The Real Matrix
August 11th, 2009Scattered Bricks
My dad and I are working to get my sister’s cancer treatment going, and to put some order into her life. It is not easy. The situation is considerably worse than we feared, so my sister can’t afford to waste a minute, and we are experiencing a fair amount of discord. Prayer would be appreciated.
Speaking of prayer, I had a funny experience last night. As I’ve noted earlier, I pray when I lose things. When I put things down, I don’t realize it, so I generally don’t know where they are. The solution is to have predesignated places for things, but I only have a few things I have managed to nail down to specified locations. Lately, when I say such prayers, they are often answered before I can finish them. It has been a little shocking at times.
I wanted to hear a certain CD last night, and I didn’t know where it was. I checked the two most likely rooms and came up dry. I was standing next to the dining table when I decided to pray; there is always a certain amount of junk down at one end of it. I hesitated for a minute. I thought about the amazing streak I had been having, finding things so quickly. I was worried I’d ruin it. I might pray about this thing and then be unable to find it. I realized how stupid that thought was, and I started to pray. As I began, I picked something up from the table, and while I lifted it, I saw the CD.
There was no reason for it to be there. It’s not where I would ordinarily put it. Of course, I was freaked out.
The CD was one of Perry Stone’s. He talked about the importance of giving, in order to have prosperity. He’s not a flashy “God wants us all to be rich” type. You know the kind of person I’m talking about. “God has given me a special anointing to get people prosperity, so send me money, and God will send you ten times as much.” They beg and beg and beg, and they never tell you what they do with the money. Because they’re spending it on mink toilet seat covers and orange Bentleys and really big black velvet paintings of Elvis and Jesus riding their Harleys together. You know about common white trash and easy money; it does not have to be explained. Perry Stone doesn’t beg, and he explained why. It’s because he doesn’t particularly like doing TV, and it wouldn’t bother him a great deal if he couldn’t afford to do it.
I got very fed up with the “God wants us all to be rich” movement back around 1990, but I do believe blessings, including financial well-being, are linked to generosity, and the Bible repeats that message over and over. The hitch, I believe, is that you have to give correctly. You have to support your own church as well as well-vetted charities and ministries. You can’t just hand it over to the Christian equivalent of Billy Mays. If you do, you’re rewarding a rotten person for doing evil. You can’t expect God to get behind that. And you have to handle your own money in a way that isn’t sinful. I don’t think God is willing to give us rope with which to hang ourselves.
It seems like we are supposed to imitate God, and God is generous. To a large degree, he is to us as we are to others. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing; life will never be free from problems. But I believe we are supposed to make the most of his general willingness to treat us as we treat others.
He started talking about our need to be familiar with the Bible, and how we build “line upon line, precept upon precept.” That struck me as interesting. To get anything out of the Bible, you have to be familiar with as much of it as possible, because different parts of the Bible explain each other. You have to read different parts in pari materia, harmonizing them to avoid idiotic results. For example, we are taught that God will do what we ask in Jesus’s name. Well, go outside and ask God, in Jesus’s name, to drop a billion dollars in gold bars on your lawn. It’s not going to happen. Your silly prayer goes against other ideas expressed in the Bible. We are not supposed to covet. We are not to be greedy. We are to seek his kingdom and his righteousness first.
For a long time, I’ve been aware that faith can’t be explained in a linear manner. You can’t lay out propositions and conclusions in order, in a single column, to explain Christianity. It’s multidimensional. The Talmud reflects this. You take one piece of the Torah, and from that page, commentaries shoot out in all different directions. They work in parallel, not in series. Like a matrix, not a sequence. Trying to explain God using ideas linked in series is like trying to get all three stooges through one doorway at once.
It’s impossible to present everything you need to know in a single-file progression of ideas. And even if it were, the Bible is not written that way. The only way to make sense of it is to get it into your unconscious mind–your memory–where ideas roll around and collide and interact like clothes in a dryer. Some Christians call this area of consciousness the spirit, and maybe it is. This is where the synthesis occurs. It’s like building a coherent wall from bricks found in random locations.
