On Faith and Fanaticism
A Review of Mendel Adelman's book, Precipice
I can’t claim objectivity in the following book review as the author is the gabbai (master of ceremonies) at my shul (synagogue), and if I give him a bad review, I might never get an aliyah (calling up to the Torah) again. . . . But, if it came to that, I just wouldn’t do the review, and he has specifically asked me to be as critical as possible. I can’t make any promises, but I will try and be fair. BTW, I haven’t written a book review for about 30 years, so there’s that as well.
In his most recent book, Precipice, Rabbi Mendel Adelman defines and discusses religious fanaticism and how to distinguish it from profound piety. This exploration follows his previous book, Lodestone, in which he argues that our “innate morality” offers a check on literalist readings and misreadings of the Bible and Torah Law—and, to some extent, the latter book builds on the former.
Precipice is a thoughtful, well-written, and entertaining book, though throughout, I wondered why this particular topic at this particular time. Except for its use as a label of abuse—which the author addresses—I don’t see the issue of religious fanaticism as particularly relevant to our moment, though obviously, it’s an issue that never goes away.1
I also couldn’t help feeling that the book skirts the issue of religion itself as fanatic, i.e., the notion held by skeptics that any form of orthodoxy is extremist and harmful. I, for example, have seen secular Jews argue that asking kids not to eat on fast days is fanatical child abuse. And, of course, there is the controversy around circumcision, which is, according to some (often fanatical) opponents, a form of religious fanaticism.
Adelman addresses these issues, including circumcision directly, but not very deeply, because he takes for granted, largely, that religious belief and orthodox practices are normal and reasonable. He basically argues that parents have the right to inflict small, non-permanent pains on their children when they see it as in their child’s best interest.2
I accept circumcision as a small, if permanent, pain, but I know a lot of people who don’t.3 But those people, I think, are not a target audience for this book, and one must be careful to critique the book that is, not the book that isn’t, and this isn’t a book about the reasonableness of faith. It is, rather, a book about having faith and being reasonable.
The question of audience, though, is important. Precipice seems a little unsure, at times, of who that is. On the one hand, Adelman will define terms like “halacha,” Jewish law, which no religious Jew would need to be defined, and on the other hand, he will reference a halachic issue such as the “rebellious son” without explaining it.4 No Orthodox Jew would need such an explanation, but anyone who didn’t know what halacha was would.5
In general, though, this is not an issue, and certainly, anyone, Jewish or not, religious or not, would not have too much trouble with this book as most of the important references are explained.
Moreover, the prose style is clear and concise and aimed at a middle- rather than high-brow audience. Thus, though Adelman takes up serious issues of ethics and philosophy, there is nary an “ontology,” “epistemology,” nor “teleology” to be found in the book. Nor is there yeshivish jargon or even Chassidish jargon. Though Adelman is Chabad, there’s no mention of Sefirot or Tzimtzum or any number of other Kabbalistic terms. Nothing but good ol’ plain English here, which is just fine by me, as it exemplifies what I often claim in this Substack and elsewhere—that you don’t need ten-dollar words and discipline-specific jargon to communicate deep and important ideas.
And it’s not just sentence-level clarity I admire here. Adelman knows how to hook and keep an audience. He typically begins a chapter or topic with an arresting anecdote or story garnered from the pages of history or current events to capture our attention and build a foundation for his argument. Along the way, he will bring in entertaining and thought-provoking trivia such as the origin of “rock, paper, scissors” in Ancient China, explaining how it was originally “slug, snake, frog” and establishing surprising connections, for example, comparing the game to martial arts and the United States Constitution. His frame of reference is broad, ranging from Queen Isabella’s role in the expulsion of Jews from Spain to rock climber Alex Honnold scaling a cliff sans equipment.
Speaking of which, Adelman himself knows how to deploy a cliffhanger, such as when he concludes a chapter on “Nakam,” a 1940s secret Jewish organization that sought to exact revenge on the Germans for the Holocaust. After explaining how they scrapped a plan to poison Nuremberg reservoirs, he ends the chapter, “So, they turned to Plan B: kill the German POWs”—with the result, of course, that the reader is unlikely to put the book down before starting the next chapter.
In short, Adelman is a skilled storyteller, which contributes greatly to the work’s readability.
But what, you may ask, is he actually saying?
The book starts with a basic distinction that carries throughout the work: the distinction between a fanatic, exemplified by Yigal Amir,6 who assassinated Yitzchak Rabin, and a pious figure who might be seen as a fanatic but is not: the Biblical figure Pinchas.
Pinchas, grandson of Aaron, brother of Moses, shows up in the Book of Numbers when he spears through the bellies and backs a fornicating couple—and, for doing so, earns the High Priesthood for himself and his descendants. Amir was a religious Jew who, in 1995, shot and killed the then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzchak Rabin.
Pinchas, so the story goes, was trying to end a plague upon the Jews caused by cohabitation with the Midianites. Amir was trying to derail the Oslo Accords, an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan he feared would result in the annihilation of Israel. Both men sought to save Jewish lives. Both men killed public figures.7 But Pinchas is a hero and Amir a villain. Pinchas is pious, but Amir is a fanatic. Why?
