(no subject)
Feb. 15th, 2012 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAlso, I finished Tom McCarthy's Remainder yesterday and... I'm frustrated with myself for not expecting the book to go where it did, and frustrated with myself for being somewhat disappointed with where it did go. It is a magnificent, beautiful monument of a novel and the ending is spectacular, but it was not a Jewish ending. (It was not an un-Biblical ending. It was not a Christian ending. I don't want you to misconstrue "not a Jewish ending" as "failing to incorporate Jewish perspectives" as I often use that phrase with great rage. I did not rage after finishing the book)
Instead, what we had was a novel about the act of Creation that concludes with a moment of ecstatic worship to the concept of entropy. It's a profoundly Modern moment, but not exactly a wrongheaded or flawed one. In many ways it's the obvious direction for the novel to go, not quite religious but certainly an interesting approximation of it. That's why I'm frustrated with myself for not expecting it. I did sense it coming. As the Creation narrative built, I could sense but not exactly put my finger on the places where it wasn't going according to plan. I knew he wasn't just parroting Genesis but altering its structure in deep ways. But it still took me by surprise, even though I should have known better.
I think I usually place my Jewish faith as a layer on top of my understanding of entropic development, so that I am not confronted directly with the idea of Entropic Heat Death. I speak frequently in religious contexts of the idea that Creation created a little bubble of space where entropy is being resisted. (It seems connected to tzimtzum for me, though I do not profess to be a Kabbalist). Finding faith immediately in entropic decay is a bridge too far for me. It made me very, very uncomfortable.
Instead, what we had was a novel about the act of Creation that concludes with a moment of ecstatic worship to the concept of entropy. It's a profoundly Modern moment, but not exactly a wrongheaded or flawed one. In many ways it's the obvious direction for the novel to go, not quite religious but certainly an interesting approximation of it. That's why I'm frustrated with myself for not expecting it. I did sense it coming. As the Creation narrative built, I could sense but not exactly put my finger on the places where it wasn't going according to plan. I knew he wasn't just parroting Genesis but altering its structure in deep ways. But it still took me by surprise, even though I should have known better.
I think I usually place my Jewish faith as a layer on top of my understanding of entropic development, so that I am not confronted directly with the idea of Entropic Heat Death. I speak frequently in religious contexts of the idea that Creation created a little bubble of space where entropy is being resisted. (It seems connected to tzimtzum for me, though I do not profess to be a Kabbalist). Finding faith immediately in entropic decay is a bridge too far for me. It made me very, very uncomfortable.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 01:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 01:25 am (UTC)(Though I'm unsure which angle you're coming at it from. If you know the science stuff but not the religious stuff, I have different recommendations than if you know the religious stuff but not the science stuff.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 02:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 10:27 pm (UTC)Maimonides has undergone cycles of respect and disrespect in the Jewish world, for example. The difficulties with his work are numerous- he occasionally seems to say heretical things, which is why his work was banned in parts of the Jewish world for centuries. He himself laid out the law that it's against Halacha to live in Egypt, while at the time he wrote it he lived in Egypt. And relevant to this point, he appears in some of his writings to be an Aristotelian. In certain passages in Moreh Nevuchin, ("The Guide for the Perplexed") he argues against understanding Genesis literally in favor of Greek ideas about creation we now know are equally erroneous.
Lawrence Schiffman, the noted Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and current provost at Yeshiva University, argued in a memorable lecture I attended that Maimonides wasn't saying that Aristotle was right. He was saying that Aristotle's approach was right- that Jews should learn about the natural world using empiricism and rationalism. Whatever science's latest and most convincing explanation of how the universe works is how Jews should believe, at the moment, is how God created the world.
Dr. Schiffman then went on to say that Maimonides is no help when it comes to entropic heat death. :P The overall thrust of his lecture was that Jews worrying about how the Big Bang Theory contradicts the Biblical account of creation are wasting time that they should be spending worrying how a compassionate God could create an entropic universe.
I don't know the answer. Part of my personal answer of the moment is that the human ability to organize information locally resists the direction of entropy, and that is an amazing and beautiful thing. And the promise of an Olam Haba, a World to Come after the End of Days, is essential as well to my Judaism. And a third part is that allusion to tzimtzum, which seems relevant even though I'm no Kabbalist and don't understand it. It's important to me to believe that God gave us hidden knowledge we're unable to comprehend about how the universe works.