Shoftim: tradition(alism)

This week’s parsha demands the establishment of several systems of authority. Judges are the agents of impartiality. Priests maintain the religious practices. Kings protect the nation and work for its advancement. Prophets guide the nation to maintain unity and purpose as conditions change. Did the system ever work?  Is any part of it applicable now?

The description of each of these systems comes with admonitions. The judges must pursue righteousness: צֶ֥דֶק, Tzedek. The priests and Levites are to be landless. The king must write a copy of the Divine law and read it daily. The prophet must pronounce all that he receives and never confabulate.

On top of these admonitions, there is a repeated call for the removal of deviant positions with prejudice. The elder who does not accede to the majority position and seeds protests has committed a capital offence. Idolatry, including resurrection of the local cults, by an individual or community is to be destroyed and its perpetrators killed.

Inside all of these rules about rules, there is the prohibition of superstition and magic.

לֹֽא־יִמָּצֵ֣א בְךָ֔ מַעֲבִ֥יר בְּנֽוֹ־וּבִתּ֖וֹ בָּאֵ֑שׁ קֹסֵ֣ם קְסָמִ֔ים מְעוֹנֵ֥ן וּמְנַחֵ֖שׁ וּמְכַשֵּֽׁף׃

Let no one be found among you who consigns a son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer,

These prohibitions belong in a chapter that establishes a system to maintain the creed and prohibits competing frameworks.

It is easy for us to dismiss the augur (who examined the entrails of birds for signs), the soothsayer and the sorcerer as purveyors of nonsense. Perhaps the introduction, consigning children to fire, generated disgust, even in earlier generations, that carried over to the other less violent superstitions.

 

To the people of the time, these activities were science: the most accurate predictors of the future and methods to influence events in nature, available. The Israelite was rejecting the molecular biology of the time.

This brings into focus the interaction between traditions and scientific progress. In medicine (probably the oldest alloy of science, tradition and superstition), this battle is clear to the practitioner. New approaches require the approval of governmental agencies and, absent that, are illegal and subject to penalty. Payers (insurance) often requires a more rigorous level of proof (the new treatment is usually much more expensive) and rigorous adherence to recipes used in published studies is mandated. This rigor has been manipulated by pharma so that medications that have the same mechanism of action cannot be substituted for each other. A drug that enhances the immune system to fight lung cancer cannot be used for the same purpose in Hodgkin’s disease.  The Hodgkins immunostimulant must be used.  Since a clinical trial, to see if the lung drug works in Hodgkins ( as it should, and actually does) would cost millions of dollars, drug companies can safely divide the territory and need not fear competition. The empirical has triumphed over the rational.

Traditional approaches are often vague. Diagnoses based upon the microscopic appearance of tissue include criteria that may be aberrant in the specimen, yet the diagnosis remains. Diagnoses need not  answer to the  requirement for response to therapy; and which criteria can be elided while maintaining the same expectations for outcome is not clear.

Traditional approaches are like language. A word can mean several different things, yet we cleave to it.  Language, which has evolved in its own unsupervised way, is  not likely to become more precise. The recognition of its imprecision is, perhaps, the best we can do. Will large language models impact this issue positively or negatively? For now it seems to perpetuate and broadcast a worldview of “should”: what people say they believe, not what is real. It all ends happily ever after.

How does the Torah instruct the believer to think about our, contemporary science? Is it sorcery?  Our epidemiologists look at entrails to follow microbes (tiny, invisible spirits) that cause disease.  We are poked with needles that contain RNA that protects us from last month’s ( no longer prevalent) Covid strain. There are no storehouses of water in the sky.

I can weasel my way out of heresy by opening the words of Torah to a broader interpretation. Alternative, scientific, explanations and models do not violate the prohibitions because they work. I need not “believe” in them, they are simply useful. [Consumers of sorcery probably felt the same]. Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions made things easier by pointing out that today’s science becomes tomorrows superstition. It also becomes tomorrows tradition, blocking advances ( and error).

 

Mainstream Judaism has fondly adopted the evolution of science and produced a disproportionate number of its leaders. The subtlety of language allows contradiction to flourish.