This post is dedicated to the elevation of the soul of Dalya Davida bas Yisroel.
I. DOES ANYONE HERE EVEN LISTEN TO NINA SIMONE
“There1 is only one thing worse than being misunderstood: being understood,” Oscar Wilde might say if he lived in 2023. If it were much earlier than 2023, we would not be given a choice. To be understood was once inevitable. Philosophers over the ages have described world systems in which the role of the individual is primarily pre-determined, the world an organism or mechanism in which one functions as a single organ or cog. For the peasant to rule, or the unlearned to marry the daughters of the wealthy of Vilnius, was no more possible than the femur studying the chapters of the Guide for the Perplexed devoted to the secondary or tertiary roles of societal non-elites.
The holy Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism, was sent to Earth primarily, a sociologist might tell you, to kick over the blocks of this hierarchy. He elevated the simple Jew, the misunderstood Jew. The simple peasant boy who crowed at the Yom Kippur service was able to accomplish through sincerity what the learned and righteous could not through conformism. The peasant boy didn’t happen to be misunderstood; he was fundamentally incomprehensible from the outside. The Baal Shem Tov can see from the inside; he is attuned to the soul over superficiality; he knows Jews from within because he is The Jew. As I wrote in “Moshiach is Canceled,” there is something redemptive about our current culture of shame and recrimination. The highest repentance deals with sin per se rather than its mere effects, which means that inexpungeable identitarian impurity is the mark of a society ready for the Future Redemption. The Torah of the Baal Shem Tov, a taste of the Torah of the Future Time, finds unassailable redemption even within the irredeemable. If it is, therefore, impossible to judge another person from without, it would not surprise Maimonides, who writes in halacha that “the weighing [of sins and merits] is carried out only according to the wisdom of the Knowing God.” (Hil. Teshuva 3, 2) If the workaround for this statement has traditionally been the sin of demoting halacha, we cannot judge it.
The history of understanding has been a long, mostly uninterrupted diminution since the Middle Ages, with the recent emergence of assertive radical subjectivity embodying a kind of negative crescendo, a fulminating fusillade of failure to understand, and ultimately, the rejection of the possibility of understanding. Today, the desire not to be understood is not just fashionable; it is a survival trait, one of the best shields in a society that has closed itself off from traditional modes of atonement. The sages of social media have declared, “Become illegible.” To be completely understood on the Internet is often the first step in destroying one’s reputation, livelihood, and sometimes more. When the virtual mob comes for you, the advice goes, they should feel confused. However, like most good practical advice, we would do well to avoid making illegibility our principle. It implies that we wish to shield ourselves while reading others; it’s a tool for a competitive edge, while no one stops to ask whether human beings should or can be read at all. If the self is not a function of the universe but rather vice versa, judging someone’s quality from their effects on the universe would be rather difficult. I am aware that this position is radical. It challenges how we deal with other people in day-to-day life. If the inability to judge others sounds impractical or even the basis of a certain dangerous social and moral looseness, you have found the challenge of all mysticism.
II. HOW MANY MYSTICS DOES IT TAKE TO FILL AN ASYLUM
As discussed previously, mysticism is the belief that the self is the actual reality, and the further one gets from oneself, the less real things become until one gets to physical objects in the external world, which are a mere shadow or metaphor or even illusion, not beginning to approach the reality of the self. The problem with mysticism is what to do with the (apparent) existence of “other selves,” the way those distant, parochial experiences at our interfaces seem to accrue into beings like us in one way or another. A vast amount of mysticism or mystical wisdom is devoted to resolving this problem, which is generally considered tricky. It is so complex that it would almost drive us to seek out alternative paths to mysticism, were there any other paths without even more significant problems, such as “How can any self possibly exist.” Mysticism’s Other Self Problem probably has as many different solutions as there are forms of mysticism, but it usually demands long years of hard work. Understanding the role of other selves is an art, not a science; its non-simple answers are traditionally lived rather than stated.