The difference, Adelman argues, is not one of core beliefs or extreme behavior but that the fanatic acts upon faith that is “one-sided and unbalanced”—he leaves no room for doubt about his motives, logic, or the outcome of his planned action. On the other hand, the pious person has the intellectual humility to consider he might be wrong and to consider “how much harm could come from being wrong” (39).
Amir, Adelman argues, never questioned his motives and wisdom and never considered the disastrous possibilities that might have followed the assassination, namely the destruction of Israeli civil society. Pinchas, on the other hand, acted on “prophetic insight” (136), sought permission from authority (according to Biblical commentary—not the actual Biblical account), and correctly understood that he was saving lives (as the cohabitation with the Moabites had brought on a plague that was killing thousands of Jews).
It’s a bold and useful contrast—if one fully accepts Adelman’s narrative of the two killers, that is to say, if one accepts both the journalistic accuracy of his depiction of Yigal Amir and the historical accuracy of his depiction of Pinchas.
Concerning the latter, it would be easy for a skeptic to argue that Biblical commentators whitewashed the story8 to excuse Pinchas from the very charge of fanaticism that Adelman says does not apply. A skeptic might suspect Pinchas was, indeed, a religious fantastic who murdered a couple for what, in our day (consensual sex), would be no sin at all, that, in fact, he seems more like a crazed killer even than Amir.
But that gets, in part, to the question of audience. A non-believer will find much to question in this book if they come from a position of religious skepticism. But such a position, I would suggest, is largely outside the range of this book’s discourse, which in no way seeks to defend faith as faith. And if you don’t accept faith’s legitimacy, then pretty much all of religion seems fanatical.9
But there is an out, even for the skeptic, which is this. You don’t have to believe that the story of Pinchas, as Adelman lays out, is literally true. You only have to stipulate that, for the sake of argument, the facts of the case are correct. Because the argument is not about Biblical or even contemporary history. It’s about a mindset, and these two stories, whether factual or not, illustrate a principle: that we must exercise intellectual humility and act out of “innate morality” before taking any actions that might seriously harm others.10
The notion of “innate morality” hearkens back to the premise of Adelman’s previous book, Lodestone, that the human psyche is built upon a “bedrock of an innate sense of right and wrong” (151). So strong and reliable is this innate morality, that it seems even to curb Biblical direction and Torah law—an interesting take from an Orthodox rabbi.
Adelman argues that “If the Torah permits something that seems wrong, we should step forward and forbid it on our own” and that “If the Torah commands us to do something that feels wrong. . . or has punishments that feel too harsh, we should look for loopholes” (106).
These are not reformist injunctives, he argues, but standard practice in Orthodox Judaism. An example of forbidding what the Torah allows would be laws against slavery. An example of seeking loopholes for harsh punishments would be the rabbinic understanding of the “rebellious son,” which institutes so many conditions (see footnote 3 below) as to make it all but impossible ever to enforce the Biblically prescribed punishment of death by stoning.
This is where I run into some trouble with the author. Not that I want to stone or enslave anyone, but I’m less sure of this whole “innate morality” thing.11
In Lodestone, for example, Adelman suggests that the Aztec practice of human sacrifice was consistent with innate morality. Yes, they tore the living heart out of their victims, but they also “had laws outlawing homicide, perjury, rape, aborter,” etc. . . . (p 15). The sacrifices were not counter to innate morality but, on the contrary, an expression of it since the Aztecs were operating under a kind of mistaken science, the belief that human sacrifice would appease the Gods—and so save lives.
Now, maybe they had some complex reasoning that led them to such a conclusion, but I would reverse engineer it differently.
What caused the Aztecs to believe the brutal and bloody sacrifice of human beings—removing a beating heart, etc.—would be pleasing to the gods? It could have been some complex idea of sacrifice, but it could also have been because it was pleasing to them, because humans enjoy that sort of thing.12
Reason might suggest that the Aztecs were just trying to control the weather or some such thing. But Nietzche and Freud, not to mention the Marquis DeSade, would suggest that, far from any “innate morality,” we have an innate desire to take what we want and to delight in the harm of others, and the only thing that holds us back are the demands of civilization, of state or tribal power.13
There’s a scene at the end of The Warriors, a film I suspect Rabbi Adelman has never watched. In that movie, a charismatic teen gang leader is assassinated, and the blame for the assassination is falsely pinned on the gang “The Warriors.” When, at the end of the film, the leader of the Warriors confronts the true assassin, he asks, “Why’d you do it? Why’d you waste Cyrus?”
“No reason,” says the assassin. “I just like doing things like that.” And he chuckles.
Maybe Yigal Amir killed Rabin because he wanted to save Jews. Or maybe he just liked doing things like that.
To some extent, Adelman anticipates this counterpoint in Lodestone by starting with the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic psychopath. Psychopaths, Adelman argues, are rare exceptions, suggesting that his book is essentially for “normal” people.
