Steelmanning Judaism

"Tell your son on that day saying, 'Because of this God acted for me when I came out of Egypt'"

1 Introduction

"The Lord's our shepherd, " says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb!

—Tom Lehrer

A fact that is surprising to no one, with the possible exception of a few deranged college debaters who accused me of antisemitism: I’m Jewish. I come from a Jewish family, had a Bar Mitzvah, and spent the first many years of my life going to Hebrew school. To this day, when I’m home with my family, I say prayers on Shabbat and eat challah!

I come from a family of conservative Jews, where most of the rest of my extended family is reform. Conservative Jews tend to take Judaism seriously but not literally—reform Jews, um, not sure if there’s a nice way to say this, tend not to take it either very seriously or literally, doing little with regards to Judaism beyond going to temple perhaps once a year and making their kids go to Hebrew school and have a Bar Mitzvah.

In the reform and conservative circles in which I hang, no one really advocates for the truth of Judaism. Occasionally, people argue for the existence of God, but often while using wildly revisionary definitions of God—saying things like “well, I don’t believe in a literal person with immense powers, but I think there’s, you know, something out there.” I’ve always found such statements puzzling; of course, there is something out there, but absent specifying the sort of thing that you think it is, your statement amounts to little more than “there exists at least one thing.” Normally when people utter “something exists,” we’re not all that impressed!

When people argue for Judaism, they’ll argue that it has good values or that preserving the tradition is valuable. Virtually no one ever argues that it’s actually true—that God did a bunch of Miracles to free the Jewish people from Egypt and that the Torah, along with the rest of the Pentateuch, is, in a broad sense, from God.

Jews always seem to become postmodernists when arguing about Judaism. “Okay, it’s not literally true, but there’s a deep spiritual truth behind it,” they mostly say. For this reason, it’s refreshing when people argue that Judaism isn’t just a valuable wisdom tradition but is, in fact, true! I intend to do so in this article. I’ve already written an article steelmanning Christianity—failing to do so for Judaism would dishonor my ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob :P. Notably, I am not convinced by this case, but sometimes one should practice their ability to steelman positions they do not actually hold.

2 Kuzari

For please ask . . . whether there has been anything like this great thing or heard like it: Has a nation heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of the fire, as you heard, and lived? Or has God tried to take himself a nation from the midst of a nation, with trials, with signs, and with wonders, and with war, and with a strong hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terrors, like everything the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?

—Deuteronomy 4:32–43

Unleavened bread will be eaten throughout the seven days . . . You will tell your son on that day, saying: “This is because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt”. It must be a sign for you on your hand and a memorial between your eyes, so that God’s law will be in your mouth, for with a strong hand the Lord brought you out of Egypt. You must observe this rule in its season forever.

—Exodus 13:7–10:

The Kuzari argument is the most popular bit of Jewish apologetics, though it’s still pretty obscure given the relative paucity of Jewish apologetics. It seems all the analytic philosophers interested in apologetics are Christians! But the Kuzari argument is surprisingly convincing.

One must begin with the Kuzari principle. It’s a very old principle, dating back to The Kuzari, by written Judah Halevi. A modern articulation comes from the wonderful Tyron Goldschmidt:

A tradition is true if it is (1) accepted by a nation; and describes (2) a national experience of a previous generation of that nation; and (3) the national experience would be expected to create a continuous national memory until the tradition is in place.

Goldschmidt adds up two other criteria to beef up the Kuzari principle which are, while not part of the traditional argument, helpful additions. The amped-up Kuzari principle is:

A tradition is likely true if it is (1) accepted by a nation; describes (2) a national experience of a previous generation of that nation; which (3) would be expected to create a continuous national memory until the tradition is in place; is (4) insulting to that nation; and (5) makes universal, difficult and severe demands on that nation

If the Kuzari principle is true, the Exodus happened. The Exodus story was accepted by the Jewish people, described a national experience, is the sort of thing that would be expected to create a national memory, is insulting (describing the Jews being cowardly over and over again and constantly turning to idols), and makes severe demands. As Goldschmidt notes “the Torah includes 613 commandments and prohibitions governing absolutely every aspect of personal as well as national life: clothing, food, sex, labor, housing, worship, war.”

