Ecclesiastes 1: 12-18 [12] I, Koheleth, was king over Israel in Jerusalem; [13] I put my heart to study and to exploring by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! [14] I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. [15] What is crooked cannot be made straight; what is lacking cannot be numbered. [16] I thought to myself, "Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge." [17] Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly. But I learned that this, too, is chasing after the wind. [18] For with much wisdom comes much anger; the more knowledge, the more pain. Morning Prayers talk, Friday, 6 December 2002 A Tension of Tolerance It may seem strange for me to speak here at Morning Prayers. I am not Christian, yet this chapel is not in Memorial Temple or Memorial Prayerhouse but Memorial Church, a church no longer sectarian but still specifically Christian, both in emblems -- the prominent gold-colored cross behind me -- and in worship. What's more, I am a mathematician; yes, also a musician and other things too, but it's mainly as a mathematician that I speak today. So I should be twice disqualified from addressing this congregation on matters spiritual. It seems contradictory, and we mathematicians are particularly vexed by contradictions -- in the humanities they're called "tensions", which feels more tolerable than plain "contradiction" or "paradox". As it happens, it is a vexing paradox that I come to share with you, an old "tension" that becomes more pressing in our tense times, and can provoke the kind of weary Weltschmerz conveyed by the reading from Ecclesiastes. It is a tension of tolerance: a paradox that puts true tolerance of other cultures and beliefs out of reach when it feels like we need it most. There's a similar paradox in mathematics. You may know it as Russell's Paradox, or the "who shaves the barber?" puzzle, or the paradox of Epimenides the Cretan. We can even find a version of the Cretan paradox in the New Testament. In Chapter 1 of Paul's Letter to Titus, we read at verse 12: One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons." Wow -- we're a long way from First Corinthians, Chapter 13! But never mind the ethnic stereotyping. St. Paul continues: "This testimony is true." That's the paradox. He doesn't seem to notice that if a Cretan is giving true testimony, then it's not true that Cretans are always liars, which is part of this supposedly true testimony. Now when we first encounter this paradox or one of its variants, it has the feel of a trivial puzzle, of smart-alecky logic-chopping. But it turns out that one of these variants is a true logical difficulty, one that threw mathematics into a crisis some 100 years ago. It took a lot of time and work to recover and find ways to avoid the paradox without giving up centuries' worth of mathematical progress. Tolerance of people and groups of different moral or spiritual persuasions entails a similar kind of paradox -- and again it's a more serious paradox than it seems at first. It can be very convenient to avert our eyes from this paradox when we can, because tolerance has the practical virtue of promoting harmony in a diverse, liberal community. So the familiar slogan seems to make perfect sense: "Tolerate all but the intolerant". This slogan may not be completely logical; it's not as demanding a standard as "Love thine enemies" [Matthew 5:44] or, from our secular scriptures, "freedom for the speech we hate" [O.W.Holmes]; but it's a practical standard, and one with a sensible symmetry: I'll tolerate you if you tolerate me. But that's not good enough. Not only am I being a bit illogical -- that in itself is allowed outside of mathematics -- but, by making intolerance the one unforgivable and intolerable sin, I myself commit the same psychological sin, a failing of sympathy. Truly, the intolerant are rarely wicked or vicious in their own eyes. Arguably it is their cause that is the more compelling: I act for the sake of a temporal and temporary harmony; they act on divine and eternal commandments, to save their and their children's immortal soul, and maybe mine too. Where I see their intolerance as small-mindedness -- as the inability to see beyond their dogma -- they see my tolerance as weak-mindedness. Even when I tolerate you symmetrically, I'm admitting in some way that you have as much right to your beliefs as I do to mine; all the more so if I take the next step of "moving from mere tolerance to acceptance". But then I can't have that much faith in my own beliefs, or I'd _know_ that mine are right, and yours are wrong. Now of course this is not a new dilemma, and lots of solutions have been proposed. But none that I've seen seems to completely work. Given the time limit, I'll briefly address just a pair of approaches that are particularly popular here in academe: diversity and education. The idea is that we'll all become more tolerant once we get to know folks from other cultures and religions as real people, and learn the truth about their traditions and beliefs. We'll learn, for instance, that an atheist can be as moral as a God-fearing churchgoer; we'll learn how little the religion of Voodoo has to do with acupuncturing one's foes in effigy; we'll learn that Shariah, the code of Islamic law, is an extensive legal tradition grounded in the Koran, in much the same way that the Jewish Talmud builds on the Torah -- and that when Shariah demands sensational punishments like chopping off the criminal's hand, the evidence to prove his guilt must be almost impossibly airtight. It is true that diversity and education are the great antidote to the kind of intolerance that comes from bigotry and ignorance. Still, they are not an easy recipe for living happily ever after with each other as we celebrate Simchat Torah and Ascension Day and Diwali. That's because we won't like everything that we learn. For instance, Shariah doesn't equal hand-chopping, but it does go fundamentally against cherished Western ideals like equality before the law and freedom of religion: Shariah accords men and women very different rights and duties, and makes apostasy a capital offense for Moslems. To give a more personal example, and then I'll be done: When I was a child in Israel, I knew little of Christians beyond some vague notions -- they believe in Yeshu; they have a Scripture called a New Covenant; there's a Pope. I studied music, so I also knew a bit about Gregorian chant and Masses and church organs. When I came back here, I experienced some of the wealth of great art and music that Christian belief has inspired. But I also learned that Christian belief includes some notions that are most shocking from a Jewish perspective. "Yeshu", Jesus, seems to be variously God, the Son of God(!), one-third of God(!?), or all three at once; he said that no one -- not just "no Christian", no one at all -- comes unto God except through Him [John 14:6]. There's more: this Jesus-God is claimed to be the same Lord Adonai of the Hebrew scriptures, scriptures whose prophecies are put forth as predictions of the life of Jesus. That's even harder for a Jew to stomach. So, education and diversity made me much better informed. Did they make me *more* inclined to religious tolerance? That's another question. So there's our paradox: we need tolerance, but true tolerance is hard if not impossible. What's the way out? I don't know. At this point if I were giving a math lecture, I'd leave this question as an exercise, or more honestly say it's beyond my scope. But as a university, we have another great value besides education and diversity: research. Part of our mission is to work hard at making unexpected connections and figuring out difficult problems. I hope that I leave you persuaded that we have here a difficult problem that's worth hard work. Thank you.