Post by Rabbi Neil on Apr 28, 2023 23:32:14 GMT
Tomorrow morning as part of his bar mitzvah ceremony, Ezra chose some lines from Talmud (Eruvin 13b) as one of his study passages. It’s a very bold choice of reading. It says, “For two and a half years, the Schools of Shammai and Hillel maintained a dispute; the former said: It would have been better if people had never been created; the School of Hillel said: It is better for people to have been created than not to have been created. They took a vote and came to this decision: It would have been better had people never been created, but since we have been created, let us pay close attention to our actions.”
The two greatest schools of Jewish thought debate whether or not it is good that we even exist. The chutzpah – the cheek, the nerve – of the debate cannot be understated. In the beginning of the Torah, God creates on days one to five, and assigns a value judgment – that it is good. But when God creates humanity, Torah says “God saw all that God had made, and it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) When humanity is created, the universe is not just good, but very good. So, it is easy to side with the School of Hillel who say that it is good that humanity exists because Torah literally says that! So, how could the School of Shammai say something as outrageous as it would have been better had we never been created?
At a stretch, we could perhaps take from Kabbalah where, in that mystical way of thinking, God is perfect so in order to create the universe, God had to engage in tzimtzum, in a form of Divine contraction, to give space for the imperfect universe to exist. That is not to say that the universe exists where God is not, or that God shifted over like one might do on a park bench (“Excuse me, could I please put my universe down here?”) but more that the perfect God gave space for the imperfect to exist. At a stretch, then, we could say that God allowing the universe to exist allowed for imperfection to exist, and that it would have been better had imperfection never existed. We could say that, but it wouldn’t be a traditional perspective at all, and since that particular mystical view didn’t appear until a thousand years after Shammai, it’s extremely unlikely that this would have been considered.
Imperfection is good in Judaism because imperfection allows for growth. Judaism is directional – it looks ahead to a better world. Growth from the flawed to the less flawed is an essential part of Jewish ethics, which means that it is better that bad things happen and that we learn from them than bad things had never happened at all. So, how could Hillel and Shammai agree that it would have been better had we never existed, and simply reached a compromise position on what we should do since we have been created?
Perhaps the answer lies in despair. It’s easy to despair at the world around us. Unless you believe that everything that happens to us, good or bad, is part of a Divine plan that is good even if it doesn’t seem like it, there are some really bad things that human beings do to each other and to the world around us. Following on from last week’s sermon, we can ask ourselves whether or not it has been good for the planet for us to have existed? That’s actually a much more difficult and nuanced question than one might at first assume. There are definitely parts of the world where humanity has made a positive impact on the natural world, protecting species that would have otherwise gone extinct, using land management techniques to bring millions of trees to areas that were previously deserts. Many of these efforts, though, are responses to the damage that humanity has caused beforehand, though, so it’s harder to pat ourselves on the back for undoing damage that we had ourselves caused. In Hillel and Shammai’s time, though, humanity had not become a geological force as it has today, forever altering the entire biosphere to the point that it is less capable of sustaining life, which is clearly less good than a biosphere teeming with life. So, on the assumption that Hillel and Shammai were not talking about our effect on the world around us, how could they have agreed that it would have been better had we not been created?
