Ask A Genius 945: Rick Rosner on Israel Jacobson and Reformed Judaism

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/15

Rick Rosner: You had assigned homework for me, which I didn’t complete because I took a nap. You wanted to discuss the role of God in Judaism? It’s not only that, but a specific concept within a particular reform of Judaism.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The idea involves the Hebrew word for Messiah, meaning anointed. In Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, there’s a much more direct interpretation of this. How do you see this in Reform Judaism, if at all? Because I know you’ve mentioned that we don’t always understand what Reform Jews believe, based on my understanding and exposure to Reform Judaism.

Rosner: I don’t see it. I wish it would happen. I have a giant mosaic of Jesus that I’m restoring in my office, so I look at Jesus frequently. Of course, Jesus is someone else’s Messiah, but I wish for his return. Unlike a typical Jesus-like thing, I hope he’ll return and clean the house. He spoke regarding all the people who are degrading life in America and around the world. You don’t have to kill them; just capture them. My idea is to send them to Europa, or whatever the ice moon of Jupiter is called. Drill some ice caves and make them comfortable.

Comfortable under the surface of Europa for the 10,000 biggest jerks on Earth and have a limbo with a capacity 10,000 in caves you’ve dug on the moon. If they get their act together and stop spreading lies and nonsense, they can return to Earth; otherwise, they remain on Europa. If you permanently or semi-permanently removed the 10,000 biggest jerks on Earth and then sent another 10,000 to limbo on the moon, people would behave much more rationally. We wouldn’t have so much support for Trump in America if conservative media weren’t lying most hours of the day. But I expect something else. It’s just a vain hope. I do not believe in the coming of the Messiah.

My beliefs are not entirely unspiritual, but they are heavily science-based. I believe I share this view with most Reform Jews. I also think many more observant Jews, Christians, and Catholics would agree that religion has been overshadowed by our knowledge of the world, by our understanding of the world. You can still be nominally a Catholic or a Muslim but not necessarily believe in the eventual return of a messiah or heaven and hell. I think our understanding of the world is too advanced, and while not complete, it’s full enough to eliminate most people’s belief in religious magic.

Jacobsen: Between 1768 and 1828, Israel Jacobson lived in Germany. He founded Reform Judaism and held services in German rather than Hebrew. What do you think was behind his decision to use German rather than Hebrew when founding Reform Judaism? What was his intention?

Rosner: I was going to ask you. When you read about him, what did it say was behind that decision?

Jacobsen: I would say it was for understandability and accessibility and possibly time commitment. 

Rosner: He wanted a form of Judaism for busy people of the mercantile class because the bourgeois lifestyle takes much time.

Jacobsen: What do you think could have happened in Germany, of all places, in the early 19th century?

Rosner: Germany was the home of the Hanseatic League centuries before, the first European mercantile league. Business people got together to make it easier to do business. I am still determining exactly how the Hansa worked but look at the houses in Amsterdam, where they’ve got those triangular roofs and a window on the top floor with a buttress for a pulley over the window. Those houses were designed for business. You get your goods. You winch them up to storage in your attic. Your store is on the first floor, and you live on the next two or three floors with storage in the attic. Germany and the rest of Europe were probably being built for business. I don’t know because I slept through and then dropped out. My history class covered that period in my first semester of college. There was a partial eclipse during our first midterm, and I fell asleep and flunked the test. But I was business.

Jacobsen: What about the institution of both boys’ and girls’ confirmation to replace the traditional boys’ bar mitzvah ceremony?

Rosner: I don’t know. After my bar mitzvah, I was given the choice to go on and get confirmed. I said no. We lived in Boulder, and our temple was half an hour away in Denver. I hated my Sundays being taken up by Temple School. That would have been another two years, at least, of Temple School. If there had been a chance of me getting a girlfriend in Temple School, I would have stuck with it, but the other kids mostly went to the stuck-up school Cherry Creek High School, perhaps the fanciest public high school in Colorado at the time. And they were jerks to me, and I didn’t want to have anything more to do with them.

