When I was a girl, my father’s behavior in the Boston suburb we lived in struck me as weird. His volatility was embarrassing. His emotionalism was out of place. He was a Rachmaninoff cadence where everyone else played Mozart, a medieval gargoyle perched atop a Lutheran church, a mai tai in the midst of the odorless, colorless gin and tonics that were Boston’s favorite drink. When I grew up and moved away, I recognized his eccentricity for what it was—the incomplete conversion of this assimilated Jew, all quick, erratic motion and nervous energy, to the phlegmatic chill of New England. Where Dad worked, at the Harvard School of Public Health, the atmosphere was cool as the inside of a church—as were the faculty, several of whom he had roomed with at Eliot House ten years earlier but never dined alongside, since the university’s eating clubs in the 1950s were strictly segregated. In their spacious Cambridge houses they remained secluded, the graceful curves of high brick walls separating their jade lawns from the jangly street traffic of nearby Harvard Square.
In the context of the city’s strict composure, an uprightness that hoarded physical energy as if every movement were a waste of vital spirit, my dad’s Jewish exuberance must have seemed shockingly flamboyant. And indeed, he was all violent activity: he screamed himself hoarse when we squabbled in the car, darted across streets before the “WALK” sign, rifled wildly through the stacks of papers in his office searching for the document he had stashed in some forgotten place because it was “important,” huffed his way through car dealerships when some hapless salesman offered statistics that contradicted the basic laws of physics, ate too much from the party trays his Harvard colleagues nibbled from, and blew in to our house at the end of the day—disheveled but triumphant as some Greek general returning home at the end of the Trojan War.
Ignoring my mother’s demurrals, my dad typically wore sneakers on the several occasions each year when our family drove into the city to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He commented with gleeful sarcasm on whatever stupidity passed for convention and took the talk of car mechanics more seriously than the abstracts of some of his colleagues, who massaged their data, he felt, rendering their experiments unethical and valueless at a stroke. He spoofed Harvard’s sanctimonious dinner parties in the mock prayer with which he inaugurated family suppers (“Good food, good meat, good God let’s eat”). And, aggressively competitive, he never missed an opportunity to let the more socially conscious faculty of the School of Public Health know by example that their inherited facility among the intellectual elite could not stand up to his own uncouth, native brilliance.
Years later, reading Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman’s memoir, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!,” I recognized in this physicist’s indifference to social protocol and his failure to suffer fools gladly a “curious character” like my dad. Feynman, too, had a low tolerance for mediocrity. A physicist friend at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs remembers that the Nobel winner refused, point-blank, to attend meetings: they were fine for his colleagues, he thought, but his own brain was too valuable to idle away in committee. This pronouncement must have met with a mixed reception, but it was delivered with Feynman’s usual aplomb. The anecdote he recounted as a new graduate student at Princeton might have been one of my father’s own. Feynman could sniff out pretentiousness like a police dog trained to find street drugs; at Princeton, he found plenty of grandiloquence. The university was “an imitation of an English school” complete with phony British accents. The “Mahstah of Residences . . . was a professor of ‘French littrachaw’” who invited him to a tea party—at which he distinguished himself in his inimitable Jewish way. Asked whether he would like cream or lemon in his tea, the scientist replied “ ‘I’ll have both, thank you,’” at which the stricken dean’s wife could only manage, “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.” Here was Dad—except that he, as all four of us children knew, would have asked for five spoons of sugar too.
I have inherited my father’s contempt for pieties. Ceremonies of all kinds make me squirm: I satirize homilies at weddings and funerals with whispered aspersions, as if to consent to ritual were to surrender independence of mind. Of course this irreverence made for a stormy childhood, since the edicts I resisted most were my father’s. But defiance of tradition is my birthright: hard to break. I am, after all, my father’s daughter. I have absorbed his Jewish habits of mind. Because I spent my school years within the shadow of the Old North Church, however, I associate observance with New England culture rather than with Jewish orthodoxy. Two hundred years after the Revolutionary War, the tree-lined streets of Concord and Lexington wind in serpentine curves past stands of pine and the occasional field of corn left intact as a rural reminder of two centuries before. School trips prompted us to recall “our” heritage: the smallish boulder on the edge of the windswept coast that was Plymouth Rock, the cotton-smocked women who dipped candles and made soap from lye in perennial re-creation of Salem’s Puritan past. Route 126, once a dirt path Paul Revere traveled on his Midnight Ride, is choked now with traffic from the burgeoning computer industry. The Daughters of the American Revolution still organize an annual restaging of the Revolutionary War hero’s call to arms. Each year, the bugle call dragged me from sleep in the early morning hours. I woke to the harsh cry of the riders through the field behind our house and the hurried clacking of horseshoes on the tarred road outside: a small group of men in the costume of 1776 galloping by as if time had folded over itself in some quaint history book illustration of Einstein’s theory.
Piety for me is Anglo-Protestant, Boston’s choleric interpretation of its British inheritance: Cromwell’s humorlessness, the starched white collars of eighteenth-century merchants whose portraits hang in the colonial wing of the Boston Fine Arts Museum—and the prim, moralizing gaze their grand-children’s grandchildren turned upon my voluble family when our excited conversation troubled their polite restaurant murmurings. To be pious was to be dutiful, whether in dress or at prayer, at cocktail parties or school functions. Piety meant proper conduct, form rather than substance, the icy sangfroid of decorum. I favored irreverence because it allowed me a small rebellion against this incurious citizenry, as parsimonious of gesture as they were of speech. For a people who valued social compliance above all else, gaudiness was godlessness, brashness an unpardonable sin. Talking with your hands was showy, vulgar, gauche. It was what my father called, in the loud drawl he designated as parody, “taaaacky,” the very word itself too outré for Bostonians to utter.
