In the Valley of the Shadow

On the Foundations of Religious Belief

James L. Kugel

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781439150559
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

TEN YEARS AGO, Harvard professor James Kugel was diagnosed with an aggressive, likely fatal, form of cancer. "I was, of course, disturbed and worried. But the main change in my state of mind was that the background music had suddenly stopped—the music of daily life that's constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities. Now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence. There you are, one little person, sitting in the late summer sun, with only a few things left to do." Despite his illness, Kugel was intrigued by this new state of mind and especially the uncanny feeling of human smallness that came with it. There seemed to be something overwhelmingly true about it—and its starkness reminded him of certain themes and motifs he had encountered in his years of studying ancient religions. "This, I remember thinking, was something I should really look into further—if ever I got the chance." In the Valley of the Shadow is the result of that search. In this wide-ranging exploration of different aspects of religion—interspersed with his personal reflections on the course of his own illness—Kugel seeks to uncover what he calls "the starting point of religious consciousness, " an ancient "sense of self" and a way of fitting into the world that is quite at odds with the usual one. He tracks these down in accounts written long ago of human meetings with gods and angels, anthropologists' descriptions of the lives of hunter-gatherers, the role of witchcraft in African societies, first-person narratives of religious conversions, as well as the experimental data assembled by contemporary neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists. Though this different sense of how we fit into the world has largely disappeared from our own societies, it can still come back to us as a fleeting state of mind, "when you are just sitting on some park bench somewhere; or at a wedding, while everyone else is dancing and jumping around; or else one day standing in your backyard, as the sun streams down through the trees... " Experienced in its fullness, this different way of seeing opens onto a stark, new landscape ordinarily hidden from human eyes. Kugel's look at the whole phenomenon of religious beliefs is a rigorously honest, sometimes skeptical, but ultimately deeply moving affirmation of faith in God. One of our generation's leading biblical scholars has created a powerful meditation on humanity's place in the world and all that matters most in our lives. Believers and doubters alike will be struck by its combination of objective scholarship and poetic insight, which makes for a single, beautifully crafted consideration of life's greatest mystery.

1 The Background Music

In the summer of the year 2000, I began writing a book that would eventually be published as The God of Old. I had been working on it for about a week when I drove into Cambridge for my annual physical exam, and when I emerged an hour and a half later, I knew I had a pretty serious case of cancer. I was scheduled for a series of further tests the next week, so I didn’t do anything (or tell anyone) right away; but eventually I had to break the news to my wife, and we went together to get the doctors’ report on the tests.

The tests were not particularly encouraging. Today’s doctors are—I suppose, largely as a result of malpractice lawsuits—extremely careful not to raise false hopes in their patients. They told us that the degree of degeneration in the cancerous cells taken in the biopsy was alarming, since it revealed a particularly aggressive form of the disease. I confess I don’t remember much of the rest of what they said—something about cells “piercing the capsule” and making the prognosis even grimmer. “We probably can’t cure the cancer,” they said, “but we can treat it.” They told us that, with proper care, I could expect to live at least another two years without debilitating symptoms, and that with all the new research and drugs becoming available, they hoped it would be possible to extend my life for two or three years more, perhaps even longer. I was 54 at the time.

The reason I am relating all this is because I want to recapture a certain state of mind that one enters under such circumstances. (I am sure many people who have gone through a similar experience will recognize what I am about to say.) After the initial shock, I was, of course, disturbed and worried. But the main change in my state of mind was that—I can’t think of a better way to put it—the background music suddenly stopped. It had always been there, the music of daily life that’s constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities; and now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence. There you are, one little person, sitting in the late-summer sun, with only a few things left to do. What should I do? Try to keep working on that book? You think: If I could make it through five more years, that would be generous. That would certainly be fair.

This was definitely a different perspective. But how could I have ever thought that life would just go on forever? I did, of course; that’s what the music does, and everyone is caught up in it. The marvelous, often ironic writer William Saroyan is reported to have said on his deathbed: “I know everyone has to die, but somehow I always thought an exception would be made in my case.” It’s what we all think.

You learn all the shortcuts to the hospital and the best places to park in the underground garages. For some reason, hospital parking lots in Boston all seem to be staffed by recent immigrants from Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, refugees from a festering conflict. You get to know them, and after a while you even learn to say, “Hello—how are you this morning?” in their language (which is not Amharic, but either Tigrinya or Tigre). They smile in appreciation. You kid around with the nurses. But all this is just self-deception, trying to make this horrible, multiplex service center for the dying into something less ominous than it is.

Chemotherapy can be easy or not so easy—there are dozens of different regimes that go by that name, and in any case, different individuals respond differently to the same mix of drugs. It did not go very easily for me, and while this is not ultimately connected to the “music,” it certainly had a role in what I thought and felt during those difficult days. I tried to get back to writing, but I just didn’t have the strength. Life became very local: the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. The people who love you loom large; their love is as tangible as bread. As for you, you are small. Your life is winding down now, and you can clearly see its end point; your life has become a compact, little thing. Good-bye. I have subsequently gone to many funerals, and I am always astonished by the smallness of the freshly dug, open holes you see here and there in the cemetery grounds. Can a whole human being fit in there, a whole human life? Yes. No problem.

Do not rely on the mighty to save you, or on any human being.

