The new literature is so threaded with such meditations that it often seems existentialist, as contemporary as today, full of the pain and joy of real existence. In the Song of Songs we meet “the Shulamite” and her lover, an unmarried couple, who play out an antiphonal game that never fails to stir the reader. She speaks first:
I was asleep but my heart stayed awake.
Listen!
my lover knocking:
“Open, my sister, my friend,
my dove, my perfect one!
My hair is wet, drenched
with the dew of night.”
“But I have taken off my clothes,
how can I dress again?
I have bathed my feet,
must I dirty them?”
My love reached in for the latch
and my heart
beat wild.
I rose to open to my love,
my fingers wet with myrrh,
sweet flowing myrrh
on the doorbolt.
………………………
His arm a golden scepter with gems of topaz,
his loins the ivory of thrones
inlaid with sapphire,
his thighs like marble pillars
on pedestals of gold.
Tall as Mount Lebanon,
a man like a cedar!
His mouth is sweet wine, he is all delight.
This is my beloved
and this is my friend,
O daughters of Jerusalem.
……………………………
“How graceful your steps in those sandals,
O nobleman’s daughter.
“The gold of your thigh
shaped by a master craftsman.
“Your navel is the moon’s
bright drinking cup.
May it brim with wine!
“Your belly is a mound of wheat
edged with lilies.
Your breasts are two fawns,
twins of a gazelle.”
In later times rabbis and church fathers, quite undone by encountering such goings-on in Holy Writ, will explain to their flocks that the Song of Songs is an allegory—which it plainly is not. It is a celebration of a relationship, an erotic relationship, in which two people face each other repeatedly with hot admiration, even intoxication, and the reader is meant to enjoy the proceedings. As the lover advises:
“Feast, friends, and drink
till you are drunk with love!”
One wonders what Avraham would have made of this poem. And Sara, would she not have found it unthinkable that “love is as fierce as death” and that “great seas cannot extinguish love” and that a woman could be so free—and even have most of the best lines? Could any woman in history before these verses were written have asserted with credibility: “My beloved is mine and I am his”? Throughout the Bible there have been innumerable marriages and sexual relationships, but here for the first time is a reciprocal relationship—a relationship “face to face,” with much of the mystery, drama, power, and pleasure of Israel’s face-to-face relationship with God. If the Song of Songs were only an allegory, the relationship of the lovers would serve as a mere mirror for the relationship of the soul (or Israel) with God. But the Song of Songs, appearing in the Bible after the long recounting of Israel’s labyrinthine relationship with God, suggests rather that this God-human relationship has at last made possible a genuine human-human relationship.
In the Book of Ruth, Job’s theme of suffering and the Shulamite’s theme of reciprocity are brought together in a delicately humane story, set in the generations before David. Scholars have found it impossible to date this text, some even settling for the period of the late monarchy, but many placing it in post-exilic times. This book, whatever its relation to the actual events of history, is a well-proportioned short story, just four chapters long.
We meet Naomi, a woman from Bethlehem, who during a famine migrates with her husband and two sons to Moab—Moav in our translation of Exodus, the country east of the Jordan from which Moshe viewed the Promised Land. Naomi’s husband dies in Moab, and her two sons marry Moabite women. The sons also die, upon which Naomi decides to return to Bethlehem, where food is plentiful again, and she sets out with her daughters-in-law. But along the way Naomi has second thoughts: “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s house,” she counsels. “May YHWH show you his faithful love, as you have done to those who have died and to me. YHWH grant that you may each find happiness with a husband!” And she kisses each of them goodbye.
From the first, the reader realizes that this is a new kind of story. The main characters are all women (even the phrase “your mother’s house” is startling); and they are women left in trying circumstances, not knowing where their next meal will come from. But besides this, we are presented here with a loving family, modeled on God’s own “faithful love,” in which people do not play power games against one another but genuinely care about each other—the daughters-in-law for their husbands and Naomi for her daughters-in-law, for though her situation is desperate, she is determined not to draw her daughters-in-law into it. On the way, she has meditated on what their plight is likely to be and resolves not to pull them down with her.
Both daughters, “weeping loudly,” protest that they wish to stay with Naomi—which could only be because of their affection for her. Naomi has a tart reply: “Have I more sons in my womb to make husbands for you? … Even if I said, ‘I still have a hope: I shall take a husband this very night and shall bear more sons,’ would you be prepared to wait for them until they were grown up?” It is as if Sara the pawn had finally gotten some lines of her own, for here we hear the sharply realistic sound of ancient sisterhood, given voice at last.