When I watched my father speak to my classmates’ parents on those few occasions when school functions brought us all together, I read in their slight stiffening the checked but palpable hostility this constricted social world exhibits toward the unreserved. My father’s conversational brio distinguished him as unerringly as if he were wearing Joseph’s coat. To New England eyes, he must have seemed honky-tonk as a neon sign blaring its advertisement for Budweiser, a loud macaw, a blotch of scarlet in the midst of their graceful monochrome of silvery birches, white-painted churches, and wrought-iron weather vanes tempered dusty black.
Growing up, I detested this obtrusiveness. Now, living some three thousand miles away from Boston’s Back Bay, I realize that his expansive gesturing and mercurial speech, like his cocky disregard for convention, were inherited from his eastern European predecessors, themselves viewed askance by the Russians, Germans, and Poles they lived alongside. Strong emotion hovers like static electricity over his head. But so, too, does intellectual inquisitiveness, a respect for brilliance—whether in the field of automobile mechanics or theoretical physics—and a refusal to assume that established custom is inherently virtuous. My father’s imperviousness to the glamour of the politic and his lack of obeisance to institutional authority constitute a principle pure as faith. Admiration for innovation, curiosity unfettered by the worship of long-established theory, and pleasure in scholarly epiphany that shatters intellectual tradition without a second’s regret define his attitude toward work, as they typify the work of Jewish scientists more generally. Dad taught us that the only way to arrive at new ideas was to be a maverick. But his irreverence is less the product of “the scientific method” than of a Jewish tradition he shelved and largely “forgot,” or rather, translated into an ostensibly nonpartisan affinity for Freud, Kafka, and Rilke—like many other secular Jews who find themselves living in uncongenial social climates. Framed within the wake of the World War II history that perpetually cautioned where it did not silence, this brashness is defiance; a refusal to prostrate the self before the unsympathetic gaze of the intolerant.
As a Rorschach test, the coupling of “Jews” with “modernity” is hardly ambiguous. Out of the inkblot, one picture habitually resolves: the Shoah, the second of the century’s genocides. Two decades after World War II, the Holocaust became the pivot point upon which Jewish intellectual life turned. It remains, today, more than a half century later, the hinge upon which our sense of ourselves depends. Its wake of loss and erasure paradoxically solders American Jews together as a religious and cultural community. But the Holocaust has become the black hole of our history, swallowing the time-space within which it unfolds. Every narrative we produce today must bend and twist to accommodate this central force. If in ancient times we were treated to miracles and monarchs (King David, the burning bush, the plagues in Egypt, Joseph’s prophetic dreams), the twentieth century brings only ash, quiet as snowfall.
In the past we had heroes, we had warriors, we had lovers—Solomon, the Song of Songs, the lilt of the lute, and the backward glance of the maiden. Rebecca, Deborah, Judah Maccabee. I was raised without these stories. Instead, like many of my secular contemporaries, I have come to know Jewishness as a badge of suffering, an ethnic “knowledge” ironically echoing Germany’s yellow star. Like it or not, my iconography is the victim’s, informed by photographs of people in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the death camps, through whose darkly intelligent eyes we see a prescient knowledge of their own erasure. In some sense the memorials we have constructed to the dead merely strengthen the pull this central sadness exerts upon us. Each visit to a museum, designed to honor our ancestors, reminds us as well of the inescapability of our fate as outsiders.
Such witnessing, in those of us temporally distant enough to be immune from fear, is an upwelling of Job’s pride. Like William Faulkner’s Anse Bundren, the patriarch of As I Lay Dying, we seem proud of being chosen for special misery. Pale eyes glued open in the “pleased astonishment” of the plagued unfortunate, Bundren repeats a mantra—“if ever was such a misfortunate man”—that could be our own. Faulkner’s humor reveals the particular patterning of race conflict as it takes shape in the American South. The writer censures the way both Blacks and whites accept tragedy as their portion: dumbly unreflective as oxen, they keep their shoulders to the plow in assent to their twin Fates. Bundren is a comical figure whose complacency in the face of his family’s endless calamities Faulkner vilifies, but his smugness finds an uncomfortable parallel in our readiness to anticipate perpetual trauma.
Habituated to understanding the modern period as allegorical of Jewish suffering, writing about achievement seems not so much difficult as blasphemous. Images of what Elaine Scarry calls “the body in pain” have crowded out alternate representations so fully that, come time to write this essay upon relationships between Jews as victims of war and Jews as engineers of war’s most devastating technology to date, I initially found myself hard pressed to scratch out more than a few solitary paragraphs. “The cataclysm of murder and atrocity that we call the Holocaust is inescapable and indelible,” Cynthia Ozick argues in “Tradition and the Jewish Writer,” a 2005 essay. Sixty years after its end, the Shoah “inevitably marks—stains—our moral nature,” she continues, as if conferring memorial tattoos upon her readers.
The unfortunate side effect of Paul Célan’s brilliant, jet-like poetry is to absorb into its darkness the happier ghosts of the twentieth century. We remember the bitter irony of “Todesfuge”: “He whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground / he commands us play up for the dance.” But all the others—the painters, the violinists, the chemists, the novelists, the surgeons, the architects, the engineers, the physicists—are forgotten, left without burial. To end this ceaseless listening to the dead feels hard, but I wish to honor our achievements, not the specious dignity we claim for the victim, and to offer my daughter another way to see, transporting her from the memory of Auschwitz toward Einstein and Feynman, as well as her grandfather—people whose unkillable drive to understand is shared by those lost to history.
