divine presence and absence

The writers of the exodus story imagine a god who dwells on Mount Sinai and transforms its terrifying divine thundering into the time-worn, tamed linearity of writing. The rumblings in the desert stun the people as a formidable presence, if only a distant, untranslatable echo, while writing affords another kind of being, a shift to a more easily reachable text, however irremediable in it the memory of an absent voice.

We are at the foot of the mountain in the desert, freshly liberated. We depend on manna. We are landless. Yet we manage to think of ourselves as proud, limned autochthones. What text engages us to speak of land as an uninhabited Ur-possession? Aren’t we all allochthones and heirs to the conditional promise of the land?

donkeys

These are a couple notes on trade in the ancient economy after reading Howe in his 2015 edited book (Traders in the ancient Mediterranean). According to Monroe in the first paper of this collection, donkeys were a “rather inefficient means of long-distance transportation” (p. 13 of “Tangled up in blue: Material and other relations of exchange in the Late Bronze age world”). He mentions their carrying capacity as being a third of their weight. Wasn’t it a fifth rather, i.e. 20 to 30% of their weight, that is about 50 kgs (36 to 82kgs)? How is one to measure their efficiency? Monroe doesn’t detail the low consumption of feed, the longevity, resistance to disease, etc. He does note that they are cheap. So, in ground transportation, the “point of diminishing returns” was rapidly reached, but what if the goods were luxury goods rather than grain? I think of the example of the Samaritan in Luke 10. Fortunately, we now have the 2018 book on The donkey in human history. An archaeological perspective, by Peter Mitchell. Here is a quote from chapter 8, the donkey’s tale, about the nature of the association of donkeys and people.

… donkeys (and mules) extended the geographical reach of human societies. They ate away, in other words, at what James Scott has termed ‘the friction of distance’, bringing people into closer contact with each other and making desired resources more accessible (page 225).

Concerning “importations” of grain, the figure of 80,000 kors of grain is reported by Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 15.314, and accepted by APPLEBAUM, “Economic life in Palestine,” 2:669. The figure seems impossible at first sight. The overland transport of such a quantity of grain would require in the neighborhood of 100,000 camel-trips or donkey-trips, and a great deal of time to organize the continuous train of caravans. It represents ca. 16,000 tons, which about one hundred heavier boats of the time could carry. One may however accept that very large quantities of grain were brought in. Josephus insists on the magnitude of the effort and on the deep impression it made on Herod’s subjects as well as neighbors. For comparison, it may be noted that thousands of camels and donkeys could be mobilized for long periods of time in the 1920s to transport cereals from the Hauran to the coast of Lebanon: WEULERSSE, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient, 137.

As for entrepreneurship and “incipient capitalism” in the ancient Mediterranean, Monroe gives a simplistic definition of capitalism. It would be a “rational, continual pursuit of profit”. His approach is to give a catalogue of examples or what he calls “indications”: rationally used weights with known ratios, the use of symbols (seals), etc. No structural reasoning that I can see.

Why not add military conquest to this “incipient capitalism?” Use of force was a much more efficient way of getting at stored silver, bronze, gold and luxury cloth in palaces and temples, as well as at specialized labor—including soldiers—that would be useful for more conquests or revenue. In two ways: a) by helping the military machine; b) by suppressing the local capacity to rebel and therefore appropriating directly the mostly agrarian goods and local metal trade that were absolutely vital for carrying on more wars. This use of force required that the local political systems had reached a certain level of development that made them attractive targets for military powers of similar or superior strength. Not too surprisingly, ancient Israelite prophets—or the exilic and post-exilic leadership that had to make do without kings and prophets and edited the prophetic books we have—saw the accumulation that kings and elites went after for what it would become: an unmitigated disaster, no matter the religiously-framed excuses they had in their competition for security and risk abatement.