After more argument, Naomi convinces one of the women to return home. But the other, Ruth, refuses, speaking the famous lines:
“Whither thou goest, I will go;
and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
thy people shall be my people,
and thy God my God.
Where thou diest, will I die:
YHWH do so to me, and more also,
if ought but death part thee and me.”
“Thee and me”—so like “my beloved is mine and I am his,” but here in such different circumstances and yet another example of face-to-face reciprocity.
After the two bereft women reach Bethlehem, Ruth is reduced to a gleaner, following after the reapers of Bethlehem’s fields and scavenging what they have left behind them—so that she and Naomi may eat. But she is already on the lookout for “some man who will look on me with favor,” as she tells Naomi. The man she happens on is Boaz, an excellent prospect, both prosperous and kind; and Ruth, almost in the manner of a Jane Austen heroine, sets to scheming with Naomi, who advises her on just the series of ploys to gain Boaz’s heart. All ends well, and in the course of events, Boaz proves himself sharp, resourceful, and un-threatened by Ruth’s bold intelligence.
The story of Ruth has neither the hard-breathing romance of the Song of Songs nor the stomach-wrenching wretchedness of Job, but it has both pain and exaltation and the suggestion that, behind the scenes, God is at work, bringing his purposes to fulfillment. At the story’s end, following the marriage of Ruth and Boaz and the birth of a beloved child, Obed, there is a lovely final scene of Naomi, whose womb could bear no more sons, “taking the child, [holding] him to her breast.” In her closing comment, the writer tells us that this beloved child will be the father of Jesse and grandfather of David. So all suffering, however wretched, the story suggests, will have its happy outcome—sometimes far beyond the ken of any human being—and, as a peculiar Jew of the first century will write, “God works with those who love him, those who have been called in accordance with his purpose, and turns everything to their good.”
Ruth and Naomi’s suffering has had a purpose, which they can appreciate in their own happiness at the story’s end. But only we, who can look back to the obscure beginnings of the Isra
elites and see their gradual transformation into a people who can understand that what is most important is invisible, only we who can see that Ruth and Naomi are an integral part of this great transformation can appreciate what has really been at stake all along:
Sometime toward the beginning of the second millennium B.C. a man named Avram was called by a mysterious Voice and told that his was to be a new destiny. He was a sharp-eyed, sharp-eared man, a wily trader and very much of his time and place, but he did something no one had ever done before him: he put faith in this Voice and upended his whole life, becoming in the process a new man with a new name and an individual destiny, a destiny that was only his, a personal vocation, not something written in the stars—something no one before him had ever imagined possible. But this destiny was also to be familial, national, and even (in some mysterious sense yet to be defined) global, for Avraham was to be the father of a great nation, a nation with a singular destiny and a unique role among the nations.
For many generations his family, now called the Israelites, passed on the story of their unique destiny, father telling son, mother telling daughter. Despite the vicissitudes of human existence that so easily wipe out group identities over time, we find this family—perhaps more than half a millennium after Avraham—in Egypt, where they have become forced labor engaged in building Pharaoh’s storage cities but still aware of the old stories of their father Avraham, who talked and walked with their God. There appears among them a new leader, a tongue-tied prince, whose claims they find credible. He tells them that the God of the ancestors has spoken to him, instructing him to lead them out of their slavery and back to the land once promised to Avraham. The God has told prince Moshe his name, YHWH, and, therefore, to the ancient mind has communicated something of his essence: he is “I-will-be-there,” the God of gods, the God you can count on.
Moshe has the same kind of faith that Avraham had: he believes the Voice and is willing to put his trust in it. Throughout all the ups and downs of the many years to follow—as the Israelites escape and wander, seemingly without end—Moshe remains full of hope, hope in the Promise, hope for the future—that it will be something truly new, something full of surprise. Under the surface events of this tribal story, new ideas are developing: time is becoming real; a real future is possible. And because of this, the choices I make individually are important: they make a real difference to a real future. And because all outcomes have not been predetermined in advance, the present is full of adventure and the freedom to make choices that will profoundly affect the outcome.