Escape artists invented the atom bomb. Nazis destroyed European Jewry, and then the remnants of European Jewry became destroyers of worlds. Here is Albert Einstein, with his teasing smile and Charlie Chaplin eyes, caught by the camera: the Houdini of nuclear physics. Bright lights and fearsome acts, the magicians of World War II, the scientists of the Manhattan Project, strike a pose in Los Alamos. There is Hungarian-born Edward Teller, who fled Germany, at once irascible and charming. In the corner the retiring Emilio Segrè, his shadowed face inclined toward earth, a refugee from Italy. The young Otto Robert Frisch, who edged out of Denmark just as the Germans invaded. Wolfgang Pauli, who worked with Niels Bohr in his Copenhagen lab but left Europe between the wars. Alongside them are ranged the Americans J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman, the first lean as a pencil, the other a fine-boned Puck sweetly naughty as that Shakespearean provocateur. Dead men if for the flight from Europe, these outcast performers orchestrated in New Mexico what would be the century’s biggest spectacle, to daze and dazzle a darkened world.
The Holocaust and Hiroshima are twin icons of the apocalyptic violence that inaugurates the modern age. At the center of both—like it or not—are Jews. If they were half of the twelve million consigned to death in Europe, Jews comprised an even larger percentage of the scientists whose efforts in New Mexico would transform two Japanese cities, likewise, into ash. Wartime chronicling, like Holocaust memorialization, is typically painted as a series of two-dimensional poster boards to victory and defeat. In one, tragedy: the “black milk” of Célan’s “Deathfuge.” In the other, courage: the Allied effort to win the weapons race against the Nazis. Insulated from each other and from us, these wartime simulacra offer an appropriately dignified version of World War II history as epic, larger than life, a theater of extraordinary action and heightened emotion.
Jettison these, and we lose the monumental grandeur that retrospectively lends coherence to violence. But we obtain a quality of attention that restores to modern Jewish experience its richness and detail. At a minimum, the knowledge that the relatives of the victims of the gas chambers were instrumental in the race to develop the most potent weapons on Earth should give us pause. In the disparate countenances of these scientists, a range of feeling too mixed to find a place within the exalted rhetoric of wartime contest, an alloy of rage and hope resisting ruin. Juxtapose a photograph of the physicists who worked in Los Alamos side by side with a picture taken through the barbed wire mesh of Auschwitz. In the memorial photograph, breathing stick figures stare back at you. Too emaciated to stand up straight, they still pose for the camera. Their black eyes smolder, guttered fires that will flame up again at the slightest provocation of the air.
Turn to the equally famous image of Albert Einstein, and the accomplishments as well as afflictions of Jewish lives in the twentieth century come into focus. Einstein, his Mona Lisa smile at odds with the sad dark eyes, large and lustrous and fringed with lashes heavy as half-drawn curtains. And then there is the sidelong smile itself, the very icon of Jewish experience, with its marvelous shades of feeling, bittersweet and rueful, lilting as the minor-keyed clarinet melodies of klezmer music, a little melancholy, a little mocking, epigrammatic, knowing. A smile that is ironic and romantic and pragmatic, quizzical without bemusement, nostalgic for a childhood paradise it recognizes it never enjoyed, slightly superior but hesitant (hovering at the corners of the mouth like a watcher at the edges of a party); a flirtatious smile that mutates from seduction to sadness in an instant; a glancing smile with the head turned a quarter turn away from you yet that still engages you steadfastly and squarely with the “j’accuse” that neither Jews nor non-Jews would ever mistake for mere abstractedness.
The time has come to return this sidelong look with an equally searching gaze, forgoing the satisfactions of bereavement in order to examine more complicated solutions to the untenable choices history offers. Einstein, we know, refused to become involved in the wartime science that would translate his famous theory into its most destructive practice. But many other Jewish physicists were instrumental in the work the young Feynman saw as necessary, given what he called, with his penchant for understatement, the “fright” of Germany’s militarism. Their hearts beating faster in the thin desert air, the physicists who gathered at Los Alamos waved away mourning, forgoing Kaddish as they bent their heads together in the race to solve each day’s scientific problems. The clamor of the lab’s cafeteria refused the myth of silence, Europe’s slow procession of shades packing their bags to hell without sound or sigh. The mathematical language these physicists spoke was competitive, argumentative, barely containable at presto tempo.
At Norway’s Norsk Hydro plant, Nazi engineers oversaw the stepped-up production of heavy water—water laced with deuterium, the hydrogen isotope whose denser molecular structure releases neutrons that moderate and control the reactions that split uranium atoms. Learning of this effort from a Dutch colleague who had been expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Einstein wrote a letter of warning to Roosevelt. The president did not immediately pay attention to this resident “alien” of whom the FBI pronounced in the early 1940s: “This office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein, on matters of a secret nature, without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.”
In the end, many scientists “of his background”—socialists and Jews—were invited to collaborate upon the New Mexican–based bomb project administrated by Robert J. Oppenheimer, himself blacklisted after the war. In an irony we would do well to acknowledge, it was the refugee from Hungary, Edward Teller, who later spoke most vociferously against this young American. Oppenheimer gave twenty hours of each day and some thirty pounds on an already too-slender frame to the Manhattan Project. Still, in 1954, he was essentially “tried” for disloyalty, his security clearances permanently revoked, his legacy ineradicably blackened. His wife, Kitty, had once been married to Joseph Dallet, a member of the Communist Party who had been killed in 1937 while fighting for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. This “affiliation”—if such it was, for when does your partner’s former spouse become your own relative?—was sufficient to scapegoat Oppenheimer.
