Bruce Feiler's Where God Was Born continues to provoke and surprise. His conclusions don't always mirror mine but the way he goes about interpreting what he reads in the Bible and what he experiences walking where the events in the narrative took place is compelling. That's one heck of a way to write a book!
As Feiler himself says, he needed to write the book. It was his way of getting back into the spiritual dimensions of his religion as seen through modern American eyes confronting modern realities of conflict and hope.
Many of Feiler's ideas do resonate with mine. He sees Judaism as a religion taking shape after the Babylonian captivity of the remaining Kingdom of Judah. Forced to deal with the enormity of the disaster befallen their nation, the Jews reinvented themselves. Cut off from the Temple that had become the geographic center of their spiritual life, they began formulating a God that was not rooted in place. Synagogues took shape, allowing for dissonant voices to be heard as we now recognize democracy to be. Monotheism took a giant step into the modern age.
I have always been fascinated by Jews and Judaism. They certainly have maintained the trappings of tribes into the present. These are what define them, the source of so much conflict with everybody else and the source of hope for the Jews. Maybe this century can modify this and the other religions in the world. Maybe we can approach religion in a new way, not using it to define who are unlike us but help us see ourselves in each other. Maybe we can move from being rooted in nations to being rooted in our humanity, and beyond that, in our being all in the same ark.
In writing about the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Feiler pointed out that disasters for the Jews were seen as "precursors to salvation." Suffering some catastrophe was interpreted by the prophets and the people who listened to them as signifying God's disfavor and they mended their ways and tried to follow Yahweh's commandments again. I remember when AIDS broke out and some fundamentalist Christian pastors announced the plague was punishment for gay men's sins. Their proclamations were drowned out by voices that eventually became the majority. The immune system disorder was a disease with an etiologic agent. A person caught it not from being a sinful person but from acting in a way that the virus was transmitted to him to cause the illness.
We need hope when bad things strike. Without hope we can descend into despair and inaction. In both Christianity and Judaism (Islam, too, from the little I know), hope is a dominant theme. Everyone hopes for paradise after death, for the painful reverses to be righted on earth. From hope we created justice, human justice sprung from the human heart, limited and subjective as it is.
I am reminded of another book that put words to what was inchoate in my mind. Albert Camus' The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) ended with Meursault declining the priest's consolation of hope:
"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still."
Commentators see in the novel's ending fatalism or existentialism—the meaninglessness of life. For me it has salvific power. We anthropomorphize life. Life is more than the life humans live, even more so, the life humans understand and know. I prefer the Buddhist description of conditions giving rise to conditions. When the temperature of the upper and lower air strata are so, moisture is sucked up and rain forms. Rain does not fall in response to prayer although our perception of an answer to our prayer can be compelling.
Perception and emotion are human realities. I acknowledge their dominion over me but don't see that dominion as absolute. There are realities outside the conventions of human thought and beliefs. There be dragons there, certainly, for fools can make anything out of nothing. Hence the value of facts in courts of law. But facts exist alas only as perception so where does this leave us? We have an opinion on something. It is often somewhat true but Truth? Nowhere do I find Truth. It's as impossible to define as Being. The simplest way to point at existence is as evidenced by consciousness. I think therefore I must exist. But existence is not the fullness of being. Being is like God, some indefinable stateless state where no one is a citizen but all belong.
What I argue for is humility, acknowledging we hold opinions but that opinions don't hold us. It is acknowledging that our value does not depend on being right; it depends more on our being humble to know right and wrong are labels we give to phenomena we only partially understand. Like Feiler and people like Feiler, we are constantly rewriting history. History is not what happened in the past. It's simply the version of what happened by an individual or group of individuals subject always to Time. Give it time, Hoosiers say about the weather, and it changes. (I hear people from other states and countries have identical sayings.) Give it time and opinions just like the weather change. To go to war for something as fickle? Greater foolishness than this I don't know.
At the same time passions can forge our energies into something noble and great. Faith is powerful stuff. But we can choose what outcomes we want from the choices open to us. We can't let faith or passion lead us into the Valley of Death again and again, unless death itself, like disasters, can transform our anger into hopelessness, into facing today as it is, and laying ourselves open to something beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding, grace that too falls like rain. Perception, too, but maybe all is not foolishness if it leads to a more graceful way of living.
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