Why think that this is true—both the original one and the amped-up version? Well, it’s quite psychologically plausible. If someone claimed that God appeared before all Americans in 1850 and did a miracle, telling everyone to pass it to their children and their children’s children—and that he instructed the people to not eat certain foods and chop off part of their penises, no one would believe him. Believe me, I’ve tried to get people to chop off part of their penises by claiming God did a miracle 200 years ago—they’re shockingly resistant! As Goldschmidt says:

So far as speculative psychological projection goes, this principle is even more plausible than the previous, and so far as precedent goes, there are no counterexamples. Just imagine trying to convince the Nepalese that 300 years ago Napoleon visited their country for fifty years, and that everything he touched turned into gold. And also that: most everyone he visited tried to molest him, and so he put a curse on them—their enemies will enslave them unless they fast once a week, and tell the story to their children every day. And that they did tell the story to their children every day. It’s not going to happen. The Nepalese would not believe this unless it happened.

But the better reason to believe the principle is that there are simply no counterexamples! There is not one example of any false belief—with the exception, in the minds of skeptics, of the Exodus—that meets all five criteria, or even the first three criteria. Lots of beliefs meet these criteria—belief in the civil war, in world war two, belief among Laotians in the U.S. bombing spree, belief among Libyans of the Italian atrocities—yet every single one, without exception, other than the belief in the Exodus happens to be true.

If a form of testimony is accurate in every other context the world over, one has quite strong reason to think that in any particular case it would be accurate. The Bayes factor of such evidence must be quite high! Thus, such a principle is both intrinsically plausible and is not subject to a single counterexample!

איזו הוכחה לנס אלהים עשו לנו

There are various popular objections. One common one notes that we could imagine such a story slowly developing over time, with the story being spread from the high priests, for example, to others. But the mere fact that we could imagine something happening doesn’t mean it’s likely to happen. As Dovid Gottlieb notes:

Why should we accept this principle? After all, everything relies on this principle. Could we defeat it? Here is one way not to go about it. We should not say: “You are telling me that just because it is an event that if it had happened would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence, that you can’t get people to believe it? I don’t think that is right. I can imagine very well that a very influential priesthood, or a very powerful leader, or a person whom you would think has magical powers, convincing people to believe in even things like that. I don’t think there is any limit to what the populace can believe. I think I could even write a very convincing novel describing such a case and get it pulished.”

Does your ability to imagine such a case defeat the principle? The answer is no. This is a principle about real people in the real world. The principle doesn’t say anything about your imagination. People can imagine all sorts of things. They can even imagine impossible things. People have imagined squaring a circle; it just happens to be mathematically impossible. I know people who imagine machines that run without loss of any energy. There are people who design them every year. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it is impossible, yet they do it anyway. The limits are on your imagination are is of no interest. The question is: Do real people in the real world accept beliefs like that?

The only way to defeat the Kuzari’s principle is to find real cases. Real cases of communities that have come to believe events which if they had happened would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence, and didn’t happen, and therefore the evidence wasn’t present. I have never yet come across such an event, nothing even remotely resembling such an event.

Here’s another popular objection to the Kuzari argument: okay, perhaps it gives some reason to think the Exodus happened, but we have overwhelming evidence that the Exodus didn’t happen. Had 600,000 Jews left Egypt—about half of the Egyptian population—and pranced across the world to start invading other places, we would have heard about it and discovered the corpses and material they used. Furthermore, given the quite solid support for the documentary hypothesis and the many errors in the Bible, we can’t trust its reports.

But this assumes that I am arguing for a very literalistic strand of Orthodox Judaism. For the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to have performed a miracle and led the Jews out of Egypt, for him to make them his chosen people, every word in the Bible need not be fully accurate. As the Torah stresses over and over again, the Jews constantly turn away from The Almighty and worship idols—it’s no surprise that some of the details of the Exodus would get jumbled!

