"the on-going tradition, has refused all kinds of settled interpretation to which Western thought is always tempted"
AS POSTED HERE the end of last year, I needed to take a lot more time with the book I was excerpting and commenting on during Advent, Walter Brueggemann's An Unsettling God. I have started going through it from the very beginning, looking up and reading about the things he cites in the book, that is in so far as that's possible in my situation. One of the ways I try to study things that need that depth of study is to either write out or type out the text, I find copying and copy-editing my copy is a really good way to get farther into such a book. Brueggemann is widly recognized as one of the finest contemporary scholars of the writings that comprise both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Old Testament. As such when he engages with the text, he's not shy about raising difficult questions. If you intend to read Scripture or history or anything seriously, you don't cover up the most glaring, most controversial and even dangerous issues in it. Those are going to be the most important issues for your time and place. I'm too old and time is too short for me to waste my or your time doing the opposite. Whatever I say would be just more useless crap if I did run-around.
One of those issues Brueggemann handles in the Preface to the main text is a good example to consider due to current events.
As I have thought about God and God's partners, I have focused on four such partners that are evident in the Old Testament, partners that continue to be front and center in our contemporary world.
1. There is no doubt that God's first partner is Israel as the chosen people of God. Israel emerges in the text through God's call to Abraham (Genesis 12:1-2), through the emancipation of the slaves from Egypt (Exodus 15:1-18) and through the covenant made at Sinai so that this people will be a "priestly kingdom" among the nations (Exodus 19:6).
There is no doubt that Israel as God's chosen people is a complex and difficult claim on many counts. For example, this designation of a special people introduces into the core of the tradition the "scandal of particularity," the conviction that God may take sides in quite concrete ways in the world, so that many peoples are "not chosen." Second, the idea of Israel's chosenness is a complicated issue for the Christian tradition, for the claim of Christ's ultimacy lives in some tension with the claim of Israel. Christians continue to struggle with such an issue. Third, there is no doubt that the theological claim of Israel as God's chosen people is made more complex in the contemporary state of Israel that both makes theological claims and operates by the force of Realpolitik. Fourth, at the very edge of the Old Testament there are hints that this same God may in the end select other chosen peoples as well (Isaiah 19:24-25; Amos 9:7). What becomes clear is that our more-or-less settled judgments about this matter must be rethought in careful, disciplined ways.
Alongside such reality, it is useful to recognize that Israel is peculiar in its practice of interpretation that, in the hands of the rabbis and the on-going tradition, has refused all kinds of settled interpretation to which Western thought is always tempted. Jews historically have refused "final interpretation" (by being open to continued dialogic interaction), and have been victims, in the twentieth century, of an attempted "Final Solution." Thus much work remains to be done to see how the "scandal of particularity" is related to the unbearable violence against Jews in the twentieth century. It is clear in any case that "final interpretation" is a step toward "final solution."
Talk about a bundle of difficult issues. Calling the claim made in the text of chosenness "the scandal of particularity" is, I think, fair. To claim "chosenness" you have to assume that others are "unchosen" maybe all others. But the necessary question is, chosen for what reasons and what purposes?
I don't know the extent to which modern conceptions of that chosenness are confused by scientific racism or the Darwinian conception of "selection" which, as in his title to his book claims that some "races" are "favoured by nature," meaning that those which are not "favoured" are marked by "nature" for extinction. The history of Darwinism proves that Darwinists, from the earliest years if not months of reading On The Origin of Species, figured that human beings, especially those in elites, were a good substitute for "nature" in making such "selections" of human beings even as those engaged in animal husbandry did farm animals. I've given the list of those in Darwin's inner circle who blatantly made such assertions, Darwin, himself, his sons George, Horace, Francis and, most of all Leonard, his cousin the inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton, his closest colleague and "bull dog" Thomas Huxley, his foremost Continental disciple and colleague, Earnst Haeckel, and so many others. And, in fact, that's how the Nazis thought of things, to the extent that that's what Mengele called what he was doing at the train siding as he chose People to be murdered immediately and those who were to be worked to death - in case you continue to wonder what I meant when I talked about "economic utility" in those posts you're complaining about.
That's an entirely different idea from that in the Jewish Scripture. I will resist getting into my observation that materialists and atheists are always inventing gods as part of their denial of God, "natural selection" being just one of those I've identified. Given that it is Jews who were chosen by the Nazis as those who were to be murdered into extinction, the same People for whom the claim of "chosenness" is made, and some of the more gruesome confessions contained in Scripture about claims that killing others was commanded by God, the issue is fraught with tensions and implications and numerous subsidiary issues and, if you want, "scandals."
