Step One. Grow up in a Traditional Right-Wing Yeshiva. Values: Putting on Tzitzis in the morning, listening to Gedolim Stories, memorizing Mishnayos.
Step Two: Difficulty reading and translating Hebrew.
Step Three. Logic through Talmud as well as through secular studies introduced (6th-7th Grade). The Gedolim Stories are not all that they seem.
Step Four. Bar Mitzvah. The realization that nothing really changes even after you put on Teffilin.
Step Five. Chofetz Chaim Brand High School education. Evolution taught, but Jewish perceptive taught as well." Nothing New under the Sun." Read Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series.
Step Six. Mussar. Mussar. Guilt. Mussar. Guilt. Reject Mussar.(11th-12th Grade)
Step Seven. Rationalism. Ramchal. Rambam. ect. There is no fantasy in Judaism.
Step Eight. College Education. Plato. Kant.
Step Nine. The synthesis. The rejection of the synthesis. The limits of Rationalism.
Step Ten. Existentialism. Kierkegaard. Rosenzweig. ect. Back to the Gedolim stories. Not true, TRUE. Accepted as true.
Step Eleven. Life is a search for meaning. I'm going to Daven.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
I know nothing
Ask me what I know, and I will tell you that I know nothing. I know absolutely nothing at all. I try to imagine that I actually know something. I read books that supposedly contain knowledge. Then I ask myself, what do I really know? I come back to the same answer: Nothing.
I went through many years of school. I studied hard to get good grades, please my teachers, and acquire a body of knowledge considered socially acceptable. Looking back on it all, I can say with certainty the same as Solomon, All is vanity. Everything I ever learned is not TRUE. All that I studied lacks the backbone of certainty in my mind.
History is his story. Literary interpretation is a particular person's interpretation. Science is the science of the scientists of the day. Even math is full of the imaginary. There is no subject in the High School catalog that can say, "I am Truth. What I say you can bet the farm on. You can truly KNOW." The college catalog is less inviting to TRUTH. Uncertainty is masked in big words.
So I turn my head and heart toward the religious subjects, but even there I find no solace. Religion, the very source of certainty, has left me with a hole filled with nothing but more questions. Is the food Kosher? What time is the right time to pray, and if I miss the time, should I pray at all? All day I sang, "Moshe is Truth, and his Torah is truth," yet I go home wondering if I have to remain without a shower for the next two days.
We all love people who can make a decision and stick with it with consistency. Yet the only one who can claim true consistency is someone who has a system in place that can work all the time. I don't claim consistency; I don't even know if any such system exists that can work all the time. Who can say what is true? What is false? When new knowledge shows up, consistency with past truths just seems like a person who keeps saying they know something in a situation where they really know nothing.
I know nothing.
I went through many years of school. I studied hard to get good grades, please my teachers, and acquire a body of knowledge considered socially acceptable. Looking back on it all, I can say with certainty the same as Solomon, All is vanity. Everything I ever learned is not TRUE. All that I studied lacks the backbone of certainty in my mind.
History is his story. Literary interpretation is a particular person's interpretation. Science is the science of the scientists of the day. Even math is full of the imaginary. There is no subject in the High School catalog that can say, "I am Truth. What I say you can bet the farm on. You can truly KNOW." The college catalog is less inviting to TRUTH. Uncertainty is masked in big words.
So I turn my head and heart toward the religious subjects, but even there I find no solace. Religion, the very source of certainty, has left me with a hole filled with nothing but more questions. Is the food Kosher? What time is the right time to pray, and if I miss the time, should I pray at all? All day I sang, "Moshe is Truth, and his Torah is truth," yet I go home wondering if I have to remain without a shower for the next two days.
We all love people who can make a decision and stick with it with consistency. Yet the only one who can claim true consistency is someone who has a system in place that can work all the time. I don't claim consistency; I don't even know if any such system exists that can work all the time. Who can say what is true? What is false? When new knowledge shows up, consistency with past truths just seems like a person who keeps saying they know something in a situation where they really know nothing.
I know nothing.
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