In the early 1940s, however, the tensions between the impolitic Jewish refugee and the urbane scion of a wealthy Jewish American family were shoved aside. The escaped scientists who occupied side-by-side offices at Los Alamos had been spat at and despised by Europe. Above deep Atlantic seas, from the decks of the ocean liners, they watched home recede beyond the horizon line. But not beyond memory. Reviled by the countries that would forever remain their native lands, is it any wonder they chose an affiliation that made more respectful use of their intellectual gifts?
In New Mexico they substituted cooperation and what Feynman condescendingly labeled “engineering” in place of the pure science that gave to their lives its rare and sustaining grace. Like other brilliant people fortunate enough to find outlets for self-expression in their work, these physicists possessed the ability to become so wholly absorbed in concentration that the separate antiphonies of self resolved momentarily into a single clear note. Such intellectual joy they sacrificed, for a time, at Los Alamos: shelving the questions and musings that surfaced at odd moments of the day to remind them of their real interests, so that they could, committee-like, construct a bomb. But for the refugees, particularly, I suspect that a certain degree of camaraderie—the fellowship they had once enjoyed in their own European laboratories until it became unalterably compromised in the early 1930s—compensated for the temporary cessation of their larger concerns. Much scholarly collaboration is an uneasy mix of people in suspension rather than solution. The scientists at Los Alamos—with their inside jokes and their Sunday walks in the canyons, their summer camp dormitory arrangements and their weekend parties— were fiercely competitive as only the intellectually self-possessed can be, but they were united in their common aim, their respect for one another’s work, even, paradoxically, their maverick iconoclasm.
Those of us born decades after World War II have been raised in the long shadow of nuclear fallout. We know apocalypse as unpleasant fact, a slow toxicity: radiation deposited in our bones from yearly X-rays, the painstaking accretion of mercury in our blood, the thickening and blurring of our atmosphere with carcinogenic fuel emissions so that we no longer see the horizon of clear days. Of course the scientists gathered in Los Alamos during wartime would have preferred pursuing their own work: questions about the formation of the stars, the as-yet-unnamed forces far more potent than gravity that seemed to be keeping whole constellations from collapsing, the origin of the universe itself. These large, ennobling problems had occupied them before the petty but virulent spite of human conflicts redirected their collective intelligences toward the service of weaponry. For them, apocalypse was imminent.
The silence from their families overseas would have sounded loud as the hiss of a blank tape. Worry about their welfare would have clouded their focus and destroyed their concentration, so that they must have been grateful to be occupied. Late in the war, reports of barracks constructed with the sole object of dispatching those they housed to oblivion had begun to circulate in the classified circles many of the scientists were privy to. In these shadowy death cities that had sprung up on the edges of ordinary towns, clocks marked the hours from waking to work to extinction in grotesque imitation of quotidian rhythms.
How strange to wake to this purity of sun and light in New Mexico instead, the blue dome of sky contoured by clouds, the piñon and scrub pines falling away on the slopes below you, the peaks of the Jemez range on the far horizon deepening the clear expanse till it appears profound as the space between stars. Los Alamos offered the long view, the mesas slow to crumble, the half-lives of stones carved by wind and the endless cycle of sunlight a geologic measure that reduced all the grandeur and grimness of the last five hundred years of European history to a second’s shadow across the sun. No wonder Oppenheimer chose this place, the same one he had ridden across so often as a young man with the few companions strong enough to weather his fourteen-hour stretches on horseback. On the weekends, the scientists hiked with him up the rock faces of the mesas surrounding their temporary quarters and steadied their palms against the sun-warmed contours of stone. Breathing hard in the thin air, did they see the dark mirages of their families waver on the horizon?
At a minimum, they must have felt the adrenaline surge of satisfaction when they manipulated a power immeasurably more concentrated than the chemicals made by German companies that were vented through “shower-heads” to suffocate the history professor down the street, the neighborhood bully who had tormented a son, the clarinet player next door whose eternal practicing was audible through the walls when traffic ceased. Later, surveying photographs of the lunar rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (empty as the abandoned death camps in Europe that likewise denied the bereaved the consolation of gravestones), did some of them turn their back on the New Mexico skies to face Europe again and whisper—knowing the burden they left in the doorframes of the bombed-out houses—This is finished in your name?
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The eulogy J. Robert Oppenheimer pronounced after the bomb detonated has become proverbial for American global dominance. But Oppenheimer’s first-person pronoun gestured as well to people across the seas in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and France, binding the refugee scientists in Los Alamos to their separate geographies of home. For the director of the Manhattan Project, there was that other kinship, a tug of recognition slight and uncomfortably familiar as an irregular beat of the heart, which gave to his grave pronouncement a more pointed edge. What more appropriate power for Oppenheimer—cosmopolitan, scholarly, open minded—to call up as epitaph for the Jews of Europe than the spirit of Shiva? Physical principle rather than vengeful deity, the Hindu god appeals equally to the tenets of science and belief. Shiva is entropy. Cosmic assessor of destructive forces, he judges the capacity of systems to tolerate chaos—and so provided Oppenheimer a way to negotiate between physics and faith. Too worldly to be wholeheartedly religious, too wealthy to commit to physics with the single-minded absorption of the refugees and self-made American men he managed, he found in Shiva, however attenuated, the retributive force of his heart.
