Why Civilisations Die
In her book The Watchman’s Rattle, subtitled “Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction,” Rebecca Costa delivers a fascinating account of how civilisations die. They do so, she argues, because their problems become too complex.1Rebecca D. Costa, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction (New York: Vanguard, 2010).
Societies reach what she calls a cognitive threshold. They simply cannot chart a path from the present to the future.
The example she gives is the Mayans. For a period of 3,500 years, between 2600 BCE and 900 CE, they developed an extraordinary civilisation, spreading over what is today Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize with an estimated population of fifteen million people.
Not only were they master potters, weavers, architects, and farmers. They developed an intricate cylindrical calendar system, with celestial charts to track the movements of the stars and predict weather patterns. They had their own unique form of writing as well as an advanced mathematical system. Most impressively, they developed a water-supply infrastructure involving a complex network of reservoirs, canals, dams, and levees.
Then suddenly, for reasons we still do not fully understand, the entire system collapsed. Sometime between the middle of the eighth and ninth centuries, the majority of the Mayan people simply disappeared. There have been many theories as to why it happened. It may have been prolonged drought, overpopulation, internecine wars, a devastating epidemic, food shortages, or a combination of these and other factors. One way or another, having survived for thirty-five centuries, Mayan civilisation failed and became extinct.
Rebecca Costa’s argument is that whatever the causes, the Mayan collapse, like the fall of the Roman Empire and the Khmer Empire of thirteenth-century Cambodia, occurred because problems became too many and complicated for the people of that time and place to solve. There was cognitive overload and systems broke down.
It can happen to any civilisation. It may, she says, be happening to ours. The first sign of breakdown is gridlock. Instead of dealing with what everyone can see are major problems, people continue as usual and simply pass their problems on to the next generation. The second sign is a retreat into irrationality. Since people can no longer cope with the facts, they take refuge in religious consolations. The Mayans took to offering sacrifices.
Archaeologists have uncovered gruesome evidence of human sacrifice on a vast scale. It seems that, unable to solve their problems rationally, the Mayans focused on placating the gods by manically making offerings to them. So, apparently, did the Khmer.
Which makes the case of Jews and Judaism unusual, perhaps unique. They faced two centuries of crisis under Roman rule between Pompey’s conquest in 63 BCE and the collapse of the Bar Kokhba rebellion in 135 CE. They were hopelessly factionalised. Long before the Great Rebellion against Rome and the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews were expecting some major cataclysm.
Some groups, like the Qumran sectarians known to us from the Dead Sea Scrolls, did indeed withdraw into apocalyptic visions and desert retreats. Others, like the Sadducees, seem to have carried on as if nothing were about to change. But the Pharisees and their heirs, the rabbis, did precisely the opposite of the Mayans and the Khmer. Instead of focusing obsessively on sacrifices, they dedicated their energies to finding substitutes for sacrifice.
One was gemillat ḥasadim, acts of kindness. Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai comforted R. Yehoshua, who wondered how Israel would atone for its sins without sacrifices, with the words, “My son, we have another atonement as effective as this: acts of kindness, as it is written [Hos. 6:6], ‘I desire kindness and not sacrifice’” (Avot DeRabbi Natan 8).
Another was Torah study. The sages interpret Malachi’s words (1:11), “In every place offerings are presented to My name,” to refer to scholars who study the laws of sacrifice (Menaḥot 100a). “One who recites the order of sacrifices is as if he had brought them” (Taanit 27b).
Another was prayer. Hosea said, “Take words with you and return to the Lord…. We will offer our lips as sacrifices of bulls” (Hos. 14:3), implying that words could take the place of sacrifice. “He who prays in the house of prayer is as if he brought a pure oblation” (Y. Berakhot 8d).
Yet another was teshuva. The Psalm (51:19) says “the sacrifices of God are a contrite spirit.” From this the sages infer that “if a person repents, it is accounted to him as if he had gone up to Jerusalem and built the Temple and the altar and offered on it all the sacrifices ordained in the Torah” (Leviticus Rabba 7:2).
A fifth was fasting. Since going without food diminished a person’s fat and blood, it counted as a substitute for the fat and blood of a sacrifice (Berakhot 17a). A sixth was hospitality. “As long as the Temple stood, the altar atoned for Israel, but now a person’s table atones for him” (Berakhot 55a). And so on.
What is striking in hindsight is how, rather than clinging to the past, sages like Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai thought forwards to a worst-case-scenario future. The great question raised by Parashat Tzav and its subject matter, the different kinds of sacrifice, is less “Why were sacrifices commanded in the first place?” than, “Given how central they were to the religious life of Israel in Temple times, how did Judaism survive without them?”
The short answer is that overwhelmingly, the prophets, the sages, and the Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages realised that sacrifices were symbolic enactments of processes of mind, heart, and deed that could be expressed in other ways as well. We can encounter the will of God by Torah study, engage in the service of God by prayer, make financial sacrifice by charity, create sacred fellowship by hospitality, and so on.
Jews did not abandon the past. We still refer constantly to the sacrifices in our prayers. But they did not cling to the past. Nor did they take refuge in irrationality. They thought through to the future and created institutions like the synagogue and house of study and school that could be built anywhere and sustain Jewish identity even in the most adverse conditions.
That is no small achievement. The world’s greatest civilisations have all, in time, become extinct while Judaism survived. In one sense that was surely divine providence. But in another, it was the foresight of people like Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai who resisted cognitive breakdown. They created solutions today for the problems of tomorrow. They did not seek refuge in the irrational. Instead they quietly built the Jewish future.
Judaism is the civilisation that did not die because, despite its respect for and loyalty to the past, it is a fundamentally future-oriented faith. We see this in the Torah in a very pointed way in its description of the death of Sarah. Abraham was then 137 years old. He had just lost the woman who had shared his life’s journey and who had twice saved his life. He might have been paralysed by grief. Yet this is what we read: “Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and weep for her. Then Abraham rose from beside his dead wife” (Gen. 23:2–3): a mere ten words in Hebrew.
We then read how Abraham bought the first plot of land in Israel and arranged for a wife for his son. Long before, God had promised him children and a land. By the time Sarah died he owned no land, and had one unmarried child. Instead of complaining to God that He had not fulfilled His promises, he understood that he had to take the first step. First he had to build the future. That was how he honoured the past.
What the sages did after the destruction of the Second Temple is one of the great religious achievements of all time: creating a form of faith that would hold Jews to their identity, linking them to God and to one another through the longest exile ever endured by a people, despite an unparalleled history of dispersion and persecution. Finding substitutes for sacrifice, they showed how a civilisation inspired by eternity can defeat death itself.