Rav Chaim Lifshitz

ESCAPING THE SYSTEM

A factor that is common to a group of people, meaning that this factor collects them and groups them according to like characteristics, and classifies them into like categories, is also the same factor that divides them and separates them according to the differences that separate one group from another.

This division into categories does not relate to human qualities, but rather to a quantitative mechanism that belongs to a systematic view of creation. In this view, the created universe is built of a system of components within a larger system comprised of mechanical laws that operate and activate the created universe. There is no doubt that the human race as well is a part of this system. It is no exception to, and it does not deviate from the system.

As a system in himself, the individual human being is subject to, and subjugated by mechanical laws. Thus heredity is a system that determines individual tendencies of physical behavior, of diseases, of capabilities that operate and activate the physical system and its physical movements. This includes speed and efficiency of the muscular system, level of sensitivity in reaction time and in overall coordination, and even the capacity for absorption of data, for memory, and for all mental activity, which too belong to a mechanical system that has been extensively investigated by Piaget and his fellow students of cognitive development, among whom I was included, having had the privilege of being involved with Piaget, and knowing the great scientist at close hand.

During one of the seminars, in which we were given the opportunity to discuss directly with Piaget any issues relating to the activity of intelligence, I posed a question that left the master speechless: According to Piagetian theory, cognition reaches maturity during the middle of adolescence, at approximately age 14-15, the age at which the adolescent is capable of activating abstract thought and operating at the abstract level of cognition. To my question, what happens after this age, Piaget replied that there is no new level of cognition, but only mechanical/quantitative improvement, such as increased speed of absorption and discharge, and improved proficiency in activating the cognitive process.

What of the quality of cognition, I persisted. What do you mean by the quality of cognition, Piaget inquired. I mean by it originality, creativity, intuition, creative imagination, discerning subtleties, in short all qualitative activity that bursts the technical confines of one's own accumulated personal experience. I mean the writer who is capable of creating new situations that do not derive from his own personal or collective experience. I mean the creative artist who sees ahead of his time, to the point of prophesying future processes of human behavior that could in no way have been predicted, as well as their repercussions, fraught with social and political implications. I mean the literary artist whose probing insight into psychological conditions is so profound that no psychologist would have been able to comprehend or predict them through the scientific tools at his disposal. Thus Flaubert, in his Madame Bovary was able to understand the complex and intricate workings of a woman's heart despite his total lack of experience with women and despite the rare level of disinterest in the feminine sex that characterized this great artist. Thus Mozart was able to produce musical creations of a perfection that knows no equal, with no correcting or rewriting or other creative struggling, directly from his brain to the musical notes on the page, as though the music had been preserved on a tape inserted into his brain by an invisible hand. Thus a literary artist such as Dostoyevsky - a name pulled at random from a long list of such names - was able to delve into the subtleties of the human mind so deeply as to provide inspiration for the likes of Nietsche and Freud, who came after him. Dostoyevsky did not merely provide inspiration and influence for the science of psychology that became the established, accepted source of rules, criteria, and applications in the field of mental health in the twentieth century. Dostoyevsky laid the actual foundations of modern psychological theory. This remark is not intended to express an opinion about the quality or validity of this theory, for this is a highly controversial issue still unresolved to this day.

Yet no one contests the fact that a qualitative intelligence exists that is not a corollary of, and has no connection with the mechanism of cognition. Surprisingly enough, I do not mean to attribute any human quality to these geniuses, despite their impressive achievements. The fact that the quality of a work is unable to testify to the quality of human character in the great artist proves the absence of any such connection. Too often, their human perfection was in reverse correlation to the artistic perfection and quality of their work.

Continuing in the direction of my historical question to Piaget, let us sharpen our inquiry even further: Moral behavior, perfection of character, courage, bravery, insight, common sense Ð to which system among those systems fixed into natural law can one relate them? To what extent can one view them as personal achievements, rather than as the product of the achievement of some mechanical system? Does there really exist - if at all - any quality that is not connected to a predetermined system? And if no such quality exists in systemic reality, what shall be the fate of free choice? Is the entire issue of free choice not perhaps an illusion, a sweet fantasy? Does freedom exist? Personal responsibility? Can there be any justification to reward and punishment? To judging behavior? To demanding that the individual distinguish good from evil? Might such a demand not be a cruel mockery, if one is faced with behavior that is the inevitable outcome of mechanical systems operated by predetermined rules?

This is the reason that the Torah devotes so much attention to guiding subtle distinctions between minute particulars. The Torah addresses the smallest details of the human tendency toward a systematic attitude. It drives in stakes and erects barriers intended to stall the inexorable and irresistible pull, by which a human being is drawn unresistingly into an automatic merging and succumbing to systemic factors. Human behavior constitutes an inseparable aspect of the systemic factor, and this gravitational pull penetrates to the very fabric of human existence, both internally and externally.

On the basis of this understanding, one can comprehend the Torah's addressing Ð by way of the positive and negative mitzvos Ð behaviors that seem to have nothing to do with values. These are commandments that do not deal with ideals but rather with the smallest of small change, to the point of what appears to be pettiness and a digging in the garbage of existence. Laws for using the bathroom, for example, take up a number of pages in the Maseches Brochos. What has spirituality to do with leprosy? With the biological cycle of women? Of men? Why does the Torah make such a to-do over eating, with laws of kashrus that enter the most picayune of minute details, all of a purely technical character? To what point this tendency to connect tedious technical preoccupations with the world of values, of concepts, of symbols expressing abstract ideas? What spiritual tidings are borne by the laws of kashrus and prohibited foods?

To be continuedÉ