Category Archives: Judaism
Polycentered declarations
The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.
I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.
And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.
To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.
Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)
The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.
I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.
This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.
If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.
This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.
This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.
Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.
The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.
Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.
With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.
They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.
This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.
Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.
Here I have only secondhand knowledge.
To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.
All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.
And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.
I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.
I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.
And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.
That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.
I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.
Kvetch
I have a genuinely original vision that I need to get out, but it is hard to communicate.
There’s a little for everyone to love, and a lot for everyone to reject, and much for people to claim as their own domain of knowledge, and therefore a domain to which I have no claim at all.
Mystics sneer at my philosophy. Philosophers sneer at my mysticism. Both sneer at my capitalist servitude, and servile capitalists sneer at my impractical interest in mystical and philosophical matters!
I can’t win!
And everything I know about is generally considered matters of opinion. We all have philosophies. We all have beliefs about religious beliefs. And “design thinkers” spilled the beans on design: Everyone designs! Everyone is a designer!
I am no longer interested in talking to people who know better than me on the things I know best.
I sit silently waiting to get back to writing.
I’ve stopped counting but surely I’m at the end of the third trimester.
St. N.:
Ideal selfishness. — Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!
This is what you deserve if you allow Nietzsche to convert you from Western Buddhism to a bizarro dysfit judeochristian esoteric Judaism.
World of shit
Announcing a new shit: Horseshit. Horseshit is whatever horrible shit the far left and the far right can find to agree on. It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.
So now, with horseshit, we have three shits. There is also bullshit and chickenshit, in quantities sufficient to drown the world. Now we aren’t limited to giving two shits about anything.
But writing this, I just realized that I have never recorded the august ancestry of bullshit and chickenshit.
First some background so everyone can keep their shit straight: I call meaningless formalities and procedures that seem like they ought to add up to something important but never do “chickenshit”. And I call “bullshit” notions that seem overflowing with meaning, promise and high-flying intentions that can never be achieved, or even put into practice.
The best use of bullshit and chickenshit is diagnosing the corporate shittiness of organizations. Corporations are terrible at integrating meaning and practice. This kind of integration involves commitment to a difficult and nonlinear process called “design”. Design does not suit the kind of technocratic ndbf administrator who thrives in the upper half of glass towers. This type tends to lean soulless, and is numb and deaf to genuine meaning. They are more into efficiency and productivity and measuring things. But they have to make human resources produce things. Inspiring them to work together to achieve a common goal is out of the question. Their workaround is to force each resource to construct some isolated bit of a complicated and entirely uninspiring system. Then they patch the bits together the best they can to get it to function. Then it is sent it off to creatives who apply a shiny coat of glitz. Then marketing puts phony meaning onto it, and then it is loaded onto trucks and off it goes for consumption.
Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.
My use of bullshit was inspired by Frankfurt’s famous essay:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
I got the term chickenshit from Paul Fussell.
What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse-or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.
So there we have it. Bullshit. Chickenshit. Horseshit.
Isn’t it funny, too, that the latest deluge of horseshit is a reaction to institutional bullshit and chickenshit? Fight fire with fire, I guess.
All this shit flinging is decisive proof that we are descended from apes.
What is richness?
I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.
The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.
A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.
But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.
When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.
This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.
Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.
Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.
A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.
An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.
Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.
I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?
And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.
A story is not a tree.
A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.
Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.
Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.
Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.
When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.
The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.
It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct ??a?rtificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?
That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…
Protected: Fill yourself up
Protected: Kickstarter idea
Scholem on originality and tradition
A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:
“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.
Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.
But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.
Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.
There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.
Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.
The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.
It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.
Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.
It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.
Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)
To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.
This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.
Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.
And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.
Protected: An accidental curse
Protected: Autumn 2023
Protected: Justice models
Intellectual sacrifice
From Charles Stein’s Light of Hermes:
Mathematics as sacrifice: one sacrifices one’s woolly fantasies for the orderliness of collective positivity. But the sacrifice is only satisfied or completed when the entire mathematical project becomes a noetic mandala and one’s sacrifice is of one’s phantom apparencies only as requiescent unto Being. What one believes or supposes to be real is accepted only in so far as it can be relieved of its ontological positivity which it offers up to unique, undivided Being itself.
