BonosSaint
Rock n' Roll Doggie
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- Aug 21, 2004
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Note to self--do not try to respond while in work.
As sort of related clip from a film called God on Trial. Really good. I gotta look into seeing more of this:
YouTube - God on Trial: The Verdict
...God On Trial stopped being about theological arguments, and became about the fact that people might be capable of having a theological argument on the way to the gas chamber. In Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, there is the story of a doctor who is giving someone long-term treatment for cataracts, even though she knows that both she and her patient have only days to live. Is this idiot optimism, self-deception, or a heroic refusal to submit to the dehumanising process? And where does that heroism come from? It's a fact that, although many people lost their faith in the camps, just as many had it renewed. As French philosopher La Rochefoucauld says: "A great storm puts out a little fire, but it feeds a strong one." Reading the Bible in the light of the Holocaust was a bit of a storm for me. It came close to putting out my fire, but in the end it blew stronger.
I didn't tell you the end of the story. After they find God guilty, one of the rabbis says: "So what do we do now?" The reply is: "Let us pray." Is this a wry story about Jewish stoicism? Is it about a failure of moral courage? Or what? For me, it's about faith. Faith has had a bad press of late. It's been used by politicians as a rationale for going to war without reason, because it "feels right". That is not faith - that's a hunch, plus vanity. The Final Solution was conceived as a public health project; its perpetrators thought it was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. No matter how extreme it was, we should remember that the rationale was completely in line with the then "best practice" in eugenics. People who are now humanist heroes - Marie Stopes, for instance - were of the opinion that the gene pool needed cleaning (she stopped talking to her son when he married someone with glasses).
The camps tried to reduce individuals to components in a project. In the end, they did that literally. What good stories do is the opposite. They say the human is irreducible. Tobias Wolff has described the story of the Prodigal Son as "surely the most beautiful thing ever written". No one hears it without feeling the conflict between the need to do right by the eldest son, and the need to express the overwhelming love you feel for the lost one, now returned. The father is nothing without the son. That contradiction is crucial. I'm hoping that God On Trial is a mirror image of that story. Only this time it was God who seemed to go away, and people who - inexplicably perhaps - were prepared to rush out to welcome him back.
"You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us have been
"A place that has to be believed to be seen"
~ U2
Keep in mind that, apart from the Gospels and the Book of Acts, the New Testament is Paul's attempts to lay out a theology -- codifying man's relationship to God in the Old Testament and unpacking a theology of grace in the New. As a result, the OT is story-driven, while the NT is theology-driven. While I agree that the story of David and Goliath may be more narratively compelling than Paul's discussion of an old life and a new life in Romans 7, I find value in both.
And as far as the equanimity in the relationship between God and man, I find this pretty powerful from Jesus on the night he was betrayed: "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." ~ John 15:15
And I know of no other more haunting moment in either Scripture than Jesus wrestling with His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging if there is any way for the cup of wrath to be passed from Him...
Quote:
The most salient irony of all is one that Miles misses the chance to point out: by replacing the old political covenant with a new spiritual covenant, God gets himself permanently and conveniently off the hook. No one can tell, this side of the valley of the shadow, whether his promise of eternal life will hold up. From his refusal to intervene in John the Baptist's death to his lack of enthusiasm for restoring sovereignty to Israel, he defers victory to the afterlife, where no one can hold him accountable. Lo ha-metim y'hallelu Yah, says Psalm 115: the dead don't praise God, and they may not accuse him either. The life of Christ knits up the raveled ends of God's promises with marvelous ingenuity and skill, but he is still giving aesthetic answers: the promise of eternal life solves his problem, not ours. To a mind looking at the question with profane detachment, it seems likely that he can't keep this promise either.
While Jesus says "friend" and I am sure the human in him was grateful for the social interaction (as was perhaps the god in him), I do not get much of a sense of the equality of friendship. He is affected by the people around him, but he does not change as god does in the OT.
The ultimate sense I am left with in the NT is that the death of Christ allowed God to abdicate from any personal accountability that he had in the OT (my perception) to a promise of life after death. "Here's my son. Here is my blood sacrifice to you." A brief life on earth, a horrific (but also brief) suffering, a god experiencing human doubt and fear. And then god, like Pilate, can wipe his hands clean of messy humanity and personal responsibility.
Not to diminish the sacrifice, but he physically suffered (horrendously) but briefly and he KNEW this was not the end for him. So suicide might be too strong a word for a three-day interlude of death--which he knew--as opposed, perhaps, to a person who suffers death to save another with no assurance of that raising or no belief in it. So the blood sacrifice may have been symbolic of a new kind of covenant, I'll grant you that.
