THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City March 29, 2015 One week ago this past Tuesday, which was Election Day in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broadcast a desperate appeal to his supporters. The right wing rule is in danger, Netanyahu said. The Arabs are flocking in droves to the polling stations. As it happens, I spent that Tuesday in the Israeli city of Nazareth, the largest city in the north of Israel. It is also known as the Arab capital of Israel, since virtually all of its citizens are Arab Israelis, two-thirds of whom are Muslim and one-third Christian. I went to Nazareth in part to meet with representatives from the Ma ase Center the word Ma ase in Arabic means deeds. The Center, primarily sponsored and to some extent run by Israeli Jews, enables young women in their late teens, most of them Arabs, to volunteer in local schools. Israeli young women of similar age are typically serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. More than 650 Ma ase volunteers currently work in 50 cities across Israel. Over afternoon tea, I met with the director of the organization, along with several volunteers and their mentor. One of the volunteers, an effervescent young woman named Amal, told me her story through a translator. When she finished high school two years ago, she didn t score well enough on college entrance exams to go to an Israeli university, and her father wouldn t let her get a job. Fortunately for her, she found the Ma ase Center and signed up to volunteer in the schools, which her father allowed. As part of Amal s preparation, she and a dozen other new volunteers were assigned to a staff mentor, who meets regularly with them both in a group and as individuals. In these meetings, they speak about the deep divide in Israeli culture between the Jews and Arabs an important conversation, since they sometimes volunteer in Jewish neighborhoods located in nearby villages and towns. They also talk about how to balance the satisfaction they find from playing a role outside the home, either their father s home or their future husband s, within a culture where women typically have no role outside the home. For her part, Amal has made several short-term forays to Lebanon in order to study English, a trip her father has allowed her to make without a male relative because it helps her become a better volunteer. Amal s hope, expressed with a look of eager wistfulness on her face, is that she will eventually be able to attend college in Lebanon and study English literature. Amal s mentor, a Jewish woman named Or Benjamin, told me that Arab and Jewish young people in Israel rarely interact. They live in virtual isolation from each ~ 1 ~
other. Most new Arab volunteers don t know any Jews, and they express fear of entering Jewish towns or neighborhoods. The same is true of Jewish mentors and volunteers: they don t know any Arabs and fear entering Arab neighborhoods. In this sense, the work of Ma ase is genuinely transformative: it enables both Arab and Jewish young women to see each other differently and explore their common humanity, even as it enables young women to see their gender roles differently and explore a place for themselves outside the home. I had traveled to Israel at the invitation of the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University and its more recent offshoot for non-science disciplines, the Minerva Humanities Center. Raef Zrieck, a Harvard-trained legal philosopher who is one of the academic directors of Minerva, explained to me the problem that Cohn Institute and Minerva Center scholars are trying to address. The academic universe, he said, is designed to divide knowledge into ever-smaller domains. As knowledge becomes increasingly specialized, it also becomes increasingly insular, accessible only to specialists. Each discipline thus becomes effectively isolated closed off to other disciplines. Knowledge also becomes increasingly technical focused on getting something done, whether collecting data in order to complete a study, or publishing papers in order to get tenure. Even at its most insular, however, knowledge always develops in response to particular human needs and aspirations, whether to study a disease, get tenure, or track down terrorists. The problem being addressed by Cohn and Minerva scholars is the isolation of knowledge from its larger human context. I took Raef to mean, for example, that to study a knife in isolation is to view it merely as a piece of steel, a collection of molecules, without any consideration of its use by human beings to chop vegetables for dinner or to kill each other in combat. To study genetics in isolation is to view it merely as a protein puzzle, without addressing how the racist wing of the eugenics movement in America fueled its development, which was taken up with genocidal enthusiasm by the Nazis. As we allow knowledge to disappear down the rabbit hole of specialization, we run the risk of allowing it to sabotage our humanity, rather than to serve it. And even if knowledge doesn t turn malicious, it can become irrelevant to the questions we most need to have answered. Put differently, our most pressing question today isn t how molecules make a knife, but rather how the use of knives and other weapons have helped create the world as we know it. And while we can certainly use more knowledge about how cells constitute a human being, we desperately need to know more about how human beings collectively conspire either to create or to destroy a society, or nation, or even a world. It occurs to me that Raef and his colleagues at the Cohn Institute and the Minerva Center want to reclaim the university as a university, a word derived from an ancient Latin term meaning to turn into one. What does everything we know add up to in the face of our common humanity? ~ 2 ~
