Ten Timeless Rules of Investing from the Talmud
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The undead remind us of what it means to be human.
Like Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer in the new 28 Years Later film, we are living in a world overrun by the hideous hordes of zombies.
The 28 Days Later move franchise lives on, The Walking Dead TV series keeps resurrecting itself, and zombie video games have slaughtered the competition. Bookstores are stocked with titles like Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear and the Centers for Disease Control has a page on surviving a zombie apocalypse (no, really).
Like zombies, the phenomenon just won’t die.
Why do people love zombie movies?
The word zombie is Haitian for “spirit of the dead,” and voodoo folklore has it that witch doctors would revive dead people and make them do their bidding (similar to students in high school make-up courses). We know zombies as mindless, reanimated corpses, with a taste for human flesh, especially brains. What all zombies have in common is they lack free will and a soul. And they display no moral responsibility – committing murder, cannibalism, and fashion faux pas.
There are a lot of explanations floated for why we love zombies. Some say it’s our underlying fear of drug-resistant pandemics, or mass terrorism, or cyber-attacks, or climate change, or human trafficking. Whatever’s bugging us as a society right now must account for why we want to watch decaying automatons pursue their terrified victims or, alternatively, have their rotting skulls bashed in by a shovel. A modern-day monster for modern-day angst.
Except zombies are anything but modern. They may be trendy, but they’re really old.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian poem that’s the oldest known work of literature, has dead people stalking the living and eating them. Draugrs were deceased Vikings that attacked and infected their victims. In olden Germany, a nachzehrer’s first task was to eat his own family, then go out and infect others. Ro-langs were risen corpses roaming Tibet with stiff arms and legs, unable to speak, and, you guessed it, infecting people.
So zombies affect us (when they’re not infecting us) on a very deep level, across cultures and across time. Why?
Because zombies are who we’d be if we lost the thing that makes us human.
We are rational, thinking creatures, with the capacity to choose between good and evil. It’s the thing that separates us from the animals. When someone becomes a zombie, he loses consciousness and free will. Fear of zombies is fear of losing our humanity, our intuitive repulsion for what we would be if we were no longer “ourselves.”
A zombie world is one of mindlessness, chaos, violence, and selfishness. There’s no rule of law, no common courtesy, no social cues, none of the million unstated nuanced but deep-seated little understandings and interactions that get us through the day. One person on a bus looking a little funny is enough to make us uneasy. A crowd of people roaring and falling over each other to eat someone is a tad worse.
Zombies are rapacious; they’re all body, no mind, like a riderless horse, to borrow an analogy from Freud. They seem to want to kill regular people because they resent their status as fully alive. Maybe that sort of amoral, dog-eat-dog behavior is what it’s like in the animal world – but animals don’t terrify us in the same way (unless you’ve got a grizzly nosing its way into your tent).
The fear of slipping into mindlessness and losing the thing that makes us human is primal.
Animals are supposed to act that way. We know instinctively that human beings are supposed to be different. We have intelligence, self-awareness, a soul. What’s more important than that?
The fear of slipping into mindlessness is a primal one. We’re less afraid of death in the physical sense than we are of death in the spiritual – of losing the thing that makes us special. Zombies are the “undead” because they lack the thing that makes them truly alive.
This helps to explain why zombies are all the rage in philosophy. As David Chalmers, one of the leading investigators into consciousness, writes, “A zombie is physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience. Zombies look and behave like conscious beings that we know and love, but ‘all is dark inside’.” Thus, exploring how a zombie’s behavior differs from a normal person helps us understand the important distinctions between the two.
In addition, says Chalmers, zombies help us understand the spiritual implications of our existence as rational, moral beings: “The existence of consciousness is a nonphysical fact about our world, implying that God had to ‘do more work’ to ensure we weren’t zombies.”
And that may be a key to why zombies have always been around, and have now taken over. We live in a time where the value of life seems to be in question, where personal responsibility and social order seem to be on the decline, and confusion over what it means to be human (are we children of God or of Zippy the chimp?). Are we, in the final analysis, no better than zombies, or are we something more?
Interestingly, there are sources in Jewish tradition indicating there were people before Adam who lacked consciousness and free will. But they were born that way; they didn’t rise from the dead. The Talmud says one of the rabbis once created a golem – a creature with the semblance of a man but without a soul and without the ability to speak. And the Maharal of Prague was said to have created one to protect the local populace, and it did run amok and threaten innocent lives.
Just as zombies are capable of mindlessness, chaos, violence, and selfishness, we non-zombies are capable of meaning, love, cooperation, and kindness.
But golems aren’t reanimated corpses, so that doesn’t get us very far. (Jewish law says a golem can’t be counted toward a minyan, by the way, so don’t waste your time trying to create one if you’re a tenth man short.) Of course, Judaism does say we’re all coming back from the dead someday, but new and improved, with our souls fully intact, not decaying and homicidal.
No, zombies aren’t real. Just the fear of them is.
And yet, assuming they’re not massing on your house trying to claw their way in to kill you and eat your brain, zombies can be a good thing. Yes, they’re scary when they remind us what it means to be unhuman. But they can also remind us of what it means to be human. Just as zombies are capable of mindlessness, chaos, violence, and selfishness, we non-zombies are capable of meaning, love, cooperation, and kindness. The real fear shouldn’t be of fictional walking dead people, but of very real people walking through life without realizing their God-given potential.
Keep that thought with you as you go through each day, as well as a shovel next to the front door… just in case.
Fun read and thought provoking. Mr. Brand has done it again!
This comment piqued my interest. Could you point me to some other work by Mr Brand that you enjoyed?