Skepticism rather than blind compliance with established learning characterizes the rabbinic student’s disposition and the scientist’s ethos alike. Study requires discipline and labor. But what most sharpens its edge, as rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides counsels in the Guide for the Perplexed he penned almost a millennium ago, is independence: the thinker must possess “a mind of his own.” In eleventh-century Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac’s foundational commentaries on the Torah and Talmud, such critical inquiry often verges on blasphemy. The pluralistic rationalism of the most sophisticated learning in rabbinic schools dazzles like the facets of a cut gemstone. “There are seventy faces to the Torah,” rabbinic saying asserts, which condones as many readings of the Bible. The assumption here—that each person possesses the responsibility to tease out his own interpretation—echoes Feynman, as it echoes my father, as it echoes Einstein’s own satisfaction with scientific study.
Jewish scientists are quick to distance themselves from religious orthodoxy, but the intellectual qualities Talmudic scholars value are their own. Though Einstein often distinguished the work of science from the study of religion, he was aware that on one level he was translating his predecessors’ desire to decipher the laws of God into the laws of physics. “To be sure,” he acknowledges in The World as I See It, “it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand the intellectual work, creative or receptive. It would surely be absurd to judge the value of the Talmud, for instance, by its intellectual fruits.” It is not scientific application that is valuable, but scientific principle that compels. If the field of study has altered, this primary motive—“the urge to understand”—remains a constant across time.
Both Einstein and the medieval rabbinic commentaries value work more than its outcome. “Measured objectively,” the physicist asserts, “what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of self.” In retrospect we might be tempted to reduce this desire to an effort to shelter the self from the virulence of anti-Semitism rather than to understand it as a disinterested desire for enrichment. In a country that mustered a military composure the more rigid for its late unification—Bismarck’s rule was recent history, the Franco-Prussian War concluded merely eight years before Einstein’s birth—even the most assimilated German Jews remained objects of suspicion. Yet these intellectuals transformed the short-lived progressivism of the Weimar Republic into the new nation’s golden age. Berlin’s luminous culture was the product of Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, Max Reinhardt and Edmund Husserl, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Freud and Einstein. Nationalists denied them the emotional comforts of home, but release from social stricture fed their critical intelligence while the refusal of community ties sharpened their skepticism, clearing the way for innovation. The vacuum this creative minority left when they were expelled from cultural and political life in the early thirties fooled few. Asked by the Nazi minister of education whether the University of Göttingen had suffered from the loss of Jewish physicists and mathematicians in the spring of 1933, writer Amos Elon reports in The Pity of It All, the distinguished mathematician David Hilbert replied: “Suffered? It hasn’t suffered, Herr Minister. It no longer exists.”
Einstein himself had lectured at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the twenties amid the jeers of “Juden raus” (Jews out) from rioting students. But the gall of self-disgust was foreign to him. The mathematical language he listened to was exponentially more powerful than such inconsequential spite. He did not labor to counter derision with his quick-witted aphorisms; these quips were merely a by-product of his own high-spirited energy. Irrepressibly cheerful, he chose the larger world over the small-minded one. In place of the cowering, downcast gaze, he substituted time looking up at the stars. Because intellectual work requires intense concentration, he knew, it releases us momentarily from the constraints of ego, the small resentments, jealousies, dissatisfactions, and annoyances that becloud perception. The sacred is tied as closely to human effort, properly disciplined and appropriately focused, as to divinity itself, that “wind from God sweeping over the water,” as Genesis frames what is external to the material world and human consciousness.
Einstein’s need to find a kind of human work that is disinterested (immune, that is, to the distractions of illustration and example) is in essence the desire that motivates the religious to envision an alternative to the imperfect world, one remote but which nonetheless resonates in sympathy with our finer feelings. Metaphysical understanding shares with science an interest in principles. Einstein’s longing to achieve scientific clarity echoes the yearning of religious scholars to arrive at insight into the divine. And the physicist’s language of prayer is thinking, the muscular contractions that push blood through our arteries and oxygenate the receptive tissues of the brain, the bronchiole tubes that expand and contract with every breath, the dendrites and ganglia that stir with each thought, signals jumping from neuron to neuron in a pattern swift and untraceable as blinking lights in the night sky. With these conduits we work toward an understanding of things outside ourselves. Respiration and inspiration, physics and physic: the medieval clerics knew as well as we that metaphysics was a miracle of breath and pulse, of body and mind working in concert to trace pathways from the patterned millions of nerves and neurons inside to the patterned millions of stars outside. To be a doctor was to be a rabbi, to see how physiology permits philosophy, and how philosophy, in its turn, shadows God.
The medical analogies Maimonides exploits throughout his religious writings reflect this genealogy. The essays of certain contemporary physicians who are as facile with philology as physiology maintain this tradition. Perhaps the desire of people across the world to possess a piece of Einstein’s brain after his death need not be cynically dismissed as the voyeurism of the circus sideshow but instead as a form of worship that reflects an appreciation for the kinetic and chemical leaps across synapses not so different from leaps of faith.
Like muscle tissue, which atrophies or increases in girth according to our own determined effort, thinking quickens or slackens in concert with the intellectual demands we make of ourselves. We think in order to approach an understanding of the deepest spiritual questions, Maimonides argued. But the power to speculate is not simply conferred upon the heads of the appropriately pious. Reverence—that quality the Puritan culture of New England associates with piety, with decorum, with an unquestioned obedience to duty—is for Jews connected with desire, not the effort to suffocate it, with intellectual skepticism, not catechism, and with an independence of mind that always, always supersedes collective wisdom. Close to a millennium later, Einstein practiced a similar intellectual faith. He did not give up this faith ever: not when his cautions to the U.S. government about German war efforts resulted in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, not when the bomb over Hiroshima stilled the city before the nerve signals registering its brilliant ravaging could make their way to the brains of the watchers, not even when he knew the busy firings inside his own brain were within hours of ceasing. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. If Einstein inaugurated the modern scientific age, he was still a child of Descartes. The day he died of a stomach aneurism, he lay in his hospital bed writing out equations.
