On Pluralism, Axioms, and Consilience
It's been a while since I've done one of these, but I think it's time for an update, given some of the conversations I've heard lately.
On Pluralism:
One of the things to love about Judaism is its pluralistic nature: the idea that there is more than one explanation for every aspect of Torah, and more than one valid path in advodas hashem. From chassidic to litvish, from ashkenazi to sefardi, to mizrachi, to teimani… we have so many different beautiful traditions and customs. I mean, the shul I daven at has more diversity of jews in a 30-man minyan than the diversity among the 2400 families of the place of worship I grew up attending.
But it is easy to mistake those realities of “pluralism” for “boundariless redefinition”.
Judaism, as a collection of traditions, is defined as a covenantal chain of obligation in which the nullification of the covenant or its obligations results in the loss of the “name” assigned to it. Thus, not everything “based on Torah” is coherently definable as “Judaism”, and an expression of faith or theology that deviates past a series of non-negotiable guardrails may be practiced by Jews, but it isn’t “Judaism”. While Maimonides (Rambam) specifies 13 Principles of Faith, I intend only to discuss 3 of the guardrails here:
The absolute unity of Hashem: This — the idea of אין עוד מלבדו — is absolute. Any theological premise that believes that G-d is not singular, omnipresent, and omnipotent is not Judaism. This includes any form of polytheism, the catholic belief in the trinity, or even the belief in any individual human being as a divine figure (if this assertion makes you feel uncomfortable, you have teshuva to do!). This includes any attribution of corporeality to Hashem, as well as physicalizing/anthropomorphizing (beyond the level of abstraction) divine attributes. Viewing “The Hand of G-d” as a physical hand that exists somewhere rather than an abstract idea modeling for finite intellects the mechanics through which Hashem interacts with his finite creations — this also crosses this line.
The Eternal Binding Nature of the Torah: This is another fundamental, non-negotiable tenet of Judaism. The Torah, in any era and any time, is binding. Mitzvos you can do in the physical world, you must do, and even if there are ones you cannot do in the physical world at this time (i.e., the service associated with the Temple in Jerusalem) are still obligatory, and if they were ever able to be enabled, we would be immediately obligated to fulfill them. Most valid traditions even hold that there are spiritual ways to fulfill even the mitzvos we can’t fulfill physically, with the Talmud explicitly stating that we can fulfill the mitzvos of the temple service by studying their laws. Any religious movement that holds that the Torah is not collectively obligatory in all of its details and believes that “it’s not relevant in its entirety today”, or “because we can’t do everything, we can pick and choose what to do and what not to do” is not a practice of Judaism. It’s another religion based loosely on Judaism.
The immutability of the Written Torah and the Reality of the Oral Torah: The Written Torah does not change, get replaced, supplanted, or displaced. It is eternal as a text, but it doesn’t have to be taken literally in every detail. We received – along with it – a rich tradition to be passed down orally, including explanations for how to practically fulfill all the mitzvos, as well as rules of exegesis – structured systems for extrapolating and interpreting meaning from scripture. Of these rules, some function like a mathematical function or a command in a programming language, logic that “if it isn’t unassailable by any logical challenge, we ourselves admit that it cannot truly stand”. Some are more informal – more midrashic or kabbalistic –, creating guidelines for metaphysical abstraction that respect the formal boundaries, but allow us to adapt our worldview to account for new information (science!) and to process the reality around us in our limited, human vessels. Any movement that denies the validity of the oral tradition is likewise not Judaism. Not “literalist Judaism”, not “Karaite Judaism”, not “Sadduccee Judaism” — Literalism, Karaitism, or Sadduceeism.
A person who practices these deviations may very well be Jewish according to Jewish law, and if they are, I have no intention of undermining that: A person can be halachically a Jew, but still practicing Christianity, Islam, or some other faith. But to say that they are practicing “Judaism” would be definitionally incorrect, as they’ve bypassed the very structural boundaries which “make Judaism Judaism”.
On Axioms:
In a recent debate I was a part of, an assertion was made that Torah Judaism relies on a circle of authority, in which the Rabbis assert the truth of the Oral Tradition as proof that someone who denies the Oral Tradition is wrong, but the justification for their argument that their interlocutor is wrong is itself part of the oral tradition, something their interlocutor explicitly rejects. Thus, in theory, it would be impossible to justify it to someone outside the system, and it is therefore flawed.
