was also crisscrossed with wounds, new and old. Yet it was more than my memory, as well. It developed as I progressed through life’s stages, yet it had remained unchanged in some fundamental way since the day I came into the world.
Well, what was this force or animating energy? I had a soul!
Scientism reduced all of these phenomena to neurological, psychological, and sensory realities. But again, the thing itself—the soul—was irreducible to its measurable effects. Self-reflection—and the novels of Austen, Balzac, Stendhal, Thackeray, and Tolstoy, to name but a few of my favorites—offered a far better guide to its depths than did the CAT scan or the brain map. Who could read Tolstoy’s account of Prince Andrei’s last days in War and Peace, for example, and still maintain that there is no such thing as an immortal soul?
There was a grave moral danger to scientism, as well. Though science and facts revealed a great deal about the workings of the universe, they were no guide to the moral life. They could neither account nor substitute for my conscience, the inner measure that judged my acts against a universal standard of conduct. The dictates of my conscience often (but not always) aligned with public laws and norms. Yet the conscience operated even where no human law governed and no immediate punishment awaited wrong acts. Again and again, I asked myself: “Where did this inner standard or knowledge originate? Who had put it there?”
Eventually, the only explanation I could give for these two things—the soul and the conscience—was that they were the imprints, or gifts, of a Supreme Being, the Author of a transcendent order. Yet I continued to identify publicly as an unbeliever. I was reluctant to make a full assent to the faith that already flickered in my heart.
* * * * *
God embarrassed me. The thought of worshipping him, of bending my knee in a church, was always accompanied by an inner voice that hissed: “Really now! Are you going to praise an invisible bearded man in the heavens?” On those rare, disconsolate occasions when I did pray, the same voice would mock and jeer: “There you go. You’re talking to yourself again, like an old woman or a madman, and you think you’re addressing ‘God’. Don’t you feel silly? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
Pride lay behind this embarrassment. For if the God of the Bible accorded with the mind as well as the heart, faith would become a personal duty, a personal covenant. I feared that I would have to relinquish my freedom—the freedom to gossip at the office, to ogle that girl in the midriff and miniskirt, to have that ruinous “one last” drink. Was I prepared for that? In the end, I answered in the affirmative. And once more, it was reading that saved me. Two books in particular helped me to see that biblical faith was not only reasonable but compelled by reason.
* * * * *
The first was The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter’s English translation of the Torah, published in 2004. How I came across Alter’s Pentateuch, I don’t remember. Probably I read a review of it somewhere and figured that it was time finally to read the Torah from beginning to end—so why not this version, which claimed to present the true syntax, rhythm, and simplicity of the biblical Hebrew as no English translation before it had?
I don’t read Hebrew, so I couldn’t tell you if Alter’s claims about his translation had merit. Regardless, I was blown away by the beauty of these earliest pieces of Scripture, and many were the weekend mornings when I would lie sprawled out on my bed, reciting Alter’s Pentateuch out loud (sometimes while nursing a hangover from the previous night’s excess):
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the Darkness He called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day. (Gen 1:1-5)
The creation story, the account of the Fall, the killing of Abel, Moses’ several encounters with God throughout the book of Exodus—these and other wondrous passages by turns delighted and overpowered me. And they made me question whether they were the work of human hands alone.
The genius of the Jewish people infused the text, to be sure. Nevertheless, the beauty of the language and the timelessness and universality of the substance hinted at a fount of inspiration beyond the specific historical context that had produced it. One couldn’t view the Torah in the same light as, say, The Epic of Gilgamesh or the other scraps of mythology left over from the ancient Middle East. The latter were of merely archaeological, historical, or literary interest; the Torah was a living text that spoke fresh truths across a distance of three thousand years.
Consider, for instance, God’s words to Cain after Cain murders Abel: “Listen!” says the Lord. “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil” (Gen 4:10).
In a single verse, the Torah transfigured three concrete, elemental things—blood and soil and the act of crying—into a metaphor for guilt. For of course blood didn’t cry from soil, but the conscience was instantly aware of guilt; it was the conscience that cried out to the Lord of moral order. Moral order, then, preceded and informed the individual conscience. I heard the same cry every day of my life, and so, I suspected, did nearly all people. The verse had me saying to myself: “My God! My God! The Bible is its own proof!”