Jews are often seen as parochial, an irony of epic proportions given the cosmopolitanism of Jewish intellectualism. All over the world, different Jewish cultures take the phrase “intellectual work” seriously. Surprisingly, this education has changed very little over the centuries. If the origins of scholarly inquiry seem insular in the sense that they derive from religious interpretation, take a closer look. The secular among us may ridicule the Talmudic thinker as the original bespectacled nerd, but the study groups within which students cluster spur the kind of bravura academic performance that characterizes the best thinkers.
As a literature professor, I have been schooled to understand tragedy as the apex of achievement. In concert with the opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”), literary critics balk at affirmation. Like Chagall’s glorious palette, however, writings by Einstein and Feynman communicate happiness far more often than defeat. And why shouldn’t this fugitive, alchemical presence occupy our imaginative lives? If loss is complicated, how much more so the momentary luminescence of joy? While we linger upon sorrow in prose and verse, the vitality of midcentury painters owes much to the sensibilities of their modernist precursors whose energy reanimated the plastic arts. Think of the kinetic dazzle of Jackson Pollock’s canvases, where paint pulses with the un-containable energy of some unstable element. Matisse’s warmly lit abstractions of the French landscape. Picasso’s canon—imperial, muscular, assertive—and save for Guernica, a refusal of the darkness of war. And then there are the Jewish painters: the protomodern light experiments of Camille Pisarro and Max Lieberman. Mark Rothko’s shimmering rectangles, lucent as the surface of water. The figures in Chagall’s canvases that hover midway between earth and sky to mirror the elusive and inexplicable rise of the spirits.
The paintings of this Russian immigrant harbor ghosts less often than they beckon toward the dancing of circus performers. Canvases glow bright as crayon boxes. Color is so vibrant here it seems the point of painting: the blue of the azure, greens piquant as unfurling leaves, reds the cheerful crimson of newly oxygenated blood. Despite the disparagement of some native-born French, Moische Segal, survivor of pogrom and Holocaust and newly naturalized citizen, adorned the ceiling of the new Paris Opera with the effulgent hues of Tintoretto. Color—tender as spring, high-spirited as children at Purim, glamorous as Mardi Gras or the kinetic streak of red and white traffic light on time-exposed photographic films—speaks in the accents of joy in almost all of Chagall’s work.
Of course the painter was as intimate with loss as with the Torah stories he translated to paint. But sorrow he mostly contained. Melancholy remained part of the past, visible in the faint smile—a not-so-distant mirror to Einstein’s own—that played across his father’s lips. “Everything about my father seemed enigma and sadness to me,” Chagall writes in My Life, his autobiography. “Always tired, careworn, only his eyes had a luster, of grey-blue. . . . He lifted heavy barrels [of herring], and my heart ached to see him hoist those loads, his frozen hands fumbling. . . . Only his face occasionally betrayed a faint smile. What a smile! Where did it come from?” Like Einstein, whose unfathomable smile simultaneously opens to and answers for sadness, Chagall recognizes melancholy only to confine it to the horizon line of his Russian homeland.
The refugee’s wisdom: we can never recover, unless we finally stop listening.
And so, sadness shimmers faintly in the blue tones that outline the artist’s peasant homes and faraway cathedral bell. But the present is full of work, the satisfying soulful work of painting, where happy scenes are squarely foregrounded. Light, color, movement—there is the Eiffel Tower, here the chatter of talk and the clink of glassware along Paris’s tree-lined avenues. Lovers float above the ground like bright balloons escaping, fiddlers chase away death playing on rooftops above town streets, the petals of flowers glisten like stars.
If we were to express feeling in the language of physics, then happiness would be kinetic as the artist’s softly wavering canvases. Sorrow is absolute zero, the absence of energy, when even the hummingbird vibration of atoms quivers into stillness. Gladness trembles like the dappled light in Chagall’s circus pictures, which defy grief as they defy Newton’s laws. Dancers pirouette in air while a clown clasps a donkey round the waist. Human and animal alike glow with the green-yellow tones of spring.
The painter understands color the way a physicist interprets the spectrum. Not as pigment or hue but as energy, the dynamic freight of each picture’s mood and argument. Stand in front of one of Chagall’s stained-glass windows and you cannot fail to understand this force. “Just materials and light,” he explained, and “something mystical passes through the window.” Beauty drove Einstein too. Nor was this aesthetic impulse idiosyncratic; mathematicians will tell you that the finest expressions possess their own spare grace. The most elegant algebraic solution is the simplest. Shorn of unnecessary parts, the letters, symbols, and numbers vibrate with the suppressed energy of Kandinsky’s neon canvases. Stripping a mathematical phrase to its fewest elements is profoundly satisfying. In its cogency, its harmonious containment of affiliation and design, it gestures toward what Einstein and other physicists knew was an infinitely interconnected universe. William Carlos Williams echoes this idea in “The Rose” when he imagines a flower petal and the world its curved edge defines. “From the petal’s edge a line starts / that being of steel / infinitely fine, infinitely / rigid penetrates / the Milky Way / without contact.” Crafted in language as transparent as the meeting of rose and atmosphere it perceives, the poet’s understanding of the “fragility of the flower / unbruised” as it “penetrates space” is also Einstein’s belief in the comprehension of reality as spelled out in the unifying terms of general relativity. “If uniform motion was relative,” the physicist assumed, then “all motion should be.” This aesthetic dissatisfaction—an unhappiness with special relativity because it was “ugly”—moved Einstein to formulate what the editors of his writings in The Human Side call with sympathetic understanding “gravitational equations of transcendent beauty.”