Jesus and the Apostles took this approach. Look at the annotations in the Bible. They quoted the Old Testament over and over, and they followed the Jewish practice of quoting one line as a quick way to refer to the part of the Bible in which that line was found. The more scripture you know, the more like them you are. You’re supposed to be armed with the sword of the spirit, and that means you should be able to quote enough scripture to have it handy when you’re in trouble and you can’t get to a Bible. This is how Jesus defeated Satan after the 40-day fast.
Interesting stuff.
It also explains why nonbelievers find Christianity so hard to absorb. They like debate, which is a totally worthless way of looking for the truth. Debate only establishes the identity of the best debater; this is why good lawyers win bad cases. To understand Christianity, you have to listen for a good long while, as seemingly unrelated ideas are imparted. You have to shut up and hold your objections until you’ve heard enough to know what’s going on. A lot of people who don’t believe are not willing to do that. They will settle on some part of Christianity that doesn’t make sense to them and use it to invalidate the whole religion. They’ll say, “There is suffering, so there is no God.” Or, “Fossils prove Genesis is a lie, so there is no God.” Or, “Verse x contradicts verse y, so there is no God.” They can’t see the sweater; just what they perceive to be loose threads. They’re like the jurors who concluded OJ was innocent because one or two pieces of nonessential evidence were excluded.
The more I learn, the more I realize how obligated we are. You have to submit and obey and be productive, and you can’t demand that God help you while conforming to your guidelines for his nature and behavior. You can get God to do great things for you here on earth–better things than you can comprehend–but you have to live his way.
I have to get up and get some things done. I don’t know how much blogging I’ll be able to do this week.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:01 AM
May the Lord have mercy on you and your family during this difficult time.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:17 AM
I am praying for you, your sister, and your dad.
I wanted to let you know what’s going on today with my mom. After an ultrasound yesterday didn’t find anything in her abdomen(!), today her doctor ordered more scans. He also told her that she will be getting a unit of blood because somewhere she is losing blood. The infection is still in her kidneys.
So please keep praying that she is cancer free and the infection is healed.
Thanks so much.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:58 AM
Your views on giving/receiving and “multidimensional christian understanding” are exactly correct and right on the money. I ought to know, because they are exactly the way I believe, so they must be right. There’s one more thing I believe about giving and who you give it to. God, wanting us to be stewards, talks about investing in the kingdom. I believe that this means managing a portfolio, and checking returns on investment.
Still praying, and for Heather’s mom.
I know your busy, but maybe you could post a prayer request list below the blogroll?
August 11th, 2009 at 1:05 PM
Prayer for you all in your time of difficulty. May this pass quickly and positively and and that it becomes something that brings your family closer.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:20 PM
Things were going good with you, the forces against that are inspired to step up their fight too.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:51 PM
Blessings for your sister.
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“It also explains why nonbelievers find Christianity so hard to absorb. They like debate, which is a totally worthless way of looking for the truth. Debate only establishes the identity of the best debater….”
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YESSSS. I never debate politics with people; I will discuss, but never debate. For exactly the above reason.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:16 PM
This post and the last one are tours de force. Thanks and God bless.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:35 PM
I think when you pray to find something God opens your mind to where you put it. That IS an answer to prayer.
God bless your sister, your father and you.
August 11th, 2009 at 8:11 PM
Talmud is the ur-HTML. The way it’s structured it can throw you off on tangents and its scholars know how to integrate and reconcile issues. It was designed as a living text that requires learning it with someone more experienced (a scriptural sherpa?) instead of being a dead bookshelf tome or reference book. There are separate Jewish legal reference books that boil down the laws into a shorthand but they, in turn, reference the sourcetexts.