You can find some of my Hollywood and Wall Street stories, the misery of my broken ankle, God sending me messages (sort of), how a felafel almost killed me, and more at https://aish.com/authors/186013152. Or you could eat lunch. Up to you.
Zombies are dope
On second reading, readers may be surprised by a view of zombies that is inspiring, even assuring.
Eric Brand makes an elegant, funny, almost friendly case for a class of monster I’m tempted to get to know better. Well … “tempted” may be overstating it. But wasn’t The Mummy the first Zombie? And as an ancient Egyptian, not a friend of ours?
A unique and thoughtful perspective on the undying terror man has come to feel between having a spiritual source or brute nature. Though we are surrounded by "intellectual" arguments urging us to accept the utter randomness of nature, and, hence our consciousness, fear does not lie. This piece is especially timely in our Age, during which we have felt our selves less and less connected to something truly everlasting. Mr Brand should be applauded for raising the utterly mundane into a discussion reflecting a profound reflection on the battle within the human soul.
I never understood the attraction people have to Zombies until I read this article!
An interesting set of points, but I have been also reflecting on zombies recently, especially as we've been seen more unhinged behavior cropping up in the US - tranq addicts, blank-eyed protesters, etc., and it feels more and more zombie-ish - people giving over their minds in meaningless chants... I see more and more humans reminding me of zombies.
So - a timely piece.
Very well writen. Thank you for sharing.
Great article.
Very interesting angle which I never considered.
Zombies are by far the lack of all humanity in human form, which is why they scare us so much. Mr. Brand is spot on in his analysis. There's a perfect sly joke at the end of a serious article, which put a smile on my face and made it all the more poignant. Bravo Mr. Brand.
Counterpoint to the theory that zombie movies are popular because they have no soul/ consciousness: if that were true, then movies about AI /robots would have that same horror element. More straightforward explanation is that zombies are popular because of the horror aspect of the undead (similar to vampires; meaning the horror of someone not dying, or coming back from the dead), combined with being mad from disease.
Which is what this new movie is about (disease/virus), and what zombie movies have mostly been about from the beginning
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. Zombies are *people* without souls, so robots and AI might be scary to us, but not in the same way. They never were, and never can be, human. And while it’s true that in the new movie the zombies aren’t back from the dead, they certainly aren’t living their best life...
If I understand you correctly, you attempt to distinguish between Zombie and AI movies to undermine the position of the author that it is the "mindlessness" or irrationality of Zombie movies that makes them compelling. Whereas, if mindlessness or irrationality were what actually terrified us, then it should terrify us about AI movies. If that was your point, and I am unsure whether it was, I think that you have ignored the great and growing genre of AI movies whose subject is exactly that--the similarity of AI to man and our increasing reliance on them, precisely because we believe that man is nothing more than a computing machine. This terrifies us. Think of 2001, Ex Machina, The Matrix, The Terminator franchise, I Robot, Westworld, Metropolis (1927), Ghost in the Shell, and Blade Runner
"you have ignored the great and growing genre of AI movies whose subject is exactly that--the similarity of AI to man and our increasing reliance on them, precisely because we believe that man is nothing more than a computing machine. This terrifies us."
I agree with everything you wrote, other than your final sentence. Most reasonable viewers (in my opinion) would agree that AI movies have little "terror", and certainly not "horror", in the way zombie movies do. Which is exactly my point. Rather, they're extended thought experiments, in the tradition of sci-fi
Perhaps, but I think to call them all part of a sci-fi genre is reductive. In the Terminator franchises the AI destroys man in a nuclear holocaust; in 2001, HAL kills his controlers after he malfunctions, and we experience Bowman's terror in trying to save himself from certain death by destroying HAL; in Blade Runner, the "off-world" machines return to kill their creators; and, in The Matrix, man has become the slave of the machines he created. In each of these films, the source of man's terror is the result of his failure to recognize that man and machines are not the same: man is not a better computer, and machines have no soul. When he assumes that he can rely on them as if they have a conscience, he sows his own destruction.
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your examples. All those examples are classic sci-fi tropes. The additional element is simply 'action' label, and superhuman abilities. Questions re conscience/soul plays very little part in them. And again, certainly not labeled 'horror', as in zombie movies. There are of course movies/TV shows that explore questions of "do/can robots have consciousness" (Ex Machina, Westworld, etc), but again, those aren't 'horror' in any sense, they're simply classic sci-fi thought experiments
While it was interesting to debate with you the difference you raised regarding "horror films" (which you claim exist only in Zombie movies) and AI movies (which I argued also create "monsters" that attempt to destroy their creators, and which also embody a similar visceral type of horror), our dispute is obviously beside the point of the author's article.
Instead, the author uses zombies as a metaphor to examine the nature of humanity in its most noble and conscious exercise of free will, which, therefore, embodies "life." Zombies, on the other hand, express man at his worst: primal mindlessness, whose only expressions are violence and selfishness, and who embody "death." This is why, I believe, the author's essay is so compelling: "Zombies remind us of what it means to be human."
Fair enough, but at the end of the day, this is modern-day 'drush'. The essay and your reading of it both impose symbolic meaning on zombie films that are intended for visceral horror. You're extracting deep metaphors about human nature from genre tropes designed to shock and disgust. That's fine, but let's be clear: it's interpretation layered onto entertainment, not the 'pshat'.
More apropos would be to to simply analyze media (Ex Machina, Westworld, etc) that explicitly deal with the 'humanity' of human-like beings, ie robots. Instead of 'kvetching' this interpretation into a (possibly) adjacent genre
Great piece. Thanks for this!
Comparing zombies to animals?
I think you may have missed the point. A wild animal in the desert, or in the cave, or in the sky...who knows how it will act when confronted? We are not talking about domestic pets who love us, and whom we love back.