For this reason, we don’t need to accept a massive Exodus of half the Egyptian population. Instead, we can accept that a smaller number of Jews—perhaps just a few thousand—left Egypt and became the nation of Israel. Against this, there is not any contrary archeological evidence—instead there is evidence from archeology and history favoring this interpretation. A helpful summary of the evidence comes from James Kugel’s excellent book How To Read The Bible:

1. Moses is a typically Egyptian name. If later authors wanted to make up a name, they would probably, to make sure he seemed suitably Jewish, have given him a Jewish name. In addition, they might not have known what an Egyptian name would have been like. Phinehas is also suitably Egyptian. If I were making up a story about ancient Egyptians without access to the internet, I’d be unlikely to get the names right.

2. Some of the Exodus place names are also accurate. The Israelite slaves are supposed to have made the cities of Pithom and Ramses, which were real cities constructed under Ramses. Furthermore, a Greek historian named Diodorus wrote of an ancient Egyptian king “On these labors he used no Egyptians, but constructed them all by the hands of his captives alone.” If I didn’t have the internet, I’d be unlikely to get Egyptian city names write if writing a later piece of fiction.

3. Papyrus Leiden 348 tells of, under Ramses, “‘apiru who were used for ‘hauling stones to the great pylon.’” It’s unclear exactly who the apiru were—apiru is a generic term of denigration—but they may have been the Jewish people. Otherwise, it would be too coincidental that the reports of the Jews being enslaved all point to Ramses.

Thus, the only thing that’s needed for the Kuzari argument is a miraculous Exodus from Egypt—the details about the ten plagues, for instance, could have been later embellishments. And that is something we do not have convincing evidence against.

3 The survival and success of the Jewish people

Don't you know I'm still standing better than I ever did
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
I'm still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind

—Elton John

The Jewish people are still around. Hallelujah!

The Midianites—gone. The Canaanites—gone. The Babylonians—gone. The Jews are the only group to survive thousands of years of intense persecution without a state. Had a religious Jew in 70 BC been asked to guess whether the Jews would survive a thousand years, they would have said yes. Had a secular Roman, for instance, been asked the same question, they’d have been quite confident—probably more than 99% confident—that the Jews would be wiped out. The survival of the Jews, then, is good for a Bayes factor in favor of Judaism of at least 100.

People often say that Jews have survived because their persecution prevented them from fitting in. But as Gottlieb notes, that fails to explain why the Jews survived periods they weren’t persecuted, like the Golden Age of Spain or modern America. It also fails completely to explain why other groups like Pagans didn’t survive intense persecution. Finally, it pushes the problem back a level: why were Jews unique in facing a kind and degree of persecution that ensured their survival, unlike so many other groups? Not only is there no plausible story of how the Jews survived, even if there were such a story, because nearly every group in diaspora dies out, the survival of the Jews would massively favor Judaism.

Additionally, aside from surviving, Jews have resisted fragmentation to a unique degree. While Jews have taken the core commitments of the religion seriously to different degrees, there is nothing like the kind of fragmentation present in Christianity. No official splits over the Filioque, only marginal disagreements about the core Jewish claims—the different denominations differ only in how seriously they take those claims. That Judaism has, despite being practiced in a hundred different countries—Yemen, America, Tunisia, Spain—maintained its core beliefs and not fractured is a hugely improbable Miracle.

On top of this, the Jews have, despite being the most persecuted group in world history—something predicted by the Torah—been arguably the most influential small group in world history. Jews make up 0.2% of the world’s population, but we have won over 20% of the Nobel prizes. That Jews would be the most influential small group in world history is something that a first-century Jew would have predicted, yet a gentile would have stridently rejected. Yet once again, the Jews would have been right.

Not only do Jews have influence, they live better lives than non-Jews. We have higher rates of literacy, lower rates of addiction, and lower rates of crime. If the tradition is, in a broad sense, inspired by God, this is to be expected—if it is a human invention, why would Jews be so successful?

Additionally, a tradition being directly inspired by God explains many unique features of the Jewish tradition. Gottlieb helpfully notes several distinct features of the Jewish God:

1. Monotheism.

2. Jews thought only their God was worthy of worship.

3. The only ancient religion to declare that God has no physical embodiment, form or likeness is Judaism.

4. Only Judaism understands God as the creator of all that exists and completely unlimited in His power over creation.

5. Only the Jewish God is depicted as being perfectly wise and just.

The other groups at the time had tribal war gods—gods who brought thunder and lightning, who were not worthy of praise or worship, who were amoral, powerful superbeings. Only the Israelites had the conception—one that later was confirmed philosophically—of a single benevolent God who created all things and was sovereign over all things.

