The World is Already (Re)Enchanted.

Clairvoyant matza, invisible demons, sentient songs, and “the Higher Naïveté.”

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “Les Hasards heureux de l’escarpolette,” c. 1767-8.

Prelude

“My principle is this: I believe anything written in ancient Latin or Greek unless I can’t. Now, things that prevent me from believing what I read are that they are internally contradictory, or what they say is impossible… So, in those cases I abandon the ancient evidence. Otherwise, you’ve got to convince me that they’re not true.

“Now, you might think of this as, indeed, gullible. A former colleague of mine… spoke about — and I like to claim this approach — the position… which we call the Higher Naïveté.

The way this works is, you start out, you don’t know anything, and you’re naïve. You believe everything. Next, you get a college education — and you don’t believe anything. And then you reach the level of wisdom — the Higher Naïveté — and you know what to believe even though you can’t prove it.”

— Prof. Donald Kagan, lecture on the Greek Dark Ages

I. Passover before the Exodus

“And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned to him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and he baked unleavened bread [matzot], and they ate.”
— Genesis 19:3

“‘And he baked matzot’ — It was Passover.”
— Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki)

A naïve question: Was Rashi stupid?

As Lot is baking matza for the angels visiting him in Sodom, Israel and his sons aren’t born yet, let alone gone down to Egypt. Israelite slaves eating the bread of affliction and then baking the bread of freedom that didn’t have time to rise — that’s all centuries in the future! Passover remembers (or, rather begins the never-ending story of) the Exodus — so how can Rashi possibly assert that Lot is already celebrating it hundreds of years too early?

Rashi was, of course, very not stupid. He was invoking an established idea from the Rabbinic tradition that the Patriarchs pre-intuited and practiced the commandments of the Torah, long before they were revealed at Sinai. The Sages taught that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — and, here, even Lot, Abraham’s beloved but morally-less-than-exemplary nephew — were so attuned, somehow, to the Divine will that they were able to observe (and study) the Law before it had even been given. (I have to presume, in the case of Lot, that he was not himself such a spiritual giant, but rather must have learned the Way of Torah from Abraham.)

Another question, then: Were Rashi and the Sages modern academic scholars?

What interests me is that the portrayal of the Patriarchs as practicing commandments before Sinai can be read as either ultra-traditional or as modern/critical — or, in keeping with the tenets of Paradox Judaism, as both at once. What came to be written down in the Torah as “commandments” were practiced first by pre-Israelite ancestors. That sentence is a kind of paraphrase of this traditional Rabbinic idea, even as it also aligns with modern academic ideas about the evolution of Judaism over time out of predecessor ancient Near Eastern cultures.

This is not to say that the traditional view and the modern academic view easily harmonize — they obviously don’t, especially regarding what you think did or didn’t happen at Sinai, among much else. I merely wish to note that there is more overlap between the two perspectives than one might at first assume.

II. Demons are all around you

“Rav Huna said: Each and every one of us has a thousand demons to his left and ten thousand to his right.”
— Berakhot 6a

The Rabbinic Sages, of blessed memory, thought there were invisible demons everywhere. Today, of course, we (the enlightened, the elect, the elite) scoff at such things.

Just listen to atheist writer Philip Zuckerman in a debate with Ross Douthat about the existence of God. For the argument from cosmic fine-tuning, Zuckerman has enough respect to offer counter-arguments. Responding to Douthat’s belief in demons, however, Zuckerman can’t even bring himself to dignify it with any real rejoinder. He positively sputters (and to get the tone I would suggest listening to the audio, not just reading below) with a somewhat affectionate, but also sincere, contempt. He seems to think that the sheer vehemence of his own incredulousness ought to be sufficient to persuade anyone:

“I had a hard time with this one, because I respect Ross tremendously. I read everything he writes, and I was like, what? This dude writes for The New York Times and he thinks there’s demons?… I don’t know how to answer this other than — I’ll just appeal to the general epistemological principle that one ought to have evidence to make such claims. Ross provides none… I don’t know how to say this politely so I’m going to be impolite: To believe in demons is to remain in a permanent state of early adolescent summer camp, tingled by tall tales and spooky stories.”

Now, I’m not here to stand in front of Douthat, who is more than capable of mounting his own defenses (and if you haven’t yet read the book in question, you simply must).

But I would like to offer a few words in defense of Rav Huna.

And here they are: Get a microscope.

COVID. Flu. E. coli. Salmonella. Measles, and may God save us from foolishness. Rav Huna claimed that there are invisible beings all around us, all the time. Some are harmless; some are deadly; but they’re all around you right now. Well, was he wrong? The demons are real! And if, nowadays, we contrive to see them with microscopes, rather than by resorting to the ashes of the placenta of a firstborn female black cat born to a firstborn female black cat, then still, that’s a discrepancy of measurement quality, not existence; who can deny they’re there — a thousand to our left and ten thousand to our right?

Now, I don’t know what Rav Huna, were he resurrected today, would say about my implication that the real demons are the microbes we ingested along the way. Maybe he’d nod along; maybe he’d denounce me as an apikoros (or, let’s face it, an am haaretz; I’m probably not learned enough to be an apikoros).