Chagall’s calculus expressed art as the sum of materials and light. Einstein’s greatest insight about the relationship of mass and energy originated from a similar focus on the natural world’s basic elements and a corresponding faith in its unity. Earth’s balance is everywhere reflected: in the tensile strength of a single hair and in the perfect proportions of an Ionic column, whose flower-stem slenderness holds thousands of pounds of marble aloft. The physicist’s most famous equation expresses with austere beauty the “profound interrelationships” that compose our world. Einstein’s equation is a mathematical metaphor for an elegant universe regulated from interstellar space to single-celled organism by the same physical principles. Marvelously efficient on the page, it gestures toward forces of such magnitude most of us cannot conceptualize them without the aid of analogy. “E,” “c,” “m,” the number “2”: the alphabet a child learns. E=mc2, symbols connecting immensities with minutiae. To contemplate this equation is to see the microcosm in the world and the universe contained in a grain of sand. Travel far enough away from the blue-green radiance of Earth and this small round beauty becomes the colored iris of a human eye. Even as dark energy scatters stars, cohesion rounds a water droplet into a globe.
The writings of scientists reflect the same affectionate awe for the world that is visible in Chagall’s buoyant canvases. We are quick to understand twentieth-century physics as our era’s heart of darkness, but this is to mistake its crudest physical expression, the technological power unleashed during warfare, for its supreme translation on Earth. The scientists whose investigations with atomic fission led to the engineering of the world’s most powerful weapon spent the majority of their lives marveling at a universe whose incomparable beauty was expressed in forces held in harmony, supple and strong and lovely as the sinew from ankle to knee. Reducing the laws of nature to their most elemental relationships was a kind of distillation process, rendering observation free of blur, of noise, of distraction. Einstein’s elegant equations were elixir: when he transcribed natural laws into mathematical symbols, he was, like the Greek philosophers, sifting out impurities. Physics was for him a way of listening intently to the music of the spheres. The ancients described the starry skies as suspended in ether, an atmosphere so rarified the world could not breathe it. And physics was to the cosmos what the listening ear was to music: the means by which we connect with what surrounds us in a wholly unmediated way. Direct as touch, sufficient in itself, this is an insight too fine to be carried by language. Its equations link art and nature. Concordance, harmony, balance: this is what Einstein sees in the universe and what a cellist hears in Bach’s fugues. Listening, we sum up the balanced frequencies of each note into purity in our ear. Like the cello’s spare loveliness, Einstein’s equation possesses infinite expressive power.
Function creates form. Understanding the intricate design that holds forces balanced in tension is an aesthetic and an ethic, providing artistic and scientific observations with their profound depth. Einstein gestures toward this sense of connection in his 1931 travel diary, writing of a winter storm: “The sea has a look of indescribable grandeur, especially when the sun falls on it. One feels as if one is dissolved and merged into Nature. Even more than usual, one feels the insignificance of the individual, and it makes one happy.” How many of us have felt the sharpness of our own losses gentled when we look out over the expanse of ocean or the dome of sky, knowing the endless waves of water and wind and cloud across horizons will remain long after our own hearts have stopped? The grandeur that Einstein felt at the water’s edge mirrors the sublime insight Genesis offers: “The earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water.” Light generates itself from chaos. Just so, the recognition of a being dissolved and released of the weight of significance in a greater power brings ease and lightness. Creation does not issue from bitterness or a sense of affliction but rather from grateful understanding of the poised, interrelated forces at work in the world’s design.
The brilliantly energetic skepticism that characterizes the work of Jewish physicists is as much the hallmark of Jewish culture as is the piety of melancholy. To doubt is not to falter or despair. It is to create possibility, to see the world in a different way, to sweep away established wisdom without a second thought or second look when that legacy does not adequately explain experience. The blind reverence to memory and stubborn hold on the past long attributed to Jews are merely by-products of this unhesitating energy, an after-the-fact apology compensating for a defiance that catalyzes innovation. In a postwar lecture on “The Value of Science” delivered at the 1955 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Feynman privileged skepticism when he defined scientific knowledge as a collection of statements of “varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.” Incertitude catalyzes exploration. The “freedom to doubt” is a liberty—a privilege wrested “out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science.” Permit us to question, these seventeenth-century thinkers demanded. Allow us “to not be sure,” the twentieth-century researcher repeats.
Asking questions, not supplying ready answers, makes good science. Here we come full circle, to the traditions of study explained by Shlomo ben Isaac and Maimonides, traditions sustained by Talmudic study to this day. In “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” Feynman recalls a discussion of electricity he led for a class of rabbinical students in New York City. He assumed, with his usual arrogance, that science would best their religious logic. But they were ten times quicker than he was. “As soon as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist—I can’t remember how—and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea—phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages!” Here is the Jew as escape artist, the intellectual Houdini who wriggles free of his chains and slips out of confinement, the wartime refugee who eludes the Shoah with the light-footedness a starvation diet allows. In the midst of gloom, the lilt of klezmer music, an alto clarinet kicking up its heels like a wedding dancer. A hint of melancholy in the minor key played at allegro tempo. And always ideas, intellectual fission released as marvelous, uncontainable energy.
