Rabbi Shalom Carmy

For the spring 2021 semester, Rabbi Shalom Carmy, assistant professor of Jewish philosophy and Bible, is teaching Belief and Religious Commitment, which explores the question of how people believe what they do. It is being offered at Yeshiva College in collaboration with the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. YU News sat down with Rabbi Carmy to discuss the course.

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The course is called Belief and Religious Commitment, as if they are two separate concepts. However, some may see them as the same idea. Do you see belief and religious commitment as separate entities or one and the same? Can you have one without the other?  

In ethics and religion, we expect that believing gives you a reason, perhaps a compelling reason, to live your life accordingly. But we do find people who adopt a detached, neutral attitude. It’s important to understand both sides: what impedes people from translating intellectual conviction into real life? How can one overcome such indifference?  

What is the goal of the course? Do you view it as a course that is meant to inspire belief/religious commitment, or is it purely an academic study of the subject?  

In our culture, most people, especially those who do not study philosophy and history and literature and other liberal arts subjects, get their outlook, without thinking much about it, from the surrounding culture. That culture is predominantly secular and uncritical. Often the stories we pick up from the culture, whether from the intellectual overclass or the media, are contradictory. To take one example: One common ideal exalts the individual thinker who sits in a room and works out his or her system of belief from ground zero. Descartes’ Meditations exemplify that kind of experiment at the dawn of modern philosophy, although Descartes realized that this model is inappropriate to practical life and religious belief. It leads many to disparage tradition as a source of truth and to set up artificial standards of proof that foster skepticism. The history of science displays a different idea in conflict with this sort of methodological skepticism. Stephen Shapin’s Social History of Truth, for example, argues that modern science, as developed in the 18th century, is a cooperative venture. Science advanced only when it could presuppose that inquirers trusted each other to work responsibly, to be honest about their data and so forth. Religious commitment is predicated on the believer’s personal connection to God. The content of Jewish religious belief, to a large extent, is produced not by the individual but by the historical experience and tradition belonging to the Torah community. I am not committed to Torah because I, as a solitary individual, have worked out all the details but because I am part of that community. Likewise, no contemporary physicist can claim to have mastered the entire corpus of physics; what the physicist believes, outside a narrow specialty, is based on the consensus of competent scientists. Examining these models of knowledge and discovery helps us to understand how reasonable people effectively arrive at reasonable beliefs. Doing so enables us to appreciate how religious belief is like other areas of investigation and how the process of attaining it differs from other disciplines. Philosophy enables us to realize that the dogmas and modes of reasoning prevalent in our secular culture are not the only ways of thinking. History teaches us that our present culture is not the only way to live. Literature shows that secular culture is not the only reality we can imagine. I can multiply examples, regarding the questions of belief and many other areas in our lives and culture, of why it is essential for thinking religious individuals to develop broad, critical perspectives. This is something we need for self-understanding, to understand others, and to overcome the narrowness and self-delusion that are inevitable when we lack the ability to think and reason and imagine beyond the options provided by secular institutions and media.  

Why did you decide to teach this course? Why is it interesting and meaningful to you?

I have always been intrigued by the question of how people believe what they do, how they change their outlooks, how they get it right and how they get it wrong. And I have always recognized that these questions involve not only analytic philosophical arguments but the entire human experience. For that reason, I am attracted to interdisciplinary work that is not confined to one method and a narrowly circumscribed subject matter. A good meal, for me, is one that offers many dishes, so that you get up from the table well nourished but with an appetite for more. The type of course I’m trying to offer is a multidisciplinary approach to a specific set of issues relating to real life, not a general survey but broad enough to be intellectually nourishing and to leave room and appetite for more.  

How does the class exemplify the creed of Torah Umadda? 

If our work helps people grow as thinking religious individuals, I don’t need to say more.  

What texts are the students reading and discussing?  

Mostly philosophical classics written by Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Hume, which have shaped philosophical debate. Three great 19th-century figures: Kierkegaard, Newman and William James, each one of whom brought with him a different set of problems. Some interspersed discussion of how philosophical assumptions play out in religion, in science and in daily life together with insights and arguments developed in more recent theory of knowledge and philosophy of religion. Though it is not a Jewish Studies course, we can’t avoid reading some Rambam and discussing other Jewish writers. And, of course, my primary mentors, R. Soloveitchik and R. Lichtenstein, wrote from an explicitly Orthodox point of view about the philosophical implications of modern science and the cultural crises of Anglican religion, respectively, so that their presence is at times very much in evidence in our meetings.