The God of the DMV
I’m reposting some of my work that was previously posted in other forums in order to gather it all in one place. This essay was originally posted on my “The Second Son” blogspot blog, January 16, 2010 under the title “Mechanistic Metaphysics.”
I’ve added some commentary to the post. Each comment is a sentence or two enclosed in brackets.
I went to a shiur tonight where the speaker discussed differing minhagim various communities have, particularly differing nusachs for davening. [I didn’t normally go to shiurim. I was told that it would be about Yekkish minhagim, and as someone whose family came from Germany, I was interested. It turned out I was misinformed.] He said that it is brought down in kaballah that there are twelve windows through which prayers travel into heaven, corresponding to each of the twelve shevatim. [Daveing as we know it didn’t exist until the end of the bayis sheni, long after the conquest of the Northern Kingdom and the end of the Israelite tribes as distinct entities. But sure, let’s pretend that Judaism was always the same as what we do today, and that the way Judaism is today is built into the fabric of reality.] If a member of one shevet attempts to daven using the nusach of another shevet, it will try the window dedicated to his shevet and will fail to pass through because it is the wrong kind of prayer for that window. Today no one knows which shevet he’s from, and further, no one knows the proper nusach for each shevet. Therefore it is important that we each keep the nussach we inherited from our forefathers, because that is the one most likely to be the proper match for the shevet we come from.
Leaving aside that the various nussachs we have today evolved slowly, developing regional differences (and to be fair, the speaker did address the various additions that have accumulated over the years), and that it is very unlikely that these differences have any real relationship to differences that may have existed between the prayers used by the various shevatim, this represents a very mechanistic view of the spiritual world. In this view, our prayers aren’t praise and pleas listened to directly by an omniscient Being, but rather are more like email packets sent over the internet. They must be encoded in the proper language and sent to an appropriate decoder to be unpacked and rendered so that the recipient can read it. If the teffilos are in the wrong nusach, they don’t get through, much like a corrupted email lost forever in cyberspace.
This isn’t the first time I’ve come across the concept that the spiritual world functions according to rigid rules much like the ones that govern physical reality. Perhaps the most unfair halachos are those that apply to a mamzer, a child born of an adulterous or incestuous relationship. The child, through no fault of his or her own, is a spiritual pariah, denied many of the spiritual rights of other Jews and forbidden to marry anyone except for another mamzer. When I complained about the inherent unfairness, one of my rabbeim compared a mamzer to a baby exposed to harmful substances in utero. What their mother ingested while she was pregnant isn’t the baby’s fault, but they are still born with physical and mental impairments. Fair doesn’t enter into the equation. That’s just the way it is.
At the time, I really liked his explanation. It changed the halachos of mamzer from the punishment of an innocent to an unfortunate side effect of his parent’s actions. But it also, like the windows for davening, implies that the spiritual world is a place with natural laws. This concept is found, subtly and not-so-subtly, through much of Judaism. It is very different from the intuitive way we think about a spiritual realm. It implies that, were we able to scientifically investigate this realm, we would be able to form the same sorts of theories we do about the physical world, and perhaps even develop technologies. How about an auto-prayer, guaranteed to deliver your tefilos to the right place every time?
More importantly, it reflects a view that the way the world is, including the spiritual world, is the way it must be. The analogy between the mamzer and the physically impaired baby could just as easily be posed the other way. Just as it is unfair that someone suffer spiritually for their parents’ actions, it is also unfair that someone should suffer physically for their parent’s actions. A mechanistic approach absolves God of blame only if He didn’t Create the world. If He did, then it’s not like the bad stuff in the world just sort of happened. If God created the world, then He is ultimately to blame for both the mamzer and the baby’s impairments. He deliberately set it up so that babies would suffer for the bad decisions of their parents.
To return to the original point, according to the speaker, davening is not a direct communication between a supplicant and an omniscient Listener. It is instead an incantation that must be precisely fitted to the individual in order to be effective; if it is not, God can’t hear you. It is a redefinition of “prayer” from the way we typically understand it to a ritual which, if not performed in a way properly fitted to our particular tribal heritage, we get neither credit for nor benefit from, regardless of our intentions or even of our ability to know the proper way to pray.
[At some point in the years between then and now, I had an online conversation in which someone described this sort of thing as “the yeshivish God of the DMV.” (I would like to give him credit for the insight by name, but I don’t remember who it was.) This God isn’t a Father or King who takes our intentions into account, let alone the awe-inspiring omnipotent and omniscient Creator of the universe. He’s a clerk at the DMV who needs every form filled out just so. If you don’t perform a mitzvah with perfect adherence to all the technicalities of halacha, you aren’t yotzei. The clerk will reject any form not completed in exactly the right way.]
During the question and answer session that followed the speech, not one person addressed this point. [To be fair, I didn’t either, but I’m a lot less assertive in person than I am online. Especially back then. I would have been very uncomfortable starting a debate in front of a room full of people.]