THE INFORMATIONAL DYNAMICS OF JUDAIC TEXTS

This essay addresses the nature of information in Judaic texts, focusing particularly on the written names of God. I argue that these names are the main instrument through which information is organized in Judaic systems. Names are a difficult subject in the philosophy of language because they work differently than other features of language; they tend to capture information that is much more specific than other types of language. Names are bound to specific “experiences,” “baptisms” in space and time, referring to unique persons and places. When names are written they take on different properties than verbalized names because their physical form, not their sound, persists in time.

Cognitive science gives us some valuable insights on the nature of naming in human and other biological worlds. Instead of confining these insights to previous cognitive approaches to religion, my work instead seeks to integrate research in cognitive science and related fields into the study of religion in ways that can be relevant to humanist scholars of religion. This puts me in a difficult position, between rock and hard place.

Cognitive scientists of religion have a scientific agenda in their attempts to explain religion, though they often misrepresent just how much we know about the human mind/brain and the uncertainty at the heart of modern scientific projects. I am not suggesting that the uncertainty is a bad thing; quite the contrary, science is based on potential falsification and not being certain about its basic theories.

As I have defined it, religion is dependent on language and communication. Religious language is language about or related to superhuman agents, and religious practice concerns interaction with superhuman agents. These practices are communal in the sense that they involve not just interaction with superhuman agents, but also a great deal of interaction with human agents. While this chapter deals mostly with the attribution of propositional attitudes and how such attribution changes in the context of literacy, Chapter 4 concerns communality and how it changes in the context of literacy. Superhuman agents, and their names, I treat in Chapters 5 and 6.

Religion involves the attribution of propositional attitudes; that is, it involves the attribution of representational content. One of the best glosses on the notion of content comes from Bruner (1986: 22) who describes it as “the juxtaposition of a comment on a topic”. A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to formulate theories of content without lapsing into naÏve forms of representationalism that often characterize the standard model of CSR. It is difficult not to lapse because we are constantly faced with the question of what gets communicated when people communicate (i.e. Bruner's “comment”). Clearly some sort of exchange takes place. But characterizing the exchange without burdensome metaphysical concepts is difficult. Thus, to account for religion we need a theory of language and mind that integrates action and belief.

Though it is an extremely controversial line of argument for obvious (though nonetheless important) reasons, there is good evidence to indicate that human mental functions, and perhaps corresponding brain structures, have changed in the past 40,000 years, even the past 2,000 years (Smith 2007; see also Hawks et al. 2007). There is some wiggle room in the vagueness of the concept of “mental function”, for we know so little about the mental, particularly when it comes to describing the historical past. However, it is certainly safe to say that minds have changed throughout human history, even very recent history.

As noted briefly in Chapter 2, if one approaches history from the perspective of traditional evolutionary psychology, the fact that minds have changed presents somewhat of a problem. Scholars in this field usually insist that we essentially have a Pleistocene mind, and what has changed is not biology, but culture. Surprisingly, this static picture of the mental echoes arguments made by the so-called ‘standard social science’ paradigm that many evolutionary psychologists strongly resist. In that paradigm, all human discoveries, products and characteristics are social constructions, including the findings of biology.

Reductionism is a necessary part of any attempt to make sense of the world. We have to compartmentalize the objects of our analysis and description, thereby reducing some set of terms or phenomena to others. While this form of analytic reduction is necessary for both humanism and science, ontological reduction is different. Ontological reductionists postulate that there is a single level of description that can explain all the rest, whether it is the psychological level or the physical. While most cognitive scientists of religion recognize the difference between descriptive and ontological reduction, many nevertheless insist that the individualistic cognitive terms they work with, and that they see as in the head, are the real things that explain human behaviour and language, including religion. They construct orderly individualistic concepts for cognition and then devise experiments in the laboratory and in the wild to test those concepts.

One method whereby nature and mind are organized and controlled (for better or worse) and by which textual divination takes place in literary contexts is through a process of naming and re-naming. This chapter addresses the nature of information in Judaic texts, focusing particularly on the written “names of God”. I argue that these names are the main instrument through which information is organized in Judaic systems. Names are a complex subject in the philosophy of language because they seem to work differently than other features of language: they tend to capture information that is much more specific than other forms of language. When names are written they take on entirely different properties than verbalized names because their physical form, not their sound, persists in time.