Now, this was not totally uniform. The early Jewish God was seen often to be a tribal war God of limited power. In Genesis, he creates humans by shaping them out of clay, for instance. In the Babel story, he is depicted as literally coming down to the city to wipe it out—having a physical body. Yet there was also a tradition that blossomed and became mainstream of believing that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the supreme creator of the universe—sovereign over all things. One need not think that every word of the Torah is infallible and devoid of error to think that the core narrative is.

Judaism is also the most influential small religion in that the world’s two biggest religions are offshoots of Judaism. Once again, a Jew around the third century BCE would be much less surprised by the radically transformative impact Jews have had on history—sprouting the two biggest religions—than a third century BCE gentile.

Finally, the Jewish state seems to indicate the favor of The Almighty. It formed against all odds, after 2000 years, won the wars of 1948 and 1967 when it seemed hopeless, survived the war of 1973, fought several different attacking armies over and over again, and became the free-est and most Democratic country in the Middle East by an order of magnitude. If that’s not evidence of the favor of God playing a role, I don’t know what is! This is especially so when Deuteronomy 30 predicts, “And your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and [God] will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your ancestors.” Deuteronomy 30 even correctly predicts the amazing prosperity of the Jewish state and the destruction wrought upon Israel’s enemies, saying God “will grant you abounding prosperity in all your undertakings, in your issue from the womb, the offspring of your cattle, and your produce from the soil.”

In sum then, Jews have a uniquely plausible claim to God having performed a miracle, a uniquely improbable survival story, a uniquely improbable state, a unique impact on history, a unique resistance to splintering, a uniquely high quality of life across almost every metric, and a uniquely plausible theological doctrine of God—one that has now spread from Judaism to the entire world. Jewish history is shocking on the assumption that Judaism is false, utterly unsurprising on the assumption that Judaism is true.

4 Prophecies

I am not intending to defend Biblical inerrancy. I have no problem with the idea that the Torah may err. However, it seems that the Torah gets too much right to have been pure chance.

One that is not especially decisive but is an interesting consequence of the anthropic argument: as Genesis 22:17 predicts, those descended from Abraham are as numerous as the stars in the sky. This is quite a surprising prediction—especially when one remembers that the heavens are likely infinite—yet the Torah happens to get it right.

More decisively, is the prophecy in Deuteronomy 28-30, helpfully described by Gottlieb (I slightly disagree with him about some of the predictions). It predicts many things, each of vanishingly low probability, that will happen to the Jewish people if they turn away from God:

1. The total destruction of the Jewish nation. Deuteronomy 28:45 says “They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the Lord your God and observe the commands and decrees he gave you.” This is a rare phenomenon, as Gottlieb notes, writing, “That was rare in the ancient world. It happened, but it was rare because the purpose of conquest was economic. Typically it was a question of acquiring colonies and taxing them.” In fact, this has only happened a handful—roughly 8—times, that an entire nation was exiled. But the Romans did destroy Jerusalem and scatter the Jewish people across the world.

2. It predicts the Jews would be conquered by people speaking a language they don’t understand. Deuteronomy 28:49 says “The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand.” Most people are conquered by their neighbors—however, the Jews were finally conquered and dispersed by the Romans who did not speak their language and came from far away.

3. It correctly predicted that the Jews would end up all over the world, with Deuteronomy 28:64 saying “Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other.” This is particularly improbable given the rarity of this sort of diaspora. Gottlieb notes, “Even when the Babylonians exiled us 500 years earlier, we didn’t end up all over the world. The vast majority of the population was taken off to Babylon, a large group went to Alexandria in Egypt, but there were many places in the world where there were no identifiable groups of Jews.”

4. It predicts some would be enslaved in Egypt but no one would buy them. Deuteronomy 28:68 says “The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.” This very weird detail happened to be true!

5. The main theme of the passage is that the Jews will face intense persecution. The Jews are arguably the most persecuted small group in the world, so this turned out to be unbelievably true.

6. Deuteronomy says Israel will be conquered by “A fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young.” They were conquered by the Romans who regularly practiced infanticide!

7. Deuteronomy 28:51-52 says “They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or olive oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the Lord your God is giving you.”

