In Brief: May 01, 1998

Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience
Edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and David G. Dalin
Univ. of Notre Dame Press
331 pp.; $40

This carefully selected collection of documents begins with a sharply phrased thesis: “Much of what passes for fact in the field (e.g., ‘American Jewry’s long-standing historic embrace of separationism’) turns out upon careful examination to consist of half-truths, and sometimes pure fantasy.” It goes on to present a nuanced argument through both skillful editorial apparatus and the documents themselves. That argument can be summarized like this: While Jews in America have almost all sought “equal footing” before the law, what “equal footing” has meant differs widely depending upon time, place, and circumstance.

For example, until the last third of the nineteenth century, almost all public Jewish voices expressed themselves in favor of government support for religion—whether in education, the military (through chaplains), or other venues. The difficulty for Jews in roughly the first century of United States history was to overcome laws and deeply ingrained cultural habits that, in effect, forced all American citizens to act like Christians. So Jews opposed test acts requiring office holders to believe in the New Testament, they protested when “public schools” mandated praying the Lord’s Prayer or promoting faith in Christ, and they urged the right to name rabbis as chaplains during the Civil War alongside Christian clergymen. In these protests, Jews worked against the American grain of the period, but as promoters of a more equitable approach to religion in public rather than as opponents of religion in public life per se.

In its treatment of the last 130 years or so of American history, the great merit of this anthology is to show the vigor of internal Jewish debates over church and state. Beginning with the large-scale Jewish emigration from Central and Eastern Europe after the Civil War, more and more Jews became advocates of strict separationism between religion and public life.

To such ones, strict separationism was the only way to avoid the evil effects of either America’s historic cultural Protestantism or the more active promotion of “Christian America” that both proto-fundamentalist and proto-modernist Protestants advocated from the 1880s onward. Thus, for many vocal Jews it was advantageous to seek alliances with all who opposed any form of Christianity in the public schools, in legal practice, or in observance of weekly or annual holy days, however irreligious such allies might be, since this strategy was thought to preserve the most space for Jews.

While the anthology provides ample space to illustrate Jewish strict separationism, its great value is to illustrate how many Jews have been, and continue to be, concerned about the unrestrained advocacy of that position. In more recent decades, Will Herberg’s complaint about the thinness of American public life stripped of religion and the campaign by Orthodox Lubavitchers for state support for private Jewish education have been important examples of dissenting positions. In showing that these instances reflect a well-established, if understudied Jewish pattern, Sarna and Dalin improve historical understanding while making an important contribution to current legal controversies. Americans are not known as a nuance-loving people, but the kind of carefully documented argument contained in the pages of this book means that on questions of church and state, the time for nuance has arrived, whether we like it or not.

—Mark Noll

The Wisdom of the BodyBy Sherwin B. Nuland Alfred A. Knopf 369 pp.; $26.95

Over 15 centuries ago, Saint Augustine of Hippo decried the fact that “men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, the courses of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.” Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author of the National Book Award-winning How We Die, is one of the latest in a long line of physicians and scientists whose work and writings encourage people to pause for reflection at the wonder within. As research continues to elucidate the protean marvels of the body’s modus operandi, the sense of awe and amazement continues to deepen.

The title phrase of Nuland’s new book, a metaphor for the body’s seemingly intuitive integration of its diverse faculties, was used by Dr. Ernest Starling in 1923 when delivering the prestigious Harveian Oration to the Royal College of Physicians in Great Britain. It was later employed by the well-known physiologist Walter B. Cannon as the title for a popular book, and then again by Nobel Prize-winner Sir Charles Sherrington as a title for one of his Gifford Lectures, which later became the book Man on His Nature. Nuland’s own emphasis is on the body’s intricate communication system, from the microscopic cellular level, up to the autonomic system, and further up to the level of conscious knowledge. It is this system of communication, Nuland suggests, that creates the “awareness of our inner selves” so necessary for the stability, the homeostasis, that keeps us alive. This, for Nuland, is “the wisdom of the body.”