Perhaps they were talking not about perfection or about our effect on the world but on the fact that suffering exists. Here I’m talking about not just physical pain, but emotional pain as well. This is where Rabbinic Judaism gets controversial. In early Rabbinic Judaism, there was the belief that animals feel physical pain but they don’t suffer from the same kind of emotional distress that we do from things like grief. Physical pain was seen as natural, whereas emotional distress was seen as something other, something beyond the natural, something that only complex human minds could experience. As I say, we know this not to be true nowadays, but that was the mindset back then in the secular and in the Jewish world. It may well be that Hillel and Shammai were saying that once God created humanity, God allowed for sorrow and emotional pain to exist in the world. It would have been better had that never existed. That is a generous reading of Hillel and Shammai because it takes away our moral responsibility and merely says “human pain is bad,” something with which we can all agree. In 2008, David Benatar published a book called Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, which seems to play off our Talmudic excerpt and spell out a philosophical case. Benatar says that “Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad – and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be.” Rather amusingly, he dedicates the book, in his words, “to my parents, even though they brought me into existence!” His is a serious, and depressing, book. In the introduction, he says that “in being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and do, experience unpleasantness.” From what I have read of his book so far, it seems that the case he makes is that those who never exist never experience unpleasantness, which must be better than having experienced it. He says (p.6) that “the positive features of life, although good for those who exist, cannot justify the negative features that accompany them. Their absence would not have been a deprivation for one who never came into existence.” He even goes so far as to find it curious that “while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the only … guaranteed away to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
To be fair, I haven’t read the entirety of Benatar’s book, but what I have read feels like the philosophical conclusions of a deeply depressed person. Tennyson said that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and I totally agree. I don’t need to read Benatar’s chapter saying that all the pain we experience outweighs all the good we experience. The old optimist versus pessimist debate about the glass half empty or half full isn’t a Jewish perspective. Judaism says, “Thank God I have a glass and I have something to drink, now let me say the blessing before drinking.” Yes, life can be tough and it can also be amazing. Abraham Joshua Heschel talked of the inconceivable surprise of living and the notion that we can live in radical amazement. In other words, it is amazing that we’re alive. Philosophy is great, it’s really important, but it can also be totally abstracted from human experience. Is it philosophically better not to have experienced pain? I don’t actually care. Because in Judaism, we even have a blessing on hearing bad news. We are thankful for living a life in which we acknowledge that there will sometimes be pain.
So, it may well be that Hillel and Shammai think that it would be better if we did not experience pain, but I don’t think it’s that. The second part of their conclusion – that since we do exist, we should all at least pay attention to our actions – implies that the first part is also about the way we act. I think what they’re saying is that it would have been better had humanity never been created because human beings suck. The world was created for us to live in it – Isaiah (45:18) specifically says that God did not create the world formless but to be inhabited. It was good that the world was created, it was very good that human beings were put on this earth, but it’s what comes after that’s the problem. I think they’re reading the text as it was very good at the point of creation but that doesn’t mean that it’s very good since. The poet Philip Larkin says in This Be The Verse – Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, get out as early as you can and don’t have any kids yourself. That’s very similar to Benatar. I think that’s nonsense. A more Jewish position would be… Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, so check your deeds and who are you so you’re not liable yourself.
The existence of darkness doesn’t cancel out the light as Benatar and Larkin seem to think. It goes the other way. Light dispels darkness. Yes, in our lives we all experience pain to differing degrees. In one Talmudic famous passage (Berachot 5b), one Rabbi asks another “Is your suffering dear to you,” to which the reply is given, “Neither my suffering nor its reward.” Suffering is not a good thing and we shouldn’t pretend that it is. Would we prefer a life of no suffering? Of course, but that’s not real. Would we prefer a life of less suffering? Of course, and that’s where our moral choices come into play. Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, so check your deeds and who are you so you’re not liable yourself. The world is not all dark, it’s not all bad, and it is good that we exist because we have the potential not only to experience good but also to do good. That’s where we become stewards of our society, and of the world around us. Yes, human beings can cause unimaginable pain to each other, sometimes deliberately and sometimes without even realizing, but we are also capable of so much good. Has human history been dark and bleak? Of course it has. Judaism doesn’t hide from that but embraces that and uses it to motivate us to be better. Since we have been created, since we are recipients of human history that contains so much suffering, it is incumbent upon us to pay close attention to our actions so that we head towards a world of less pain and then ultimately toward the Messianic Age. Things started very good but didn’t stay that way but Judaism is not a despairing religion – it’s a profoundly hopeful religion. And that hope rests on us. We are the hope for the future. We face the difficulties in life and say, Yes, it would have been better had humanity not gone that way, but since we did, let’s make sure that future generations don’t suffer like so many others have.
With that in mind, I don’t think that Hillel and Shammai are despairing, they’re being realists. They’re facing darkness and instead of saying that birth is a bad thing they’re saying that humanity went awry and it’s up to us to set humanity back on course. Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, so check your deeds and who are you so you’re not liable yourself. May we therefore never give in to despair. May we all come to remember that light dispels darkness but darkness can never dispel light. May we live in radical amazement, in the realization that a life that includes suffering can also contain innumerable moments of joy and blessing. And may we check our deeds for our own good and for the good of all humanity throughout all time. And let us say, Amen.
