The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

by Jonathan Sacks

  The Bible does not deny that there are ultimate meanings in the universe. There are. Human life is sacred, is one of them. But it does not help, so God found. We will always be blind to the truths we do not like, that cramp our style, circumscribe our power or stand in the way of the fulfilment of our desires. So the Bible turns to covenants – the agreements God makes with Noah, then Abraham, then the Israelites at Sinai. These are meanings that have ceased to be mere facts and become instead morally binding commitments. Do not murder, do not rob, do not commit adultery, do not bear false witness. These are part of a total system of meanings, that include the historical memory of liberation from slavery in Egypt, by which a people agreed to bind itself and its descendants, taking on themselves the collective vocation of aspiring to be ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’.

  This is meaning as moral identity, something I acquire by being born into a specific community with a distinctive history, when I recognise a duty of loyalty to a past and responsibility for a future by living faith and handing it on to those who come after me. It is what Edmund Burke thought society was: ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. It is not meaning discovered or meaning invented, but meaning collectively made and renewed in the conscious presence of God – that is to say, an authority beyond ourselves and our merely human devices and desires.

  If that is what meaning is, then it is not lost in a postmodern, anti-traditional, aggressively secular age. It is never lost, because it can always be remade whenever a group of people decide to make or renew a covenant with God, as did the Jews in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, or as did the Puritans aboard the Arabella in 1630 on their way to the New World, there to build ‘a city upon a hill’. The very idea of covenant means that certain types of meaning can always be renewed, because they are not ‘out there’ as fate, nor ‘in here’ as fiction. They may lie dormant, like seeds frozen into inactivity by cold or drought, but ready to burst into life with the sun and the rain. Covenants can be renewed, which is why I could not agree with Bernard Williams, because although he was the most rigorous and subtle thinker I ever met, he did not seem to have come across the concept of covenant as it exists in Judaism – one of those elements that was lost when it was translated into Greek.

  So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.

  By the stories we tell: When I take part in a seder service on Passover, telling the story of the book of Exodus, I am not engaged in a cultural act like watching a film or reading a book about it. I am enacting it, making it part of me. On Passover the Exodus ceases to be mere history and becomes memory: not something that happened somewhere else to someone else long ago, but something that is happening to me, here, now. It defines me as part of that story, linking me to a community of others in different places and times. It changes me, for I now know what it feels and tastes like to be oppressed, and I can no longer walk by when others are oppressed. People who have lived the seder service are different for having done so, and the world is different because of them. It is why there were so many Jews (Joe Slovo, Albie Sachs, Joel Joffe, Helen Suzman, Nadine Gordimer and others) in the fight against apartheid, and why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Martin Luther King.

  By the rituals we perform: The American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport (1926–97) understood more than most that ritual is an act of meaning-making. Societies, like nature, suffer from entropy, a breakdown of order over time. Religion is the great counter-entropic force that prevents the decay or disintegration of order by performative acts that renew the collective order of the group. A ritual is an enactment of meaning. That is what makes a house of worship not a theatre, and a congregation something other than an audience. A congregation participates in a ritual; an audience merely watches and listens. A congregation lives the reality encoded by the ritual; an audience merely suspends its disbelief while the play is going on, knowing that what it is seeing is a fiction. A ritual is an act in the world; a drama is not, it is a mere imitation of one. Rappaport calls ritual ‘the primary social act’, because it makes meanings.15

  By the prayers we say: Prayer is a way of seeing, not unlike the account Iris Murdoch gives of the aesthetic sense:

  I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful frame of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment, everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to the thinking of the other matter it seems less important.16

  She calls this ‘unselfing’, and sees as it essential to the moral life. This is what happens, or ought to happen, when we pray. The relentless first-person singular, the ‘I’, falls silent and we become aware that we are not the centre of the universe. There is a reality outside. That is a moment of transformation. We hear the universe singing a song to its Creator. We join our ancestors as they sang psalms in the Temple, or lifted their voices in thanksgiving as they passed through the divided waters of the Red Sea. For a moment we still the clamour of desire and experience instead:

  that serene and blessed mood,

  In which the affections gently lead us on,

  Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,

  And even the motion of our human blood

  Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

  In body, and become a living soul:

  While with an eye made quiet by the power

  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

  We see into the life of things.17

  Religion is a sustained process of using the deep power of joy to see into the life of things. No Jew, knowing history, can be a naive optimist. Like Tolstoy and Camus, we have stared into the abyss. Jews are not strangers to the valley of the shadow of death. But people like Max Ostro and my father never gave up hope, because they never conceded the loss of meaning.

