May 1988

EVEN IF WE ARE ALL WISE..

Richard Feynman and the Jewish Doughnut Revisited!

Earlier this year. I was
startled to find on the front page of the N.Y. Times, a large two-column
obituary with a picture, coverage usually reserved for chiefs of state, for a
gentleman I was a little embarrassed to admit I never really heard

of before. He was Richard
Feynman. In the words of the Times (2/17/88), arguably the most brilliant,
iconoclastic and influential of the post-war generation of theoretical
physicists. His handiwork permeates the foundations of modern science and he
was the inventor of the indispensable Feynman Diagrams of Parti­cle Behavior
which took half made conceptions of matter and energy and shaped them into
tools that ordinary physicists could understand and calculate. He was a Nobel
Laurete for work he completed while only in his 20's remaking the theory of
quantum dynamics.

But he had at least three
other scientific achievements for which he could have easily received Nobel
prizes for any

one of them.

How this giant of our times
could have eluded my knowledge is a matter with which I will have to cope
individually. One thing that was evident to me, particularly, because of his
name, was that he was Jewish, which was confirmed in his autobiography, Surely
You're Joking, Mr. Feynman And I began to wonder whether this premier
genius of our time who could master Mayan hieroglyphics, Portuguese, Chinese
and a little bit of Japanese could move just as

sur­ely in his own Hebraic
heritage.

Some while back after the
passing of Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, the science of computers,
and the

most celebrated prodigy of
his time, I wrote and article entitled The Jewish Doughnut What I
meant to convey by that metaphor was the Jew who knew almost everything about
everything, from the physical sciences through Mandarin Chinese and yet was
abysmally ignorant about anything Jewish. I called him a Jewish Doughnut because
while he mastered with astonishing excellence much of the circle of knowledge
he was empty at the core. In the middle, which is the soul and essence of his being,
there was nothing.

Indeed, in his own remarkable
autobiography, Wiener sorely lamented his Jewish ignorance and strongly takes
to task his mother for deliberately shielding him from his spiritual
birthright

Another Jewish Doughnut was
Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb

who could read the Hindu
sacred writing in their original, yet couldn't make out a

Hebrew letter.

Is Fire Electricity?

And no where else is this
incredible paradox of the Jewish Doughnut more evident than in a chapter
of Feynman's ribald and irreverent autobiography he calls Is Fire
Electricity?' Not only does he betray here how unknowingly bereft he is of
the most elementary knowledge of his faith but also of the entirely
uncharacteristically careless way he ap­proaches matters Jewish. There were few
more rigorous and exacting scientists than Feyn­man. He did not trust the
experiments of others, however impeccable their reputation and insisted upon
confirming them by himself in the laboratory and calculation, nor would he rely
upon the synopses of others he had to read all the material by himself yet
for some reason he didn't feel that any of this rigor and exactitude were
required to make him an expert on Judaism. He writes:

While I was at a conference, I stayed
at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where young Rabbis I think they were
Orthodox were studying. Since I have a Jewish background, I knew of some of
the things they told me about the Talmud, but I had never

seen the Talmud. It was very
interest­ing. it's got big pages, and in a little square in the corner of the
page is the original Talmud,

and then in a sort of L-shaped
margin, all around this square, are commentaries written by different people.
The Talmud has

evolved, and everything has been
discussed again and again, all very car­efully, in a medieval kind of
reasoning. I think the commentaries were shut down around the thirteen or
fourteen or fifteen-hundreds there hasn't been any modern commentary. The Talmud
is a wonderful book, a great, big potpourri of things, trivial questions, and
difficult questions for example,

problems of teachers, and how to
teach and then some trivia again, and so on. The students told me that the
Talmud was never translated, something I thought was curious, since the book is
so valuable.

in this one paragraph, there
are at least four egregious errors, which trumpet Feynman's incredible
ignorance of both the content and form of Judaism.

1)     
Anyone with a
modicum of familiarity with Jewish life knows that the Jewish Theological
Seminary is the citadel of conservative Judaism and not orthodoxy. 2) Little
squares in the corner of the page is in general an inaccurate description of
the regular page of the Talmud. 3) There are a plethora of modern commentaries
of the Talmud and they were not shut down around the thirteen fourteen or fifteen hundreds 4)And, of course.
There is the renowned Soncino English translation of the Talmud completed more
than half a century ago.

But what is most astonishing
here is that while he may have taught himself to fix radios, speak Portugese,
Chinese

and Japanese, Decipher
hieroglyphics and play the bongos, and while he was also a wizard safe cracker
to boot he broke the combination of the safe installed to protect the atom
bomb secrets, leaving behind unlocked steel doors with the impish note.
Feynman the safe cracker!, he's not ashamed to say that he had never opened
the Talmud, that supreme literary-religious creation of his people, before he
reached middle age, and then after that once, apparently never again.

By the way, he entitled the
chapter Is Fire Electricity? because it was at that conference that
for the first time he was confronted with the prohibition of putting on fire or
initiating electrical contact on the Sabbath. It is obvious, and unbelievable
that until then he wasn't even aware of the question.

One of the highlights of the
Seder night is the declaration Even if we are all wise and we are all
understanding...we are obliged to recount the story of our redemption from
Egypt... These words take on especially poignant and tragic cadence when we
think of the Jewish Doughnuts!

Rabbi Zevulun Charlop