Then there is Feynman himself, an imp who writes of his safecracking and lockpicking tricks in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” with uncontainable glee. In the iron-clad security of Los Alamos, the scientist is a human dust devil blowing away other scientists before his antics like tumbleweeds in fright:
I went back to the first filing cabinet and CLICK! It opened! . . . Now I could write a safecracker book that would beat every one. . . . I opened safes whose contents were . . . more valuable than what any safecracker anywhere had opened—except for a life, of course. . . . The safes which contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb: the schedules for the production of the plutonium, the purification procedures, how much material is needed, how the bomb works, how the neutrons are generated, what the design is, the dimensions—the entire information that was known at Los Alamos: the whole schmeer!
At the heart of darkness this sprite, exposing security flaws and defying gravitas, sidestepping sermon, mocking seriousness, delighting in his own brilliance with a childlike openness that deflates any claim to destructive self-importance. To observe the slight figure of the physicist watch his colleague blanch before a safe that is empty save for a scrap of paper scrawled in red crayon with the words “Feynman was here” is to witness that other Jewish tradition, an energy that flaunts grief to find a trickster’s happiness at the center of gloom.
Much scientific brilliance was volunteered at Los Alamos in service of weapons that remain the vanishing point for our own nightmares. But death, destruction, and the world laid waste need not be the end of the story. The same wartime refugees—outsiders like Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and Emilio Segrè—have given the Earth its location among the stars, explored galaxies at the outer edge of the universe, discovered the forces that keep the void of space from collapsing in upon itself, else no Earth, no sun, no stars, no universe. Why see the faces of Jewish people as the fallen leaves of history, scuttling this way and that according to an ill-intentioned German wind? At the very period memorialized by history as a dead loss, an era of unspeakable suffering whose end point is a mass vanishing, Jews remade the cosmos. The nadir of Jewish history marks the greatest profusion of scientific ideas since Newton, and these physicists, pushed malignly to the edges and then out of sight of Europe altogether, were central to its flourishing.
The omniscient grandeur earlier centuries gave to the angels, the scientists bestowed on themselves—not as creators, but with the humility of intelligent watchers. They contemplated the beginnings of time and its end, watched as stars exploded, imploded, and exploded again, their materials coming to momentary rest in the iron of our blood and bones. Not passive, not waiting, not paralyzed by despair, the people pushed to the margins of their own townships traveled out to expand boundaries most of us could not even invent, much less understand. The destructive energy that found a language in the barked commands of midcentury wartime was nothing to these scientists’ positively charged masses, volatile with ideas, exuberant with the momentum of insights they knew were inescapable, unstoppable, transforming.
I could not understand even the simplest physics equation to save my life, but the cocky insouciance for “what other people will say” conforms closely to my familial experience. I recognize in Feynman’s inimitable self-possession an ebullience akin to my father’s brashness, as well as an impatience with the social rituals of the less curious who took refuge in site visits and committee meetings while he wanted only to be in the lab, thinking. Intellectual tendentiousness and a sublime lack of fear at jettisoning accepted wisdom is my inheritance too—albeit in a different academic environment than the research medicine that is my father’s profession or the theoretical physics that is the province of so many Jewish scientists.
So, writer and reader of literature that I am, I stumble through Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe hoping in my snail’s pace to pick up a few surface understandings about string theory and edge my way through the tangled thicket of The Fabric Of the Cosmos anticipating that a few small burrs of insight about our eleven-dimensional world will stubbornly cling to my sleeve. I know that this very desire to learn is in my case a provocation inherited as well as discovered, a cultural impulse pleasing and profound as the muscular intelligence that performs its own daily miracles when we lift a cup to our lips, or draw a violin bow across a string, or, like my artist daughter Zoë, put pen to paper. I have neither studied Talmud nor sat for more than two hours at a time listening to rabbinical sermons. But it is to thousands of years of these scholarly traditions that my own pleasure in learning in part originates. Effortless as the body’s memory, and as poised, the gift of intellectual brashness opens to a kind of secular faith. The math may be performed by supercomputers in windowless laboratories, but still, it is stargazing that catalyzes such scientific inquiry. What more spiritual than this, this unbalancing looking up at the dome of sky, your hands raised slightly to compensate for your body’s tilting, your head thrown back—this open-throated but unspeakable yearning, this willingness to connect to what is beyond the self that ends in rapturous acceptance of the world’s mystery? Here, the past is not a burden, nor a bitterness without balm. Instead, it curves toward the future; just as, looking up, we think beyond our present moment illuminated by starlight from places gone before all of us— nation after nation, people after people—began, slow as a flower’s unfurling, to move from the crouch of four feet to learn the upright stance that makes stargazing possible.
What more curious gift than the capacity we have of bending time, the way a few moments recalled in the lightning flashes of memory obliterate the darkness of difficult years? Such refugee scientists show us that against humanity’s timeless cruelty—ancient “problems from hell” translated into modern genocide—we also possess some understanding of relativity as an interest beyond our own footing. Intellectual work can move equally toward serenity as tragedy. What drives insight is not the pain of loss but a transporting recognition that is outside of the body altogether, outside of humanness, even—a floating upward heedless of gravity that connects us with what the Greeks called the ether and what we still do not know to name.
Science and art extend themselves hopefully as Chagall’s lovers, connected by the hands as they leave the ground. And time is the key. Perhaps this is what occupies Jewish physicists in their exploration of the universe: a means to recapture a sense of time as marvel, stretching behind us and in front of us like the seas upon which continents float. In place of the Holocaust, engulfing light and air, they listened for a wind over the darkness that portends movement, a stir of atmosphere that gestures toward presence, a quickening from absence. This conception is ancient and again modern, and no more miraculous than the idea that our own universe—anchored where? And floating in what, if not more space?—will itself grow to fullness to the edges of time, then contract all time back into itself . . . a trillion trillion measures slower, yes, than the memory of human life—but sure as the rhythmic rise and fall of our own breathing.