In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief

Where Kugel is really brilliant… is in teasing out of his own brush with death, as well as out of religious texts and artifacts, an account of what intimations of God feels like.

—The New York Times Book Review

In the Valley of the Shadow

On the Foundations of Religious Belief

James L. Kugel

Author of How to Read the Bible

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

For R.

Write!—For whom?—Write for the dead ones whom you loved in the past.—Will they read me?—No.

Søren Kierkegaard, Diary

Dear Brooke, Elisabeth, Hanan, Michael, Yehuda,

Although I have spent most of my life as a professor, this book is not intended as a work of scholarship, but something that is at the same time more personal and more wide-ranging than the things that I usually write. Of course, some of what follows inevitably draws on my academic specialty, the Hebrew Bible, as well as on some wider readings in the related fields of religious studies and anthropology. In the end, however, what pushed me to write this was a desire to integrate what I have studied over a long period of time with what I have personally seen and felt. It hasn’t always been easy, but throughout I have tried to be faithful to both…

1

The Background Music

In the summer of the year 2000, I began writing a book that would eventually be published as The God of Old. I had been working on it for about a week when I drove into Cambridge for my annual physical exam, and when I emerged an hour and a half later, I knew I had a pretty serious case of cancer. I was scheduled for a series of further tests the next week, so I didn’t do anything (or tell anyone) right away; but eventually I had to break the news to my wife, and we went together to get the doctors’ report on the tests.

The tests were not particularly encouraging. Today’s doctors are—I suppose, largely as a result of malpractice lawsuits—extremely careful not to raise false hopes in their patients. They told us that the degree of degeneration in the cancerous cells taken in the biopsy was alarming, since it revealed a particularly aggressive form of the disease. I confess I don’t remember much of the rest of what they said—something about cells piercing the capsule and making the prognosis even grimmer. We probably can’t cure the cancer, they said, "but we can treat it." They told us that, with proper care, I could expect to live at least another two years without debilitating symptoms, and that with all the new research and drugs becoming available, they hoped it would be possible to extend my life for two or three years more, perhaps even longer. I was 54 at the time.

The reason I am relating all this is because I want to recapture a certain state of mind that one enters under such circumstances. (I am sure many people who have gone through a similar experience will recognize what I am about to say.) After the initial shock, I was, of course, disturbed and worried. But the main change in my state of mind was that—I can’t think of a better way to put it—the background music suddenly stopped. It had always been there, the music of daily life that’s constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities; and now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence. There you are, one little person, sitting in the late-summer sun, with only a few things left to do. What should I do? Try to keep working on that book? You think: If I could make it through five more years, that would be generous. That would certainly be fair.

This was definitely a different perspective. But how could I have ever thought that life would just go on forever? I did, of course; that’s what the music does, and everyone is caught up in it. The marvelous, often ironic writer William Saroyan is reported to have said on his deathbed: I know everyone has to die, but somehow I always thought an exception would be made in my case. It’s what we all think.

You learn all the shortcuts to the hospital and the best places to park in the underground garages. For some reason, hospital parking lots in Boston all seem to be staffed by recent immigrants from Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, refugees from a festering conflict. You get to know them, and after a while you even learn to say, Hello—how are you this morning? in their language (which is not Amharic, but either Tigrinya or Tigre). They smile in appreciation. You kid around with the nurses. But all this is just self-deception, trying to make this horrible, multiplex service center for the dying into something less ominous than it is.

Chemotherapy can be easy or not so easy—there are dozens of different regimes that go by that name, and in any case, different individuals respond differently to the same mix of drugs. It did not go very easily for me, and while this is not ultimately connected to the music, it certainly had a role in what I thought and felt during those difficult days. I tried to get back to writing, but I just didn’t have the strength. Life became very local: the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. The people who love you loom large; their love is as tangible as bread. As for you, you are small. Your life is winding down now, and you can clearly see its end point; your life has become a compact, little thing. Good-bye. I have subsequently gone to many funerals, and I am always astonished by the smallness of the freshly dug, open holes you see here and there in the cemetery grounds. Can a whole human being fit in there, a whole human life? Yes. No problem.

