Q & A with James L. Kugel
Author of IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
(Free Press; February 1, 2011)
Q: What is IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW about?
A: In the summer of 2000 I was diagnosed with a pretty bad case of cancer. The doctors said that they probably couldn’t cure it, “But we can treat it,” they told me. They said I could go on for about two more years without debilitating symptoms; they weren’t sure about anything after that.
I was of course worried and upset, but the main thing I remember from that time was the feeling that – this is the only way I can put it – the music suddenly stopped, the music of infinite time and possibility that’s always playing the background. Now it was gone, replaced by nothing. There I was, one small person with only a few things left to do. The more I thought about it, the more this state of mind seemed important to me – and that’s really the subject of my book.
Q: Why was that state of mind so important to you?
A: Because of its connection to religion... Probably not the first thing you’d think of. But I’ve been studying religion most of my adult life, and the connections were definitely there. I try to spell them out in the book. I should say that I had had that feeling of smallness before – sometimes in the most unlikely places, for no reason at all. And it’s always seemed to me that that feeling—of being somehow contained, fitting inside your own borders—has a lot to do with the very starting-point of everything we call “religion.” To put it simply: believing in God or the gods or the supernatural seems to begin with how you conceive of yourself, how you fit into the world.
Q: Do you think your book will be of help to people who find themselves in the same position as you were in, with a diagnosis of cancer?
A: I hope so. But probably not in the way people might think. My book isn’t about turning to God in your hour of need. It’s more about the essence of religious faith and what it’s based on. You know, anthropologists and psychologists have studied what they call the “sense of self” that people have in different parts of the world, and it’s surprising how different our own “sense of self” is from that of most of the people on this earth. They are quite the opposite of the Western individualist. They typically see themselves as part of some larger entity – a family or clan – and that entity is, in a way that’s hard for us to understand, who they really are. But that’s only one part of their “sense of self.” The space around them is filled up in a way that ours is not. God, the gods, evil spirits, or beneficent ancestors are everywhere, and so they are constantly being taken into account. They fill up the space.
I’m not talking just about so-called primitive cultures or peoples. One of the things I discuss in the book is religion in traditional, Arab society. Anyone who spends any time in an Arab country comes back with the same impression: these people are always talking about God. That doesn’t mean they’re more moral or better than other people – my impression is that people all over the world are pretty much the same. But it is true that Arabic speech has built into all sorts of obligatory references to God. You can’t mention your own plans – “I’m flying to Paris next week” – or reasonable expectations, “After the baby’s born,” without appending the phrase Insh’allah, “If God wishes.” I admit it becomes automatic after a while. But the underlying idea is that it would be presumptuous and arrogant to talk about the future as if God did not have the final say.
People might chalk this up to the influence of Islam, but I think that’s really getting it backwards. Anyone who has studied the writings of ancient Mesopotamians can’t miss the continuity between their mentality and that of later, Islamic culture. They all have this common starting point: God or the gods are very big, and you are very small. That’s why that feeling I had right after my diagnosis was so fascinating for me, even in those bad days.
Q: One of your chapters is called “Man Stands Powerless Before Elevator.” What does that have to do with your subject?
A: It’s an example of what I called “the need to do something,” which is also connected to religion. It all goes back to something I noticed at my first job after graduate school. I had an office in a building that was very tall – maybe 20 stories. So of course it had an elevator – state-of-the-art for the 1970s. There was a button you pressed, and the button would immediately turn orange after you pressed it. But the elevator rarely came right away, so a small crowd of people would usually form on the ground floor, waiting for the elevator to come. That’s when I noticed something funny. A new person arriving and seeing the button already illuminated would nevertheless sometimes go up to it and press it again. Nothing would happen, of course: it was already orange. Now these people were for the most part graduate students or professors, and so probably not idiots. But they kept on pressing that button, sometimes more than once. I know, because sometimes that person was me.
I talk about this in the book because I think it’s a model of some people’s idea of what religion is all about, “the need to do something.” People say prayers, go to churches or temples, offer sacrifices or slip a dollar bill onto the plate – but deep down they’re like the people waiting for the elevator. They know it’s not going to do any good: the elevator can’t register any more than one press of the button, it can’t feel their desperation or hear their pleas, and it can’t deviate from what it has been programmed to do: make all its intermediate stops until it gets to the bottom floor. But people keep pressing the button just because they feel they should do something.
Q: But you don’t agree with this view of religion?