The text is a bit unclear about exactly what counts as a prophecy—some of it seems clearly hyperbolic—so it’s hard to put precise mathematical estimates of the probabilities (the math is different if 10 prophecies all turn out right than if of 15ish prophecies 10 turn out right), but the fact that so much of this so accurately describes what happened should at least give us some pause. Each of these are quite thoroughly improbable, so the fact that all of them happened—seemingly every non-hyperbolic prediction in Deuteronomy turned out right—is quite surprising. I don’t know exactly how seriously to take this, but it’s something.

5 Objections

One first worry you might have is that I have not so much proven Judaism as proven that at least Judaism is correct. Everything I’ve said so far is perfectly consistent with both Christianity and Islam. Islam is, however, ridiculously improbable, so that leaves Christianity as the only remaining option. I think there are several points favoring Judaism over Christianity.

First, Christianity, unlike Judaism, talks a great deal about hell. If, like me, one finds it implausible that the fate of many people will be postmortem punishment, and that the holy book would seem to suggest that people suffer forever, leading billions of people to believe the incredibly implausible infernalist doctrine, this counts sharply against Christianity.

Second, given that Christians accept the divine inspiration of the Torah, it’s a problem that their doctrines conflict sharply with those given in the Torah. The trinity runs counter the claim in Deuteronomy 6:4 that, "Hear Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is one." Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent.” Ezekiel 46:16-17 suggests that the Messiah will have kids. Isaiah 11:2 says the Messiah will fear God, but God would not fear himself! Deuteronomy 13, in fact, predicts false prophets doing Miracles, with their doctrines going against the Torah, so even if one is convinced of Jesus’s miracles, if his teachings conflict with those in the Torah, one shouldn’t trust them!

Third, Judaism, unlike Christianity, doesn’t hold to the bizarre and hard-to-make sense-of doctrine of a trinity. While I haven’t time to explore the bizareness of the trinity, it’s both wildly unclear why there are supposed to be three persons in the Godhead, rather than 4 or 7 or infinity, and how there could be more than one person in a being.

Fourth, Judaism doesn’t hold that God became incarnate to redeem us. How would this work? How would God being incarnate redeem us? It’s quite hard to fathom. The Christian doctrine of the atonement is so bizarre and alien that no one would ever accept it were it not a commitment of their religion. A much better explanation of thier belief in atonement is that their views grew out of ancient barbarism, their seeing God sacrificing Jesus as morally equivalent to sacrificing a lamb.

A second worry one might have about my case is that Judaism implies the repugnant doctrine that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Such a doctrine sounds rather immoral—why would The Almighty, sovereign over all things, who created the heavens and Earth, pick favorites?

But Jews shouldn’t think of their status as God’s chosen people in this way. God doesn’t like Shlomo Yitzhak Ben-Yehudastein more than Jon Smith simply because he’s a Jew. Rather, God chooses a people to guide, through whom he reshapes the world, using it to eradicate the barbaric Pagan ideas that were ubiquitous before the spread of the Abrahamic faiths. Picking the Jews to do a task—not an easy task, one that involves great sacrifice and difficulty—isn’t an objectionable kind of picking favorites.

A third common worry is that the Bible seems to contain various evil deeds allegedly sanctioned by God—the wiping out of the Canaanites and the Amalakites. The God of the Bible, in various places, seems upon first reading to be a barbaric and tribal war God—not the perfect being that created the universe. But once again, I do not affirm inerrancy. What God has guided is the tradition—one which accumulates wisdom over time—to prosper, rather than ensuring the Torah contains no errors. Judaism must be thought of as a wisdom tradition, rather than an infallible book of rules. Against this more liberal view, Biblical errors are no objection.

The kind of Judaism that is the most plausible is one according to which the Jewish people—and their scriptures—erred. But they were guided by God to gain more wisdom, root out many of their errors, and shape the world. They helped guide the world to a deeper understanding of God—not as a petty and vindictive Zeus character, but as a wise, temperate, just, and loving being. They helped root out the brutality and child-sacrifice that was all too common before the Abrahamic faiths, and provided unprecedented scientific advancement. Such a picture makes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob quite plausible—all the more so because of what his existence explains.