In the film A Serious Man, which I noted in Chapter 1 is a key to understanding Judaic systems, Larry Gopnik goes to see three rabbis to try to find out “what HaShem is trying to tell him” by subjecting him to the struggles that frame the film (Coen and Coen 2009: 87). The second rabbi, rabbi Nachtner, begins their session together by answering Larry's question with another question: “How does God speak to us: it's a good question.”

I will return to his answer to this question below, but for now it is sufficient to say that he continually reminds Larry the physicist about the limits to our knowledge. Larry persists in wanting an answer, until finally:

Like Rabbi Nachtner's parable, much of this book has been about the methodological limitations in studying minds with a mind. This limitation justifies the move we made away from “Platonic” magic languages that confuse us into thinking we know what we are talking about.

Within the few hundred years after the closing of the Biblical canon and the flowering of rabbinic Judaism, the process of interpretation within Judaic systems transformed. As the locus of religious power shifted from diviners and priests to teachers, the divinatory search matured into outright textual research, midrash. As the corpus of hermeneutic experimentation expanded, the digitization that had been applied to single letters and names transformed into a practice of referencing whole sentences and stories.

For the ancient rabbis whose debates are recorded in the Talmud, the true study of Torah could only take place in the context of a plurality of debating friends and loved ones. The heart of their hermeneutics involved a method of enquiry that today should be characterized as a form of sampling. The image below, for example, of the story of the oven of Aknai – from one of the oldest manuscipts of the talmudic tractate Baba Metzia (59b) – is a sample, coming at you through a series of technological processes: memorization, writing, copying, transcription, printing, scanning, cutting/pasting (Figure 7.1).

In his intriguing book The Talmud and the Internet, Jonathan Rosen (2000) compares the modern technology of the Internet with the ancient technology of the Talmud. He argues that the Talmud – which was often described as an endless sea (ימ – on which one could surf?), and where the word for “tractate” (masechet, מסכת) literally means “webbing” – anticipated the digital and hypertextual nature of the Internet.

The body is still the elephant in the room for disciplines in the humanities such as religious studies. Scholars have written books on the representations of religious bodies, and pay lip service to the idea that there are living and breathing human beings to which such religious systems ultimately refer. But unfortunately scholarship has not been able to cross the chasm that separates representation from reality. I would never argue that science crosses this chasm either, but I do think it gives us some tools to talk about bodies in new and relevant ways.

This book is about how technologies of literacy interact with bodies and minds over time. Pointing to literacy as a decisive shift in religious history is not a completely new idea, but integrating that shift with vocabulary from the mind sciences is. The book thus builds a hybrid form of humanities scholarship that incorporates vocabulary and states of art from the harder sciences.

Both biological and religious systems are dynamic. They are constantly changing and developing in relation to one another. I view the relation between them much the same as the relationship between genotype and phenotype, between the genetic “code” and how the code is expressed. The case has recently been made by Day (2007) that the anomalous relation between genotype and phenotype parallels the anomalous relation between neurons and mental states.

The last few chapters examined some of the social cognitive and intersubjective changes that communicative technologies like divination undergo when robust forms of writing and literacy are introduced. The remaining chapters take up specific examples in Judaic systems to illustrate the points made in these early chapters about the effects of literacy. Specifically, in the next three chapters I examine divination, names and cognitive environments of Judaic systems.

In the film A Serious Man, aside from the main protagonist, Larry Gopnik, viewers also get involved in the story of his brother, Arthur. Throughout the film Arthur is obsessively writing a manuscript called the “Mentaculus”, but when we finally find out what it is, it turns out to be some kind of mad Kabbalistic cipher. Larry, the brother and main protaganist in the film, explains what it is to his friend Mimi: “Te Mentaculus? He says it's a, uh … a probability map. Of the universe. He asked if I could help him publish it. Um, it was a little hard for me to evaluate” (Coen and Coen 2009: 63).

As it turns out Arthur has been using the Mentaculus to make a lot of money gambling. Arthur might just be a genius who uses Judaic divination to predict the future. He gives the money to Larry's son Danny, who puts it to good use. Danny says later: “He won a lot of money, Dad! The Mentaculus really works!” (Coen and Coen 2009: 94).