James Kugel’s vast eru­di­tion and straight­for­ward style made his course on the Bible one of the most pop­u­lar at Har­vard in the 1990s. He brought those same gifts to a very dif­fer­ent task after he was diag­nosed with a form of can­cer that was expect­ed to be fatal — when, as he puts it, the back­ground music of dai­ly life sud­den­ly stopped. 

Kugel pon­ders mor­tal­i­ty as one instance of an ongo­ing sense of a ​“small­ness” in the face of a world that over­shad­ows and ulti­mate­ly con­trols much of our lives. Our idea of a self that decides the impor­tant things in our lives, Kugel reminds us, would be con­sid­ered strange or incom­pre­hen­si­ble to cul­tures in oth­er places and times. Even sci­ence is now doubt­ful that there is any sin­gle ​“com­mand cen­ter” in the brain that cor­re­sponds to what we think of as our indi­vid­ual mind. Death, once a famil­iar reminder of human lim­i­ta­tions, is now put out of sight and vir­tu­al­ly out of mind; oth­er­wise it might upset our new-found sense of our sov­er­eign selves. 

Explor­ing what he calls the ​“stark world” of con­ver­sion expe­ri­ences he finds a com­mon theme: a sud­den rev­e­la­tion in black-and-white terms that opens a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent way of see­ing the world, one that los­es ​“the detail in favor of the essence.” Prof. Kugel remarks on the ​“eerie prox­im­i­ty” of that stark­ness to the every­day world in ancient times, where it was unsur­pris­ing that gods and angels would walk among human beings, bare­ly dis­guised. Inevitably Kugel asks what he calls the ​“sick­en­ing ques­tion” of the abun­dance of unfair­ness in the world, and it may come as a sur­prise that he finds an expec­ta­tion even in poly­the­is­tic cul­tures that the gods nonethe­less pre­ferred the world to be main­ly good. 

Prof. Kugel draws on a daunt­ing array of sources that include the poets Rilke and Hous­man and Jar­rell, Han­na-Bar­bera car­toons and Wittgen­stein, neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy and anthro­pol­o­gy, Augus­tine and Herodotus, St. Jerome and the Hebrew Bible. Yet all the while he keeps his con­ver­sa­tion­al, anec­do­tal tone, even in his trans­la­tions of his sources. The book is full of fresh ideas, offered by a decent and hum­ble man with a prob­ing inter­est in the mys­te­ri­ous forces we sense beyond our world.

Inter­view

Prof. James L. Kugel has received sev­er­al major awards for his schol­ar­ship, includ­ing a $200,000 Grawe­mey­er Award for The Bible As It Was and
Tra­di­tions of the Bible. In 2007, he won a Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award for How to Read the Bible, which was also rec­og­nized by The New York Times as one of the best books of that year. His lat­est book is more per­son­al, inspired by his thoughts while being treat­ed for a form of can­cer that is often fatal. JBW’s Bob Gold­farb talked with Prof. Kugel about In the Val­ley of the Shad­ow at a cafe in Jerusalem.

Bob Gold­farb: A lot of time has passed since the ill­ness that inspired this book.
James L. Kugel: When I start­ed the book it had been sev­en years since I’d begun my treat­ment. Part of writ­ing it, part of why I want­ed to wait, was to stick myself back into that sit­u­a­tion. That was not easy, but after sev­en years I felt safe. Right after it was over I did oth­er things.

BG: Did you rethink your ideas as a result of the ill­ness?
JLK: I can’t say there was any great recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion. What I wrote about was a cer­tain state of mind; it was what I saw most vivid­ly after I got my diag­no­sis. Sev­en years lat­er, though I pret­ty much returned to my old way of being, I remem­bered very vivid­ly what that sense of self was like. It had always seemed to me when it was hap­pen­ing that it was some­thing very real. I think every­body at some point comes to his or her sens­es — you kind of feel your­self fit­ting into the world in a dif­fer­ent way. That was mul­ti­plied so much by this experience.

BG: Do athe­ists feel that way?
JLK: A lot of them try to locate the begin­nings of reli­gion in pre­his­toric times and try to talk about what it was in ear­ly man’s brain that led him into this false belief in the gods. All those expla­na­tions are pro­jec­tions of the writer’s own self back in time. That seems all wrong to me. Where we came from was a very dif­fer­ent kind of self. In ear­li­er times they felt a sense of small­ness; that they fit in the world more than we do.

I don’t mean to say that our sense of small­ness has any eth­i­cal dimen­sion. I guess I wish it did, but I’m not sure. I say it’s a kind of somat­ic small­ness and that’s what I mean — fit­ting in your own bor­ders, just being the per­son you hap­pen to be.

BG: Is there a way to recov­er that sense of small­ness?
JLK: I’ve always thought it’s con­nect­ed to some­thing basic in reli­gion. I’m not sure there’s any study­ing one can do to will it into exis­tence. But I think peo­ple who prac­tice a par­tic­u­lar reli­gion may have a bit of an advan­tage because it push­es you in that direc­tion. I’ve thought the most one can do is, in read­ing about it or talk­ing about it, to be more attuned to one’s own state of mind, so that if it comes along you’ll know it. It’s part of our pat­ri­mo­ny from our ancient past. At one time it didn’t need to be said out loud; it was tak­en for granted.

BG: You quote Koheleth (Eccle­si­astes), who says that even the most mem­o­rable per­son is even­tu­al­ly for­got­ten. What has your expe­ri­ence taught you about how to live in the face of that knowl­edge?
JLK: I’ve always liked the first chap­ter of Koheleth, his insis­tence that for every action there’s an equal and oppo­site reac­tion. Koheleth is com­pli­cat­ed:
he ques­tions the canons of wis­dom lit­er­a­ture, but he comes out of the school of Israelite sages.

To me life is like a paint­ing. Every­one is giv­en a can­vas, you get to work on it for a cer­tain num­ber of years, and you get to do one paint­ing. You can do with it what­ev­er you want. It becomes more and more detailed. It’s done when the last detail is added. We all want, or should want, to do the best paint­ing we can. In this kind of paint­ing every­one is absolute­ly equal. You just have to come up with the best paint­ing you can.