That is unavoidable if you are going to address the Scriptures and history and the continuation of history into the present. I no more take the entire corpus of the Old Testament as being honest in the claims made in it, I certainly don't believe God ever commanded anyone to wipe out the population of a place, I think there are parts of it which are clearly morally depraved in making such claims and, given what is known about the compilation and revision and editing that is evident in the texts, that's not at all surprising, though, especially among many Christians, it is unrecognized or denied outright. I think it's entirely relevant that those claims of divinely inspired slaughter and even genocide were made in legends and lore about the founding of a nation, what in the modern period would be considered a nation state. I don't think that's at all irrelevant to such claims being made by any nation state or People. However, there is something confessional about the way it is presented in the entirety of Scripture and certainly as the study and commenting on that has continued into the modern period. I would think that such claims are less and less believed by believers even as their like seem to be more and more believed by secularists in the modern period. Many of those secularists, such as so many "white evangelicals" in the United States are full blown vulgar materialist worshipers of Mammon, as well as the likes of Sam Harris and his contemplation of murdering tens of millions of people living in Muslim majority countries in a day of nuclear genocide.
Talking about those things will be full of perils but it helps if you have a moral imperative that hold that, in the end, no one gets killed, no one gets enslaved, no one is held to be anything but a being beyond any system of valuation, singly or comparative and that everyone should have a role in bringing about the future. Though many of their ideologies, superstitions and self-esteeming pathologies should not. No one who refuses a moral absolute of basic equality of PEOPLE can be trusted to participate in the governance of a democracy or to have a media platform to project their moral depravity. That's a world of difference from holding they should be obliterated as People.
The claims of "chosenness" in the Hebrew Scriptures is certainly nothing unique in the national literature of any Peoples, many if not most groups which develop a lore or scripture type of literature feel themselves set apart from "others" and even if they haven't developed those, the tendency is always to hold a group you hold to and consider basic to your identity is some how set apart and superior. Whether it's a small modern street gang or a population the size of Russia's or the United States or even that rump of an Empire, Britain or the similar one of France, or China, that sinful tendency seems to be at least wide spread.
What is different about the Jewish and Christian Old Testaments, is that that "chosenness" couldn't be more unlike the conception of a "favored race" which is favored by "nature" to thrive and flourish. The chosenness in the promise to Abraham was intimately tied to acting as a moral example to the rest of the world, a light to the world, bringing about a "priestly kingdom." That the Scriptures give a history of the perils, the problems, the disasters, the successful attacks of foreign empires, the falling short, the recovery and the rest of the confessional aspects of the Scriptures is, I think, quite unusual if not unique in such collections of lore and legend and extremely true and valuable insightful bodies of works. I think that is why the tradition of the Old Testament persisted as active belief for this long in human history as so many other national legends and lore and ways of encountering God have not. I think it's why the Jewish People have endured and survived as long as they have as a People and why secularization and the attractions of fashion and popular culture are probably the greatest danger to the persistence of that distinct identity, today. And that would be a terrible thing.
Realpolitik
In both the corrupt incompetence of the Netanyahu government in Israel and its continuing criminality in its response to the Hamas attack in its treatment of Gaza, as previously in other places, there is an enormous problem for thinking about the presence of ancient Israel in the Scriptures and talking about that, today. For Jews, Christians, I'd expect Muslims, it is inescapable that the Scriptural tradition does, in fact, concern itself primarily with Israel as a People and, later, as a nation. That the modern-day, largely secular-inspired Zionist movement and the state of Israel has been a rather disastrous phenomenon is certainly not allowed to be addressed nor is it ever far from the most obvious of truths about the ongoing strife in the Middle East. A modern Israel on land from which the Palestinians were displaced by violence and coercion and in the midst of hostile nation states (whose carving out of the empires of Europe - the Europeans favored, to their conceived advantage - were bound to generate plenty of strife and violence even if Israel was never founded there) was bound to have a history like the one it has had. That was certainly noted from the early days of the Zionist movement, as Israel was being formed and declared and onward to today. I think the American historian Howard Zinn said it best when he said he went from being a supporter of the founding of Israel to coming to consider it as a profound mistake. That's, of course, not an especially helpful claim to make now, when it's there and it's not going to stop being there. But I don't think pretending it's been what it was claimed it was going to be, a place of safety for Jews who were, at times and in some places unsafe in disapora, has been any more helpful.