Jacobsen: Additionally, Israel Jacobson removed any reference to a personal Messiah to restore Israel as a nation. What do you think of that?

Rosner: That sounds like materialism. I just finished a series of novels set in England that has been at war with Mystical and Lovecraftian forces for decades. These forces were unleashed by computation, mechanical computation as done on computers. According to the premise of these novels, computation weakens the walls between our world and the world of demons. Eventually, these walls are breached, and a demon king is now the prime minister of England in the latest novel. In this world where magic now works, the new conspiracy theorists and deniers are materialists, people who believe only in science. They think all this magic is a giant conspiracy, which was a nice twist. Israel Jacobson lived until 1828, 20 years before Marx published Das Kapital, a significant critique of capitalism. During Jacobson’s life, commerce and capitalism thrived in Germany. By Jacobson’s time, science had already been developing for centuries. Commerce and trade were thriving.

A trilogy by Neal Stephenson, the Baroque Cycle, discusses how science was evolving rapidly from the 1660s into the 1800s. He wrote it as science fiction because, at the time, science was advancing rapidly. Life must have seemed like science fiction. I assume that Reform Judaism aligns with that progress. When you visit town squares in Europe, you see many preserved to look as they did in the 1760s, elaborate, gilded, and covered with sculpture, ringed with guild halls. Commerce was making these towns and cities prosperous. It was science and business driving that prosperity—oh, and coffee. Coffee came to the New World. People, especially in London, were drinking coffee. Newton might have been drinking coffee, hanging out in coffee houses, and discussing new ideas. Much science emerged from the first effective stimulant. Also, tobacco, another stimulant, people were energized.

Jacobsen: What about the lack of requirement for male circumcision?

Rosner: I’m okay with that. If you look at studies, circumcision has religious reasons, but the medical reasons don’t necessarily hold up. It doesn’t make you less susceptible to disease, although if you do have a foreskin, you need to work a little harder to keep it clean. I guess not having one makes it more accessible. So yeah, I’m okay with people choosing whether to get it. I know people who’ve had it done if it caused issues. Some people are born with the head of the penis stuck to the foreskin, making it impossible to retract, which is a problem. If you need surgery to correct that, do it. I know a couple of people who had surgery to address issues with the urethra. But if it’s not causing you a problem, leave it alone. Another reason, which may not be significant, is that I think American women are more accustomed to circumcised penises, based on what is seen in American pornography.

So if you consider that, it might be worth it for parents to think about whether an uncircumcised penis might concern future partners. There’s an argument that removal of the foreskin leads to loss of sensitivity because the head is constantly exposed and being rubbed against everything. In contrast, an uncircumcised penis has the head covered, which might make it more sensitive. But I don’t conform to the religious reasons for circumcision anymore.

Jacobsen: Do you eat pork?

Rosner: I’ll eat pork if it isn’t gross. Pork has fatty parts that I don’t like. I’m not just going to eat a piece of bacon. I’ll find the lean part of it, tear away the rest, and eat just the meat. If pork is greasy, I don’t like it. But for religious reasons, no. I do not like lamb chops. They’re not pork, but they are greasy if not prepared properly. So, no to lamb chops. But a nicely cooked pork chop is delicious meat when it’s lean. My mom’s grandfather was a rabbi, so she didn’t eat pork. But when she went out of town, she had pork and pork chops, which were fine.

Jacobsen: What was your family rabbi’s name?

Rosner: Carmel, I believe. No, there was also Coleman. Carmel is spelled C-A-R-M-E-L. It may have been one of those names given at Ellis Island. Coleman, C-O-L-E-M-A-N might be the same. My mom’s maiden name was Carmel.

Jacobsen: Do you know the meaning of that name?

Rosner: No, although Mountain Carmel is mentioned in the Bible, I’m not sure what happened there.

Jacobsen: Do you pray?

Rosner: I do, not as much as I used to, but yes, I still pray a little.

Jacobsen: In what way?

Rosner: I pray for things to go well for myself, my loved ones, and the world. I pray for us to be safe.

Jacobsen: What do you think is the most frequent form of prayer?