Hamas

For antisemites and fundamentalist thinkers, the hatred of Israel has many causes whose edge cannot be easily taken off and that are not amenable to reason. In this short page, I’ll try nonetheless to follow a partially historical view and see where it may lead. Muslim fundamentalists have their own special theological and political reasons to resent and reject a democratic style of life that Israel has managed to keep so far by choosing to separate religion from politics and civil life. Many Muslims in the Middle East, however, live in countries that are not democracies, far from it. They want to see new democratic regimes come to power as they made so overwhelmingly clear in large revolutionary movements for freedom in Tunisia, Egypt, and many other countries in 2011 and after. But poverty, religion, and the deep trust granted to a party like the Muslim brothers of Egypt, unfortunately help dictatorships and aristocratic regimes inherit power and hold to it. There are nations whose history reaches far beyond Islam, as in Egypt and Iran, who both claim a glorious and imperial past. For many people however, even today, the only avenue is to turn to God and Islam in the hope that justice and peace can be secured that way. Their nations and states are recent creations bound to histories of colonization and exploitation. The only unity and trust that seem workable in these nations, therefore, is within the ummah of Islam, the great community of believers, rather than in national governments.

Regardless of their having a similar political history, however, a number of nations have succeeded in separating religion from politics since the sixteenth century, at least for some ostensibly “enlightened” European kingdoms. It took decades of violence and cruelty in a terrible civil and religious war before practical, hard negotiated solutions could find a way to peaceful relations. But it is also true that those conflicts lost their pathos when the economies of these nations improved dramatically from the sixteenth century on and especially in the nineteenth century when an industrialization that was fueled by enormous oil and gas deposits made it easier for freedom and democracy to spread further (Gaël Giraud, Composer un monde en commun. Une théologie politique de l’anthropocène. Paris: Seuil, 2022). This new freedom and rejection of institutions like the immensely powerful Church couldn’t prevent the new economic forms in Europe or the USA from competing and using military violence to colonize and often bring ruin to local peoples. So-called modern nations did this while presenting this new form of greed under the guise of access to civilizational values and unabated progress.

Israel came into modern existence as a home for dispersed, delegitimized, and surviving victims of a most murderous totalitarianism. It was and still is a Zionist home, a refuge and a return to an ancient story that is irremediably attached to Christianity and Islam. In the thirties and forties, many Jewish immigrants were leery of being associated with colonizing forces. But in spite of this reluctance, Israel was/is also following in the wake of modern nations for whom the process of industrialization and use of power cannot be separated from violence. So, the perceptions that Palestinians have of the nakba are more justified than I could ever estimate. The barbarous murders by hamas are not. And neither is the extreme response by the Israeli government.

My page above is an attempt to understand a few features of the situation of local peoples and states. It doesn’t justify believers to be willing and ready to do what they do. It unerstands the principle of self-defense. But only compassion and a willingness to hear the opponent’s story can hope to close some wounds in time.

neighbor and originalism

The Supreme Court is looking at the possibility of regulating gun ownership. Some of the judges believe in originalism. This is the notion that the interpretation of constitutional law has been drifting too far and that one should go back to the origins of those laws. We should adopt stricter interpretations that reflect more accurately what the writers of the constitution and its amendments were envisioning at the time of their writing.

So, let’s see how this intellectual frame of mind would play out if confronted to a similar problem, namely the interpretation of the Bible. There are at least six Catholics or ex-Catholics among the nine judges of the Supreme Court. They are not professional exegetes but surely appreciate the essential role still played by the Bible in our secular times. Would they be willing to apply the legal principle in question–––originalism–-–to the Bible? The interpretation of the Bible, whether Jewish, Catholic, or Reformed, has long hesitated about that matter and still does, at least in certain congregations. Must it keep to conservative readings, or can it develop meanings that take into account new events, formulations, or needs. Even the most traditional Jews would frame their Torah study obligations as a duty to reveal the multiplicity of meanings meant by the divinity to be discovered over time.

Let us look at one famous story, that of the Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37. It cannot be properly explained without having an inkling of the Greco-Roman surroundings and more importantly of the long development of the notion of neighbor in Israelite and Jewish society after the earlier catastrophic collapse of their small kingdoms and the temple. In other words, I am suggesting that the value of the story of the Samaritan cannot be appreciated without having a sense of the development of the concept of neighbor. In fact, the expansion of the notion of neighbor to the whole of humanity has its roots in that story. That notion and its expansion, if one adopted the principle of strict originalism, would become impossible to understand. It would require belief in a Jesus entirely bereft of his Jewish and Israelite background. It would make it impossible to appreciate the profound value that the story and its biblical background have had and continue to have on the development of compassion and care in a complex, unfolding world. So, this is not a purely intellectual matter. One may actually ponder how much slower the development of hospices and hospitals would have been in past centuries if the notion of originalism had been the main guiding principle and had killed the expanding notion of neighbor.