It should come as no surprise, then, that “others can’t be judged” is as straightforward as “be joyous” or “do what G-d wants, not what you want.” They are each expected; they are each demanded. They are all impossible; they are all one imagines, identical. We should be thankful that we have been given so many facets and angles by which to approach the impossible. However, that gratitude will not solve any day’s practical problems. Some form of discernment toward the external or objective world is desired. If we will one day or in one place or by one person achieve total and profound acceptance, it should not have to be at the expense of truth itself. The Baal Shem Tov did not, one imagines, condone rebellion against G-d nor abrogate the principle of Divine Judgment. The objective world is not something other than Radical Transcendent Subjectivity; the True Self is also True Objectivity, and there is no contradiction. That’s where we’re going with all these posts, even though they will hardly scratch the subject's surface. For a complete treatment, see the entire Torah.
If solving the problem is far beyond our ability, we can at least point to an interesting case study. Sometimes, an individual claims to experience something that cannot be known “from the outside,” for which there is no objective evidence. They would pass lie detector tests. Some claim that if we eventually had real-time full-brain scans, they could ascertain whether someone was actually experiencing or merely thinking they were. I think this is exceptionally optimistic; we are not physical. If they are “wrong,” they are somehow wrong about a subject only they can see.
We call some radically subjective claims hallucinations. The people in the asylum are not (and, at a deeper level, cannot be) the majority, so we stick them in there while we roam free. Indeed, the mentally healthy have a shared objective reality in a way that the mentally unhealthy cannot achieve. I am not denying that objective reality exists. I wouldn’t even deny that objective reality is vital and fundamentally an act of love. I am simply saying that explaining the mystery of how individual private selves can step into that objective externality, share it, and make pragmatic manipulations within it, is an ongoing challenge.
Prophecy, the claim of communication with G-d, is similarly subjective yet more often demands our obedience. It is an exciting collision of objectivity with subjectivity, and even though there is a traditional objective Jewish test for true prophets, it is an exception that proves the rule. Objective standards are nested within subjective decisions. We know a prophet is speaking to G-d because, in addition to their righteousness and adherence in practice and instruction to the prior prophecy of Moses, we repeatedly test their predictions of the future in minute detail. Only someone who speaks to G-d can predict the future because only G-d knows all things from the inside as their Creator. In other words, we accept a radically subjective claim as the objective truth not due to objective insight into finite beings or events but due to personal insight into the Creator. At best, we can think of the Creator as the True Self beyond and somehow uniting objective and subjective. The way these things are united in G-d is unknowable. Therefore, we still cannot tell the would-be prophet what they are experiencing or how real it is. We can only tell them whether it springs from a place of deep enough subjectivity that it is objective truth as well, which we only know because G-d spoke to us. Our standard is based on the historically unique collective experience at Mount Sinai, where G-d spoke to a collective subjectively (more on this in an upcoming post).
It has become common, however, for people to reduce the profound interplay of objectivity and subjectivity at Sinai into a mere objective or external standard. You may have met the naïve (some might say, fundamentalist or literalist) checklist Jews, who believe that the person of G-d (and the person of the Jew) overcomplicate religion and the whole thing is just a system of rules.
It is an irony so rich that its full explication would more than double the length of this post that Judaism is particularly vulnerable to being reduced to a set of rules. After all, the Divine Commandments seem to concern that which can be externally judged, and it’s called the Law (rather than, say, the Poetry) for a reason.
On this view, there are simply those who fit into the Law better, as a fact, and those who fit into it worse, and that’s that. The Law’s constant and eternal springing forth from the mouth of Infinity is relevant only inasmuch as violators will be eternally prosecuted. Any small, sad, quivering soul attempting for some undoubtedly wicked reason to fight against the persistent and objective Most-High Rubric shall be shown their error and futility, and all mercy extended to them will be only by the book. It’s the world of the righteous, and we’re just living in it. In the name of the G-d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you will be understood. This brings us, at last, to the most incredible video in the history of TikTok.
III. CULTURAL APOPHASIS
“One of this person’s many pronouns is ‘God’ because “they” don’t have a gender and are existing and not existing at the same time.”
–@libsoftiktok
(whom I do not follow and who will certainly not agree with everything I’m about to say about Judaism)
As explained above, truly not judging others while maintaining a grip on reality (which includes the objective and the subjective) can be formidable. My first thought upon seeing this video, apart from a sense that something significant was happening, was that if I were close with this person, I would wish I was courageous enough to tell them that this is not healthy or real. Male-to-female or female-to-male dysphoria or transition is one thing; at least the categories rightly or wrongly bear familiar connotations and, we are now overly informed, affect how societies are organized.