The two greatest schools of Jewish thought debate whether or not it is good that we even exist. The chutzpah – the cheek, the nerve – of the debate cannot be understated. In the beginning of the Torah, God creates on days one to five, and assigns a value judgment – that it is good. But when God creates humanity, Torah says “God saw all that God had made, and it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) When humanity is created, the universe is not just good, but very good. So, it is easy to side with the School of Hillel who say that it is good that humanity exists because Torah literally says that! So, how could the School of Shammai say something as outrageous as it would have been better had we never been created?
At a stretch, we could perhaps take from Kabbalah where, in that mystical way of thinking, God is perfect so in order to create the universe, God had to engage in tzimtzum, in a form of Divine contraction, to give space for the imperfect universe to exist. That is not to say that the universe exists where God is not, or that God shifted over like one might do on a park bench (“Excuse me, could I please put my universe down here?”) but more that the perfect God gave space for the imperfect to exist. At a stretch, then, we could say that God allowing the universe to exist allowed for imperfection to exist, and that it would have been better had imperfection never existed. We could say that, but it wouldn’t be a traditional perspective at all, and since that particular mystical view didn’t appear until a thousand years after Shammai, it’s extremely unlikely that this would have been considered.
Imperfection is good in Judaism because imperfection allows for growth. Judaism is directional – it looks ahead to a better world. Growth from the flawed to the less flawed is an essential part of Jewish ethics, which means that it is better that bad things happen and that we learn from them than bad things had never happened at all. So, how could Hillel and Shammai agree that it would have been better had we never existed, and simply reached a compromise position on what we should do since we have been created?
Perhaps the answer lies in despair. It’s easy to despair at the world around us. Unless you believe that everything that happens to us, good or bad, is part of a Divine plan that is good even if it doesn’t seem like it, there are some really bad things that human beings do to each other and to the world around us. Following on from last week’s sermon, we can ask ourselves whether or not it has been good for the planet for us to have existed? That’s actually a much more difficult and nuanced question than one might at first assume. There are definitely parts of the world where humanity has made a positive impact on the natural world, protecting species that would have otherwise gone extinct, using land management techniques to bring millions of trees to areas that were previously deserts. Many of these efforts, though, are responses to the damage that humanity has caused beforehand, though, so it’s harder to pat ourselves on the back for undoing damage that we had ourselves caused. In Hillel and Shammai’s time, though, humanity had not become a geological force as it has today, forever altering the entire biosphere to the point that it is less capable of sustaining life, which is clearly less good than a biosphere teeming with life. So, on the assumption that Hillel and Shammai were not talking about our effect on the world around us, how could they have agreed that it would have been better had we not been created?