a second kippur

Two days ago, Hamas launched a complex military action against many towns and villages in the South of Israel. We do not know what the numbers of victims are. The latest news today indicated that there might be hundreds of people killed on both sides, and Hamas also kidnapped a number of Israeli soldiers and civilians, even children. A cursory reading of Haaretz shows that top officers and intelligence people were aware that the tensions were growing in both Palestinian territories and Gaza. But the new government of Israel had other plans. Their ideas regarding economic development with India, the Arab emirates, and Saudi Arabia now look very distant. But much more importantly, the government’s project of taking control of the Supreme Court and the democratic structures of Israel are all going to be pushed aside for a while. A unity government is taking over, which is not simply to satisfy the psychological need for unity but may allow Netanyahu to detach himself from the hard right. It looks pretty clear or at least it is a distinct possibility that Hamas could do what they did, not only for their own reasons, economic and religious, but also because there was a massive failure of trust in Israel, which the present government, beginning with Netanyahu, is to be blamed for. Many people are criticizing intelligence agencies. We don’t know what the reality was since intelligence is by nature secretive, but it is clear that the months-long struggle about the nature of Israel, the division of minds in the country, the social divisions, and the complete lack of concern for Palestinians and how they can endure an-ever tightening Israeli rule, all of this is partly to blame for this war.

There are other reasons such as the long arc of injustice and violence that spans over the people of the area since around the 1900s, long before many Jews began to flee to Palestine from their countries. And a powerful religious message of justice and peace that often gets derailed.

The military response will be harsh as usual even though the taking of hostages by Hamas will complicate the situation. It has always been Israel’s policy to make sure that they are the clear winners of any engagement. Still, precisely because of that policy, it becomes dubious whether Israel can continue to win, especially if the government becomes more authoritarian, the social differences continue to increase, and the cultural and religious dimensions of the conflict become a justification for the first two aspects.

An ex ambassador of Israel to France, Elie Barnavi is fairly representative of Israeli thinking. He is of the opinion that this second Kippur, like the other 50 years ago, may ruin the fragile equilibriums of the region and even lead to a third Intifada, given the terrible situation that Palestinians are living under.

Primo Levi

Aujourd’hui, Elon Musk souhaite un judaïsme plus malléable, un judaïsme sans ADL et peut-être même un judaïsme silientieux et prudent sans Levi ou Wiesel. Alors dessinons des cercles autour des X et réfléchissons brièvement à deux ou trois choses que le judaïsme apporte à notre vision du monde en construction…

Commençons par Bonnefoy et ses vues sur l’origine de la poésie: “Et j’étais donc invité à rester fidèle au premier emploi que l’on fait des mots, le désignatif, l’exclamatif” (Yves Bonnefoy, L’écharpe rouge, Paris : Mercure de France, 2016). C’est à cela et à ses prolongements que me font penser les petits-enfants: l’ébranlement d’un monde et d’une vie qui ne peuvent se résumer à une collection d’objets et de réalités aux étiquettes adéquates mais au contraire qui se laissent découvrir au bout et au coût d’un nouvel émerveillement, une conquête toujours renouvelée par cette étrange capacité à restructurer et signifier intégralement un monde que nous nous cachons tous avec plus ou moins de bonheur, plus ou moins d’émoussement des tendresses que ceux autour de nous prodiguent.

Autre chose: le livre de Primo Levi a éventuellement été plus influent que La nuit de Wiesel, rappelle Nicolas Weill dans son article de 2016 sur ce dernier dans Le Monde. Il ne dit pas que l’ouvrage de Levi est sorti en 1947, onze ans avant La nuit et qu’il n’a valu notoriété à Levi qu’après 1958 lorsqu’il fut republié par Einaudi qui l’avait refusé la première fois, et qu;il fut enfin traduit en anglais ou une multitude d’autres langues et surtout, surtout, en allemand. Il ne fut traduit en hébreu qu’après le décès de Levi, ce qui est un sort bien différent de celui de Wiesel qui était lié de près à bien des leaders de la droite israélienne. Mais on aopprend aussi dans cet article de Weill que Wiesel avait écrit des centaines de pages en yiddish qui furent abrégées en un ouvrage en yiddish paru en 1956 (perdu maintenant?). Et qu’il avait été talmid (= étudiant fidèle) de Chouchani—comme Lévinas—puis de Saul Lieberman.