Gender proliferation, primarily among the youth, appears to “genderize” seemingly random preferences or personality traits. The question for the individual in the video would be, why even call this a gender if part of it is that you're not gendered? Sure, you could say it's negating being male or female, but let's say I like paintings by Van Gogh. I could say I'm "Van Gogh gendered" in the sense that all I want to say about myself for sure is that I like Van Gogh, and my "gender" doesn't matter; I don't feel attached either way; I only feel connected to these paintings. I can't help but feel this is what someone used to mean by saying, "I like Van Gogh.” All statements of favor are inherently exclusionary, and if one believes in the free volition of the human soul, any such declaration could at least theoretically imply “without any connection to anything else about me.”
So, I’ll say it officially right now: I, yours truly, feel myself to be something like the traditional religious descriptions of G-d. That is, I feel my deepest self to be beyond description. This is not a new or rebellious statement. It is found in texts that rabbis study all day. It is also the theme of this ongoing series of posts. This has nothing to do with gender, except that by saying anything has nothing to do with gender, I am negating some portion of life from the reach of gender per se. And here we reach the precipice, the threshold of something different and frightening. If I am beyond description, then I am incommunicable. If I am incommunicable, and no cultural framework for being radically subjective and incommunicable exists, then until I can produce some defined differentiating trait or form, I can be reduced.
In my Van Gogh example, I wish to say, “I like Van Gogh,” and have the “I” be an indefinable volitional self that is the core of my being. It is not a statement of self-definition; I am not saying I am the same as my favor for Van Gogh. Any such statement has the flavor of paradox; on the contrary, I declare that the “I” beyond any definition is, at this moment, somehow directed toward this green painting of roses. But suppose there is no basis in anyone’s understanding for an “I” that remains undefined even as it freely attaches or detaches. In that case, the sentence cannot be read in any way but self-definition. The “I” becomes an empty placeholder, and the declaration “I like Van Gogh” becomes a request to define “I” as “the one here who likes Van Gogh.” This is untenable. Declaring, “I do not like to be defined as one who likes Van Gogh,” cannot solve the problem either; the “I” is still being defined (usually as a person who is not very rational); the issue is in the very word “I” itself and the way we are able or unable to hear it.
What a culture needs, then, is a form of apophasis. Apophasis in rhetoric means affirming through negation, like “I’m not going to say I hate eating broccoli,” which says just that. Apophasis is also a theological concept, however, known in Latin as the via negativa and in the Holy Tongue as the Derech HaShlila or way of negation. It works like this: G-d is unknowable. Therefore, the “closest” knowledge to G-d is knowing that we do not know. The more we learn about Him, the more we realize that each form of knowledge is only a means to subsequent ignorance. This non-culminating process, this truncated arrow pointing toward but never reaching G-d, this unending asymptotic tendency, is how G-d first enters objective reality and human reason.
The human self, a microcosm of the Divine Self, is also profoundly unknowable but, like the Divine Self, communicates. If we have lost the knack for apophasis, parallel theological and social problems arise. G-d becomes a rationally defined Being who cannot surpass His utterances, the mere First Cause or Creator. G-d and we become trapped and parametrized by each attachment and detachment.
Suppose we lose the knack for apophasis, the ability to stop thinking, to maintain in knowledge the unsurpassable limits of our knowledge. In that case, we begin to believe we know what an “I” really is. If it is real, then it must be definable. If it is not definable, then we are talking about nothing. Then, even when we realize our own “I” is beyond definition, this realization has been rendered utterly incommunicable because we can have no sense of any reality that is “beyond definition.” For a self to participate in society but remain itself, that society needs ways to recognize the limits of communal understanding communally. That’s where gender proliferation comes in. I’m not allowed to tell you anymore that I’m ultimately unknowable. This leaves me an individual who has forfeited in a terrifying game. What I need is for everyone to already know that I’m ultimately unknowable. But they don’t. So I’ll call it a gender, which is one of the only remaining places where people seem to have (not always by choice) let radical subjectivity ride. Of course, under this definition, “gender” is only one name for that area where, usually under some tribal banner, subjectivity has clawed its way back into the culture.
Belief in souls and G-d is on the decline in America. While these claimed views may not necessarily reflect how people live, they indicate what people honestly feel they can claim. Whatever “G-d” means, with whatever baggage, it seems less available to people than in recent decades.