And while thinking about that it is unconscionable to not admit that the founding of Israel was an even greater disaster for the Palestinian People who have also been the victim of manipulation by various powers in the Middle East and abroad. And as Israel continued and the fascist elements gained power, that disaster has grown ever greater with every succeeding violent decade. That Israel was in such a danger was recognized by many prominent Jewish intellectuals and scholars, one famous declaration was made when early on Netanyahu's predecessor Menachem Begin was touring and raising money in the United States. Their warnings then were prescient in ways that the claims of those who opposed them have not turned out to be. If, under attack and always on a war-time footing, Israel had managed to not do what most countries do in such circumstances, go fascist-nationalist, if the leadership of Israel hadn't passed to fascists, racists, fanatics and corrupt incompetents, things may have been less bad, maybe they'd have turned out far better, but that's not the history of things. I don't think there's much reason to hope that in the present situation that things ever will be better. Certainly a large number of Israelis, those who are in opposition to the almost uninterrupted line of quasi-fascist governments they've had since Begin first took power, must be especially pessimistic about the future of their country. Such Israelis are quite articulate about that in ways that People in the United States are not allowed to be lest they be tarred as "antisemites." The accusation that I'm answering in this piece.
I went into the recent, maybe still ongoing, project of some Jewish figures, some of them intellectuals to come up with a standard definition of "antisemitism" and it was clear from their statements and publications that what it really was was an attempt to make ANY CRITICISM OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT "antisemitism." I did a dive into the etymology of the word and found, to my surprise, that it was a word that was first invented by Wilhelm Marr, a German Aryanist lunatic and Jew-hater who wanted to give his crude and dirty ideology a more sciency cachet, making a superstitious pathology into something that sounded scientific. So the word, itself, was born in a corrupt pathology so its continued and mixed existence should be no great surprise. I think it would be a really good thing if the word stopped being used and if it was replaced by a term meaning what it originally meant, Jew-haters.*
No word or label should ever be bandied about to prevent the legitimate and honest criticism and condemnation of any nation state that does evil things, not even the state of Israel. Not even the ancient kingdoms of Israel or Judea - the biblical Prophets certainly didn't hold back when it came to that. If the whole line of them were alive today, they'd be called "antisemites" at least in the United States.
As Howard Zinn also pointed out in a book about the U.S. war in Vietnam, ALL COUNTRIES LIE, ALL COUNTRIES DO TERRIBLE THINGS. No country should ever be able to depend on such a campaign of coersive intimidation to suppress the honest discussion of and criticism of the lies and crimes and follies of any country, party, national state or group. It's not "anti-Catholic" to make the most rigorous and honest criticisms of the Catholic hierarchy or other institutions (I've certainly never held back, while being considered a member of the Catholic Church), it's not anti-American to do that about the United States, if it were anyone who engaged in American politics would have to be "anti-American" because that's what politics in a democracy consists of. You have to go to dictatorships and monarchies and other overtly gangster-run nations to see what that kind of coercive use of such terms really is, it's a cover up scheme. And that's what the practice of coercion to keep quiet advances, in the end.
The fact is, that anyone, any Christian, any Muslim who takes the Jewish Scripture seriously - and for Christians that's not an optional preference - has to acknowledge and respect the claims made in it. Among those claims is that the Covenant, certainly as far as those who take the Scripture seriously, is an eternal one. Though, clearly, Israel under the Judges, as a kingdom under kings, as any kind of country was not morally perfect. Even then, as the Second Vatican Council noted, there is no where in Scripture in which that Covenant is retracted by God. But the issues involved in that will not be any less fraught and problematic than the Scriptures themselves. Conscientious good will, generosity and acceptance of disagreement are requisite parts of a moral engagement with the Old Testament. If those aren't part of it, the motive is moral depravity.
Oddly, enough, I'm not pessimistic about things as it would seem you should be. I think that the modern period, with all of the problems listed above, is probably the most promising time in human history to come to that kind of practice. A practice which can be teased out of the Scriptures too, if you study them with the kind of engagement that Walter Brueggemann recommends and practices. That's the Jewish practice, as can be seen on page after page of Jewish commentaries which have competing and sometimes conflicting commentaries on the same page. As Brueggemann says, it is a tradition that has no "final interpretation" and rejects any such "final interpretation." That's a mind set of classical philosophy and, despite claims to the contrary, scientism. Science is alleged to be open to further evidence and findings but for easily the large majority of modern People, it is taken as a series of closed cases. Darwinism, natural selection, was one of the most firmly considered examples of that scientistic faith but, also, one of the worst things to ever be mistaken as a settled issue. That "final interpretation of it" first declared by Haeckel and certainly known of by Darwin and his circle, did lead to Nazism and Nazi eugenics which, at least from early in the history of Nazism if not from before the start of it, included genocidal murder. As I pointed out, that was a feature of Darwinism from the early 1860s and was confirmed to be part of it by the attribution of melioristic power to everything from individual murders (especially infanticide) to genocide, in The Descent of Man. It is the quintessential example of modern, scientistic, materialistic "final interpretation" there is and it did, in fact, lead to "The Final Solution" as discussed at and reflected in the records of the Wannsee Conference which planned the most organized and deadly period of the Shoah. If you want something that's settled "finally" that's a far better example of one. Sometimes accurate historical records can give you such a finality on a limited issue, though they often can't. The Nazis told themselves and to a lesser extent the world what their motives were and highest among those was the theory of natural selection, second, probably, the daffy romantic era anthropological-linguistic classification of "races" that, as well, informed Darwinism. Biologically, when analyzed mathematically, all of that stuff was bull shit but it is still bull shit that is current in the decaying stage of modernism. The existence of every Nazi of European ancestry was and is directly dependent on ancestors who were Jewish, who were members of other "races" that they had on their extermination lists, eventually going back to Africa and Black human beings and their African ancestors. The same is true for every single other person who shares, in part, in European ancestry no matter what color they are. The whole idea of "pure" biological identity is bull shit. That's the truth we're going to either live by or we'll all die. I see that anticipated in Scripture, as well. In the Christian Scriptures, certainly, but also in the Jewish Scriptures. It's not something I have any hope of materialist, atheist, scientistic secular "enlightenment" modernism will ever really accept. I think you have to do so out of good will and a belief in morality and justice to do that.
