Highly Illogical: God or Reason?

Sermon Pekudei 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha

You may have seen online that there is a new documentary coming out next week on the life of William Shatner, the actor, in time for his 93rd birthday, called “You Can Call Me Bill.”  Shatner is still around, still writing books and doing interviews and has become a kind of iconic figure these days.  The movie, directed by documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Phillipe, is garnering good reviews, in large part for Shatner’s openness and contemplative, thoughtful observations and hopes.  Who knew that was possible?

As a kid I liked the Star Trek TV series, the original one with William Shatner overacting as Captain James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy underplaying Science Officer Spock.  There have been many iterations of the show subsequently: many movies, subsequent TV series—Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Law & Order, Star Trek CSI, Survivor Star Trek, Star Trek with the Kardashians, the Star Trek Bachelor and—many video games and so on, but the original show was always my personal favorite.  Leonard Nimoy ended up playing Spock on and off for nearly 60 years until his death. The fact that both Shatner and Nimoy were Jewish, and that Spock’s famous Vulcan salute was borrowed from the priestly blessing, the Birkat Kohanim that Nimoy remembered from his Orthodox upbringing in Boston, certainly contributed to my appreciation of Star Trek.  I found out later Leonard Nimoy was quite a fine singer as a kid, sang in his shul choir, and as a 13 year-old chanted so well at his bar mitzvah that he was asked to lead services the very next week at a different synagogue.  As his long-time co-star and occasionally director William Shatner said, "He is still the only man I know whose voice was two bar mitzvahs good!"

In any case, on the Star Trek show Spock, of course, was the voice of pure reason, coming from a planet, Vulcan, where no emotion was ever demonstrated or perhaps even experienced.  Shatner’s Captain Kirk was much more emotional, while the ship’s doctor, McCoy, was completely emotional, sometimes insanely so.  Regularly, you would see the tension involved in solving the plot problems they encountered out there in space using emotion and reason played out over an episode.  Spock would famously say of some situation, “I find that highly illogical.”  And McCoy would blow up at him, and Kirk would have to mediate.  The general implication, however, was that most of the time Spock was right.  To be honest, McCoy always reminded me of the Jewish mother on the show, even though he was clearly not actually Jewish, or a mother, or female for that matter; but he was definitely highly emotional.

In any case, the show highlighted the simple fact that there has always been a certain level of tension between emotion and reason in our world, and that tension has had a profound impact on how we think about God and even whether or not we believe that God even exists. 

I’ve been thinking lately about the concept of God, and the complex ways we relate to our Deity, however conceived.  What provoked this was two things: first, a section of the weekly Torah portion a couple of weeks ago that included the shlosh esray midot, the thirteen attributes of God, which offer God’s own definition of God’s intrinsic nature.  And the second was a book I’ve been re-reading by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  The Exodus section, according to the Torah text, is God’s own self-revelation about what qualities God possesses, while in his book Haidt, who is Jewish, analyzes how human beings think, what reason and rationality really are, and how this impacts the way we think about crucial issues, including God.  And there is a fascinating interplay in these two.

The Torah passage in question reads, “I, the Lord, am a compassionate God of grace, long-suffering filled with kindness and truth, conferring kindness to the thousandth generation, removing iniquity, transgression and sin and purifying.” 

If you look closely at that section in Exodus—it is repeated several times in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible—it focuses on two aspects of divine power.  First, the compassion or kindness that God shows us; and then, equally importantly, the fact that God forgives our sins.  That combination certainly has its attractions for those who believe in God, or any higher power: the promise of divine kindness married to forgiveness for the mistakes we make. That is, in a small but important bundle, the essence of all religion: God has given us a good and generous world and offers relief from the burden of the bad actions we take.

Of course, true rationalists would say that such a belief in a kind and forgiving deity is not reasonable.  Our minds should be clear, analytical tools that aren’t confused by archaic notions of a supreme being or higher power.  We might seek kindness and forgiveness from other humans, but we cannot expect to receive these from God, if God even exists.  Reason should rule. 

Jonathan Haidt takes a different tack about personal reason.  Basing his argument on empirical scientific studies of the way human beings really think and act, he explains that rather than rationally analyzing and understanding the world, what we think of as “rational thought” or “the faculty of reason” is typically a kind of post-facto attempt to justify what we have already intuitively decided.  That is, we choose to do what we want to do, or choose to think what we want to think, then justify it by forging a rational defense for our own actions.  Many of our “rational” choices about good and evil or how to conduct ourselves are really not rational at all.  According to the social psychologist Haidt, they are simply things we choose to do because we like to do them, or our own innate biases lead us to act, and we then carefully explain our choice as rational using our reasoning to prove it, to ourselves and to others.

Which means that our values and ethics have at least as good a chance to flourish positively by being rooted in a received religious tradition—such as Judaism—as they do if we try to cultivate meaningful morality from our own faculties of reason.  Personal reason apparently has very little to do with pristine objective choice and much more to do with our own cultural and personal biases and our blinded effort to prove that we did it all ourselves, with no help from God, or any God-like creature.

If Haidt’s extensive research into the concept of the “righteous mind” is correct—and many smart people think he is—we humans have emotional desires and needs first, and then we justify them by calling them rational and constructing reasons and even systems around them.  But most of those decisions aren’t truly “rational at all” and have nothing to do with what is really right.   

There isn’t really a dichotomy between cognition and emotion, between thinking and feeling, with thinking being the higher-order function.  The research in fact demonstrates that in studies you can’t actually differentiate between what people are thinking and how they are feeling; feelings color the “rational” choices that everyone makes.  There are no Spocks among us mere humans after all.

Maybe the ancient Greeks had it right: they trained smart, articulate young people in the art of rhetoric.  Masters of rhetoric could argue one side of a question, using a wonderful, reasoned approach; and then immediately switch sides and argue the other side of the same question with equal success.  I know this because two of my children were state debate champions; they could out-argue me for years on either side of an issue.  Today’s high school and college debate contests use the same format for their competitions; the team or individuals who win do so because of their successful use of appropriate, well-reasoned arguments in a structured format, and can be, and are, called upon to argue either side of a question. 

Lawyers follow this as well; they are advocates, and it is far from unusual for, say, a public prosecutor to become a private defense attorney later in his or her career, or even the other way around.  Spock aside, reason is, in effect, just one tool that can be employed for any purpose, on either side of an ethical question.

So, what is the solution to the dilemma of our possessing quite imperfect reasoning abilities, mixed liberally with our own emotional needs and desires without our even being cognizant of that fact?  How are we to decide how to act, and live, and be patient with other views than our own if our own rational minds are so compromised?

Perhaps the answer lies in simply accepting that there is a higher level of thought and meaning than the merely personal biases we exercise as “rational,” and allowing those ideals and concepts—such as God’s gift of a generous world, and God’s ever-present forgiveness for those who atone—to influence our own actions and choices, and so improve our conduct, and perhaps even our world. 

And that may not prove to be so “highly illogical” at all.