Do not rely on the mighty to save you, or on any human being.

His breath gives out, then back to earth he goes—on that very day, his projects are all for naught. (Psalm 146)

Days are planned around pills. Start off with a little codeine in the morning, then half a Percocet around lunchtime to get through the afternoon; follow up with the other half at night, plus extra-strength tylenol or ibuprofen as needed. (All this to counteract the effects of chemotherapy.) And then there are the chemo drugs themselves: the main ingredient in the blood thinner Coumadin is warfarin, which is also the main ingredient in mouse poison; not a comforting thought. (But what does it have to do with warfare? The Internet reveals all: Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation held the patent.) The mustine-based pills—those are the worst; the same chemical structure as the mustard gas used in World War I. Keep refrigerated. After a while, even coming close to the refrigerator makes you sick. Sometimes the chemo works too well, and I have to be admitted to the hospital for a couple of days. Immune system? the nurse says matter-of-factly. You don’t have an immune system. Then, pointing up at the IV dripping into my arm: That’s your immune system up there.

Back home, in the middle of the night, when things are almost pitch black, you pass by the dresser on your way to the bathroom and you imagine it all just being over, just done with. I don’t want people to be sad. Later, staring up at the ceiling, you picture yourself being lifted up and crawling out of this painful skin, then walking around the room, free at last, a protoplasmic blob. That would feel nice. I didn’t really think life would go on forever; actually, I was probably more obsessed with death than most people. But it was that music that threw me off, that kind of background buzz that keeps the illusion going.

O my God, do not take me halfway through life.

Your time stretches from age to age:

Long ago You created the earth, and even the sky is the work of Your hands; though they disappear, You will exist still.

All things tatter and fade like a garment; You cast them off like a change of clothes.

But You stay the same, and Your years never end. (Psalm 102)

In ancient Israel, God was deemed to be actually present in His temple, so someone with a desperate request might go there to be heard. These requests—some of them perhaps fashioned by the original supplicants, but others doubtless created in advance by temple officials for people to recite—are now found in the biblical book of Psalms. A few of them speak about death—though, interestingly, not that many: apparently ancient Israelites, like many other peoples, just accepted the inevitability of death as part of God’s plan. What hurt, however, was dying before one’s time: O my God, do not take me halfway through life, as this psalm says. That was a violation of the pattern, so people must have wondered: how can such things happen? Perhaps, as the psalm suggests, it is precisely because God is eternal, Your time stretches from age to age. From God’s infinite point of view, people always die after an almost imperceptibly short period of time. They are small; ten or twenty years one way or another could hardly register with His eternity.

But the person who wrote this psalm was not, I think, offering it as a philosophical justification for his premature death. He was trying to get God to intervene:

O Lord, hear my prayer, and let my cry come before You:

Do not hide Your face from me in my time of trouble; hear me when I cry out, and answer me soon.

For my life is drifting away like smoke, as my bones burn in a bonfire.

My insides are dried up like grass, withered from lack of food.

I’ve been groaning so much my ribs show through my skin. (Psalm 102)

Reading these lines now, I don’t have any trouble imagining the person who wrote them. He was very sick, perhaps in the last stages of some form of cancer. There was a good chance he would be dead in a few weeks or months… But he still had some hope. So he had dragged himself to the very place where God resides, the temple. If he could cry out there, he thought, perhaps God would hear him and intervene, since what was happening really wasn’t normal, really didn’t fit the pattern: O my God, do not take me halfway through life.