A career as a surgeon has specially qualified Nuland to write on this subject, for surgeons have direct, intimate dealings with the body not experienced by most others. “For thirty-five years, my hands have been deep within the body of humanity,” he writes, and such visceral contact—actually touching, feeling, palpating, probing, seeing, smelling, and hearing the inner man—gives a certain authority to Nuland’s physiological observations and philosophical ruminations about our humanity. There can be no substitute for such experience.

Nuland does a superb job of portraying fairly both the mechanistic and theistic views of human nature. He eschews atheism, he says, because it is presumptuous and unscientific.

His observations have simply led him to believe in a biologically based explanation for our existence. Reason, conscience, morality—all are products of potentialities inherent in human biology: “The human spirit is, I believe, the generated product of our innate biology, encompassing the molecular behavior of our cellular structure. Nothing more need be sought. There is no need to invoke either a higher power or magic. We need only invoke what is in our human cells—the highest power and greatest magic that has ever awed a wonder-struck observer of its magnificence.”

But Nuland is quick to add that “nothing in my hypothesis about the human spirit necessarily rules out the existence of God.” Nor does it mean the human spirit is simply the sum of its biological body parts. Though shying away from the numinous, he believes that anatomy and physiology can create a human spirit that surpasses the body’s individual components, that “a thing greater than the innate has somehow been crafted from the innate.”

This phenomenon of a whole organism being greater than the sum of its parts can also be found outside the human realm. In The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas points out that social insects—such as ants, termites, and bees—are individually animals without much of a mind. (He describes the ant as a ganglion on legs.) Yet when they gather together, they seem to accumulate intelligence. When a critical mass is reached, “thinking” begins, as evidenced by their behavior in building complex habitations. The same phenomenon can be observed in life forms as various as slime molds and flocking birds.

A single human neuron has limited capacities, but place 10 billion neurons with 60 trillion synapses together in the cerebral cortex, and a human will have a brain that, like a termite colony, thinks. Integrate this with the unfathomable complexity of the human body, and—so Nuland argues—the human spirit emerges, a biological construct capable of love, reasoning, morality, altruism, worship, and able to sense beauty. All of these qualities magnificently transcend the simple evolutionary survival requirements of DNA transmission.

Nuland’s book is organized into a veritable tour de force of discussion about the various body systems: immune, cardiac, reproductive, nervous, and so forth. Clinical stories of his patients’ travails and triumphs are sprinkled throughout the text as adjuncts to his lecturing.

Unhappily, The Wisdom of the Body has some crippling shortcomings. Circular reasoning is repeatedly employed in trying to make a case for the chance evolution of humanity, discussions are often ineffective in communicating complex anatomical ideas, and the tedious breadth of some chapters is prohibitive.

In short, Nuland has bitten off more than he can chew. In what is often little more than a physiology text discussing complex concepts, this 369-page book contains a paltry nine illustrations. In contrast, standard physiology texts usually have one to two illustrations or pictures per page because words alone have limited ability to communicate complicated anatomical physiology. In this field, a picture is worth at least a thousand words.

Nuland would have done better to increase the number of chapters and shorten their length, breaking up broad, complicated material into smaller morsels his readers could digest (much as Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey did in Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image.) As it is, the writing is uneven: wonderful stories, told in superb fashion, jostling cheek by jowl with long sections of tedious and confusing textbook exposition. The unhappy result for the reader is often restlessness or somnolence.

But for those who have the patience to wade through the slow parts, especially if they also have access to an anatomy or physiology text, The Wisdom of the Body offers a new and perhaps uncomfortable measure of self-awareness.

—David Graham

Fiction

ParadiseBy Toni Morrison Alfred A. Knopf 318 pp.; $25

After the climactic violence of Toni Morrison’s latest novel has subsided, two prominent ministers of the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, are helpless to explain the recent events “because neither had decided on the meaning of the ending and, therefore, had not been able to formulate a credible, sermonizable account of it.” Morrison’s jab reminds readers to avoid facile interpretations of her own story; but all such admonitions aside, this disturbing, entangled novel leaves the reader sympathizing with the pastors’ plight.