Point taken. . . and yet, I don’t think even normal people are free from animalistic, sadistic, self-destructive, and sometimes flat-out evil desires, and that these sometimes besiege our “innate morality,” such that it is. The distinction between normal and psychopathy, Freud would have argued, is not so much one of difference as degree.
Adelman might have usefully addressed this issue through recourse to Chassidic thought, to the idea that we have both an animal soul and a Godly soul, but he doesn’t take that route, perhaps to reach a wider audience, not only of “misnagdim” but even of non-Jews. But it is an omission that, for me, weakens the argument of both books.
But, of course, maybe I’m back to doing what I said I wouldn’t: discussing the book the author hasn’t written. Then again, maybe that’s the book I’d really like to see him write, maybe one that would round out these first two, a book on why good people do bad things, a book on the id, the evil impulse, the animal soul, what have you. Because, for me at least, that is the missing element in these first two books.
That being said, whatever Rabbi Adelman chooses to write about next, I’m sure it will be thought-provoking, intelligent, and entertaining.
So, do I still get my aliyah?
Well, let me qualify that remark. There’s a certain religion of peace that seems to have bred a lot of fanaticism for the past half century, but while its practitioners might benefit from this book, I don’t think they are a likely audience. Right now, among Jews and Christians, I’m not seeing a lot of fanaticism of the type discussed in this book—unless you include a certain kind of “Christ is King” antisemite, and they are also not likely to be reading this book.
Vaccination would be an obvious, largely uncontroversial, example of this. People might argue against the wisdom of vaccines, but I’ve yet to encounter people who would see it as fanatical to vaccinate a child.
Including both my parents, OBM. One of these days, I’ll write more about circumcision. Having gotten my brit at 40, I have a unique perspective. It’s a topic about which I’ve seen people make extreme claims, but one that is not, maybe, so simple once you step out of the realm of religious belief.
I guess I should explain this concept. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 explains If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, 19 his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. 20 They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.22
Pretty harsh, right? But Talmudic commentators have set up/revealed criteria for “the rebellious son” so specific as to be almost impossible to fulfill. He has to steal money from his father, use it to get drunk, and stuff himself on meat. There must be two witnesses who warned specifically against this. And it only applies between ages 13 and 13 and 3 months. The practical effect of these strictures is that the Talmud declares: “There never has been a case of a ‘stubborn and rebellious son’ brought to trial and never will be.”
Likewise, he will cite texts such as “Yoma 39b,” without explaining what that is (and without a bibliography). I assume it’s a Talmudic tractate. But what do I know? Not much in that respect. . . .
My first response to reading this name in the book is that Adelman doesn’t pull any punches, leading off with a Jewish fanatic whose act of assassination still provokes powerful feelings. At the same time, one might ask, and indeed a friend did ask, why not bring up Barch Goldstein, who killed 29 worshippers at a mosque in 1994?
The male half of the couple Pinchas “skewered”—as Adelman puts it—was a leader of the Tribe of Simeon.
And, indeed, I’m just the sort of guy to make such an argument. See Rabinnic Retcon.
Cf. For example, the committed Substack atheist whose comments on my comments led to my post, “Pleading the Truth?”
He breaks these down into five steps of self-questioning:
1. Consider you might be wrong
2. Make sure your priorities are in order
3. Consider less harmful alternatives
4. Consider the likely outcomes and
5. Examine your motives to see if they are moral, i.e., driven by the desire for a positive goal as opposed to revenge, pleasure-seeking, envy, etc.
And also, the “judge the Bible for yourself” approach seems to lead inevitably to something like Reform Judaism, as in, I judge the distinctions between men and women to be immoral, so I’m not accepting that part of Judaism, for example. Once we decide our innate morality trumps Biblical literalism, where do we draw a line? How to avoid the slippery slope from Orthodoxy to Conservative to Reform to “I read and judge the Bible and its commandments for myself?”
I was once at a UFC fight where people literally called for blood, and there is a whole genre of horror explicitly devoted to extreme violence: splatterpunk. Or take, for example, Mortal Combat, which I play sometimes with my son. Almost every bout depicts, explicitly, the crushing of your opponent’s vertebrae. The human desire to witness, if not participate in, extreme violence may not be universal, but it is certainly not uncommon.
Nerousis, Freud argues in Civilization and its Discontents, results from the uneasy compromise each of us makes between our animalistic desire to take what we want however we want it and our rational understanding that we are better off taming that desire in the interest of cooperating with others. The compromise is not a moral one but a pragmatic one. Civilization provides for my needs better than does a state of animal nature.
"Nothing but good ol’ plain English here, which is just fine by me, as it exemplifies what I often claim in this Substack and elsewhere—that you don’t need ten-dollar words and discipline-establishment jargon to communicate deep and important ideas."
One might argue that academic jargon gets in the way of communicating deep and important ideas. Or, more cynically, that academic jargon is used to give mediocre ideas the appearance of depth and importance. (H/T Eric Blair.)
I am totally sold on reading this book. I read Positivity Bias and Shall We Have Another, which seem like a similar genre.