Or take the scene of Jacob wrestling a stranger in a twilit desert. “And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. And he saw that he had not won out against him and he touched his hip-socket and Jacob’s hip-socket was wrenched as he wrestled with him” (Gen 32:24-26). I recall reading this haunting passage over and over. It had a folkloric touch that was familiar to me as a Middle Easterner. And yet it pointed beyond the folkloric raw material of which it was made, toward a lucid and even frightening theophany.
Several question marks hung over this passage, not least the identity of the “man” whom Jacob wrestles: Is he a messenger from heaven? An angel? A “night spirit”, as Alter speculated in annotation? God himself in some quasi-embodied form? “Not Jacob shall your name hence be said,” the stranger tells the patriarch once they stop wrestling, “but Israel, for you have striven with God and men, and won out” (Gen 32:28). But Jacob’s sparring partner refuses to reveal his name (Gen 32:29). Jacob concludes that he has seen God “face to face and come out alive” (Gen 32:30).
The renaming of Jacob recalls Abram’s rebirth as Abraham (Gen 17:5). The wrestling, meanwhile, prefigures Moses’ more definitive encounters with the divine. In the Tent of Meeting, we learn, “the Lord would speak with Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his fellow” (Ex 33:11). Yet even Moses is denied a glimpse of God’s face. “I shall put you in the cleft of the crag and shield you with My palm until I have passed over,” God tells him in the Sinai. “And I shall take away My palm and you will see My back, but My face will not be seen” (Ex 33:22-23). God is at once friendly and near, awesome and overwhelming.
That these various passages echoed each other suggested that the Torah writers sought to convey an interconnected whole, a sequence of encounters with God that had indelibly marked the Jewish people. The literary form and the beauty of the Torah thus reflected an inner logic and gave meaning to the history of Israel.
Abraham and his progeny learn their true identity—their true name and heritage—after being initiated into a divine order. And God henceforth identifies himself as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”. It was only in relation to God that human life attained its full meaning. “Man”—as a spiritual, philosophical, and moral concept that encompassed much more than the mere Homo sapiens—made sense only within a divine order of creation.
The same dialectic of mutual identification was in play at the individual level, in a way that I recognized in myself. My soul, too, wrestled with God, as it were, and sought to know his name and to be named by him in turn. Even my early “great” rebellion against God, and my quest to find cheap substitutes for him, had betrayed a longing to see God’s face and to be in relationship with him. I had a soul, yes, and that soul needed God. So why not be honest about this longing!
Only, the relationship between God and man was strained, because our earliest ancestors had tried to sit in God’s place (Gen 3:5). Now here was the real core of the Torah, the substantive kernel, which led me to conclude that the Bible was a truer account of human nature than any science or philosophy. Biology, psychology, sociology—none of these matched the Fall as an account of the alienation and brokenness that I felt in myself and witnessed all around me. At best, those other accounts answered the how questions. But the deepest diagnosis was to be found in the Bible, which said that brokenness was written into human nature, into my nature. I needn’t have taken the story of Adam and Eve literally to agree that somehow the taint of an original transgression had spread to my own soul.
My conscience knew—and perhaps had always known—that this was true: How else to explain my predilection for doing evil for its own sake going back to the earliest days of childhood? The failure of the various utopian visions I had championed—from Marxism to the utopian liberalism of my Arab Spring days—likewise attested to the truth of the Fall. Every attempt at achieving perfect justice and liberation on human terms was bound to fail, because it would inevitably run up against fallen human nature.
No scientific discovery, no communications technology, no newfangled theory of secular salvation, no system of government, however admirable and well conceived—none of these things could ever “fix” what was wrong with the world. Sin—not “misconduct” or “aberrant behavior” or “structures of oppression” or what have you—sin, in the biblical sense of an affront to the divine order and a rejection of divine love, was a permanent feature of human life.
All civilizations, the pagan and the modern, felt the weight of sin. All of them, not just the people of Israel, devised various scapegoats and sacrifices to repair the breach caused by sin. That included the Shiite Islam of my childhood. It had its sacrificial lamb in the figure of Hussein, the warrior-imam who laid down his life for the truth and for his friends. All human history and all the best art and literature through the ages and across nations told this one story: of the inexorability of sin and the yearning for sacrificial expiation.