This great, overwhelming movement, exemplified in the stories of Avraham and Moshe, makes history real to human consciousness for the first time—with the future really dependent on what I do in the present. This movement is the movement of time, which, once past, becomes history. But the movement is not like the movement of a wheel, as all other societies had imagined; it is not cyclical, coming around again and again. Each moment, like each destiny, is unique and unrepeatable. It is a process—it is going somewhere, though no one can say where. And because its end is not yet, it is full of hope—and I am free to imagine that it will not be just process but progress.
But there are right choices and wrong choices. In order to make the right choices I must consult the law of God written in my heart. I must listen to the Voice, which speaks not only to the great leaders but to me. I must take the I seriously. And in this way, after many catastrophes, the people who became the Jews could begin to go from the I of David to the I of the spirit to the I of the individual to the I of compassion-for-the-I-of-others.
The Jews gave us a whole new vocabulary, a whole new Temple of the Spirit, an inner landscape of ideas and feelings that had never been known before. Over many centuries of trauma and suffering they came to believe in one God, the Creator of the universe, whose meaning underlies all his creation and who enters human history to bring his purposes to pass. Because of their unique belief—monotheism—the Jews were able to give us the Great Whole, a unified universe that makes sense and that, because of its evident superiority as a worldview, completely overwhelms the warring and contradictory phenomena of polytheism. They gave us the Conscience of the West, the belief that this God who is One is not the God of outward show but the “still, small voice” of conscience, the God of compassion, the God who “will be there,” the God who cares about each of his creatures, especially the human beings he created “in his own image,” and that he insists we do the same.
Even the gradual universalization of Jewish ideas, hinted at in the story of Ruth the gleaner, the woman, the Moabite, the non-Jew, the classless nobody capable of friendship, was foreseen by Joel, a late prophet who probably rose after the return from Babylon:
“And it shall come to pass afterward
that I shall pour out my spirit on all humanity.
Your sons and daughters shall prophesy,
your old people shall dream dreams,
and your young people see visions.
Even on slaves, men and women,
shall I pour out my spirit…
The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside—our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact—new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice—are the gifts of the Jews.
1 The Ten Tribes of Israel are (from north to south) Dan, Naphtali, Asher, Zebulun, Issachar, Joseph (subdivided into the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim); Gad and Reuben (in Transjordan); and Benjamin (just north of the border with Judah)—all of whom made up the Kingdom of Israel. The tribes remaining are Judah and Simeon, who make up the southern Kingdom of Judah.
2 The Valley of Hinnom is the Gehenna of the Gospels, where it is invoked as an image of hell.
SEVEN
FROM THEN TILL NOW
The Jews Are Still It
It is no longer possible to believe that every word of the Bible was inspired by God. Fundamentalists still do, but they can keep up such self-delusion only by scrupulously avoiding all forms of scientific inquiry. They must also maintain a tight rein on their own senses, for, even without access to modern biblical criticism, any reader might wonder at the patchwork nature of the scriptures, their conflicting norms and judgments, outright contradictions, and bald errors. But even without resorting to modern scientific methodology or noticing what an inconsistent palimpsest the Hebrew Bible can be, we must reject certain parts of the Bible as unworthy of a God we would be willing to believe in. We read, for instance, in the Book of Joshua that God commanded the Israelites to put all Canaanites, even children, to the sword; and in the Psalms the poet regularly urges God to effect the brutal destruction of all the poet’s enemies. Though the people who wrote such words may have believed they were inspired by God, we cannot.
God may be “slow to anger and quick to forgive,” but he is also terrifying and at times as arbitrary (as in his dealings with Saul) as any Mesopotamian monarch. I don’t think it should bother us that he is no Hallmark greeting card. If God is to be God the Creator of all, he must be utterly beyond our comprehension—and, therefore, awfully scary. More than this, I, for one, am willing to give God the benefit of the doubt in certain dubious cases—even in an episode as grotesque as the near-sacrifice of Yitzhak. He had to jump-start this new religion, and he didn’t always have the best material to work with.
But it remains true that there is no way of attributing mass carnage and vindictive slaughter to a God worth believing in. Even the fiercest believer among us must, I think, admit that these operations were the work of human beings who had wrongly convinced themselves that God was on their side. The story the Hebrew Bible has to tell is the story of an evolving consciousness, a consciousness that went through many stages of development and that, like all living things, sometimes grew slowly and at other times in great spurts.
The Gifts of the Jews Page 18