Meanwhile, I suspect Ross Douthat would not be satisfied with this explanation at all. He wants to say, and I will go on record as believing it possible, that there may also be genuine negative spiritual forces in the world, i.e., the kinds of things to which the word “demons” more traditionally refers.

Still, while holding that out as (theoretically) possible, my claim for now is just that — at minimum — even if “demons” per se don’t exist in any other form, the Sages are simply, inescapably, prima facie correct about the existence of omnipresent invisible things that have the capacity to harm people. And maybe it’s only from sociochronological snobbery that we shrink from calling them demons.¹

III. Was blind, but now I see

“All things are full of gods.”
— Thales of Miletus

“And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely, there is YHWH in this place, and I — I did not know.’”
— Genesis 28:16

The song “Amazing Grace” knew more and better than its composer did.

When John Newton felt himself amazed by grace, his first move was not to leave the slave trade. He stayed, although after his conversion, as the Library of Congress puts it, he “began to ensure that every member of his crew treated their human cargo with gentleness and concern.” (You may count me skeptical at how far this gentleness could have gone, in such vile context.)

Newton left his career captaining slave ships for the church in 1764, trading body-enslaving for soul-saving. He wrote “Amazing Grace” in about 1773. It was not until 15 years later, in 1788, that he first proclaimed a single public word against slavery.

It is possible, I suppose, that by 1773 his thoughts were already turning against slavery. But various sources I’ve read seem to assume that his conversion to abolitionism didn’t happen until shortly before he began speaking out on it, and that “Amazing Grace” was intended as a celebration purely of his earlier religious conversion.

Today, of course, we can’t hear the song in that way. When the first African-American President sang that song at the funeral for the murdered martyrs of Mother Emanuel Church, there was a resonance in that hymn that certainly included Christianity, but also added something more. The aura, if you will, of “Amazing Grace” carries with it something particular about freedom, about the story of abolition, and about the painful but proud history of the people of the African Diaspora.

I want to claim that there is something more to this than reception history and cultural resonance. I am claiming something I can’t prove and don’t care to try. I am claiming: The song knew.

It knew all along. The song knew before Newton knew. The song chose a slave-ship captain, and flowed out from his pen, not because the writer was a genius but simply because the song had a job to do in the world. And if it took the writer 15 years to catch up and catch on to that purpose — it didn’t matter to the song.

Postlude

“I always think there’s a band, kid.”
— Meredith Wilson, “The Music Man”

“all the magic I have known
I’ve had to make myself.”
— Shel Silverstein, “Magic”

“‘You are my witnesses,’ says YHWH, ‘and I am God.’”
— Isaiah 43:12

“Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai taught: ‘IF you are my witnesses, THEN I am God. If you are not my witnesses, then — as if it could be said — I am not God!’”
— Yalkut Shimoni 271.5

We have more control than we like to think over our reality. That’s certainly true of our minds and feelings; it may be true even beyond them. The physical is probably secondary to the mental altogether, rather than the reverse. Logic, math, physics — these are all eminently useful and true things — and they are also things that seem to break down around their edges, to collapse, past a certain point, into absurdities and self-contradiction. They can be trusted to a degree, but not entirely. I don’t think anything nearly so simplistic or mechanistic as “The Secret”/“Law of Attraction” (a.k.a., The Think System?) can possibly be true. Still, I think there may well be subtler or less crassly linear and mercenary ways in which the relationship between the the physical world and the mental world is a feedback loop rather than a one-way channel.

But set that claim aside if you want. The more important point is that the vaunted dichotomy of enchantment vs. enlightenment, or science vs. magic, is more emotional than ontological, more about vibes than empirics.

I have said before that “an atheist is just a grumpy pantheist.” I now say further: One vital mission for religious people in this unmoored era is to fight the surrounding grumpiness with irrepressible joie de vivre — to spread the Good News that enchantment isn’t a claim, it’s a choice. Wonder, like love, is a verb; it isn’t something to hope for that might fall into your lap, it’s something you can nurture by trying, by building, by creating.

Never give in to the lies that would tell you that a miracle explained is no miracle. Never give in to the pernicious claim that stage magic is anything less than true magic, or that love is somehow fake just because it’s tied up with brain chemicals. Never believe that any proof of the soul is needed beyond the existence of music.

How much of the world is like Tinkerbell, brought to life by applause or attention? How literally can we say that not only God’s reputation but even His existence “rests upon the praises of Israel”?

I don’t know. We probably can’t know. I only know that we get to choose how we’re going to walk through this world.

Might as well dance.

1. One might argue that the reason we don’t like to use spiritual words like “demons” to refer to physically explicable phenomena is that we want to signal that physical and scientific rationality/inquiry applies to them. But it seems to me that whatever exists must be amenable, to some degree, to rational inquiry (if not necessarily to satisfactory answers). The idea that some things can be “natural” and others “supernatural,” but both real, makes no sense; if something actually exists, then by definition it’s part of nature. (I wrote a bit more about this in my review of Douthat’s book for Aish.com.)