March 2000 Embattled Reason By Rabbi Alvin Kass During the Middle Ages, many of the greatest Jewish minds sought to make reason the ultimate arbiter of religious truth. Philosophers like Saadia Gaon (892-942) and Moses Maimonides (1135-1206) were convinced that the teachings of Judaism were consistent with our rational faculty. The allure of demonstrating harmony was to remove subjective considerations from matters of faith. Furthermore, since our God-given reason is what distinguishes the human species from other animate creatures, the application of reason to religion was regarded as an act of religious adoration. Proponents of the religion of reason even tried to prove God's existence through logical exposition. The desire to enthrone reason in the formulation of religious and moral principles has survived into the twentieth century. A case in point is Milton Steinberg's historical novel, As a Driven Leaf, which makes the Talmudic personality Elisha ben Abuyah an uncompromising seeker of a religion of reason which would be totally objective, universal, and demonstrable. Eventually Elisha concludes that in the realm of religion, logical certainty is impossible. The most one can hope for is plausibility. To accord reason an exalted role in the formulation of religious doctrine is highly understandable when you consider the preeminent role that reason has played in the civilization of the last 1000 years. It transformed the world from a multitude of isolated communities to a single neighborhood. With computers, a push of the button can send words around the globe, cure disease, and destroy cities with a single weapon. The handmaiden of reason has been the scientific method with its unremitting mandate to experiment and to test every hypothesis. Perhaps even more fundamental is reason's call for an open mind, a willingness in all aspects of life to consider possibilities other than the received truth. Sigmund Freud, who was generally rather pessimistic about human possibilities, declared that reason, with its persistent effort to transcend the dark instinctive forces of our psyche, provides "one of the few points on which one can be optimistic about the future of mankind." The darkest moments of the twentieth century resulted from the abandonment of reason. Between Nazism and Communism, more than 100 million people were killed because of blind devotion to totalitarian regimes which had zero tolerance for dissent. These governments justified their suppression of independent thinking by claiming to be perfect political systems. Since they regarded themselves as the political embodiment of man's utopian aspirations from time immemorial, the leaders presumed to possess the right to force everything and everyone into a single mold. Senseless slaughter continued to the end of the century as millions more were murdered because of their beliefs or ethnic identity. The savagery of Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda is comparable to the most primitive, brutal, and bestial manifestations of barbarism in earlier ages. The catastrophic things that have happened to those who forsake reason ought to give us pause when we consider recent religious developments which have embraced the individual, the passionate, and the subjective in place of the reasonable, the objective, and the universal. There certainly is a legitimate role for emotion and feeling in the realm of religion; but if they produce a tenacious determination to shut out what we don't want to hear and what makes us uncomfortable, the consequences will be disastrous. It is such disabling certitude and deafness of the mind, that have enabled otherwise intelligent people to justify senseless acts of terrorism and the extermination of religious opponents. We may have abandoned the effort to enthrone reason as the sole arbiter of religious truth; but we urgently need to pay heed to the claims of rationality. There may be more to faith than reason; however, our religious views ought at least to hang together in a plausible, coherent, and sensible way. They should certainly be free of the patent irrationality which generates a suspension of our ethical duty to respect others who disagree with us and to treat all human life as sacred. The struggle for an open mind continues. The battles in behalf of reason are far from won.