This was published in 1962 but is MUCH more pertinent today than it was then.
“As the clay in the hands of the Potter . . . so are we in your hands.’’
When we say that truth is stranger than fiction, I think we are really saying that there is truth that transcends, defies, and ignores reason or the sensible. Fiction is written within the realm of reason. A fiction story that is unreasonable is ridiculed. Truth can be unreasonable or illogical and simply prevails whether we accept it or not. I feel that Kol Nidre represents this message, the message of a truth that overpowers man’s reason. You are no doubt familiar with the dramatic portrayals of the recitation of this soul-stirring prayer and melody in fifteenth-century Spain when the sword of the Inquisition hovered over the head of every professing Jew. Do you know anything about Spain of that day? Spain was the imperial power of the day. Her armada roamed the oceans to carry on trade, conquer lands, and return riches to her treasuries. On the day of the final expulsion of Jews from Spain, Columbus set sail to uncover new continents to annex to her empire. Spain was the home of Arabic culture and Christian advance. Spain was rich, powerful, civilized, respected, and feared. Anyone looking on at the scene of glorious Spain and the cringing Jews, hidden in the cellars on Yom Kippur eve, reciting in passion-filled melody the meaningless prayer of a law on vows— for Kol Nidre is only a nullification of vows contracted against G-d, not a supplication, a prayer of petition or praise—would have logically concluded that the mighty arm of the empire would soon destroy these wretches and their declaration which, as a prayer, is senseless.
Yet truth, not logic, prevails. We are still reciting the Kol Nidre of the wretched, defenseless Jews and mighty Spain has fallen so that her glorious days are forgotten. This truth of Kol Nidre, in contrast to the logic of the continued prevalence of power, ought give us modems much about which to think. Logically, it would be fair to say that with our scientific reach to outer space, we are freer than ever before, we are less hemmed in. Yet recently Time magazine reported on a starkly brutal French film which portrayed modern man in the society he has fashioned, as a child in a centrifuge. You know the centrifuge at the amusement park which begins to spin, forcing the child against the wall, so that he can’t move backward or forward, and scrambles on the walls upside down. He is a prisoner of the machine. So, modern man, who sought salvation through science and technology, finds that instead of being freed by these advances, he is bound in their chains. The threat of unparalleled war is not distant, the curtains of tyranny are closing in, that which augured good has been distorted for disaster. Man is becoming a slave to that which was to serve him in our “have-button-will-push” age. Scientific advance is not only our master, but our god. Its minister is the white-frocked scientist, with mathematics as its bible, the split atom is its revelation, and the production line and warhead are its Inquisition techniques.
This does not mean that technology is bad, for it has much to give man, so long as it is piously directed. However, technology as a religion is disastrous, for it submits to no other standard of piety. It has not answered man’s problems of life— how to live at peace with himself, his fellow men, and the universe— it has greatly deepened the confusion. The tyranny of technology grows in the minds of men who behold it as the end-goal of life, rather than as a means to enriching life. It is a tribute to man’s reason and genius to bow before his own progress. Dr. Wemher von Braun, for whom I have little regard as a man who served Hitler as well as the United States, and who now directs the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, recently stated: "Nothing has probably retarded human progrress more than idolatry of our own achievements. By worshiping our own scientific achievements, we kill humility. By adoring our own technological advancement, we kill the urge for improvement.” I am sure that Dr. von Braun speaks from personal experience.
Charles Lindbergh, who was once a hero of technology, wrote in his Of Flight and Life: “Living in rented apartments, jamming roads and subways, punching time clocks, cramming children’s minds with technical knowledge, modern man sacrifices health and freedom of spirit to the scientific idol of his time. On its altar go the smell of the earth, the feel of the wind and weather, vision of fields and rivers, warmth of friendship, understanding of children, even the contemplation of G-d; all these are given over to a metallic intellectual existence.” We collect things, live for things, and worship things. Our material enslavement has blinded the eyes of our soul with which to see the truth beyond the intelligence and reason that developed our technology. In our assembly-line age, man must respond to the timing and demand of the machine which he planned to run but which now runs him. Machines are replacing man in many functions, calculating better and faster than he, responding more effectively to instructions, even making love matches on Univac. Man becomes the robot before the machine and insignificant before its significance. His very self-worship and its creation may destroy him completely. This technological giant not only tends to dominate man physically, but spiritually as well. Power is the last word, with its predecessors: cars, television, comfort, gambling tables, instead of honesty, integrity, charity, character. Its pragmatism declares morality to be that which society accepts, we are told by its prophet, John Dewey. Hence, there are no moral absolutes; but shifting moral standards that are reacted in the Kinsey report, that can be cheated by payola, fake contests, kidcbacks. Thus does the machine that was to serve us now dictate our very spiritual response.
