The Firm Soil of Our Lives

In the volume of Shabbath in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Joshua b. Levi told a story of Moses’ experience on Mt. Sinai (sometime between the day he started his ascent and the fortieth day, when he discovered the Israelites worshipping at the foot of the golden calf). Levi tells us that the ministering angels asked God what a human man could be doing amongst them. The answer, of course, was that he’d come to receive the Torah.

Said they to Him: “That secret treasure, which has been hidden by Thee for nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created, Thou desirest to give to flesh and blood!” After all, Moses is just man, and the Torah is the holiest of texts and traditions. Perhaps we can excuse the indignation at this slight of slights.

After some initial hesitation, Moses answered the angels as he was commanded to do by God. Quoting the Torah and its commandments, he asked the divinities, “Did ye go down to Egypt; were ye enslaved to Pharoah: why then should the Torah be yours?” Further: “Do ye dwell among peoples that engage in idol worship? Do ye then perform work, that ye need to rest? Is there any business dealings among you? Have ye fathers and mothers?”

Inasmuch as there exists any kind of beauty in our civil and legal doctrines, worthy of preservation and adoration, there is the mundane, turning the figurative Greek pillar of institution from white to gray, from round to square. As such, the Torah may be the most blessed of all things to the Jewish people, but a high proportion of its dealings involve the inspirational equivalent of the ethical quandary resulting from the goring of one man’s cow by another man’s ox. To what does the one man owe the other man? What is the just way to proceed? Am I supposed to feel interested in any of this?

Indeed, in rabbinic tradition the heavenly is physical (or vice versa). In law more generally, the articulation of justice is textual. This may all come as a disappointment to those who champion “the right to define one's own concept of existing, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of life” as doctrine. Existing and meaning can actually be a slog, as even those legendary Biblical figures came to find (especially Abraham’s direct descendants, whose joys and conflicts were captured well in a modern television series).

What has been given to us, either as a result of chance or nature, is no less worthy of our time or admiration just because it’s perceived as routine. The proportion of our activities that fall short of the aesthetically sublime or ‘sweetly mysterious’ is too high to conclude otherwise, lest we cast the substance of our lives to sea without anchor. Edmund Burke was said to have worshipped inanimate objects simply because they were real. Again, in law, we should strive to value that which is real in the sense that it is bound by something other than our subjective interpretation, by a thread that’s woven through time and place, linking the “here” and the “there” (or the “now” and the “then”) while stopping as close as we can to the predicament of confusing the two.

It is not just about law and religion, but about all aspects of the conservative life. Michael Oakeshott said, “To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” We encounter the familiar, the fact or the actual like Heidegger encountered his “tree-in-bloom”: face-to-face, on the firm soil of our lives. The heavenly is the physical, the flesh-and-blood, lest we have no use for Torah. What is just is what is out there, contained in form and available to be articulated to human beings who share more than the ability to define their own modes of existence by their own made-up rules.