The assertion that circularity presents a flaw is incorrect. Circularity isn’t a flaw; it’s a feature. In fact, it’s a feature in every dimension of stable human inquiry. Every dimension of human exploration, in every discipline, in every field, relies on axioms. These are ideas or statements we assume to be true and base every subsequent assertion upon them. The scientific method assumes empiricism, repeatability, and falsifiability. But how do we justify those? We use epistemology, which isn’t even a science, per se, but a meta-philosophy that studies the nature of human knowledge, how it is held, justified, and transmitted… And epistemology is itself human knowledge, which means that it’s subject to its own recursive constraints.
Why does a certain method work?
Because it hasn’t been proven wrong yet.
Because we assume that the axioms upon which the method is built are solid.
Inductive reasoning only works if you assume that future experiments will align with past observations, which in and of itself is a circular axiom: we assume that the future will reflect the past because we have observed it to be true.
History and archaeology rely on the assumption that humans in the distant past behaved in ways that were comprehensible to modern humans. Without first-person testimony from an ancient human time-traveler, any conclusions we draw from unearthing artifacts at archaeological digs rely entirely on this premise; without it, history becomes an incoherent mess. Carbon dating? It relies on the assumption isotopes decay at consistent rates, but our capability to observe and interpret the decay of nuclear isotopes is limited to the past 150 years (if I’m being REALLY generous), which means that even carbon dating relies on an axiom that differing environmental conditions or interactions with solar radiation (or atmospheric content) thousands of years ago would have no effect on the consistency we’ve observed in our relatively small slice of time.
The Axiom some faiths revolve around is that their “guy” is right or divine. The axiom that literalists revolve around is that the individual observer is the arbiter of the text's meaning and can interpret it based on their own literal understanding.
That's not structure, that's anarchy.
What happens when an axiom breaks down? Language and communication rely on the axiom that we maintain shared definitions for words —that assumption itself is an axiom. The second we start arguing over definitions, language itself becomes brittle. The epistemic fracture of our modern reality, where politicians weaponize language and partisans of different political alignments can’t agree on “what is true” and “what isn’t,” is the direct result of an axiom failing.
So, how can we stress-test an axiom (like ours, regarding The Oral Tradition) to know that it’s true?
On Consilience: Axioms cannot, by definition, be proven within their own system. But there is a valid way to stress-test the Axiom to determine whether it can be part of the ultimate truth. To do that, you need consilience.
Consilience is the place where knowledge comes alive; the philosophy that holds that all knowledge is part of one unified whole and all knowledge points to the same core, regardless of one’s starting point. Consilience says that if contradictions appear in the pursuit of Truth, looking even deeper will help us resolve them. Consilience complements Epistemology — where one teaches analysis of one’s own knowledge, the other teaches how to draw connections — spinning a great, living web of ideas where every piece of knowledge and every fact plays its own part in a stunning ecology that enlivens thinkers and turns them into visionaries. In true Consilience, psychology can justify thermodynamics, and theology can even justify biology — faith demands the pursuit of science, and scientific discovery deepens the pursuit of faith. This is the driving force behind the genius of Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci, who saw the pursuit of knowledge in science, art, language, and history (and more!) as a quest for the divine footprint in the physical world. Newton and da Vinci did not silo the vast sea of knowledge into isolated tanks, and saw the world through an illuminated lens — one where the puzzle lacked none of its pieces and the grand tapestry was missing none of its threads.
In order to stress test an axiomatic system, one must do so by using the collective sum of physical reality. If a structure of faith and belief contains sufficient abstraction and reconciliatory elasticity to illuminate the physical reality with meaning – or even just to avoid hypocritical contradictions – without sacrificing its core tenets or introducing intellectual inconsistency, it is a worthy thread of the grand tapestry.
It is here where 2 primary failure modes of most religious systems emerge:
Presented with a scientific assertion contradictory to their belief system (I.e. Scientific research implying that the world is 13.8 billion years old, when they are a biblical literalist and therefore hold that the world must only have been created in 6 days, 6000 years ago, and the Human Scale is the only acceptable frame of time), an incomplete system with inadequate Axioms will either 1) reject the scientific assertion wholesale, building an artificial wall against it, claiming that it has no grounds in reality. “I can tolerate all truth except this truth”... Or it will 2) quietly abandon parts of its core belief to accommodate the new information (I.e. We can read and interpret every part of the text literally except this part. Oh, and this part too.)
But if the axiomatic belief system is healthy, it will include a natural capability to flex and accommodate. It will contain structure for abstraction, mysticism, and boundless ways to elastically reconcile contradictions. Contradiction does not become a limit requiring ontological compromise, but a driving force for exploration, where each new contradiction forces you into a yet-deeper level of understanding.
And in the end, what you arrive at is truly sublime: No less than the total unity of all knowledge – including your own beliefs along with all the secular disciplines and the truths they point to. And if all knowledge is unified, so must be its creator.