Gandhi had probably one of the most exhaustively documented lives in history; he not only wrote prolifically himself, but also lived essentially without privacy for the last four decades of his life. Which actually makes the ambitious researcher's job harder, since (in his biographers’ invariable cliché) "he was a complicated man" to begin with, plus his status as an international icon always gets in the way. There are hundreds of biographies in English alone, most of them either tiresome hagiography or even more tiresome anti-hagiography. I am not a Gandhi expert.I don't know any more about Ghandi than the typical casually informed American. Impressions mostly. The impression was certainly one of admiration with some frustration, but it is quite vague for me. Can you recommend a good book on him for me?
I think that probably reflects cultural and intellectual change in Israel/Judah over the last half of the first millennium BC, more than anything else. Centuries of direct influence from first Persia and then Greece radically altered Jewish ideas about the nature of the world and God's relationship to it, which in turn created major problems for the Jewish preoccupation with divine justice. Judaism by Jesus' day would’ve been almost unrecognizable to a Jew from a millennium before, with its polarized mess of competing theories about "souls," "afterlife," and "messiahs," and its unfamiliar "synagogues" and "rabbis" vying with temples and priests for religious authority. While some New Testament ideas--the need for a savior in whom faith alone saves, the authority of God to forgive one man's sins against another--might be called specifically Christian innovations, the problem of what exactly man's relationship to God in a 'scientifically' understood world might consist of haunted both religions. In Judaism the main response gradually became the doctrine of tikkun olam, 'repairing (or redeeming) the world,' the partnership between God and man to realize creation's potential through recognition (and thus restoration) of God's unity. It's not a totally new idea--there was always some sort of assumption that collectively upholding the law brings about its fulfillment--and the speculations about the afterlife and the messianic era did continue right alongside it, despite never becoming central preoccupations (or, consequently, coherent doctrines) in Judaism. Nonetheless, the human mission of earthly justice came to be understood as an integral arena of the divine mission itself, rather than human welfare rising or falling depending on how ‘pleased’ God is with our justness, which is more how the Torah frames it. In many ways, IMO, this is actually a ‘more interesting’ calling--humans become active agents in the redemptive process, not passive objects of it who occasionally take umbrage and rebel--but it's undeniably true that the folkloric intimacy of the patron god has largely disappeared, or perhaps more correctly, been reabsorbed into the sense of Jewish peoplehood, which was always the voice telling the story anyhow.I always found the Old Testament much more interesting than the New Testament. Better stories, better characters. I mean, really, pit David against St. Paul. No contest. Once you get past the Crucifixion and maybe some nice pieces in Corinthians, it's pretty tedious. I thought the dynamics between man and god were much more compelling in the Old Testament. Man pushed against god, challenged him. It was a much more intimate relationship. A much more "equal" (if you will) relationship. Man could affect god. Man could shame god.
That changed in the New Testament. In a book review of a Jack Miles book, the reviewer summed up what I was thinking nicely.
Elie Wiesel wrote a play back in the 1970s, The Trial of God, based on the same Holocaust legend as that movie (in fact I think he may have been the original source for the legend). Wiesel doesn't attempt to set the scene in Auschwitz; rather he chooses the setting of a fictional Ukrainian town during the 17th century Cossack pogroms. Three traveling Jewish minstrels arrive to stage Purim plays for the local Jews, who it turns out have all been killed in a recent pogrom, save for the innkeeper Berish and his now-insane daughter. Berish tells them, Forget Purim, there’s nothing to celebrate--what I want is for you to help me put God on trial for what He's done to our community; you do that, I'll give you your food and shelter. They reluctantly agree, but unsurprisingly, no one feels quite up to serving as God's attorney. In the end a mysterious guest at the inn, Sam, volunteers for the job. Sam proves to be a formidably eloquent, rational, sharp-minded advocate whose calm, confident faith and command of theodicy soon start to make Berish's single-minded outrage look less and less compelling.
Then the local Catholic priest, doctrinally anti-Semitic but a good man, shows up with some bad news: another pogrom is imminent. Let me help you, he pleads; bring your Purim masks, I'll convert you, and once the danger passes, you can remove the masks and I could nullify the conversions. I’ll do no such thing, Berish angrily replies; my family were all murdered as Jews, and I am ready to join them. Ever-vigilant, Sam pounces: Now you stand by your faith, even as you find God unworthy of it for permitting the same fate last time--is this case then dismissed? I absolve God of nothing, Berish replies; I've always lived as a Jew, and I'll spend my last breath protesting as a Jew to God. Sam stoically concludes, Our task is to glorify God, to praise Him, and to love Him--we must endure, accept, and we say, Amen. With the mob approaching the inn, the minstrel-judge is forced to dissolve the trial, vowing it shall reconvene even though they won't, that it will be for others from "a later stage" to pass a verdict. As the assembled prepare to die, Sam begins to back away, and his true identity is revealed as Satan (Samael, the angel of death in Jewish folklore).