Rosner: It’s just this little abridged thing that I developed. I used to turn in circles and chant to God when I was a very little kid, which resulted in me being sent to a shrink when I was six years old. Many religions have mechanics for prayer. Like the prayer wheel. Who uses the prayer wheel? It seems like a Tibetan thing. What religion do they have in Tibet?

Jacobsen: Maybe the Buddhists have a prayer wheel. 

Rosner: You spin the wheel, and every rotation is equivalent to saying the prayer once, with the idea being to say the prayer as much as possible. Catholics have Rosary beads, which, when you go to confession, you’re told to say 15 Hail Marys and 10 Our Fathers. Prayer is more effective the more times you say it. That was what I thought as a little kid, so I had this little ditto mark in my prayer. It was like saying to God, repeat what I asked you to do and do what I asked you to repeat. This means I had this prayer I’d said at some point, and I was asking God to A, do it and B, repeat the prayer on my behalf. And that’s still my prayer.

Jacobsen: Do you think it works?

Rosner: I’d like it to work, but not so much. I feel like when athletes thank God for their win at the end of a game. Also, I don’t want to bug God with trivial matters. Praying for your team to win is trivial because both teams are praying for that, and now you’ve given God an impossible task, which is to have both teams win. So, it’s not happening. But I want it to. And we must mention Pascal’s wager. Pascal, one of the wisest men of his time, said to turn to God, take God into your heart on your deathbed, or do whatever you need to do to get good with the Christian God because there’s a non-zero chance that Christianity is right. He didn’t think it was, but his reasoning was that. It costs you nothing, and the cost of being wrong is infinite. So get with it; you’ve given up heaven, which is endless pleasure and joy, all because you didn’t take God into your heart right at the end, which is a relatively inexpensive thing to do.

Rosner: What do you think are reasonable counters to that argument?

Jacobsen: One reasonable counter is that there’s no way that God exists. That’s one argument. But he already knew that argument. He said, yeah, well, so what? Even if it’s 99.9999, for that 0.001% chance, take the chance. Another argument is that God will look at your last-minute repentance and say, “Come on.” But there is plenty of Christian doctrine says you can jump in at the end, and it’s just as good as if you’ve been faithful your entire life.

Jacobsen: It depends on which branch of Christianity.

Rosner: But that doesn’t negate the argument because you can get right with various branches of Christianity by simply opening your heart or doing whatever is required.

Jacobsen: If you were to take a Martian view of human religion, which religion seems the most likely?

Rosner: The faith in science will eventually bring us all the rewards religion promises. In that way, I believe in scientism, if that’s even a word, which it is.

Jacobsen: Technology will eventually get us to where we want to go.

Rosner: It will make all our wishes come true. Of course, it will make all our wishes come true, but it will also make many dystopian outcomes come true. I still have faith in finding a life in that strange future. Also, you can’t stop it.

Jacobsen: What do you think will be the religion of the future?

Rosner: There will be plenty of belief in ideas of personhood, self, and transcendence, all rooted in science. Some people may diverge from the science path at various points. To some extent, science will still have many unanswered questions, and people will fill in the blanks. But many stepping-off points and foundations will be science-based. There will be religious decisions to be our natural bodies, unaugmented; for most people, the greatest pleasure you can have is an orgasm. But in the future, we’ll be able to decouple pleasure from sex.

Neal Stephenson’s work depicts a cult of mathematicians who’ve altered their brains so that they get sexual pleasure from mathematical discovery. Changing your brain will be something we can do in the future. There will be moral and religious reasoning, among other types, in what we do with these alterations. There will also be potential for religious-type discussions about how long people choose to live and in what vessel they choose to live. Do they merge their consciousnesses or bud off consciousnesses with other conscious beings? Do people believe in souls, the equal right to existence, and the non-suffering of non-human and artificial consciousnesses?

There will be religious dimensions to these issues. However, the golden rule dimension is more important than the spiritual dimension. Everything ethical boils down to the golden rule. People who feel the need for goodness and order will try to find ethical positions in the world of the future, which you know is based on the golden rule, morality, and faith in goodness. Goodness will win out.

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