Man made a machine which now makes him a machine. Scientific American once reported on a boy who plugged himself in when he ate. He imagined himself to be a machine. Dr. Bruno Bettelheim of the University of Chicago, who wrote the article, “Joey: A Mechanical Boy,” noted that the boy was “robbed of his humanity.” Carried to an extreme, is this not what communism does to its people? It robs them of individuality, of personality, and assigns them to be cogs in its industrial machine. The result of this great age, conceived in man’s mind, advanced by his logic, research, and ingenuity, is not the truth we expected. A truth, oblivious to our reasoning calculations, has resulted. As Professor Rheinold Niebuhr wrote in the opening of his Faith and History, “The history of mankind exhibits no more ironic experience than the contrast between the sanguine hopes of recent centuries and the bitter experiences of contemporary man. Every technical advance, which previous generations regarded as a harbinger or guarantor of the redemption of mankind from its various difficulties, has proved to be the cause, or at least the occasion for a new dimension of ancient perplexities.” He notes, “But our perplexities become the more insoluble and the perils to which we are exposed become the more dangerous because the men of this generation had to face the rigors of life in the twentieth century vrith nothing but the soft illusions of the previous two centuries to cover our spiritual nakedness.”
Is not Kol Nidre eve, when we can look back on five hundred years of history, and behold that the truth of the faith of the death-threatened Jew outlived the logic of the might of the Spanish empire and its assurance of survival, an occasion to assess the truth of our present-day values? Can we not see the limitation of our logic when man becomes the victim and servant of this machine which he hoped to master? It is obvious that man limited by his own devices becomes day in the hands of naturalism, technology, and auto mation. We must seek a greater truth, the Truth, which will not betray us, which is beyond and above us. We must reach that truth which is beyond reason and scientific perception, which man intuitively feels and knows in faith. A few years ago we celebrated a Geophysical Year; maybe we ought now heed the advice of Dr. Immanuel Jakobovits and observe a Geospiritual Year. Man must rediscover that even as he has eyes in his head and in his mind, so has he eyes of his soul. He is not a servant of a machine which depersonalizes him, but a servant of a personal G-d who endows him with personality. "As the clay in the hand of the potter, the Creator, so are we in your hand, behold your covenant.” Such a commitment transcends a machine, is greater than man, his discoveries, and inventions. It speaks in absolute terms of morality, honesty, integrity, justice. It represents abiding Truth that seeks a Kingdom of G-d on earth. It demands a moral society in which human personality is sacred as an image of G-d, which expresses unalterable truths and provides man with solid foundations on which to build life instead of the shifting sands of man-made social mores. Beyad hayotzer not beyad hayetzirah; “in the hands of the Creator,” not "the creation.” Kol Nidre on the day of Yom Kippur, when we withdraw from technology and even from the physical demands of life insofar as is possible, ought to open our eyes, the eyes of our souls, to meet directly the eyes of the souls of the Jews in the underground cellars of Spain as they chanted this sacred expression; the eyes of the Jews before the gas chambers of mighty Germany, as they sang, Ani ma’amin be’emunah shlemah, “I believe with a perfect faith in the coming of the Moshiah.” It must make us aware that netzach Yiarod lo yeshaker, "The Eternal One of Israel will not deceive,” that we carry a Truth through centuries of suffering and tragedy that transcends the wisdom of man’s power and can defy the ridicule of his logic; that only in Torah can man find peace and salvation. It is for us to incorporate Torah in our lives, by submitting to its discipline of Mitzvos. Such a pattern of life, which dictates that man must be the image of G-d, automatically is guided by eternal moral standards, seeks spiritual meaning in life beyond the physical and the here, into the spiritual and the hereafter. Such a pattern of life allows machines to be used only in the best service of man’s interest, never bowing to the power of the machine that may come to enslave him. Let us become the material in G-d’s loving hand, before we become the material of machines’ grinding wheels: then can we pray, Labris habeyt, “Look O Lord to Your covenant” bestow on us Your eternal blessing—of peace, joy and abundance.
