Coerced by Persians or Demons?
The Talmud's Argument Against Idealism
If one was forcibly compelled to eat matza on Passover, he has fulfilled his obligation.
Who compelled him to eat the matza?
If we say that a demon forced him, i.e., that he ate it in a moment of insanity, this is difficult. Isn’t it taught in a baraita: With regard to someone who is at times sane and at times insane, at the times when he is sane, he is considered competent for all purposes and is obligated in all the commandments. And when he is insane, he is considered insane for all purposes, and is therefore exempt from the commandments. If so, someone who was compelled by a demon to eat matza is not considered obligated to perform the commandments at all.
Rav Ashi said: We are dealing with a case where the Persians compelled him to eat.
(Rosh Hashana 28a)
The Talmud distinguishes between two kinds of coercion: coercion by demons and coercion by Persians. The one constitutes insanity, the other genuine oppression. Both are forms of coercion, in the sense of referring to a force not one’s own. But mental illness, as it were, obviates legal standing. Political suffering, by contrast, does not take it away. The person who hallucinates cannot be commanded. The person who is physically oppressed in the material world, by contrast, remains commanded.
Commandments have a carnality to them. They are operative in the world of atoms. But demons exist only in the twilight of bits. Commandments are more than code. Software may be eating the world, but the world it is eating is not the world of commandments. Software wins only in the world of demons. In the world of Persians, commandments rule.
The Talmud could have offered us any number of examples to make its general point that some commandments do not require free will or intentionality to “count.” But it gives us the example of force-fed matza for poetic reasons.
Matza has a two-fold meaning. It is the bread of affliction and it is the bread of freedom. It is the bread of slaves and it is the bread of Exodus, the bread of leaving slavery behind in haste. Matza is a poor-man’s bread, but it is also the bread of those who celebrate their newfound freedom. What more ironic example of slavery-in-freedom and freedom-in-slavery could there be than a person who is forced to eat this bread by a political enemy?
In saying that the force-fed man fulfills his obligation, the Talmud makes the point that the matza itself contains its meaning, independent of context. Whether willfully ingested or forced, it contains the paradox of being both a thing of freedom and a thing of unfreedom. The person who chooses to eat matza chooses to imagine a life of oppression, but the person who is oppressed in the act of eating it, needs no imagination. Instead, the matza, as it were, does the imagining for him. The bread of slaves imagines itself, at the same time, as it were, to be a bread of Exodus.
But demons can’t force one to eat matza, because, as Wittgenstein argues, in On Certainty, if you can’t know that your hand is a hand, you can’t know anything else. Demons introduce us to a world of such radical skepticism that we are no longer in the same discursive universe as the one in which matza means something. Matza may be carnal, but it’s not merely carnal.
The Passover story is often taken metaphorically. But it can’t only be a metaphor or else we have abstracted it from the world of atoms to the world of bits, the world of matza to the world of demons, the world of politics to the world of psychology.
That the man fulfills his obligation to eat matza even under conditions of external force is the Talmud’s great argument against “idealism”—the theory that reality is all in our heads. No. There really is matza. There really is Pharaoh. There really is evil. And there really is human agency, even when it appears constrained.
While the person facing demons is exempted from obligation by an insanity defense, this is not a good thing. Strikingly, the text teaches that it is preferable to be oppressed by Persians than by demons, by the phenomenal world rather than by one’s own neurochemistry.
To be free requires getting out of the deterministic mindset that sees everything as just a projection of the mind. The man who eats matza is free, no matter the circumstance, because he has found something outside himself. He has extricated himself from the Matrix, has found religion and God to be more than just a simulcrum.
P.S.—I’m hosting an “Ask Me Anything” Salon with a focus on skepticism on May 4. Sign-up here.
Here’s a new podcast I did with Zachary Davis of Ministry of Ideas. I gave my twenty minute account of the meaning of life.
You may also enjoy my recent conversation in the Paris Review with Sheila Heti, David Heti, Nathan Goldman, and Noreen Khawaja, on Annie Hall.