Holographic Judaism

Carl H. Flygt

November 2005

To maintain Judaism is to maintain a kind of nothingness that in turn allows for limitless possibilities of growth and transformation.

-Douglas Rushkoff, 2003

The basic idea behind my theory of conversation is to give the potential latent in language a chance to express itself in cosmo-mechanical terms. The cosmo-mechanicality behind language, of course, is the spiritual nature in the human being, the capacity for clairvoyant intuition, for spiritual dreams, for moral judgment and for causal embodiment in the etheric and astral dimensions of an otherwise physical world of movement, texture, sound and color. The final purport of an authentic and certified theory of conversation, should such a thing come fully into being, would be to create a world of literal cosmic spirits in the presence of other free and self-conscious spirits, with its attendant splendor, beauty and ultimate glory. On my theory, if we can get conversation right, the City of God will infallibly and by induction appear on a distant horizon.

Given these sober and modest aims, I think we are compelled to work out a generally plausible theory of Judaism. The Jews, after all, were the early adopters of monotheism and have led Western society and Western culture on a scale far out of proportion to their numbers and their acceptance by other, more settled people. In an important sense, a theory of conversation may really be a theory of Judaism, or an extension of Judaism, because Judaism, of all the human ideas of the transcendental divine, is thoroughly and exclusively social in its purport. Judaism is the attempt to come to terms with God on an abstract and intellectual basis, in doing so to eliminate errors of conduct and to support norms of justice, and to do no more, because these conditions are sufficient, it is thought, for God to move the world on his own terms and according to his own designs.

The great achievement of the Old Testament Jews, other than to survive their enslavement in Egypt and the aggression of their neighbors to the north, all sources agree, was to renounce idolatry. This puzzling cultural milestone is much less trivial than it may appear, because it represents the capacity for abstract and critical thinking to supersede the impulses and reflexes of the agrarian preoccupation with fertility, with territory and with harvest and its surplus. To sustain an abstract and codified relationship with an unknown and unknowable God, rather than with an iconic and often sensational ritual propitiation of the divine, is simply more sophisticated and intelligent, and ultimately more sociologically powerful. Jewish iconoclasm is probably the real source of socio-cultural progress in the West, leading through Mediterranean trade to Roman law, to Enlightenment thought and to the positive and workable governments that were eventually established in America and in Western Europe. Moreover, if we interpret it correctly, the admonition against idolatry will apply in a new and very rich way as the theory of conversation gives us, in the New Age of the 21st century, a way to think about, and even to enact, an environmental movement of the mind.

Materialism, of course, is the new idolatry, and modern conversations are suffused with it. Real conversation, by way of contrast, as defined from some very modest and logically impeccable premises, makes modern idolatry quite impossible. Real conversation relies on just the maintenance of a nothingness that produces real inner growth and transformation. Real conversation is civil transaction with Divinity itself, much as the Jewish doctors would have it. And much as it has been the fate of the Jews to suffer the resentments of those who would be deprived of their icons, we may expect those committed to pure conversation to be similarly outcast. Or perhaps not. Times are changing as information and intelligence expand, and real political power may this time devolve to those willing and able to keep their balance sheets neutral and their astral slates clean. One can only hope, in that eventuality, that they will be up to the task of administering a world-school that will be tremendously complex, all-encompassing and responsible for the deliverance of the human potential from the moment of birth to a good death and beyond, and for a world where only what is good and beautiful and true is given legitimacy and cultural value.

Douglas Rushkoff, writing earnestly as a lapsed but self-conscious subscriber to Jewish ideas and ideals, proposes a reworking of Judaism through conversations among educated Jews playing something like the metagame I outline in my forthcoming book. Rushkoff sees these conversations, embedded as they must be in the spiritual potency of Jewish sensibility, as sufficient to produce a sort of living and world-affecting hologram, in which the self-consciousness of the individual, because it is Jewish, brightens and enhances the transcendental presence of the God who works invisibly within all creation and all living manifestation. Rushkoff’s idea is that Judaism is due for a major renaissance, one that will again serve to lead humanity in the ways of God, and that this time it will be by enacting the reality of God as a social organism. Judaism, he thinks, is rich enough to enable this dimensional leap into what can only be supposed to be a new form of life acted out by at least some of its warrantees.

Quite frankly, for the sake of my theory of conversation, and for the sake of all sentient beings as well, I would like to meet with some of these warrantees and see what sort of cooperative progress is possible along the lines both Ruskoff and I have outlined. I think my theory of conversation can be of some help in Rushkoff’s enterprise, because although Judaism is rich, from Moses to Maimonides to Spinoza, scientific logic is richer, or at least is more materially powerful, and scientific logic is what my theory purports to offer. Perhaps if we can combine the intelligence of the spiritual Jew with the intelligence of a formal and material approach to conversation, both explicitly cognizant of the etheric and astral dimensions of the language-using human being, we can expect to create a stable social emptiness in which the Divine finds it not merely possible, but actually necessary to emerge and to work its own imponderable way through the world.

REFERENCE: Ruskoff, Douglas. Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism. New York: Crown Publishers, 2003.