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I have a magnet on my refrigerator with a prayer on it for finding lost items. I don’t use it often as I don’t want to trivialize it. At the end of the prayer, there is an instruction to give charity (most Jewish homes have more than a few “pushkes”, charity boxes, for schools, hospitals, whatever). Judaism and scripture are hostile to the notion of amulets (don’t get me started on red threads from The Kabbalah Center sported by Madonna and Brittney Spears), but the prayer hasn’t failed.
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The value of a classical liberal education is the ability to communicate in shorthand a complicated concept. Say “Plato’s cave” and that’s enough. Our culture has made huge errors in facilitating our scriptural illiteracy so we struggle with communicating parallel shorthand for moral concepts.
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An observant Jew who is familiar with scripture objects to rationalizations like “Rabbi” Harold Kushner’s “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” because he concludes that God’s power and involvement in what we consider mundane is limited.
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We also have to accept that sometimes humans make decisions that negate subsequent ability to exercise free will. Regretting jumping out of a 100-story building isn’t going to reverse the laws of gravity. Scripturally shallow people look at the words “God hardened Pharoah’s heart” from Exodus and see God as cruelly manipulating Pharoah. Instead, God created a heart that could be hardened based on repeated human choice. Pharoah chose to be wicked so many times, he crossed the line as much as someone jumping out of the above building. God created the laws of gravity, thermodynamics and the human heart and soul.
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“You have to read different parts in pari materia, harmonizing them to avoid idiotic results.” Rabbi Yishmael, a rabbi 3 generations following Rabbi Hillel, expounded on thirteen rules of scriptural exegesis. Any “conclusion” about scripture which fails on ANY of these fails altogether.
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1 Kal va-Chomer (a fortiori): We find a similar stringency in a more lenient case; how more so should that stringency apply to our stricter case!
2 Gezera shava, similarity in phrase: We find a similar law in a verse containing a similar phrase to one in our verse. This method can only be used in a case where there is a tradition to use it.
3 Binyan av, either by one or two Scriptures: We find a similar law in another case, why shouldn’t we assume that the same law applies here? Now the argument may go against this inference, finding some law that applies to that case but not to ours. This type of refutation is valid only if the inference was from one Scripture, not if it was from two Scriptures.
4 Klal ufrat, a generality and a particularity: If we find a phrase signifying a particularity following that of a generality, the particularity particularises the generality and we only take that particular case into account.
5 Prat ukhlal, a particularity and a generality: If the order is first the particularity and then the generality, we add from the generality upon the particularity, even to a broad extent.
6 Klal ufrat ukhlal, a generality, a particularity and a generality: If there is a particularity inserted between two generalities, we only add cases similar to the particularity.
7 Klal shehu tzarich lifrat, a generality that requires a particularity, and a particularity that requires a generality: If it is impossible to have the more general law without more specific examples or more specific cases without the statement of the general law, the above three rules don’t apply.
8 Every thing that was within the general rule and was excluded from the rule to teach us a rule, we don’t consider this rule as pertaining only to this excluded case, but to the entire general case.
9 Anything that was included in a general rule, and was excluded to be susceptible to one rule that is according to its subject, it is only excluded to be treated more leniently but not more strictly.
10 Anything that was included in a general rule and was excluded to be susceptible to one rule that is not according to its subject, it is excluded to be treated both more leniently and more strictly.
11 Anything that was included in a general rule and was excluded to be treated by a new rule, we cannot restore it to its general rule unless Scripture restores it explicitly.
12 A matter that is inferred from its context, and a matter that is inferred from its ending.
13 The resolution of two Scriptures that contradict each other [must wait] until a third Scripture arrives and resolves their apparent contradiction.
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This is brain-breakingly difficult and it’s hard for me to fathom how rabbis, pre-Gutenberg’s printing press, succeeded in not making errors all the time since there is no way they’d have access to all the commentaries and scholarship that preceded them. But they didn’t.
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When you master the Divine tools, amazing things can materialize… and of course that’s the whole theme of this site, no?
August 11th, 2009 at 8:36 PM
Again, you, your father and sister are in my thoughts and prayers. If you need more, you need only ask.