November 7, 2014

A father and son try to make sparkling wine with a SodaStream. They end up with a wine-colored kitchen. 

Do you believe in miracles? Haftarat Va-yera suggests that you should.

The Haftarah concerns the Prophet Elisha and two miracles he produced. First, Elisha is confronted by widow hounded by creditors who has only a jug of oil and no money to pay them (in case you thought that the Bible does not relate to modernity, think again). Elisha tells her to get vases from her neighbors and fill each vase with oil from the jug. Miraculously, the jug becomes bottomless, the woman can fill several vases, sell them, and pay off the creditors. Second, Elisha saves the son of a woman who had previously shown him hospitality. He had been pronounced dead for several days, but by lying completely upon him, the prophet brings the boy back to life.

What might such things mean to us now? One might say that they really shouldn’t mean anything to us: faith healers might be okay for late-night television and dodgy radio stations, but not for us. Or we could try to squirm out of the problem by indulging in metaphor: the jug of oil story is just an early version of Stone Soup, or a demonstration that people working together can solve problems.

But that may be giving up too easily. Our whole lives constitute a miracle, and I am not speaking metaphorically.

Let’s first ask what we mean by a miracle. At least for present purposes, “>evolutionary biologist David Barash claimed, “No literally supernatural trait has ever been found in human beings.” 

But this is wrong. Science cannot explain the very experience you are having now. It cannot explain consciousness.

You see a sunset. It is beautiful, and stirring. It moves you. But what is the scientific evidence that it has moved you? Science can explain how the images of the sunset hit your optic nerve, and how that nerve connects with your brain, and how your brain processes the electrical impulses. It can even describe how your heart might jump into your mouth. But it cannot tell you how it feels to have that reaction.

The philosopher Roger Scruton, who specializes in aesthetics, observes that music is more than “a sequence of pitched sounds”. He notes that “to hear the music it is not enough to notice the sounds”.  One has to have a subjective, conscious reaction of the sort that materialism has so far been unable to explain. Zombies, who lack consciousness, only hear a sequence of pitched sounds; human beings hear music. That is a massive difference.

And it has massive implications, because just about all the things that make life worth living – love, compassion, awe, beauty, the list goes on – are phenomena of consciousness. In that sense, the very experience of life itself is quite miraculous. I am not playing with words: quite literally, the brute fact of human consciousness violates the materialist natural law that effects can be explained by physical causes.

A skeptic would rightly interject here: “Simply because science currently does not explain consciousness hardly implies that it cannot do so. Give it time.” That is a fair objection: perhaps one day neuroscientists will find the gland or the chemical which, if removed from our brains, will turn us into zombies.

But there are reasons to be skeptical of the skeptic. Even if we could discover the magical gland that gives us consciousness, it is hardly clear that we could understand how it does so because we lack any vocabulary for it: in other words, it might be that while our minds can have consciousness, they cannot conceive of the way to relate a mental phenomenon to a physical one.

In a celebrated essay entitled “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?,” “>As Berkeley’s Alva Noe notes, such claimants “have simply taken a specific family of philosophical assumptions for granted, so much so that their own reliance on them has become all but invisible to themselves.” Science has achieved spectacular success, yet here it seems suspiciously stuck in neutral.

What to do? Jewish tradition points to how to deal with the problem, with perhaps the most fundamental virtue, or middah: humility. In this case, the humility is not personal, but epistemic. We must be conscious of what we do not know — but also recognize that we may never know, because we can never know. Perhaps we will be able to know, and we should certainly try. But perhaps we will not, and we must not assume that we will. If our people’s history tells us anything, it is that confident predictions – either good or bad – turn out to be false. Ethically, we would do well to assume that we will never know. And that, then, means we should accept the miracle of consciousness that we find.

Abraham Joshua Heschel once arrived late to a speaking engagement and to a hushed audience explained, “I just saw a miracle!” The audience waited for explanation and he finally said, “I watched the sun set.” To the people’s quizzical looks he said, “Every sunset is a miracle if we will only open our eyes and minds and spirits to the wonders of it.”

Close, but no cigar. There was a miracle there, but it was not the sunset itself. It was Heschel’s own experience of the sunset.

Ironically, then, the miracles in Haftarat Va-yera understate the miracles in our everyday lives. Elisha may have brought a dead man to life, but we can enjoy the sunset. Let us appreciate and cherish the literal miracle of the human mind.