Cormac McCarthy’s Most Jewish Novels Have Little to Do with Jews, but Much to Do with Faith

Last year, Cormac McCarthy released two novels with intertwined plots, The Passenger (named one of Mosaic’s books of the year) and Stella Maris. Their main characters are the brilliant siblings Alice and Bobby Western, whose father was a Manhattan Project physicist and who are, respectively, a troubled mathematical genius and a thrill-seeking salvage diver. Abe Greenwald writes in his review:

The Passenger and Stella Maris are the most Jewish books McCarthy has ever written. Which is to say, they’re not very Jewish at all. But Bobby, Alice, and both their parents are Jewish. There is no evidence of their ever having been exposed to an inkling of Jewish life or thought. But it’s made unmistakably clear that they are Jews. And this raises a question: why? The answer is simple. Verisimilitude. McCarthy knows the degree to which Jews are overrepresented in math and science. His friends and colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, [the scientific research center where he is a trustee], include or have included theorists such as Murray Gell-Mann, George Zweig, and Lawrence Krauss. He’s well aware of the statistics on Jewish genius.

As Alice says to [the psychiatrist] Dr. Cohen, “Jews represent 2 percent of the population and 80 percent of the mathematicians. If those numbers were even a little more skewed we’d be talking about a separate species.” Some might bristle at the “separate species” remark, but it’s clear McCarthy means it only in reverence.

When it comes to religion, however, the books offer a message of more substance

Alice says . . . in Stella Maris: “Mathematics is ultimately a faith-based initiative. And faith is an uncertain business.” This is McCarthy’s check on scientism, the secular faith that purports to answer all of life’s meaningful questions through the process of observation, experimentation, equation, and peer review. And McCarthy knows whereof he speaks. . . . He edits books and papers from some of the country’s most accomplished scientists on a broad range of topics. Science and math, by his own admission, have come to occupy him more than literature. Thus, he addresses the faith-vs.-science debate from a much-needed perspective. And that perspective, embodied in both Bobby and Alice, is this: science and mathematics are vital in telling us how little we can ever understand, and a world so inscrutable makes faith and mysticism at least a viable avenue of contemplation.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Jews in literature, Literature, Science and Religion

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society