The Face of the Deep

Talking to Alan Nasser, my advising professor for the duration of the quarter, is a lot like deep-sea fishing. You drop your lure to the bottom expecting a familiar fish or two, only to pull up a tentacled and impossible something-or-other. Cursory boatside examination is inadequate for categorization. Full autopsy is required to understand its fearful symmetry, and even when every squirting nodule has been labeled, you remain somewhat uncertain that nature exercised its most cogent judgment in its creation.

This is how I felt when I heard the sentence "Jews no longer exist." I learned long ago to deactivate my "crackpot" alarm around Alan. He says things that seem wildly inappropriate to the point of delusion, and then proceeds to outline his reasoning in a way that always seems to make sense, even though I generally don't agree with him. In this way he has presented theories ranging from a predicted violent uprising of black Americans in the 1980's to why he feels women are more prone to homosexuality than men.

The four things a Jew doth make, according to Mr. Nasser:

1. Aversion to injustice. Jews have generally oriented themselves on the extreme left of the political spectrum. American anti-semitism may be a direct consequence of immigrant European Jews' tendency to be outspoken socialists, communists and anarchists.

2. A history of persecution, especially at the hands of European Christians.

3. A shared historical/ethnic heritage.

4. Belief in the tenets of the Old Testament.

These four pillars have been crumbling for some time. Their sense of justice has been undermined by their support of Israel and its vindictive policies and there has been a general drift into mainstream liberalism. Jewish persecution is no longer a reality; the sense of victimization that has become central in the Jewish self-conception has been amplified out of proportion by the Israeli media to justify the state's aggression. The very premise of the Jews as sharing a common ethnic heritage is questionable in light of controversial new research published by Israeli geographers and anthropologists.

I don't know enough about Jewish history to really comment on these assertions, except to say that they seem in some way totally wrong.

Regarding the religious beliefs themselves, he applies a "cluster" litmus. Complex things, he says, are defined by clusters of properties. What is a lemon? It is something that is smaller than a watermelon that has pocked yellow skin and tastes citric. If a similar object was smaller than a watermelon, had pocked skin and it tastes like lemon but it is blue, is it still a lemon? What if the same blue fruit was the same size as a watermelon but its juice was indistinguishable from lemon juice?

The Bible appears very unambiguous on this issue. God's lemon shalt be yellow, and shalt be small, and shalt taste of lemons, and the lemon that is blue shall rouse the anger of the LORD and shall be struck from the face of the earth for all time.

You often hear people talk about the self-contradictory nature of the Bible. Indeed, some popular translations, especially the New International Version, were actually streamlined to eliminate many of these contradictions. But as far as God's requirements of His chosen people go, I see only black and white.

We see the essence of the Old Testament God's will in the story of the Tower of Babel:


Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words.
It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly." And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.

They said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.

The LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.

"Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech."

So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.

Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.


I feel that this story conveys the most essential imperative of the Old Testament, or at least as much of the Old Testament as I have read: we are not to value our own agency over divine commandment.

The point is reiterated over and over again, in almost every passage. The story of Abraham and Isaac, one of the Bible's most well-known, is just as powerful. Abraham, the founding patriarch of the Jewish and Christian faiths, is told by God that he must make a three-day journey to a mountain where he is to sacrifice his son Isaac, who had been divinely gifted to Abraham's infertile wife Sarah. When they reach the top of the mountain, Isaac carrying the wood that is to immolate him, Abraham moves to kill his son with a knife. At that moment, an angel appears to him and tells him to stop, as God is appeased that he did not hesitate. Abraham then notices a ram whose horns are entangled in a bush behind him, which he sacrifices in place of Isaac.

The lesson is that human judgment must be sublimated, utterly, to the will of God, and that trust must be absolute.

The entire narrative of the early Hebrews is one of punishment for abrogation of this duty. God repeatedly exterminates Moses's followers by the thousands for seemingly minor infractions. A huge portion of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, is dedicated to an accounting of Levitical law, the holy strictures of behavior required to adequately serve the Lord. This includes the ten commandments.