English translation:

These days, Elon Musk wishes for a malleable Judaism, a prudent Judaism without ADL and perhaps bereft of Levi and Wiesel. So, let’s draw circles around his X’s and think briefly of one or two aspects that Judaism brings to our shaping views of the world…

Let’s start with Bonnefoy and his views on the origin of poetry: “And I was therefore invited to remain faithful to the first use that we make of words, the designative, the exclamative” (Yves Bonnefoy,Red scarf, Paris: Mercure de France, 2016). This and what it reverberates is what the grandchildren make me think of: the shaking of a world and a life that cannot be summed up in a collection of objects and realities with adequate labels but on the contrary that allow themselves to be discovered at the end and at the cost of a new wonder, a conquest always renewed by this strange capacity of ours to restructure and fully signify a world that we all try to hide from ourselves with more or less luck, more or less dulling of the tenderness that those around us provide.

Another thing: Primo Levi’s book was possibly more influential than Wiesel’s The Night, recalls Nicolas Weill in his 2016 article on the latter in Le Monde. He does not say that Levi’s work came out in 1947, eleven years before The Night and that it only brought notoriety only after 1958 when it was republished by Einaudi who had turned it down the first time, and that it was finally translated into English, or a multitude of other languages and above all, above all, into German. It was only translated into Hebrew after Levi’s death, which is a very different fate from that of Wiesel who was closely linked to many leaders of the Israeli political circles. But we also learn in this article by Weill that Wiesel had written hundreds of pages in Yiddish which were abridged into a work in Yiddish published in 1956 (lost now?). And that he had been a talmid (= faithful student) of Chouchani—like Levinas—and then of Saul Lieberman.

imago dei

When I visit our grandchildren, I appreciate both how closely related they are and yet how different they can be from each other. Their life path will not replicate what they perceive, wrongly or rightly, to be an image of life that parents and others hold for them. More broadly, neither will they, I hope, succumb to the tyranny of images and become imitators or copyists. To help me think about the marvelous difference that exists between all human beings and the danger of reducing it to genetic chains, I bring up two short texts that come to us across nearly two millennia.

The first one is a passage from the Mishnah Sanhedrin, written by the end of the second century of our era, where the basic oneness of human nature, symbolized by the minting of coins, is contrasted with the extraordinary variety of people. I quote:

Human beings were created as individuals, to teach that whoever destroys one soul, it is as if a complete world was destroyed, and whoever sustains one soul, it is as if a whole world was sustained. [….] For coins are made by being struck with a die, and yet they all resemble each other. But the Divine One struck each human being with the die of the first person, yet none resembles the other. (Danby, The Mishnah).

The die or seal used for the “first person” produces a different image each and every time, yet there is but one “die”, used an infinite number of times. In contrast, mints had to replace metallic dies because these wore out after a few thousand of strikes. And yet the coins retained the same imagery throughout the series. The expected uniformity of the coins, in turn, made the task of governing, taxing, and controlling people that much easier. In sharp contrast to this use of uniformity for consolidating power, the divine agent, we are told, is willing to relinquish control and have images of self that can be very different from each other, with value in and of themselves.

In a second text that portrays Jesus, the same elements are at play: a divinity, earthly kings, a coin, and the business of images (Mark 12:13–17; Matthew 22:15–22; Luke 20:20–26). Jesus is at the temple in Jerusalem, confronted by Pharisees and Herodians, i.e. the government’s critics and representatives of the time, who colluded to ask him a trick question: “Is it lawful to pay the census to Caesar or not?” In response, he requests a silver coin, which he lacks, because of poverty or religious piety, and then asks whose image and inscription the coin bears. Does he even look at it? When he is told that they belong to Caesar, he answers: “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” a famous answer often used to support various degrees of separation of church and state, as if the two spheres were different actors in the political drama that repeatedly plays itself out. The immediate point of the answer, however, is about the nature and limits of power. There were boundaries even to the powers of a Caesar, most especially in regard to the sameness of the images and their capacity to make people believe that they were a full extension of his presence everywhere rather than an ersatz of it. He could have statues and coins copy his picture and be distributed at the limits of his military power, but those images could never replace him, whereas the divine imageless presence could be detected everywhere, past and beyond the great variety of nature and human beings.