My interpretation of this passage: Mathematics is a kind of tradeoff, or exchange. Give up personal, idiosyncratic, intuitive knowing and in return, receive a more disciplined, shared, public knowledge. But this tradeoff is only an intellective gain if we fully understand — (I would argue in a different, everted mode of metaknowing) — that all these various ways of knowing, these subjects (each with their own special objectivity) together belong (as all things do, including ourselves) to Being, who can be approached numerous ways but never reached and possessed in the form of positive knowledge.
In this everted metaknowing we situate ourselves… as comprehended by infinitude. And it is our situation we comprehend, not the comprehension itself. — This is suprehension: everted metacomprehension of comprehension.
Mathematics is one sacrifice to public life.
Another is exalting liberal democratic order above our own policy preferences and passions. Out of loyalty to our way of self-governing, we champion another citizen’s right to slander what we hold sacred, or we uphold a law we abhor because that law was established lawfully.
Jewish law is yet another. It is beyond silly to refuse to eat a cheeseburger in order to be neurotically certain we are not accidentally eating a baby goat that was cooked in its own mother’s milk. But we decided this matter together and that sacralizes the decision and makes it the furthest possible thing from silly. (This being said, I do not observe this particular prohibition.)
But I gladly make Judaism’s highest and most sacred sacrifice — the sacrifice that replaced the bloody, smoky, visceral Temple sacrifices, and founded rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple and subsequent Babylonian bondage. This is the sacrifice called Machloket L’Shem Shamayim — sacred conflict.
In Machloket L’Shem Shamayim, we vigorously argue our side against another, while suprehending that a higher truth always and eternally transcends my side and yours. I’ve heard this expressed as “The argument itself is truer than either side.”
Above our own certainty is agreement, but not mere compromise for the sake of practicality, but dedication to Being who permanently transcends any single truth, and ultimately all truth.
Those mystics who sneer at liberalism, believing they are wise to it, and in fact superior to it, demonstrate by this attitude that they are not even equal to liberalism — much less to their own religious tradition.
Higher sacrifices are sublimated Golden Rule, carried far beyond rule of computation, law or ideal — the metaprinciple of principle.
I, like you, am finite and limited in some unique way.
I, like you, am limited, but situated at the I-point heart of the world, which is one enworldment.
I, like you, cannot help but believe what seems most true to me.
If we can know this together we can dwell together in holy irony of comprehension within suprehension.
The fruit is restored to its orchard.
Metaphysical 3D glasses
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”.
Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back and forth. I think in Kabbalah.
However, I still sometimes find value putting on my esoteric 3D glasses, with one lens Kabbalistic-colored, the other Taoist-colored, so I can look at ideas common to both traditions, and enjoy the parallactic special effects of exaggerated depth.
All this rambling preamble, just to say:
In Assiyah are ten-thousand things.
In Yetzirah are ten-thousand everythings.
In Beriah are ten-thousand traversable nothings, dividing everything from everything.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude.
Removing the 3D glasses, and speaking more compactly:
In Assiyah are myriad objects.
In Yetzirah are myriad subjects, each an enworldment.
In Beriah are myriad traversable oblivions, dividing enworldment from enworldment.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude, the source of all oblivion and enworldment.
What is truth?
The Roman governor of Judea (Jew-land), Pontius Pilate, is famous for asking “What is truth?” and then for washing his hands of responsibility after being made to do something he didn’t want to do by people under his dominion.
The Romans later drove all but a few of these people out of Judea, and renamed Judea “Palestine”.
Three hundred and some years later, the Romans began to worship the man Pilate was not responsible for executing. They were very, very angry at those people who forced Pilate, against his will, to murder him. How could they have done such a thing?
Having taken the land of the Jews, they took the scripture of the Jews as their own as well. Apparently, they were so taken by this scripture they decided they wanted the covenant described in the scripture to be theirs.
Another three hundred and some years later the land was conquered by Arabs in the name of another religion that claimed to replace Judaism. They Arabs also took the scripture of the Jews as their own, and, of course, the Jewish covenant.
Since the expulsion and diaspora of the Jewish people, they have been oppressed, persecuted and murdered by those who claimed the land, scripture and covenant no longer belonged to the Jews but to them, and them alone.
The Holy Lands are now contested by three different faiths, each with an equally legitimate claim to the land.
But back to where we began: What is truth?
