Jacob Howland
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jacob Howland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But other than that, I didn't really have any Jewish identity. Got to Tulsa, first thing that happens, and this truly is the buckle of the Bible belt. The lady comes from across the street and says, won't you join our church?
So my wife, who's not Jewish, said, well, and she was unemployed at the time, and she started going to some classes and went to listen to a couple of rabbis and said, I think you'll like this rabbi. Joined the synagogue. I've never been particularly observant, but started attending. And I got interested in the Talmud. And so I started studying Talmud. And
We were lucky to have several very high ranking Jewish theologians come through Tulsa. And I told them, wow, you know, that Talmud is really interesting. It's a lot like the platonic dialogues. And I don't know how much you know about Talmud, but the thing is, so it's this massive corpus. There are two Talmuds. The main one is the Babylonian Talmud, two and a half million words.
The Jerusalem Talmud is about a million words, but the Babylonian one's the main one. And you have this fictional colloquy. That's the only way to describe it. Rabbis who maybe lived centuries apart are brought into debate and discussion. Talmud privileges questions. Privileges, questions. Questions. Most of the time, there are no answers. Or at least, yeah, I think that's probably fair.
So you have debates and you have discussions. And much like the platonic dialogues, the Talmud will start with a practical question. For example, you have two plots of land. One is your vegetable plot. The other is your neighbor's vegetable plot. His tomato plant leans over into your plot. Who gets the tomato?
Then, just like Plato starts, you know, in a dialogue called the Lockeys, Socrates runs into a couple of guys. They're saying, should we have our kids study with this guy with a newfangled weapon? And in three pages, they're talking about what is courage. In the Talmud, it can be three pages, and they're talking about why did God create the universe? So they privilege questions.
They have multiple intellectual perspectives. The rabbis are never on the same—like, they're constantly debating. And sometimes, as in the academy, the American academy, you know, it gets a little heated and contentious. So you have these debates, and then—
Well, that is true now. Right, right. I was really referring to the old joke about, you know, why is there so much conflict, you know, and why is it so heated? Because the stakes are so small.
But in any case, and very often at the end of a sort of section of debate, they've got a little acronym, which basically means the answer will be revealed in the days of Elijah. Now, the reason I mention that is,
Right. So the idea is that there is an answer, okay? We may not be able to understand it or we haven't achieved it yet. And I say that because in the Socratic perspective, I think there's also an answer. That becomes very clear in the Apology where Socrates has his friend, his friend Chirophon goes to the Delphic Oracle, says, is there anyone wiser than Socrates? And the oracle says, no.
And what's great here is that Socrates, by the way, he makes no argument for this. He says, it is not permissible for the God to utter a falsehood. That's his faith, right? So I have to take this statement seriously. But I'm not aware that I'm wise.
Yes.
I like that. That's a lot.
Yes, very much so. And of course, I mean, that's a whole interesting subject because also even in Plato, this question of how do we explain dreams? Is it a communication from the divine or something?
Yes, indeed.
Socrates says that it's impermissible for a god to utter a falsehood. So he now dedicates his entire life to answering two questions, what is wisdom and who is Socrates? So this entire philosophical quest comes out of this moment, the shortest revelation in history, which is no, right? No, there's no one wiser than Socrates.
Well, he knows what he doesn't know, but he... I thought he made a statement to that end. Absolutely.
Yeah, very possibly.
You've said a lot. So let me reply to a couple of things here. It seems to me that you're on a very fruitful path in talking about this. While you were speaking, I was thinking how this shows up in a lot of fields. So even, for example, in great literature. And the example that came to my mind is Jorge Luis Borges. Have you read any of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories? Okay.
So it seems to me that this man's writing is itself guided by a fundamental question. And maybe this is true of... other great authors. In fact, I would be willing to give you some other examples. Borges' question is this, what are the effects of infinity on human beings? Because we have stories like Funes the Memorious, the guy falls, hits his head, and not only cannot forget anything, and
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