Apophasis of G-d and man has less communal or cultural currency than it did, and this country, which despite simplistic analysis, remains the world’s largest manufacturer of new cultural artifacts, immediately got stranger. Objective reality itself became an object of great struggle. Rebellious opinions are taking over in Silicon Valley, where apophasis is most thoroughly dead. Why are people suddenly so into Astrology and other forms of, at best, pseudo-scientific human categorization? Who hasn’t encountered the anti-vaxxers, or the disorder of the new new world order theorists, or the flat-earthers? And finally, who has not beheld a combative TikToker applying makeup and speaking to their just-named gender identity?
It is interesting to think of these phenomena in terms of the historian Jacques Barzun on “Decadence”:
All this is meant by Decadence is “falling off.” It implies in those who live in such a time no loss or energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
It will be asked, how does the historian know when Decadence sets in? By the confessions of malaise, by the search in all directions for a new faith or faiths…Such causes serve to concentrate the desire for action in a stalled society…The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life.
From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun (2000)
Tell me if this sounds familiar: A civilization in decay would see an explosion of creativity to try to “get around the block,” driven by terrible ennui. Apophasis serves as a pressure valve to cultural forces. It allows the culture to step back from its definitions and declare, “But we are something else.” The narrower that release, the more those energies must be routed elsewhere. The status quo must be escaped. Oh, L-rd, please let me be misunderstood.
IV. EVERYONE CHOOSES, AND THAT’S OK
Do I have anything helpful to suggest, or am I just here to use many big words? I acknowledge your interrogative.
In the status quo’s defense, I think the G-d-gendered individual in the TikTok video needs help. Not all of these developments are healthy. Firstly, that video is not apophasis. It’s what’s left when apophasis is impossible. There is a zero percent chance that this replacement can accomplish what true acceptance of radical subjectivity can. When it fails, it leaves destruction in its wake. And the atheism is the cherry on top. Your author believes in G-d and does not believe in G-d-gender.
However, the way forward cannot be the way back, which is the bald assertion of objectivity. The problem, as with reaction in general, is that we want to return to the objectivity the ancients built without knowing how to support it. We think that objectivity is stable. It is not. As we discussed earlier, the objective was always grounded in the subjective. The encounter at Sinai was always a meeting with Someone. Faith was always the insurer of rationality. Constitutional liberalism always required religion. G-d as the Creator and Lawmaker always needed G-d beyond all knowledge.
Throwing the book of religion or even, heaven help us, a biology textbook at the contemporary irrationalist worse than misses the point. Our shared cultural reality is unstable, running like water, seeking its lowest roots in the personal and subjective. Unable to stably exist as an undefined individual, the self is told, “Here’s the objective truth about who you are, who G-d is.” Even if they accept it and it makes them happy, it’s an invitation onto the deck of a sinking ship. How do I know? Because it’s an invitation. In other words, it’s something they choose to accept. And a volitional reality is not an objective reality. Traditionalists are trying to achieve the result of the inescapable weight of tradition, of ways of thought that once had no alternative, among people who already know alternatives.
The same Barzun in the same book wrote in the 90s that “today nobody has ‘a physics’; there is only one and it automatically taken to be the transcript of reality.” This unity is dying. Even science is revealing itself to be largely opt-in. Institutional inertia, the objective cultural cachet of the group that molds the individual rather than vice versa, is dying even as the collective is at its loudest and most insistent, and the latter is causing the former. People desperate for freedom feel they can opt-out into madness because the status quo is also a form of madness despite superficial similarities to tradition. The reactionary solution is to continue insisting it’s not madness as they become an insular minority like every other insular minority, another voice in the madhouse. The only thing we now cannot choose is that we are choosers. It has come even for the Satmar Chassidim. That path is dead even if it’s still writhing, and it should by now be clear that the more it is insisted upon, the colder and more unmoving it will grow.
We all must do what we have to do. I have to believe in G-d; I’ve made this choice. But the need to be right, clinging to objectivity, is because we’re scared. If we admit that our choices are also choices, we fear it will be chaos. People will get to exist subjectively, and there will be nothing we can do but counter with our own subjectivity. We are scared and angry. There is someone we cannot know and thus cannot even control in principle. We step out into objectivity and search for the comfort of G-d and find nothing there, not even ourselves.