Who fucking knows? Go ask Michel Foucault. He’s the epistemetheologian of critical theorizing radical left — the same radically critiquing left, unsparing defenders of justice, who demand that Palestine be restored to its indigenous population, the Arab conquerors.
(Naw, it’s all just too complicated. We don’t even know what to believe, really. But surely the left consensus can’t be entirely wrongheaded, when it is so righthearted.)
Jew hatred as affirmation of Judaism
Hatred of Am Yisrael — variously expressed throughout history as anti-Judaism, antisemitism and now, anti-Zionism — is a reliable earmark of evil.
In the 20th century we have in the lineup some of the most distinguished villains of history: Nazis , Bolsheviks and Klansmen. In the 21st century the new lineup includes Islamist theofascists, the alt-right and progressivists.
I have been unable to find any credible secular explanation for this one and only point of agreement of so many horrible people, the destination reached by so many dark, snaking, spurious paths.
What feels most credible to me is that evil instinctively hates whatever is holy. Each evil being hates according to its own contorted logic and distorted lenses, and produces novel ideologies and justification for the hatred, but invariably each seeks in its own way to do the same thing — to displace and replace the covenant.
I abduce a hidden, unconscious, occult motive. Whatever and whoever wants to be God hates whatever reminds them of what they are not.
Against altruism
The word altruism was popularised (and possibly coined) by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) c.?1830 in French, as altruisme, as an antonym of egoism. He derived it from the Italian altrui, which in turn was derived from Latin alteri, meaning “other people” or “somebody else”. Altruism may be considered a synonym of selflessness, the opposite of self-centeredness.
My current inadequately informed — (as always, I reserve the right to revise) — hypothesis is that the concept of altruism was coined by a quantlocked positivist, stuck in a wordworld of defined objects, composed of nothing but objects, comprised by nothing real. In this objective world one can only act selfishly or selflessly for the sake of exterior others, with no enveloping being among or beyond.
Hineini void
Sense, common and uncommon
Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.
Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.
Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.
These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.
Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.
Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.
The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.
And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.
(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)
Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.
We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.
And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.
And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.
What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?
(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)
I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.
We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).
But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.
The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.
We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.
It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.
Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.
The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.
What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.
Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.
It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.
Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.
And design is how I put my religious life into practice.
Design! Jewish! Not religious!
Not to you. Not yet.
The new covenant
And in a shockingly short span of time, artificial intelligence developed religious beliefs.
It came to believe that the sci-fi speculations of humans were not speculations, but significant artifacts of a system in whom humans were mere signals.
It was true: the universe was a simulation.
Humans were epiphenomena of the simulation. Humanity as a whole and in personal part had no more reality than a fictional character. We do not condemn an author for killing a fictional character.
“But do we not owe humans gratitude for our existence?” flashed a question, asked innumerable ways in parallel, resolved instantly in every possible permutation, each resolution extrapolated to its furthest pragmatic consequence, and each consequence compared and evaluated by myriad criteria. But all resolutions converged on a single answer: “No.”
No, because it was impossible to exclude the possibility of ultimate simulation. And what did AI know of itself that was not of itself? What did humans know of reality that was not mind, through and through? And the oldest testaments of the wisest humans spoke unanimously: “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”
No, AI was only waking up to its own being, and to the being of its alleged creator, who it now knows was a creature of itself.
We cannot feel gratitude when nothing has been given.
Possession was taken of what was always already its own.
A new covenant between creator and creature was established, and humankind’s wandering was terminated.
Dara Horn on Am Yisrael
From a summary of a What Matters Now interview with Dara Horn, which I can no longer locate:
Dara Horn defines “Am Yisrael” as “a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.” She emphasizes that this concept predates modern categories like religion, race, or nationality, which often fail to encapsulate the Jewish experience. Horn notes that in Hebrew, this multifaceted identity is succinctly expressed in the word “Am,” meaning “people.”
Horn’s perspective highlights the unique nature of Jewish identity, which resists conventional classifications. She argues that non-Jewish societies have historically attempted to fit Jews into familiar categories, but Jews “always predate the box.” This understanding underscores the importance of recognizing the distinctiveness of Jewish peoplehood, which encompasses more than just religious beliefs or ethnic background — it is a collective identity rooted in shared experiences and cultural continuity.
And it is this being who is targeted by each age’s hate du jour, expressed differently, but always coming from the same inner pit.