TEL AVIV — Thirteen years ago when my mother was dying of
cancer, her rabbi was a major support figure. The phrase “her
rabbi” may imply religiosity, but actually she wasn’t very
religious — not interested in God as an idea, belonging loosely to
the framework of her Conservative synagogue.
The rabbi, however, was different from the several other support
figures she had in that he symbolized something: the hope of a
connection to the divine, the hope of an afterlife, which for her
meant mainly the hope of being reunited with my stepfather and
other loved ones. She was a worldly person and those, even in her
last weeks in the hospital, weren’t her main concerns; still, his
being a rabbi, invested with spiritual knowledge and authority,
gave her a special kind of uplift.
It’s hard to see what the new, aggressive, bestselling atheists
could find to object to in this scenario. True, organized religion
has not infrequently been fanatic and harmful; but this has never
been the case with soft, easygoing Conservative Judaism. Religion
is a vast phenomenon and comes in all shades of malignity and
benignity. One could almost say the same about government; beyond
the most definitional, generic level, there is about as much
similarity between Conservative Judaism and, say, jihadist Islam as
between democracy and totalitarian regimes. In the case of
governments, one would not say that the former type should not
exist because the latter type does.
The atheists would also say that the hope for contact with the
divine, an afterlife, and reunion with loved ones, which the rabbi
represented, is — while perhaps excusable as a touching
anachronism — the sort of thing one should “grow out of” in our
rational, enlightened age. In fact, as Dinesh D’Souza argued so
well in his recent debate with Daniel Dennett, even to allow the
existence of free will is to grant the sphere of mind some
autonomy, separateness, and power over the body. The atheist
polemicists want to convince me of something, to change my mind;
they want me to read their books, ponder their arguments, and
repudiate my theism for atheism. All this presupposes free choice
on my part; I doubt that Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett et al. believe
that their words can, by some mechanical process, program my
neurons to compel me to adopt a different view.
So if the mind has some degree of separateness and autonomy over
the body, then it is reasonable to hope that it is not entirely
dependent on the body/brain and could survive its death — not to
mention that this has been believed by a line of great thinkers
including great scientists. In representing this hope for my
mother, the rabbi was contributing to keeping her spirits up and
making her last span on earth more pleasant. I can’t see that the
negations of the dogmatic atheists had anything to add to this
scenario.
*****
THESE DAYS, WALKING on the Tel Aviv shoreline in winter sunsets,
seeing colored displays as the sun sinks into the Mediterranean,
I’m affected in ways that I would call “transport.” It’s nothing
new with me; I remember nature affecting me this way as far back as
early childhood. I also began already, back then, to associate
these elations with God. It wasn’t because anybody told me to do it
— certainly not my not-too-religious parents. The God-idea was
available as part of Western culture and my rather vague Jewish
background, and I latched onto it without any individual or
institution encouraging me to do so.
In other words, it was something in my personality; I may have
“the God gene,” which is the title of an interesting book by Dean
Hamer that summarizes evidence of a genetic component in
spirituality, or the lack of spirituality. Here the atheists will
say, “Oh yes, we too have the transports — from natural beauty,
great music, great paintings and so on. But we see no justification
to go from there to the assumption of an omniscient deity who is
the source of all these great things.”
It is a fact, though, that deities appear just about everywhere
that people do; associating mystery, or transport, with
transcendent beings appears to be so widespread and cross-cultural
as to be “natural.” For me it’s an inseparable part of the
experience; someone out there is responsible for this, to whom I
want to express gratitude. Again the atheists could counter that,
if I had grown up in a more atheist environment like, say, today’s
Scandinavia instead of 1960s America, I would have been less likely
to make the God-connection with my experiences; my spiritual
tendency, if that’s what it is, need not have taken a theistic
form.
But, even if so, I can’t see how I would have been better off
for it. The atheists claim that they lead totally fulfilled,
meaningful lives despite their certainty of their own finitude and
eventual — and rather imminent — complete disappearance from the
world, and I have no right to doubt them. For me it’s different:
the belief in a deity seems to add both serenity and energy, and to
enhance the sense of purpose. It also led me to explore my Jewish
heritage and find great riches in it, including quite worldly,
ethical and psychological insights, not to mention the nonpareil
energies of the Bible.
So, again, I can’t see that the dogmatic atheists have anything
to offer but negation: do not feel what you feel, do not believe,
do not hope, there’s nothing out there, our (self-)limited minds
comprehend everything there is and it’s not much; above all, do not
seek a consciousness beyond your own. They subtract from the world
and don’t add anything to it except perhaps an opportunity to
rediscover the basis of real openness and rationality.