This challenge extends far beyond our universities. Among other things, modernity has enabled us increasingly to individualize our ways of life, thereby increasing our isolation from each other in the process. At our immediate peril, we desperately need to figure out what it means to be a human community. What separates us from each other? What could make us one? What does it mean to belong to a community, or a people, or a nation? At its best, a university is where scholars both in the natural sciences and in the human sciences study the science of being human. And a religious community is a place where we practice the art of being human. This necessary turn from scientific objectivity to religious practice is where most people start running for cover. Indeed, even as the various departments of Tel Aviv University tend to operate in isolation from each other, the university as a whole tends to operate in isolation from the city and nation that surrounds it. In fact, faculty and students at Tel Aviv University are actively discouraged from addressing issues in contemporary Israeli culture. They simply don t engage the political, social, and especially the theological questions that are wreaking havoc in the Middle East. This may begin to change, at least incrementally, with the effort to establish a new Center for Religions and Interreligious Dialogue at Tel Aviv University, which was a key focus of my visit. This proposed center developed from the conviction that the standard approach to studying religions, known as the comparative study of religion, is wrong. It approaches each religion as if it were its own academic discipline, substantially unrelated to other religions. Here s how the comparative method typically works. After examining each religion in detail, you then compare and contrast them in the usual academic way. One religion s prophet wandered in the desert, for example, while another religion s prophet prayed in the desert, and a third religion s prophet escaped through the desert. Write five pages on the religious significance of desert as a metaphor. And so on: you get the point. Anyone who spends more than 20 minutes in Israel and pays attention realizes that this approach to religion simply won t work. It s not true to how religions developed in the first place, and it s not true to how religion gets practiced today. The alternative is to recognize that religions develop with other religions in mind. Judaism emerged from a struggle against Babylonian religions. Christianity emerged from a struggle against Judaism, as well as against Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions. Islam emerged from a struggle against Arab polytheism, as well as against Christianity and Judaism. To try to understand the Middle East today without diving into these longstanding internecine religious battles would be like trying to tell the story of the United States without ever talking about England, or France, or Spain, or especially the indigenous peoples were here before us. It would be like trying to talk about the violence ~ 3 ~
against women on the globe today without ever mentioning men, which is something many people try to do. I m told that most Europeans today view Jews in Israel as Westerners stuck in a bad neighborhood. To the contrary, as one scholar put it: Islam isn t a problem that has shown up at the door of Western culture uninvited. In fact, what we call the West was bequeathed to us by Arab culture. They got there before we did. The so-called divide between Islam and the West is just as intellectually dishonest, and just as dangerous to humanity, as the so-called divide between the religious and the secular, which assumes that the spiritual domain of religion has nothing to do with the secular domains of politics, economics, and society. In his book titled The View From Nowhere, New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel examines our desire to describe what we call objective reality. The natural place to begin, he says, is with our own position in the world. But the fact that we have one particular position in the world, he explains, means that our picture of objective reality will not comprehend everything. There is no single point of view from which everything that makes an appearance in the world can be fully grasped. For this reason, he says, I do not believe that the point of view from which I see the world is the perspective of reality. Mine is only one of the many points of view from which the world is seen. Nagel goes on to say that there is only one way to conceive of the world as it actually is, which is to conceive of the world as centerless. Understanding the world as centerless, he says, includes everyone who occupies a position in the world, and it includes them on a roughly equal footing even if some of them see the world more clearly than others. He calls this way of understanding objective reality the view from nowhere. A university is where scholars study the science of being human. And a religious community is a place where we practice the art of being human. In both contexts, our goal should be to create a centerless world a world that has been turned into one. For the most part, however, both our instincts and our institutions as Westerners point us in the opposite direction. Using the approach we learned in school, we think we can conquer by dividing. But we can t. There aren t walls high enough or weapons powerful enough to divide each of us from the rest of us and keep us safe. During my time at the Minerva Institute, I spoke with a young scholar named Zahiye, whose research focuses on the interplay of modernity and religion within Islam. She pointed out that Muslims didn t see the end of the Ottoman Empire coming. When it happened, they interpreted the rise of colonialism as the result of religious failure within Islam. She wants to understand why Muslims interpreted their defeat as religious failure from within rather than political and economic oppression from without. She thinks her research may have value for understanding the devastating rise of ISIS and the perplexing appeal of a new caliphate. ~ 4 ~
I asked her how she felt about the Minerva Institute s efforts to build a bridge between Jewish and Muslim scholars, and between the Israelis and the Arabs. She responded, speaking of Minerva, I feel safe here. She went on to say, I don t want to have to discuss all the time that I m a woman, and that I m a Palestinian, and that I m a Muslim and even that I m a mother. Here, I don t have to talk about these things. I m accepted for what I am in ways that I m not in the rest of the university and certainly not outside the university. The world will be turned into one as everyone becomes included on more or less equal footing. It won t happen quickly, and it won t be easy. And it will never happen fully. But when I come face-to-face with young Muslims like Amal and Zahiye, I know that it s possible. ~ 5 ~