V. TRANSGENDERISM STILL POINTS TO G-D
I once wrote about how transgenderism points to G-d:
Transgenderism is an argument for the existence of the non-material person, dare I say, of the soul. Think about it: A transgendered person is arguing for the ascendancy of how they feel over what they look like and what their DNA says. They are saying, a woman is a person with the soul of a woman, and if the biology says otherwise, the biology can take a hike. “That’s not an argument for a soul,” you may be thinking. “It’s just an argument between their brain and the rest of their bodies.” But that’s simply not true. There is absolutely no reason why the random bits of biological matter that make up the brain ought to have more to say about your gender than, pardon me, the matter that makes up the genitals. If a human is a purely material being, why defer to some matter over other matter? Some random noise arising from the grey matter in the head has no priority over the chromosomes in every cell, and on the contrary — that matter is dangerous for the creature’s fitness and survival, and ought to be ignored from the much clearer and demonstrable traits of the sex organs…G-d was such a powerful idea that the world became religious, but G-d did not want religiosity per se; He wanted to be known everywhere, and there were always people, societies, and ideas who were turned off by religiosity and the religious way of life. And so, a stalemate, with most of the world becoming religious but total victory out of reach.
The only option was to circumvent the dichotomy, to slowly work the dialectic back-and-forth between the religious and non-religious until the lines became blurred and the two sides could intertwine, and that unity itself would be the knowledge of G-d, that religion and antireligion could work on and sharpen each other until the dichotomy breaks and they each give way to their higher grounding.
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, and the apophatic G-d is now the only G-d culturally available. The soul thirsts to express the unknowable, to use objective lies to tell subjective truths, but the only language left for it is pure inviolable subjectivity. Some souls call this "gender" and deny G-d on the same breath because G-d means some great and terrible objectivity. The atheist and the believer both now feel that if G-d exists, He exists factually. If something is to be at least in principle indefinable, it certainly will not be Him. The once overt apophasis attending the belief in the soul has become implicit in the base insistence that everything, even apophasis itself, is a gender. But either way, G-d will out. And He will not be the G-d of the Middle Ages. This, too, is by His design.
Through madmen and prophets, He extended to us the most profound wisdom, more in this year than last year and more in this decade than last decade: people are beyond rules. We are learning this wisdom very, very slowly. It is embarrassing that the reaction of the religious is to be revolted with freaks and outsiders generally and restate the violated essences, hierarchies, and closed little worlds. Religious folk more inclined to modernity also do it on scientific grounds, the science that actively denies their personhood. In the name of order, we try to shelter ourselves, to shut out the Decadence and our terrible ability to choose.
So, my practical advice: The madness will continue until we can let go and accept a G-d beyond objectivity. In its way, transgenderism points not just to G-d but to the Highest beyond all definitions. It may continue to do so until the religiously observant quit refusing to find Him. We are forced by those who make their choice against our more “traditional” choices to recognize that we, too, are making a choice. But this would offer a G-d in whom there can be no simple rational security, a free G-d, a freely choosing G-d, and that means we don’t have Him in our pocket, and that means we don’t really know whether He might not prefer the “atheist’s” struggles over our righteousness, which means that we must turn inward and submit to One Who Is Truly Beyond Us, and sacrifice the long-estranged self that is our own heart to Him on the altar. Such a devotee can speak to anyone because their G-d can be anyone else’s G-d. Their G-d is big enough for any gender, any soul. He hears the cry of the shepherd boy and the shepherd girl and anyone else. We will all learn to make this sacrifice, willingly or unwillingly, before the end.
Thanks to my friends Eliyahu, Max, and Erik for their help in preparing this post.
OK, I'm going to reread this in light of "the way forward cannot be the way back' and over what to (I) have no choice and never did.
My stats clearly say I’ve read 2% of this. (?)
Anyway, I need to say the gender matter is incomprehensible to me, so no comment.
On lost souls like this girl in the video..
They have always been around. The net puts a spotlight on it obviously.
(She could be descended from someone who *washed up on the beach* when I was at Harpur. A veritable ditto of a runaway we took in.)
To me it’s a peek at what the protesters against Cop City are talking about nightly when sit down to spaghetti-os.