  The Greeks thought of knowledge as a kind of seeing. And modern science tells us that we can no longer see meaning when we look at nature. On this, the atheists are right. Galaxies are born. Stars explode. Planets form. Species emerge, spread and become extinct. There is nothing meaningful about this whatsoever, so long as we stay in the world of subject and object, seeing and testing, theorising and experimenting, the left-brain world that takes things apart to see how they work.

  But meaning-as-covenant never was seen; it is heard as the voice of God. It is not found, but made. It belongs to the intersubjective world of persons in relation to one another. Meanings are socially constructed. They exist in the form of words, stories, constitutive narratives. They belong to the shared life of communities. They involve a living connection to a past to which we feel ourselves to belong, and a future for which we hold ourselves responsible. They are always particular – to this group, that nation, this faith, that tradition. Science may be universal. Meaning never is. Sacred meanings are those we make when we covenant with God, listening to his voice, heeding his call. Because one of the covenant partners is God, sacred covenants never die, because God never abandons humanity however much humanity abandons him.

  People who are not religious, and even some who are, often do not fully understand this. They think faith is about seeing meaning on the surface of things, as if God’s existence or his presence or involvement in history should be obvious, and if it is not, it does not exist. The Bible tells a completely different story. Even when plague after plague strikes Egypt, Pharaoh still does
not believe. Every miracle, says Maimonides, can be doubted. When, in the first century, the Israelites lost their Temple, their holy city and their land, there was nothing left to proclaim the presence of God in their midst except what the rabbis call a bat kol, an echo. Jews have long known precisely what Isaiah meant when he said, ‘Truly, You are a God who hides himself.’

  Faith, Abrahamic faith, is about God and human beings making meaning in covenant together. Giambattista Vico, that strange genius of the late seventeenth century, was the first in the modern age to understand this when he distinguished between the two kinds of truth: the partial truth we discover through science, and verum-factum, the moral truth we make through human, especially religious, action.18

  Happiness has proved elusive in the contemporary world.19 By any conceivable measure of the good life, we are better off than any previous generation since the birth of time. We are more affluent. We have more choices. We can travel farther and more easily. We have more access to education and information. Our health is better. We live longer. We keep ourselves fit. We have leisure. We are freer. There are fewer constraints on our lifestyles. We are living, compared to any previous generation, as close to paradise as people have ever lived.

  Yet by indexes of self-reported life satisfaction, we are no happier than people were two generations ago. In some respects our lack of happiness is palpable. We take more anti-depressants. People suffer from more stress-related syndromes. They are less optimistic than they used to be. They no longer think their children will have better lives than they did. There has been a palpable breakdown of trust. These facts are all well known. They are among the clichés of our time. But it is still worth asking why things have gone wrong.

  Some attribute it to our consumerist culture. Economic growth, even economic stability, depends on continuing consumption, but there are just so many televisions, cars, smart phones and watches we can have at any given moment. To keep demand flowing, we have to be made dissatisfied with what we have and desirous for what we do not yet have. But within days of a new acquisition, the epiphany fades, and the hidden and not so hidden persuaders are telling us that there is something else we do not have, or if we do, then we need the new model or the upgrade. It is hard work, this ‘hedonic treadmill’. Wordsworth said so more than two centuries ago:

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.20

  Tony Judt spoke for many when, at the beginning of Ill Fares the Land, the book he published shortly before his death in 2010, he wrote, ‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today.’ He continued, ‘For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.’21

  Consumerism has self-defeat written all over it, because of the nature of positional goods. Positional goods are ones whose goodness depends on their scarcity. An attractive house is a good; the most attractive house in town is a positional good. The more our basic needs and desires are satisfied, the more we turn to positional goods, and there are never enough of these to go round, however affluent a society is.