Wiesel wrote the play as a "tragic farce" to be performed at Purim pageants; unsurprisingly, that hardly ever happens.
I admire a response like Berish's. I admire a very particular kind of anguish I sometimes hear in BonosSaint's voice, in Irvine's voice, in Dread's voice. I wish I could feel that; to me that is being truly awake, the spiritual quality I would most wish to have more of.
Oh absolutely, the plot is unmistakably based on Job--some of Sam's arguments are even directly lifted from the words of Bildad, Zophar and Eliphaz. But there is a twist: this time God never arrives at all--the whole thing is stage-managed by Satan, at once the leader of the murderous mobs, the adversary who seeks to undermine Berish, and the advocate for God's justness. When one of the minstrels questions the appropriateness of a trial seeing as how the defendant is not present, Berish sarcastically retorts, oh don't worry--He's used to that.I've not read the play, but it sounds very similar thematically to the story of Job...When God arrives, He does not answer the questions Job has asked in the previous chapters, nor does he rebuke Job for asking them
And in us, and in the victims. I agree....And maybe that's the point. Beyond the theological arguments and the rationalizations and the attempts to be God's spin doctors, perhaps the most spiritually profound thing we can do in moments of suffering is sit and be with those who mourn, and quietly recognize the God who is there with us.
I haven't read it. But that's a fascinating way to put it, that last clause there. I'm not fond of the God portrayed in Job either (I've heard Ring Lardner's line "'Shut up,' he explained" associated with the Book of Job so many times I used to assume that really was its original referent, and it does make an apt summary). I have my own sketchy interpretation of it, but it's not one I'd feel confident ascribing to the fifth-century Persianized authors of the text. It's a fascinating question, what divine self-reflection might look like.I recently read Carl Jung's perspective on the Book of Job. In it he is highly critical of God's decisions and handling of the situation, but he also sketches out an interesting view of Job's relationship with God. That being Job's ability to see God's capacity for both good and evil, and God's inability to reflect on himself.
No, of course they should be credited with whatever good they do. The connection between the absence of good and the absence of God is relevant here because Berish himself believes God exists but not that God is present (hester panim, this paradox is called in Hebrew). Satan is "in charge" in this situation (the killers' will to commit the pogrom, as well as the victims' helpless vulnerability to it) in the sense that humanity itself appears absent; the felt mutual obligation to act justly towards others seems to have broken down, so that Berish is left unable to trust in anyone or anything, which enables Sam to exploit him. In classical Jewish thought, people do good in response to the recognition of themselves in others (the Golden Rule, the basis for justice and compassion), which in turn is understood to go hand-in-hand with seeing God in others. Obviously one doesn't have to subscribe to the latter part to act justly and compassionately, that's not the point. The reason I suspect Wiesel would find my suggestions "too easy" is not because they don't give humanity enough credit, but if anything because they may be too glib in assuming the adequacy of individual human goodness to meaningfully address radical human evil on this scale. Just as Sam's theodicies are glib in asserting the adequacy of 'God Will Provide, God Has A Plan, They Shall Get Their Reward' etc. to meaningfully address it.Does the notion that God is in us and around us in times of suffering and present in our actions do discredit to ourselves in that it may be our own sense of justice and love for others that makes the priest protective, or the inn's maid protest for Berish's character. Why does it have to have anything to do with God? (Unless you're just looking at it in the story where there is an assumption that God exists and is present).
God gets the credit when we do good and satan (or just ourselves) when we do bad.
Isn't this more broadly the problem of evil? If God is all omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, in that he can't be all these things at once.
Isn't this more broadly the problem of evil? If God is all omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, in that he can't be all these things at once.
Just from reading this thread it seems to me that God at least in the Jewish sense is much more human, or less perfect perhaps than the Christian idea of God.
I think it's more that Judaism broadly speaking takes a more optimistic view of man (or if you prefer, Christianity takes a more humble view of man; we could talk of pros and cons either way to be sure). Frankly, while I've never attempted a serious comparative study and am entirely lacking in qualification to do so, my guess is an 'objective,' in-depth scholarly comparison of the canon of Jewish writings on 'the nature of God' with Christian canon on the same would find that Jewish canon is overall far less coherent, explicit, and prolific on the topic, because Judaism is much more about how to live than how to understand God.Isn't this more broadly the problem of evil? If God is all omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, in that he can't be all these things at once.
Just from reading this thread it seems to me that God at least in the Jewish sense is much more human, or less perfect perhaps than the Christian idea of God.
On an atheist forum i used to frequent, I remember someone semi-seriously putting forward the hypothesis that if God exists, he must logically be rather malevolent, but also, fortunately, relatively incompetent. Evil but thick as pig-shit, basically, rather like the Demiurge of the Cathars:
Demiurge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia