An excerpt from Michael Novak’s new book, "No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers," replying to the recent neo-atheist best-sellers by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, criticizing their failure to “consider contemporary religious experience in the light of some of its most sophisticated and heroic practitioners.”
For instance, never before our own time have so many millions of persons of biblical faith been thrown into concentration camps, tortured, and murdered as they have been under recent self-described atheist regimes. It would have been wonderful if any of our three authors had measured their vision of religion against the hard-won biblical faith of the originally atheist scientist Anatoly Sharansky, who served nine years in the Soviet Gulag simply for vindicating the rights of Soviet citizens who were Jews.
Sharansky has written the record of his suffering in a brilliant autobiography, Fear No Evil. I think I have never read of a braver moral man, determined to live as a free man, courageously showing nothing but moral contempt for the morals of KGB officials, under whose total power he had to live. Sharansky went on courageously day by dreary day, deprived of sufficient food, deprived of sight of the sky and sun. He was punished in innumerable ways under a kind of scientific Skinnerian conditioning designed to “correct” his behavior, and this regimen went on year after year, attempting to wear down his resistance, to hold out for him trivial blandishments, tormenting his soul by isolating him and depriving him of human support.
Ironically, however, his prison experiences led Sharansky to dimensions of reason that far exceeded anything he had encountered in his earlier scientific practice. To survive, he needed to open himself to learning far more than science had taught him. He was asked to sign his name to certain untruths: “Who will ever know? What difference will it make? It is such a small thing, and it will make things go much better for you and for us, it will be for the common good.”
One of Sharansky’s colleagues, a noble soul, nonetheless deceived himself into thinking that it would be better to lie about a few small things so that he would soon be freed to carry the message of human rights outside the camps. Sharansky watched still other men try to keep their spirits up by hope — hoping for better treatment, hoping for earlier liberation — and then suddenly find themselves so weakened by false hopes that they could no longer resist complicity. Sharansky found that he needed a source of discernment deeper than any he had previously known.
In those days, the love of his beloved and brave wife, and friends and other dissidents, came to his cell in rarely received letters or messages. But such messages could also have weakened and betrayed him. In his torments of soul, he found enormous companionship with King David of many centuries earlier, when a ragged old Hebrew edition of the Psalms was allowed to fall into his hands with the mail.
The realism of David went right to his heart, and heavily bolstered his defenses. He learned the strength to be found in community — his community — in partaking of traditional rituals, drawing sustenance from the earlier sufferings, strivings, and hard-earned wisdom of his ancestors. . . . Sharansky wanted to be reborn as a member of that community, and he changed his name to Natan, signifying the biblical community with which he wanted to be identified through all time.
Sharansky became, even in the Gulag, more and more an observant Jew, in one comic scene forcing even his camp supervisor to participate — just the two of them — in a lighting of the menorah. . . . The community that had preserved the Psalms of King David down so many centuries offered him companionship of soul, and recharged his will to resist at a crucial point in his long imprisonment.
Shabbat Shalom.