{"id":46543,"date":"2018-12-27T20:31:45","date_gmt":"2018-12-27T18:31:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=46543"},"modified":"2022-07-22T15:43:24","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T12:43:24","slug":"the-scandal-of-skepticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/the-scandal-of-skepticism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scandal of Skepticism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the book of Numbers, the question of counting in the wilderness acquires a singular paradoxical force. This is related to the larger question of skepticism that haunts the text. We hear in the people’s voice a persistent tone that is variously called<\/span> massah, merivah, telunah, hit’onenut<\/span><\/em> \u2014complaint, quarreling, bewailing, a querulous ground bass\u2014that, beyond its specific targets, speaks of a failure to fully know their own experience. They are possessed by a kind of chronic bewilderment. Their specific complaints convey a continual questioning whether anything counts; whether God’s promise\u2014or, more radically, whether language itself\u2014applies to anything. It is as though the world given to them in the Exodus and at Sinai has in a sense abandoned them. <\/span><\/p>\n

Stanley Cavell discusses the problem of skepticism as it figures in Shakespeare’s <\/span>Winter’s Tale<\/span><\/i>. In Shakespeare’s play, Leontes suffers from such a failure of knowledge. He cannot be certain of his paternity and therefore cannot own his own child; he is tormented by this. More than that, Leontes cannot and will not be satisfied by merely human criteria of knowledge. “[He] wants not to count [but] wants for there to be no counting, which is to say, nothing\u2026 Counting implies multiplicity, differentiation. Then we could say that what he wants is for there to be nothing separate, hence nothing but plenitude.” <\/span><\/p>\n

For Cavell, the issue of paternity intimates the most personal experience of skepticism: \u201cI call skepticism my denial or annihilation of the other… the problem is to recognize myself as denying another, to understand that I carry chaos in myself. Here is the scandal of skepticism with respect to the existence of others;\u00a0<\/span>I am the scandal<\/span><\/em>.<\/span><\/i> [emphasis AGZ.]\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

“<\/span><\/i>I am the scandal”<\/span><\/em>:<\/em> the skepticism that haunts the Israelite experience in the wilderness is, I suggest, of this order. It is a scandal of chaos and annihilation that is personal: that is, it is one we must recognize in ourselves. In the wilderness experience, the people cannot, perhaps will not, trust the basis on which they might acknowledge the Other, who is God, and who is at the same time all others. It is as though they can see or know nothing for themselves. <\/span><\/p>\n

In commanding a census, God asks them to account for the many others, to acknowledge that they count, to note their presences and absences. This is to take place in the wilderness, where skepticism undermines experience. The camp, numbered and ordered and bannered, is to move through the wilderness as a gesture, precisely, of trust, of an almost flamboyant constancy and coherence.<\/span><\/p>\n

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