A: No, I think it really misses the whole point. “The need to do something” may be there, but people don’t pray because they definitely believe they’re going to get what they ask for. They certainly hope that might happen, but in the end it’s more a matter of what the French proverb says, “Man proposes, but God has the final disposition.” In fact, the Bible said it a long time before: “Many are the plans in a person’s mind, but God’s decision is what prevails.” So we’re really back at “Man is small and God is very big.” In a sense, the very act of praying is an acknowledgment of our smallness, you might even say, an enactment of our smallness. Of course, that’s not why a person prays; a person prays to get help. But in so doing, he or she is also expressing that great truth of human smallness, the one we mostly have forgotten nowadays.
Q: Well, we have strayed pretty far from cancer. Is that what your book does too?
A: No, actually, I try to keep coming back to cancer in the book. Because writing about religion can become very, very abstract, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to keep reminding myself and the reader of the reality of being seriously ill, because that really seemed to hold the key to the state of mind I’m talking about – just being there, no music anymore, just being contained, compact, inside yourself. So I talk about myself, and I talk about some of my friends who have died of cancer – some of them while I was writing the book. In the end, that’s just something very, very real, and I didn’t want to lose sight of it.
Q: Do you talk in your book about the New Atheists, people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?
A: Well, yes, but I don’t talk about them to try to refute their atheism. They’re certainly entitled to their opinion. But what interests me is the claim of certain neuroscientists cited in their books, to the effect that human beings have, as I called it in one of my chapters, “religion on the brain” – that somehow, our brains, like any other part of our bodies, have been shaped over thousands and thousands of years, so that we are predisposed to see things in a certain way, to be fundamentally religious creatures. Dawkins and Dennett say this in a negative way, but it may not be negative at all. What I am talking about is a way of seeing that human beings always used to have – were designed to have – until pretty recently, when (at least in the West) our minds began to close up and a lot of people just lost that way of seeing..
Q: You mean religion is just innate?
A: Well, the word religion covers a lot of territory. But at least some of it – and especially this way of seeing – seems in a sense to be built into the human brain. This might sound fishy, but nowadays we know that there are lots of things that we know are simply in our brains when we’re born: our minds are no blank slate, as scientists used to presume. I suppose the best known example of this is language. Nowadays we know that little newborns come equipped with brains designed for language acquisition: they are born with, so to speak, little boxes in their brains that help them to sort those sounds they hear from grownups into nouns and verbs and to make sense of them, no matter what language is involved. So, scholars today think that it’s not only language that human brains are set up for, but all sorts of other things – including some of the things that belong to the area of religion.
Q: Tell us about listening to “Amazing Grace” when you were in the middle of chemotherapy.
A: Well, this brings up another thing that’s really crucial about religion, what I call its “starkness.” You know, chemo can be hard. Some days I could try to work, but other times I’d get up in the morning, get dressed, and then find myself an hour later just lying on top of my bed, too tired to do anything. Even reading was too much. So I’d listen to the radio or old CDs. One day I happened to hear Judy Collins singing her a capella version of “Amazing Grace,” and I was struck by the all-or-nothing, black-and-white quality of the words. “For I was lost and now am found, was blind and now I see.” Religious poetry often has that same quality – whether it’s in the Bible or in other religious traditions. Of course that’s not how people usually see things, no matter what society they live in. Life is not usually either-or, black-or-white, lost-or-found, But it’s precisely that way of seeing that’s all over religion. You can find it clearly in cathedral architecture, medieval paintings, those corny titles of TV evangelists (“Hour of Decision,” “Night of Hope,” and so on), and certainly Gospel music. And of course the Bible – those stark encounters between people and angels, people and God. They all have the same stamp: the little nuances and shades of color disappear. So I tried to write about that, too – how it fits with suddenly seeing the world in pretty raw terms – life and death.
Q: You’ve obviously outlived your prognosis from 2000. How did your own bout with cancer end?
A: I’m not sure it’s ended. The doctors tell me to keep coming in for check-ups every six months or so – and there are, of course, plenty of other forms of cancer beside the kind I had. But for now, anyway, I seem to be okay – no symptoms. In the end, of course, everyone has to die, even though we don’t like to think about it. But that’s another thing about the “smallness” I described – it really is a different way of thinking about yourself, including about the subject of your own death.
Q: What’s the message that you want people to take away from this book?
A: I talk about a lot of things connected with religious faith – in all sorts of religions, in things that archaeologists have uncovered about the very beginnings of religion, and what brain scientists have learned about how religion may be built into our brains, and all sorts of things people have written through the ages, prayers and poems and philosophical treatises. But all this leads me to talk about something that is rarely discussed. I believe that the reality of religion – the reality of God – is something that a lot of people in the modern West have trouble seeing nowadays. It’s hidden because of us, because we have lost the old, small way of being that humans had for thousands and thousands of years. What I try to do in the book is give readers some sense of what that smallness was, and the stark reality that it can open up before our eyes – whether we’ve been diagnosed with cancer or not.
