Anti-Philosophy and 220,000 Angels

Picture this. As a part of the spectacle at Mt. Sinai, the moment when the Torah is given, when the presence of God is revealed, 220,000 angels descend with God. All of them are arranged according to banners, carrying distinct flags. The Israelites see these and immediately feel a strong desire to have flags of their own.

Later on, as time passes, while the Israelites are camped in the desert, they are counted, numbered, given roles, placement and structure. They remember the angels and they still want their flags.

This little scene sums up a Midrash on a verse about this in our portion this week, Bamidbar:
 

אִ֣ישׁ עַל־דִּגְל֤וֹ בְאֹתֹת֙ לְבֵ֣ית אֲבֹתָ֔ם יַחֲנ֖וּ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל מִנֶּ֕גֶד סָבִ֥יב לְאֹֽהֶל־מוֹעֵ֖ד יַחֲנֽוּ׃

“The Israelites shall camp each [household] with its standard, under the banners of their ancestral house; they shall camp around the Tent of Meeting at a distance.

Why were the Israelites so interested in having flags? What was it about the angels that made them so passionately desire those flags? 

Before answering the question, I’d like to bring in some help. A Jewish Russian philosopher named Lev Shestov.

Shestov was born in Kyiv in 1866 as Yehuda Leib Schwarzmann into a wealthy Jewish family. Early on, he studied law and mathematics. From the beginning of his scholarship he rejected the dominant philosophical traditions of rationalism and system-building. His ideas were not accepted and his dissertation was rejected. Shestov proceeded to find inspiration instead in writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Søren Kierkegaard. His writings challenged the authority of reason, logic, and “self-evident truths,” arguing that philosophy had too often ignored the uncertainty, suffering, and chaos at the center of human existence.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Shestov immigrated to France and spent the final decades of his life in Paris, where he became an influential voice for early existentialist thinkers. It was there where he wrote “Athens and Jerusalem,” his main work which explores the tension between Greek philosophy and biblical faith.

Shestov wrote what we might call Anti-Philosophy. His main suggestion was that philosophy itself was extremely limited because it relied on reason. He challenged the assumption that truth itself must obey reason. What if truth only reveals itself when consciousness dares to break free from the limits of logic?

Athens represented that limit, for Shestov. He thought of it as an intellectual prison which was based on and only considered necessity. Whereas Jerusalem was radically free, unpredictable and revealed itself through encounter. 

Shestov wrote: “If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe they were in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not allow Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world…. But the haze of the primordial mystery has not been dissipated. It has grown denser. Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave.”

For all we know, Shestov suggests, we know nothing. Our advancements don’t do a thing to break us out of the cave… because our prison is our logic.

Shestov strove to do away with systems. Not political or governmental ones, but rather systems of thinking. Our lives are chaotic and unpredictable and can not be unified under any single explanation, no matter how hard or how many times we try to find it. Giving in to our unique lived experience, to faith which defies logic, to trust in the unexplainable, might provide us with the freedom to create our own philosophy.

The book of Bamidbar (Numbers) which we begin this week, opens with a census, data gathering, hierarchical arrangement, space allocation and military planning. 
 

״שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כׇּל־עֲדַ֣ת בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֖ם לְבֵ֣ית אֲבֹתָ֑ם בְּמִסְפַּ֣ר שֵׁמ֔וֹת כׇּל־זָכָ֖ר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָֽם׃

“Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.’’

What is translated here as “head by head,” the word לגולגלותם actually means “skull by skull.” There is something very impersonal about these commands.

The Israelites understood their need for structure, hierarchical arrangement and data gathering, but at the same time they yearned for something more. They yearned for flags. According to our Midrash they yearned for flags like those of the angels.

The word for angel in Hebrew is mal’ach. Mal’ach's actual translation is “messenger.” An angel in our tradition is a messenger tasked with a mission, something to deliver. In other words, a messenger with a calling.

The Israelites did not merely desire the angels’ banners. They envied their sense of purpose. Every angel carried a distinct mission, and therefore a distinct flag. The banners in the wilderness became symbols not only of tribal belonging, but of irreducible spiritual vocation.

Both Shestov and this Midrash tell us something very important - Systems of thinking which are based on logic are not enough. Those systems may be instrumental for a healthy functioning of individuals together as a collective, but inside that collective there are individuals who cannot be defined by any unifying system. The attempt by us to fit into any such system may only result in the oppression of our creativity and our uniqueness.

Shestov was an existentialist in that he believed that reality cannot be explained, only lived, and that life was unique to each one of us.

We all experience the tension in our lives between being a part of a collective and radically unique individuals. On the one hand, we are fulfilling our rational role in what we would hope yields a functional society, and on the other, we hold onto truths that are deeply embedded that no one will ever understand, that perhaps we would never be able to explain. 

Just like us, the Israelites, did not have a problem being counted, and just like us, they also knew that they were not countable.