* A word that is used to slander Jewish critics of Israel, Holocaust survivors and children of Holocaust survivors, CITIZENS OF ISRAEL, as well as other critics of Israel who are, in no way, ill-disposed towards the Jewish religion or Jews as a People, is not a word used honestly. It may be a word which is necessary to describe not only those who are ill-disposed towards Jews and all things Jewish, and certainly those who have genocidal intentions is a word that can't be used accurately for anything. Those two things are nothing like each other. The word has devolved into an all-purpose calumny by those who want to use it dishonestly, as can be seen in its widest use in the United States, today. I'm coming increasingly to consider its use as a warning that the person using it might have the most dishonest intentions, the first of those to lie to cover up the crimes of a national government.
I've pointed out that to call the perhaps unwelcome desire for Jews to "be saved" by conversion [see below] to one or another sect of Christianity or Islam and the attempted persuasion for that conversion, "antisemitism" as well as the Nazi's and others' desire to murder all Jews and obliterate them from the Earth by the same word is grotesquely inaccurate and unhelpful. I have never, though, heard the word used when it's atheism or materialism or scientism, or Buddhism, etc. which Jews are being encouraged to adopt, leaving the Jewish religion behind. That matter became clear to me when I read someone ridiculing someone of Jewish heritage who was, nonetheless, deputed to be an Episcopalian. The online snarkers who brought that up largely identified as atheists. One, as I recall, had a pseudonym that consisted of two of the most obvious Jew Haters of classical and "enlightenment" periods, though I wouldn't be surprised if the idiot didn't know that, online atheist snarkers are a pretty stupid lot.
Clearly the word needs to be replaced by at least two or three different things if accuracy and justice and, you know, TRUTH are to matter in it. I'd junk the old one, it's been stretched and dishonestly used to the point of uselessness if those are what is desired.
[I'm of two minds about those who try to convert Jews to Christianity, more than two, actually. I think anyone should be free to convert to anything they, personally choose to be converted to, assuming that that thing isn't something that shouldn't be allowed to propagate like Nazism or fascism or white supremacy or any other kind of inegalitarian supremacy. I can understand why Jews, generally, might take it as insulting and annoying to have someone proselytize at them, implying that Judaism is somehow inferior to some other religion, though I have noted here that that annoyance seems to be reserved for those who try to convert Jews to Christianity. I can understand that, by the way, I've had "evangelicals" try to convert me to their sect of Christianity and it's mighty annoying. I have noted that there isn't the same hostility to atheists who try to convert Jews to atheism, Buddhists who try to convert them to that religion, etc. I haven't noticed the same level of hostility to the conversion to the banality of mere assimilation to the ambient secular swill that surrounds us all. I do that noting that there are Jews who choose to convert to Christianity and I can't see that as being anybodies business but theirs. I've noted that there is nothing in most Christian sects from preventing Jewish converts to achieving very high positions in them, there have been and are Jewish Cardinals and bishops and priests in the Catholic Church. In that troubling and disturbing case, the abduction of Egardo Mortara by the insane Pope, Pius IX, the adult Mortara never expressed anything but happiness over his conversion to Catholicism and his position as a priest who tried to convert Jews to Catholicism. I don't particularly like any of that but the man, himself, has the right to make his own decisions about his life just as others have a right to express their dislike of his conclusions. Though, in the end, as I have to respect him as the only relevant judge of his life as it was, he got to decide for himself. ]
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