You would think that a Bible professor would, in the circumstances I have described, seek comfort in these and other words from Scripture. But to be absolutely truthful, although I know much of the book of Psalms by heart, these were not the words that I kept thinking of after the doctors’ diagnosis. Instead, what ran through my mind was mostly poetry in English, poems I had learned a long time ago—some of them fairly corny. Like Fairfax’s song, memorized in rehearsals of our high school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard. Poor Fairfax had been unjustly framed and sentenced to die. As he sat in his cell awaiting the executioner, he contemplated his fate:

Is life a boon [a gift]?

If so, it must befall

That Death, whene’er he call

Must call too soon.

Though fourscore years he give,

Yet one would pray to live

Another moon.

What kind of plaint have I,

Who perish in July?

Who perish in July?

I might have had to die,

Perchance, in June!

I might have had to die,

Perchance, in June!

In context, July means in the middle of my natural lifetime—Fairfax is presumably in his thirties or forties. But better to have to die now, Fairfax says, than to have had to die even earlier, in June. (This reminds me of the old distinction between a pessimist and an optimist. The pessimist says: Things could never be worse than they are now. The optimist says: Oh yes they could!) But then Fairfax goes on to consider the opposite possibility—suppose life is not a boon at all, but a curse from beginning to end:

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit!

Nay count it not a whit,

Man is well done with it;

Soon as he’s born

He should all means essay

To put the plague away;

And I, war-worn,

Poor captured fugitive,

My life most gladly give—

I might have had to live,

Another morn!

I might have had to live,

Another morn!

I like W. S. Gilbert’s poetry (despite his occasional racism and anti-Semitism); I especially like his love affair with the letter W (When a wooer goes a-wooing…, Willow, willow, waylee, Oh weary wives, who widowhood would win…, and so on). Deep thinker he was not, but he certainly had a good ear, and he was great at rhyming. Looking back on it now, though, I wonder why I could have found these lines so captivating. Life is neither a boon nor a thorn—it’s just life, with its ups and downs, and most of us, for all the occasional downs, would prefer not to leave it, certainly not in June or July.

Another poet I kept thinking of was A. E. Housman, a man absolutely obsessed with death. In particular, I kept coming back to that famous poem of his that many students have to read in college English.

TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,

The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up

The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Housman was not only a poet; he was also a professor of classics at Cambridge University. In fact, he liked to describe poetry as a mere sideline; he saw himself primarily as a scholar of Latin and Greek literature. He also liked to say that his professional expertise had no influence on the poetry he himself wrote, but it is easy to see that this was not so. To an Athlete… is altogether imbued with the world of ancient Greece—the generic athlete as hero (a Greek notion through and through), the picture of Hades and its strengthless dead, and the athlete’s anonymous town, which might be located in Shropshire, but just as easily could have been found in the ancient hill country not far from Athens.

When you believe that your own death is not far off, however, none of this really matters. What spoke to me, I think, was this poem’s view of dying too soon, or rather, its denial of the too soon part. There’s nothing sudden or terrible about death here, it is just part of—more than that, the essence of—being a human being: first we carried you, chaired you, through the idealized town square as our triumphant hero; now inevitably, symmetrically, we are carrying you along the same route to the grave. Too bad, you might say, that the time span separating these two events was shorter than it usually is: the athlete died before his time. But, on the other hand, perhaps it is really not too bad. After all, this is the road all runners come, Housman says, and if you went down it a bit sooner than most, in the grand scheme, a few decades matter little (shades of Psalm 102). Meanwhile you did not have to live long enough to experience the vanity of human achievement firsthand, seeing the records that you broke broken anew by someone else, feeling your flesh slowly sag and fade, so that the athlete in you would disappear long before you did, and the name died before the man.

