On the shield of Yale University is a book with the Hebrew words “Urim V’Tumim.”. These words have been translated into Latin as “Lux et Veritas,” into English as “Light and Truth.” In some ways, this seems to me the dual approaches of religion and education, appropriate for this my institution once as much a place of religious as civil instruction. Religion ostensibly relies on revealed law, and not on man’s reason. While civilizations require debate and discussions, religions, of themselves, can have none.

I might ask why the prayer service is performed in a certain way, I may have fun arguing about “purposes” of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) but in the end, they simply are, presented to me by history and Providence without my input, perhaps as the inevitable coincidences of history are presented to us. No one asked us whether we wanted to read about a massacre of students like me at a school where I have friends. I could not reason about its benefits as I reasoned about various tax policies in macroeconomics today.

Who knows the tax rate? I know the tax rate. Who knows thirteen? I know thirteen. Thirteen are the Divine Attributes of God, and twelve are the tribes of Israel, and the apostles of Jesus, and the colleges of Yale, and the books of the Aeneid, and one hundred eight are the beads of the rosary and I do not mean to suggest that any faith is universal but that the Universe is and that one is the Name of God in the heaven and the earth.

The insight into the conflict between Jerusalem and Athens is not my own. But I heard recently someone talk about the comfort that religion provides in the face of death. Religion does not ask, in the end, why. It does not need to ask.

It is the counting of beads on a rosary, the often indecipherable Hebrew mumbling of grace after meals, the same as it has been for generations, and whether one has memories those mumblings does not matter, that history seems to me or to you an inadequate reason for its existence does not matter, that I may change my mind tomorrow about this whole blog, that I am writing from the gut instead of from the mind does not matter.

And it becomes less surprising that the Name of God, God Who Is in Heaven and Earth, that Name, in Hebrew, that God reveals to Moses through a burning bush, is “I Will Be” or “I Am” or “Is.” What matters, is.