Perhaps they were talking not about perfection or about our effect on the world but on the fact that suffering exists. Here I’m talking about not just physical pain, but emotional pain as well. This is where Rabbinic Judaism gets controversial. In early Rabbinic Judaism, there was the belief that animals feel physical pain but they don’t suffer from the same kind of emotional distress that we do from things like grief. Physical pain was seen as natural, whereas emotional distress was seen as something other, something beyond the natural, something that only complex human minds could experience. As I say, we know this not to be true nowadays, but that was the mindset back then in the secular and in the Jewish world. It may well be that Hillel and Shammai were saying that once God created humanity, God allowed for sorrow and emotional pain to exist in the world. It would have been better had that never existed. That is a generous reading of Hillel and Shammai because it takes away our moral responsibility and merely says “human pain is bad,” something with which we can all agree. In 2008, David Benatar published a book called Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, which seems to play off our Talmudic excerpt and spell out a philosophical case. Benatar says that “Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad – and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be.” Rather amusingly, he dedicates the book, in his words, “to my parents, even though they brought me into existence!” His is a serious, and depressing, book. In the introduction, he says that “in being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and do, experience unpleasantness.” From what I have read of his book so far, it seems that the case he makes is that those who never exist never experience unpleasantness, which must be better than having experienced it. He says (p.6) that “the positive features of life, although good for those who exist, cannot justify the negative features that accompany them. Their absence would not have been a deprivation for one who never came into existence.” He even goes so far as to find it curious that “while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the only … guaranteed away to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
To be fair, I haven’t read the entirety of Benatar’s book, but what I have read feels like the philosophical conclusions of a deeply depressed person. Tennyson said that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and I totally agree. I don’t need to read Benatar’s chapter saying that all the pain we experience outweighs all the good we experience. The old optimist versus pessimist debate about the glass half empty or half full isn’t a Jewish perspective. Judaism says, “Thank God I have a glass and I have something to drink, now let me say the blessing before drinking.” Yes, life can be tough and it can also be amazing. Abraham Joshua Heschel talked of the inconceivable surprise of living and the notion that we can live in radical amazement. In other words, it is amazing that we’re alive. Philosophy is great, it’s really important, but it can also be totally abstracted from human experience. Is it philosophically better not to have experienced pain? I don’t actually care. Because in Judaism, we even have a blessing on hearing bad news. We are thankful for living a life in which we acknowledge that there will sometimes be pain.
So, it may well be that Hillel and Shammai think that it would be better if we did not experience pain, but I don’t think it’s that. The second part of their conclusion – that since we do exist, we should all at least pay attention to our actions – implies that the first part is also about the way we act. I think what they’re saying is that it would have been better had humanity never been created because human beings suck. The world was created for us to live in it – Isaiah (45:18) specifically says that God did not create the world formless but to be inhabited. It was good that the world was created, it was very good that human beings were put on this earth, but it’s what comes after that’s the problem. I think they’re reading the text as it was very good at the point of creation but that doesn’t mean that it’s very good since. The poet Philip Larkin says in This Be The Verse – Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, get out as early as you can and don’t have any kids yourself. That’s very similar to Benatar. I think that’s nonsense. A more Jewish position would be… Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, so check your deeds and who are you so you’re not liable yourself.
The existence of darkness doesn’t cancel out the light as Benatar and Larkin seem to think. It goes the other way. Light dispels darkness. Yes, in our lives we all experience pain to differing degrees. In one Talmudic famous passage (Berachot 5b), one Rabbi asks another “Is your suffering dear to you,” to which the reply is given, “Neither my suffering nor its reward.” Suffering is not a good thing and we shouldn’t pretend that it is. Would we prefer a life of no suffering? Of course, but that’s not real. Would we prefer a life of less suffering? Of course, and that’s where our moral choices come into play. Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, so check your deeds and who are you so you’re not liable yourself. The world is not all dark, it’s not all bad, and it is good that we exist because we have the potential not only to experience good but also to do good. That’s where we become stewards of our society, and of the world around us. Yes, human beings can cause unimaginable pain to each other, sometimes deliberately and sometimes without even realizing, but we are also capable of so much good. Has human history been dark and bleak? Of course it has. Judaism doesn’t hide from that but embraces that and uses it to motivate us to be better. Since we have been created, since we are recipients of human history that contains so much suffering, it is incumbent upon us to pay close attention to our actions so that we head towards a world of less pain and then ultimately toward the Messianic Age. Things started very good but didn’t stay that way but Judaism is not a despairing religion – it’s a profoundly hopeful religion. And that hope rests on us. We are the hope for the future. We face the difficulties in life and say, Yes, it would have been better had humanity not gone that way, but since we did, let’s make sure that future generations don’t suffer like so many others have.
With that in mind, I don’t think that Hillel and Shammai are despairing, they’re being realists. They’re facing darkness and instead of saying that birth is a bad thing they’re saying that humanity went awry and it’s up to us to set humanity back on course. Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf, so check your deeds and who are you so you’re not liable yourself. May we therefore never give in to despair. May we all come to remember that light dispels darkness but darkness can never dispel light. May we live in radical amazement, in the realization that a life that includes suffering can also contain innumerable moments of joy and blessing. And may we check our deeds for our own good and for the good of all humanity throughout all time. And let us say, Amen.