The Meaning of Suffering: Part III

Jul 05, 2007 11:19 AM

Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation (www.danielpearl.org) is a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at UCLA. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and books on reasoning, decision making and causal modelling, and co-editor of "I am Jewish: Personal Reflection Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl" (2004). Dr. Pearl writes frequently on Jewish-Muslim dialogue, East-West relations, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Glazov: Judea Pearl welcome to the discussion. I apologize for raising the tragedy of your son’s murder at the hands of Islamist terrorists. Can you share with us how you coped with this horrible tragedy and how you have placed your suffering and your son’s suffering in the context of your belief system?

And kindly comment on the themes that have been raised in the discussion so far by Sheikh Palazzi and Frimet Roth (which strike/interest you and inspire a response from you).

Pearl: Let me first apologize to my colleagues in this symposium for taking a more scientific, non-spiritual stance toward suffering. I simply cannot buy the notion that suffering carries hidden meaning to us as human beings and certainly not the notion that suffering has anything to do with redemption.

Save for the obvious fact that suffering, like any other mental shock acts as an awakener that provokes a healthy examination of our place in the universe, our paradigms of good and evil, and the enigmatic role of divine providence I cannot see a particularly deep meaning in that senseless act of Lady Chance.

I must also apologize to my Christian friends for being unable to comprehend why the suffering of one individual would have anything to do with the redemption of another. I was brought up with the belief that my deeds, and my deeds alone may shape my redemption as a human being, and I would feel awfully guilty knowing that another person, however willing and divine, went through hardship or pain to absolve me from responsibilities that are totally mine.

I guess my Jewish and scientific backgrounds stand in the way of my attempts to identify with ideas that Christians find natural and appealing.

Frankly, I think that the connection between pain and redemption, the basis of all sacrificial rituals, evolved out of a mistaken Pavlovian interpretation of a child stimulus-response experience. Conditioned to expect the comforting presence of a loving mother each time he falls and scrapes his knee a child can easily mistake pain to be the cause of comfort, and from here the road to mistaking sacrifice as a cause of care, forgiveness and redemption is not too great.

How then do I cope with the terrible injustice that befell my son Danny? How do I reconcile the crying contradiction between our intuitive notions of good and evil, reward and punishment, divine supervision, loving God and the brutal murder of the most gentle person I have known, the physical embodiment of all qualities and values one would ever wish to see in a son?

The truth is: I don’t, and I am not even trying. I know that intuitive notions are merely poetic visions of reality, that history occasionally reminds us of their fallibility, and that there is nothing particularly significant about when or how these reminders cross our path. So, as a random victim of those reminders I simply put my mind on exploiting the opportunities that my private tragedy has bestowed on me, rather than agonizing over a God who slept late on the morning of January 30, 2002. Oh, God! how negligent can one get?

I actually find support to this attitude in Genesis, in the story of Isaac’s binding: "And God tried Abraham, and said to him: Abraham!, and he said: Here I am."

I have always resented this perplexing and depressing story. I never understood how people could look up to a father sacrificing his son for some God who plays games with his creatures to see how much they love him -- what vanity. Spending even five minutes on such a game seems un-befitting to a person, let alone a God, let alone a God who created those creatures in his own image, let alone trying them with suffering and guilt -- awful.

Moreover, the Bible that commands us not to sacrifice children to deities here praises a person who attempted to do just that, and all on account of some hallucinating sound saying: "Abraham! Take your son...."

But I have begun to understand the story from a different angle. Who is God? Our ideals, values and principles. What does it mean "sacrifice your son to God"? It means: Educate your children by certain principles and to certain ideals. Why is death involved here? Because living by principles is a dangerous enterprise in our world, and perhaps it has been like that throughout history.

"Here I am!" means I am perfectly aware of those dangers, and still I am committed to educate my children by the principles of civilized society.

And what happens at the end of the story? An angel comes and says: "You did the right thing, Abraham, Isaac will live on," and God promises Abraham to multiply his descendants and make them the blessing of all nations, which means: civilization survives, Humanity comes out victorious, True, a ram dies, but humanity wins. Progress is a bloody journey, there are victims by the roadside, especially those who pushed hard, and those who carved new pathways, But the caravan makes it uphill ok.

"And I will make you into a great nation and all other nations on earth will be blessed by you," which means "forget about personal redemption or reaping pleasure in paradise -- your reward lies here on earth in the progress of mankind."