Paradise—Morrison’s first novel since she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993—spans nearly a century in the communal life of Ruby, formerly Haven, an isolated (and isolationist) town established by 158 proud ex-slaves after the failure of Reconstruction. Their descendants hold fast to the founders’ determination to live in the world but not of it, but by 1976, the turmoil of the civil-rights era has infiltrated the community, and dissension has taken root. More significantly, the paradise of this close-knit community has become fractured from within, by generational conflict, by unspoken color prejudices, by religious diversity, and by the pervasive fear that God’s favor no longer rests with them.

Throughout Paradise, Morrison deftly examines how the “exquisitely human” desire for paradise falls prey to human frailty and faithlessness and an unwillingness to embrace the message of the cross. Morrison neatly illustrates the corruption of righteousness by self-righteousness in the desire of the younger generation of Ruby to alter the founders’ motto, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” to the more activist sentiment, “Be the Furrow of His Brow.” Morrison also probes the myriad ways that the truth of life and of the gospel can be distorted by half-truths—and outright lies—passed on as “gospel truth.”

Paradise suffers, however, from the sheer magnitude of Morrison’s fictional world and the extravagant breadth of her concerns. The geography of the fictional town alone, a version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha transplanted to Oklahoma, has one drawing maps to keep up; and the cast of at least 50 characters, intertwined branches of multiple family trees, undermines identification with individual figures. Likewise, the novel’s ambitious interrogation of history, gender, race, religion, miracles, love, hatred, violence, and scapegoating can exhilarate but can also weigh down Morrison’s storytelling. Then, too, as in Morrison’s earlier novels, Paradise includes several utterly unreliable narrative voices, a technique that succeeds brilliantly at times but often produces more confusion than clarity.

One senses, however, that a pleasing clarity is not at all what Morrison is after in her fiction, in spite of her precise, exacting use of language. Paradise unerringly portrays the look and feel of sin and of grace, but leaves the sermonizing to others.

—Tony Dykema-VanderArk

News of the SpiritBy Lee Smith Putnam 320 pp.; $23.95

In a 1987 interview, Lee Smith explained why selling her short stories sometimes presents a challenge: “Mine are particularly hard to sell, because they’re not real arty, they’re not really literary, and there’s nowhere they can go,” Smith said. “I like to write about domestic things, like parents and children and families, and so that makes them not literary enough for many places. But, yet, they’re not pabulum, so they can’t be published in the Ladies’ Home Journal or other places that publish schlock. They’re not sophisticated enough for the New Yorker, so they fall in between.” Most of the stories in News of the Spirit appeared in enviable periodicals before being collected in the present volume; nevertheless, Smith’s description of her writing as neither Ladies’ Home Journal nor the New Yorker, neither maudlin nor highbrow, is apt.

In that same interview, Smith confessed that she likes writing short stories better than novels. Although Smith’s nine novels (and one novella) occupy prized spots on my bookshelf, I have always preferred her stories, too; the stories in News of the Spirit, Smith’s third collection, do not disappoint. These six tales are indeed about “domestic things”: about a plain, unsophisticated girl who finds herself in a Virginia deb school and invents a wild, sexy, fearless brother (safely ensconced in a distant northern college) to make up for her own drab life; about a retired English teacher spending her last days in a stultifying nursing home; about a family reunion at a “too trashy … little cinder-block house way out in the middle of noplace.” In “Live Bottomless,” star-crazed Jenny is sequestered at cousin Glenda’s house while her mother has a breakdown and her father has an affair: Glenda teaches her about Jesus’ love, and Harlan Boyd teaches her about her “potential for backsliding.” In “The Blue Wedding,” Sarah lunches with her fat, chatty help, Gladiola. Listening to Gladiola’s story of her daughter’s chromatically distasteful nuptials, menopausal Sarah realizes that “the change of life might not be so bad. No change of life might be worse.” And in “Southern Cross,” a social-climbing Kentuckian “goes native” while on a Caribbean cruise.

If certain details in these stories seem repetitive—three of the protagonists are would-be writers, and two prize pearl rings are received as love tokens—Smith’s keen insights into her characters’ predicaments feel familiar only because they are equally applicable to our own.

—Lauren F. Winner

Tony Dykema-VanderArk is a doctoral candidate in American literature at Michigan State University. David Graham is a physician in Lemoore, California. Mark Noll inaugurated the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professorship of Evangelical Theological Studies this spring at Harvard Divinity School.