His breath gives out, then back to earth he goes—on that very day, his projects are all for naught. (Psalm 146)

Days are planned around pills. Start off with a little codeine in the morning, then half a Percocet around lunchtime to get through the afternoon; follow up with the other half at night, plus extra-strength tylenol or ibuprofen as needed. (All this to counteract the effects of chemotherapy.) And then there are the chemo drugs themselves: the main ingredient in the blood thinner Coumadin is warfarin, which is also the main ingredient in mouse poison; not a comforting thought. (But what does it have to do with warfare? The Internet reveals all: Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation held the patent.) The mustine-based pills—those are the worst; the same chemical structure as the mustard gas used in World War I. Keep refrigerated. After a while, even coming close to the refrigerator makes you sick. Sometimes the chemo works too well, and I have to be admitted to the hospital for a couple of days. “Immune system?” the nurse says matter-of-factly. “You don’t have an immune system.” Then, pointing up at the IV dripping into my arm: “That’s your immune system up there.”

Back home, in the middle of the night, when things are almost pitch black, you pass by the dresser on your way to the bathroom and you imagine it all just being over, just done with. I don’t want people to be sad. Later, staring up at the ceiling, you picture yourself being lifted up and crawling out of this painful skin, then walking around the room, free at last, a protoplasmic blob. That would feel nice. I didn’t really think life would go on forever; actually, I was probably more obsessed with death than most people. But it was that music that threw me off, that kind of background buzz that keeps the illusion going.

O my God, do not take me halfway through life.

Your time stretches from age to age:

Long ago You created the earth, and even the sky is the work of Your hands; though they disappear, You will exist still.

All things tatter and fade like a garment; You cast them off like a change of clothes.

But You stay the same, and Your years never end. (Psalm 102)

In ancient Israel, God was deemed to be actually present in His temple, so someone with a desperate request might go there to be heard. These requests—some of them perhaps fashioned by the original supplicants, but others doubtless created in advance by temple officials for people to recite—are now found in the biblical book of Psalms. A few of them speak about death—though, interestingly, not that many: apparently ancient Israelites, like many other peoples, just accepted the inevitability of death as part of God’s plan. What hurt, however, was dying before one’s time: “O my God, do not take me halfway through life,” as this psalm says. That was a violation of the pattern, so people must have wondered: how can such things happen? Perhaps, as the psalm suggests, it is precisely because God is eternal, “Your time stretches from age to age.” From God’s infinite point of view, people always die after an almost imperceptibly short period of time. They are small; ten or twenty years one way or another could hardly register with His eternity.

But the person who wrote this psalm was not, I think, offering it as a philosophical justification for his premature death. He was trying to get God to intervene:

O Lord, hear my prayer, and let my cry come before You:

Do not hide Your face from me in my time of trouble; hear me when I cry out, and answer me soon.

For my life is drifting away like smoke, as my bones burn in a bonfire.

My insides are dried up like grass, withered from lack of food.

I’ve been groaning so much my ribs show through my skin. (Psalm 102)

Reading these lines now, I don’t have any trouble imagining the person who wrote them. He was very sick, perhaps in the last stages of some form of cancer. There was a good chance he would be dead in a few weeks or months… But he still had some hope. So he had dragged himself to the very place where God resides, the temple. If he could cry out there, he thought, perhaps God would hear him and intervene, since what was happening really wasn’t normal, really didn’t fit the pattern: “O my God, do not take me halfway through life.”

You would think that a Bible professor would, in the circumstances I have described, seek comfort in these and other words from Scripture. But to be absolutely truthful, although I know much of the book of Psalms by heart, these were not the words that I kept thinking of after the doctors’ diagnosis. Instead, what ran through my mind was mostly poetry in English, poems I had learned a long time ago—some of them fairly corny. Like Fairfax’s song, memorized in rehearsals of our high school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard. Poor Fairfax had been unjustly framed and sentenced to die. As he sat in his cell awaiting the executioner, he contemplated his fate:

Is life a boon [a gift]?

If so, it must befall

That Death, whene’er he call

Must call too soon.

Though fourscore years he give,

Yet one would pray to live

Another moon.

What kind of plaint have I,

Who perish in July?

Who perish in July?

I might have had to die,

Perchance, in June!

I might have had to die,

Perchance, in June!

In context, “July” means “in the middle of my natural lifetime”—Fairfax is presumably in his thirties or forties. But better to have to die now, Fairfax says, than to have had to die even earlier, in June. (This reminds me of the old distinction between a pessimist and an optimist. The pessimist says: “Things could never be worse than they are now.” The optimist says: “Oh yes they could!”) But then Fairfax goes on to consider the opposite possibility—suppose life is not a “boon” at all, but a curse from beginning to end:

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit!

Nay count it not a whit,

Man is well done with it;

Soon as he’s born

He should all means essay

To put the plague away;

And I, war-worn,

Poor captured fugitive,

My life most gladly give—

I might have had to live,

Another morn!

I might have had to live,

Another morn!

I like W. S. Gilbert’s poetry (despite his occasional racism and anti-Semitism); I especially like his love affair with the letter “W” (“When a wooer goes a-wooing…,” “Willow, willow, waylee,” “Oh weary wives, who widowhood would win…,” and so on). Deep thinker he was not, but he certainly had a good ear, and he was great at rhyming. Looking back on it now, though, I wonder why I could have found these lines so captivating. Life is neither a boon nor a thorn—it’s just life, with its ups and downs, and most of us, for all the occasional downs, would prefer not to leave it, certainly not in June or July.

Another poet I kept thinking of was A. E. Housman, a man absolutely obsessed with death. In particular, I kept coming back to that famous poem of his that many students have to read in college English.

TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Chapter 1: The Background Music
• Chapter 2: Man Stands Powerless Before Elevator
• Chapter 3: Hope
• Chapter 4: Religion on the Brain
• Chapter 5: Under Sentence of Death
• Chapter 6: “Who Shall I Say Is Calling?”
• Chapter 7: Into the Stark World
• Chapter 8: The Eerie Proximity
• Chapter 9: The Sickening Question
• Chapter 10: An End to Omens
• Chapter 11: Medical Magic
• Chapter 12: Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright