The Old Jew and the Indian

I have a dear aunt who used to refer to my father endearingly as an “old Jew”.  Now if you read my bio, you know that my name ends in a vowel and I was raised on Long Island.  Do the math.  What my aunt was referring to was my father’s view on the world was philosophically Hebrew.  I mentioned the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius in previous articles because I was drawn to their philosophy by people that I consider heroes.  But, like my father, the philosophy that I most identify with is that of the Hebrews.  

 

One of the great losses in education today is the attempt to teach history without mentioning religion.  Unfortunately for those who object, the study of human history is the study of religion.  As my first article mentioned, man has, as his nature, an awareness of both self, and that which is beyond self.  He is the only animal who has this and it is as fundamental to his existence as breathing.  To pretend that history can be taught without attempting to understand man’s nature greatly diminishes any understanding of human philosophy.  As the Stoics have taught us, it is useless to argue against nature.  The rational mind accepts that which is.  Man by his very nature seeks to understand that which is beyond himself. He cannot help that. It is a “first principle” of the nature of man. 

 

While the Hebrews, like the Stoics, did not have the benefit of modern science, neither were they fools.  Their brightest people looked at the world that surrounded them and tried to make sense of it in the same way that we do.  The very brightest of them recorded their thoughts as stories in the Torah. What can they tell us today?

 

There is an order to the faith of the Hebrews.  The first step in that order is awe.  That is to look out at the world around you and simply to be in awe.  Everyone has their own individual awe-inspiring moments, and true awe is that which we experience every day, the sunrise, the flower, horse breath, whatever it is that amazes you.  In my opinion, one of the greatest disasters of modern life is that most of us wake up to a little electronic box, and we keep our heads down in that box for most of the day.  We can be driven through the most beautiful scenery and never really look outside. Children are especially venerable to this deprivation of awe.  The world outside is significantly more interesting than is the world on a screen but the screen world dominates us today because it provides instant stimulation and screams at us to pay attention right now. While awe requires time and thought, something that our minds have to be trained to appreciate. The agrarian lifestyle of the ancients provided time for contemplation. This is a critical difference between us and the ancients because it takes awe for man to get to the next step, and awe takes time.

 

Once we have achieved awe it naturally leads us to wonder.  Why is that mountain there, why does the flower bloom, what is it about the horse that draws me in?   Many of these questions can be answered by science.  Faults in the earth’s crust shift and bang and create mountains.  That is true in as far as it goes, but is it not still amazing that the mountain is?  Yes, the yellow of the flower attracts the bee that spreads the pollen but the ancient mind would still be in awe of the existence of the flower, and wonder at the meaning of the petal. 

 

Just as wonder must follow awe, a question must follow wonder.  The question most natural to ask is, “how did it get here?” Again, it is in man’s nature to ask that question.  The Hebrew’s (and virtually all other groups of ancient man) answer this question the same way.  It was created. 

 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the beginning of faith. 

 

Whether it is The Raven of the Alaskan tribes, the Great Spirit of the Plains Indians, Yahweh of the Hebrews, mankind keeps coming to the same conclusion. Why does this matter?  It matters because it if we accept that the nature of man is immutable, then the fact that all of mankind keeps coming to the same conclusion, regardless of their jumping off point, becomes significant.  It matters because the more we try to separate man from his natural conclusions, the more we violate his nature and, as the Stoics remind us, nature is immutable.  When we deny that which is immutable a conflict arises, both internally and externally. 

 

Now much of the issue that people have with the Old Testament is in the fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophy that it contains.  I very much doubt that evil came into the world because a woman bit an apple.  But neither do I have any doubt that Evil is real.  When these brilliant men of ancient times wrote the creation mythology of Genesis, they were attempting to reveal certain Truths.  These Truths are as certain as any of today’s science.   Evil exists.  I will point out that virtually every culture in the world has a distinctive story about how Evil came into the world.  Pandora’s box was the source of Evil in Greek mythology.  In Alaskan Native mythology, a tribal chief tries to kill the Raven creator.  Indians generally talked about the wrong actions that an animal causes to others, an imbalance to the natural order, rather than the creation itself being “Evil”.  The created animal is never Evil, but its actions can be disordered. Interestingly this parallels Plato’s notions of good and the absence of good and I’ll get to that idea later. My point is in every civilization, man struggles with the existence of Evil.  That makes it universal.  Something with which all of mankind is destined to struggle.

 

Let me give you one more Hebrew example.

 

The first book in the Hebrew Bible is Genesis.  It contains both the creation story, the story of how Evil came to be, and several others.  One of the more interesting ones, to me at least, is the story of the tower of Babel.  In this story the people of the city of Babel start to build a tower that will take them to Heaven.  Because the Hebrews are a philosophical people, the motivation of the builders matters. “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4, ESV).  God sees what they are doing and confuses their language so that they fail.  It is not wrong that they would build a tower in order to seek the knowledge and goodness of Heaven, it is wrong that they seek to “make a name for ourselves”.  Once God intervenes and they cannot speak in a common language, they descend into tribalism, they fight, the tower collapses and mankind is forever separated into tribes that cannot speak to each other.

 

There are a couple of lessons from the story.  One is in the materials that they use. They don’t use the durable creations of God like stone, but rather human creations of bricks and tar.  But again, let us go back to the nature of man.  What did these authors, thousands of years ago, see about mankind and what might be the applicability of this story today?  Does the tower that they are building remind you of anything that exists today, something that will bring us closer to knowledge and goodness, where everyone can participate?  A great edifice that will make a name for all of mankind, but instead, because we are unable to speak in a common language, now creates more strife and tribalism? 

 

How about the internet? 

 

The Hebrews, thousands of years ago, told a story that is applicable today, not because they were writing a story about a tower, but because they were studying and writing about human nature. 

 

And that nature is immutable. 

 

And that is why the story is relevant today.

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