The most interesting of the commandments, to me, is the second: "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth." At first glance, this seems like one of those anachronistic bits of useless litigiousness that no longer curries any relevance in the world, like "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk." But it is a hugely powerful intellectual conceit, and one that has defined much of the history of religion.

Muslims take the second commandment notoriously seriously. Remember the riots over the Danish cartoon of Muhammad? Their art is entirely non-imagistic, usually only geometric patterns. Fanaticism? Pointless anachronism? No. I see the line drawn in the sand, and I actually identify with it.

In some way, any representation of an object alters our relationship to the object. The religious conviction is that the representation perverts that relationship, cheapens it. I don't think I agree, but I do believe that your interpretation of the object will be forever indentured to its representation. An analogy from my own life is bird watching.

The first time I ever spotted a House Finch, I had been trying to identify the source of a particularly elaborate and beautiful call I had been hearing in my neighborhood for two weeks. Finally, I trained my binoculars on a spectacularly colored bird in my backyard; it was faintly brown with a bright orange breast and head. My first reaction was that it looked like something out of a rainforest. My second was amazement that such a stunning animal could have gone unnoticed by me for my entire life. The third was joy.

Later, I pored over a giant atlas of San Diego bird life my dad had received as a gift from the local natural history museum. It took me over an hour, but I finally identified the bird. I was weirdly crushed. The House Finch is the most common songbird in the entire city. It is entirely pedestrian, as far as birds go.

Now, whenever I see a House Finch, I no longer see a mysterious and charming creature. I see "House Finch, anthropophilic finch that favors habitat along urban gradients." Maybe this is my fault. But I always tell people who mention an interest in the hobby to learn as few bird names as they can. To name is not to know.

It can be said, and I think convincingly, that a similar phenomenon is at play in all representational art. I'm not going to wax snob, because I love art. I love it dearly. But the holism of the universe, our immediate sensory experience of the world, is translated through an infinite number of cultural and aesthetic filters that render it more familiar than maybe it really is.

The nucleus of this faith is submission. Call it a handicap if you want, I'm not fully prepared to levy that judgment on a way of life I don't really understand. But from this fact arises a major conflict: according to the explicit and implicit meanings of the Bible, in order to be fully faithful to the Hebrew God, you must subject yourself totally to His will. This means following with utmost competence all of his commandments, no matter how minute. Nadab and Abihu, after all, were consumed by divine fire when they burned the wrong kind of incense as an offering to God. This, in turn, means that we are not to worship selectively, because the audacity of exercising our mortal judgment in favor of the whole of the Word is an abomination. So to be a Jew in the way outlined in the Bible, don't you have to literally believe that every detail of Levitical Law is of consequence, and will be met with punishment if betrayed?

As we all know, almost nobody follows the Bible in this way. A.J. Jacobs, a popular author, tried for a year. His book, "The Year of Living Biblically," is fairly uninteresting (his insights are generally something along the lines of 'Golly, sacrificing chickens is weeeeird! But I feel so spiritual!') but he does encounter a number of ultra-orthodox Jews who attempt his touristy experiment for the whole of their lives. Obviously, this is not representative of the Jewish mainstream.

Even if I knew enough about the tradition of rabbinical interpretation and Jewish culture to make some kind of diminutive evaluation of their general abandonment of this zeal, I wouldn't. But I have to think that being a "secular" Jew is incompatible with that most crucial of philosophical considerations: to interpret is to betray. If this is no longer the belief, what does it mean to be Jewish?

Regardless, I think the claim "there are no more Jews" is a total fallacy. Every culture, every belief system evolves. Clearly, the Hebrew world has changed, but that does not mean that it has ceased to be Hebrew, or that it is in some way more complicit in injustice than once it was.

I am very glad I decided to do this project. Like birds, it is another case of finding that something which previously appeared dull yields strange and wonderful new things to consider. And like birds, I wonder if they can really be named at all.