It is a secular interpretation, I admit, but it is the only one that makes sense to me, and the only one that is free of contradictions. Justice? Reward and punishment? Sure. But on a collective, not individual scale. And it ties of course to Danny’s story, his trust in humanity, his unyielding honesty, love of life, talking to strangers, befriending the suspecting, living his principles and drawing others to them. He may have pushed too hard, at the wrong time perhaps, but the caravan goes on, another inch uphill. Humanity will prevail, "Veyitbarchu becha kol mishpechot haadama" -- (and all nations on earth will be blessed by you".) Amen.

Glazov: Thank you Mr. Pearl, I would just like to follow up with you for a moment.

In the beginning you state that you reject the notion that the suffering of one individual has anything to do with the redemption of another. You were brought up, you say, "with the belief that my deeds, and my deeds alone may shape my redemption as a human being."

But then at the end, you ask: "Justice? Reward and punishment?" and you answer "Sure. But on a collective, not individual scale."

Yes, you do state that you mean this in a secular sense, whereas the concept of redemption in the first instance is meant in a spiritual context (I think). But is there still not a contradiction in your view here in the sense that if reward, punishment and justice exists on a collective scale, and not an individual one, then it just may be that one person’s experience (i.e. suffering) may have something to do with the experience of another (i.e. redemption or liberation etc), no? Even in a secular sense?

And by the way, I don’t mean that if a contradiction exists it is a bad thing necessarily, since life itself, arguably, may be a contradiction, and duality, as we know, is a reality.

Also, when you state that you are "unable to comprehend" how one person’s suffering could lead to your own redemption, and that you would actually feel guilty about it, do you recognize that perhaps what we may understand or not, or may feel guilty about, is completely independent of reality? In other words, not believing in God, for example, is independent of whether He exists or not. And not understanding some ways in which He operates is also independent of how He operates.

I know in my own life that I reject certain belief notions about God and the universe, but I recognize that my rejection of those things may very well simply reveal my own blindness and incapacity to grasp certain things. So, do you hold that the fact that you may feel guilty about your redemption being connected to someone else’s suffering somehow necessarily negates the fact that your redemption is connected to someone else’s suffering? What if you stopped feeling guilty about it and actually felt inspired by it? Would this then somehow change the divine laws? Or would you then just become deluded because you are certain that things do not operate in such a way?

I guess what I am zeroing in on is the implication in your answer that our belief systems somehow engender and mould reality, when in fact our understanding of things, as humans, is actually severely handicapped in comparison to the undersatanding and workings of God Himself, if we assume He exists. So my question is, I guess: is there a reconginition in you that what you believe and think may be independent of how God works, assuming, again, that He exists?

And I also remain interested in your belief system on this matter, aside from the intellectual perspectives of God and suffering. Do you yourself believe in God? And if you do, then why do you think He allows human suffering? Or does He cause it? Or is He unable to interefere?

Pearl: There is no contradiction between admitting justice, reward and punishment in the collective sense, and limiting personal redemption to the consequences of one’s own deeds.Personal redemption is a spiritual metaphor for satisfying one’s expectations of oneself. While satisfaction reflects one’s deeds, not another person’s suffering, the expectations usually involve collective responsibility and the progress of society as a whole.

Surely, one person’s experience (i.e. suffering) may have something to do with the experience of another (i.e. redemption or liberation etc) For example, the latter might be inspired to follow the teaching of the former, or to help prevent further such suffering, in which case it is the deeds that produce redemption, not the suffering in itself.

But, of course, this is my Jewish upbringing speaking now. If I were brought up Christian, it is quite likely that I would view the suffering itself as having redeeming impact on the believer, regardless of any action taken by the latter. Spiritual metaphors tend to conflate direct and indirect effects.

As to whether I recognize that what I believe and think about God and suffering may be independent of how God actually works, my answer is: No way!. A God that works independent of the way people think of Him is totally irrelevant to human affairs and might as well retire in some black hole. It is only the qualities we attribute to God and the signals we receive from Him (i.e., natural phenomena) that shape human lives on earth; the rest is, by definition, irrelevant.

Naturally, this brings us back to the core questions: Do I believe in God? Why does he allow human suffering? Or does he cause it? Or is he unable to interfere? I believe in a God that we invented to help us encode a set of principles and ideals that, if practiced, are likely to make this a better world, Such a God, obviously, does not care about individual human suffering. Fortunately he cares immensely and passionately about the progress of mankind.

Glazov: Thank you Mr. Pearl.