The reader will perhaps have sensed that, looking back on these poems, I feel a little sheepish about them now—but perhaps that is precisely because those days seem so distant. The poems are more a curiosity than anything else, a souvenir from a bad time. In any case, they have no bearing on my subject, the background music stopping and the different sense of things that went with it. But there was another poem I kept thinking about during that period, one that is more directly connected to the state of mind I have been talking about. It doesn’t say anything openly about death, but much more than any of the other poems I thought of, this one seemed to understand about the background music.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was the greatest poet of the German language in the last century, and one of his best-known poems is The Merry-Go-Round, printed below. He wrote it while he was living in Paris, an expatriate. One day he wandered into a famous Parisian park, the Jardin du Luxembourg, and sat down on a bench. It is easy to picture the scene: The shy young poet, alone with his thoughts, looking up to observe some children riding on a nearby, rickety merry-go-round. The merry-go-round (which still exists) had its own little decorated roof, and beneath it, an assortment of various painted wooden animals—horses, lions, camels, an elephant—on which, as Rilke watched, the polite little French children took their seats. Nearby stood a brawny attendant, who operated a hand-pump that made the contraption turn around. As it gained momentum, it would go faster and faster until the time was up and the attendant would stop it. Here is Rilke’s poem:

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

Turning for a brief time in the shadow

of its roof is this revolving stand

of painted animals, all from the land

that lingers long before it fades away.

True, some are hitched to wagons; nonetheless

their faces make them still seem full of fight.

A fierce-looking red lion drifts along,

and now and then an elephant, all white.

Here comes a deer; it might be from the forest,

save that it has a saddle on its back,

to which a light-blue girl is safely strapped.

A boy in white leans on the lion’s mane—

his little hand is clinging to the rein—

as the lion shows its fearsome teeth and bite.

And now and then an elephant, all white.

And on the horses sit some girls in bright

clothes, who seem somehow a little too grown up

for their horses’ rhythmic prancing; in mid-jump

they gaze off, distracted by some distant sight…

And now and then an elephant, all white.

So on it goes, hurrying to the finish,

turning and circling for no goal or reason.

A red, a green, a gray go rushing by,

the shape of some child’s outline, half-begun.

And time and again a smile is turned this way,

a happy one that dazzles, unrestrained

and squandered on this blind and breathless game.

Here, in the most literal sense, is someone for whom the music has stopped. He is positioned outside the merry-go-round’s noisy world, a not-caught-up observer of those who are. And so he sits there. The poem’s repeated line—And now and then an elephant, all white—is meant to duplicate for the reader the experience of watching from afar as that elephant keeps coming around again.

But time is what the poem is really interested in. Every child on the merry-go-round knows that the ride will be over soon; this is the whole sweet tension of being on a merry-go-round when you are a child. It lasts only a brief time, according to the first stanza, and yet, when you are aware of the passing time, it actually seems to go on longer than you expected, though never long enough. By the same token, the animals are from the land that lingers long before it fades away. (Rilke’s untergeht really means sinks or sets, like the sun dipping below the horizon.) This is of course childhood—those girls are already too big to be on this ride, thinking about other things—but it is also life itself, the way time works in life, going faster and faster. So, at the beginning of the poem, the colors are all connected to something, a light-blue girl, a red lion, an elephant, all white, and so forth, but by the end, the merry-go-round whizzes so fast that all you see are the colors, a red, a green, a gray, the half-begun outline of a child. And then the poem turns back to the observer and his summation of what he has been watching, caught in a disembodied flash: a smile is turned this way, / a happy one that dazzles, / unrestrained and squandered on this blind and breathless game. Every poem has its secret nerves, and that simple, stupid word happy is one of them here: that is what we mostly are, happy, content in the midst of this awesome, one-time ride that we never really understand, this blind and breathless thing that has no goal or reason and ends too soon. Did Rilke know that he would die in his fifty-first year?

The fact that I am writing this now, seven years later, will indicate that the doctors were being overly cautious; as a matter of fact, they now say that I am cured, although (they always add) there is no ironclad guarantee that the disease will not return. As for the music, I thought it would never start up again, but it has—gradually at first, with extended returns to the background-less, real state; but these returns eventually became shorter and more widely spaced, so that now the music is going almost all the time. Sometimes, however, if I concentrate hard, I can make it stop. Then everything about me that is all over the room, or all