  The same is true generally about wealth and poverty. Most people in the West tend to rate their wellbeing not on an absolute scale, but relative to others. Given the choice between earning $50,000 a year in a society where the average wage is $30,000, or earning $100,000 a year in a society in which the average wage is $200,000, most prefer the former. This is symptomatic of the force driving consumerism, namely envy, whose strange logic consists of letting someone else’s happiness spoil mine. Envy is the art of counting other people’s blessings. The fastest route to happiness is precisely the opposite: not thinking of what others have and we do not, but instead thanking God for what we do have, and sharing some of that with others.

  Happiness is a state of being, not having, and still today, as it always did, it depends on strong and stable personal relationships and a sense of meaning and purpose in life.

  As we saw in the last chapter, relationships are more fragile than they were. Marriage is in disarray. In its place have come serial relationships with no formal act of commitment. They last on average just two years.22 The same applies to work. The expectation of a job for life has disappeared. Work colleagues are no longer expected to become lifelong friends, but rather temporary associates. All our relationships have become provisional. That means that we invest less emotion in them, and they give us less emotional satisfaction in return.

  In general there has been a substitution of mediated relationships – through mobile phones, social networking sites, virtual reality, chat rooms, Second Life and the like – instead of face-to-face encounters. But it is only in face-to-face encounters that we engage in empathic relationship, much of which has to do with personal presence, body language, facial gestures, touching and so on. Second Life is not real life. Virtual communities are not real communities. You can substitute electronic objects like e-books for their physical counterparts, but you cannot substitute e-people for living, breathing family and friends.

  Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to carry on.’

  The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’23

  It was this insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’ does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters.

  I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. (Ecclesiastes 2:4–8)

  Nowhere else in the Bible is the first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’24

  Happiness in the Bible is not something we find in self-gratification.

  Hence the significance of the word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot experience alone. Simchah is joy shared.

  So I come back to Max Ostro and my late father and the religious people – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and others – I have come to know. They had not necessarily undergone the kind of deep soul-searching in which Tolstoy and Camus engaged, but instinctively, it seems to me, they knew that Tolstoy’s life made sense in a way that Camus’s did not, admirable though it may have been in its relentless refusal to be consoled. They told stories and practised rituals and prayed and thus made real the things worth making real: love and loyalty and mar
riage and parenthood and membership in a community and doing acts of kindness to others. They created oases of meaning in the wilderness, places where others could rest and find shade and shelter, friendship, help and hope.

  And though such simple things have always had their cultured despisers, the truly great minds, even those who did not believe, recognised the connection between faith and meaning. Here is Albert Einstein: ‘To know an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” means to be religious.’25 And here, Sigmund Freud: ‘The idea of life having a meaning stands or falls with the religious system.’26 And here, Wittgenstein: ‘To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.’27 And lastly, Nietzsche, who said of a purely ‘scientific’ interpretation of life that it would understand ‘nothing, really nothing, of what is “music” in it’.28

  I have argued in these five chapters what we stand to lose if we lose faith: the dignity and sanctity of life, the politics of covenant and hope, the morality of personal responsibility, marriage as a sacred bond, and, in this chapter, the meaningfulness of life. Faith is not magical. It reveals meanings because we work at making them real in our lives and in the communities we build.

  It makes a difference. It made a difference to Max Ostro, to my late father, and to all those who follow Abraham and Sarah, the first to hear meaning as a call, the idea Viktor Frankl defined as ‘man’s search for meaning’. To those who live by faith, it sustains relationships even when they are fraying everywhere else. It gives us a sense of continuity even in an age of destabilising change.

  I believe in a personal God, because religion in the Abrahamic tradition is the consecration of the personal. It lives in interpersonal relationships: in love and revelation and vulnerability and trust, all those things in which we put our faith when we commit ourselves to one another in a covenantal bond of loyalty and mutuality. Love is what redeems us from the prison cell of the self and all the sickness to which the narcissistic self is prone – from empty pride to deep depression to a sense of nihilism and the abyss.