Where is the Light? The Truth?

This week, Yale welcomes upwards of 1000 admitted students to campus in hopes of convincing them through a mixture of Dean’s talks and ad hoc alcoholic revelries. I had planned to write a letter arguing the reasons why I find these so-called Bulldog Days so disappointing. In light of the shootings at Virginia Tech, that discussion seems irrelevant.

I knew nothing of those attacks until today in Hebrew class when I walked in, late, to a class whispering in somber tones the Hebrew words for to kill, to die, to be injured, casualty, massacre. All day long internet news pages loaded and re-loaded seem to know nothing but how to count: 31 killed in Virginia shootings, 32, 33. At Passover, just passed, we sing, “Who knows one?” I know one, but who knows thirty three?

I find most interesting the adjectives used to describe this tragedy: senseless, insane, and beyond adjectives, the inevitable “Why?” And then, silence, only prayers. The students at Virginia Tech were sent an e-mail by school officials telling them to remain inside away from windows. What does one say during that period? There is nothing: concern, rumors, and silence. What we thought were central actions of learning: talking, questioning, reasoning, asking and answering “why” are reduced to the inactions, perhaps, of a different human experience: prayer, silence, asking and maybe answering, “how?” Reason is impossible, irrelevant.

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.

By David Waters  |  April 17, 2007; 2:38 PM ET  | Category:  Lox et Veritas
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