These two ancient texts have something to say regarding the modern situation. We live in a world where the power to print or coin images on matter and claim the product for oneself as a private good has exploded. This capacity is more extensive than ever before and goes beyond the so-called tragedy of the commons. It reaches into the plant, animal and human domains. Copyright law, so extensive now since 1998 (death + 70 years); Patent law on genetic engineering in 1982… Since 1980, a law passed by Congress allows universities and other non-profit organizations to patent discoveries made with financial assistance from public sources. It has encouraged the profit motive among scientists, and led them to work with private sector entrepreneurs, both developments that are troublesome. Modern institutions and corporations are putting their own image and brand even on the stuff of life, which one would have thought could never be owned again.

Our world is not so different from that of antiquity in that the wondrous power of image-making is being abused, just as it was in ancient times. It is not intellectual curiosity itself that is at fault, but how it is controlled and used. We are buying these images, while working as hard as ever to pay for health, for genetically engineered and patented foods, for software, for energy, for education….

dating the gospels

How does one date the gospels? Did they not precede the fall of the temple, since one would expect them to have mentioned the Roman victory if they appeared after 70 CE? The scholarly consensus is that Mark was the first gospel, after Q, and was probablly written right before the fall of the temple in Jerusalem, so around 65 to 70. Matthew and Luke wrote after this catastrophe, around 80, since they made extensive use of Mark and Q, As for John, it dates back to the end of the first century. The four gospels are anonymous and got their names in the second century. There are many arguments for these rough dates, beginning with the obviously complex theological framework of Matthew, Luke, and John, part of which was shaped to answer the urgent questions asked by the early Christian communities. More on this urgency below. In terms of theological development, Mark appears to be the exception. This much shorter gospel would be earlier as it has rougher edges and is quoted at length by Matthew and Luke.

One way to gain some sense of the question is to use a synopsis of the gospels and compare the four versions of events reported about Jesus’s presence at the temple. So, to begin to understand the interrelations between the four gospels, one can read for example the account of Jesus’s cursing of the fig tree, right before the pericope of the cleansing of the temple. The story about the fig tree is found in Mark 11:12-14 and 11:20-26, Matthew 21:18-19, and Luke 13:6-9. In Mark, the cleansing of the temple episode is sandwiched between the initial move to see if the tree has fruit and the withering of the tree. The author is implying that the tree’s fate is that of the temple, since the fig tree served as a metaphor for the temple. It represented the temple’s power to sustain the people miraculously. But Mark is the only synoptic gospel who, after telling that Jesus is hungry and goes to the tree hoping to find figs, adds “for it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13c). How does one interpret that odd sentence? Ignorance on Jesus’s part of the seasons, or, much more likely, the thought that the miraculous possibilities of the fig tree were exhausted and replaced by another source of life? In other words, the temple’s destiny was destruction by fire, like the fig tree and its abundant foliage. Now, how is one to date this kind of thought? Was it a prophecy made before or after the event (ex eventu)? I think the latter.

Such passages (there are many) allow the possibility that the author of Mark’s gospel was writing during the war or immediately after. Matthew has a short version of it and drops this crucial sentence. Luke has dramatically changed the story and turned it into a story of hope. Both Matthew and Luke are clearly responding or commenting on Mark, and therefore come from a later point. In other words, the three synoptics—and a fortiori John—were well aware, as were the communities they lived in, that the temple fell to the Romans. Mention of it is made all over the gospels in apocalyptic terms.

It is important to remember that the followers of Jesus who were using these gospels were mostly Judaeans or Galileans. The fall of the temple to Rome was a religious and political catastrophe of the first order of magnitude and no one needed to be reminded of it as an event. It is the meaning of the catastrophe that was of the essence. The crux of the matter was that the belief in the messiahship and divinity of Jesus was partly developed as an explanation of such events. It set his followers on a difficult path. How could they dare believe in his divinity when other Jews, Judaeans or not, thought that such an event at the very least signified the falseness of messiahs? So, it took a while for gospels to integrate theological views of the fall of the temple that made sense to them.

Une vie…

Je viens de lire l’émouvant recueil de lettres envoyées de 1955 à 1978 par Jean-Claude Mahé à ses parents. Ce recueil a èté numérisé par Dominique Mahé. J’ai voulu écrire un message en réponse à ce beau livre mais ai dépassé les 1500 caractères réglementaires et l’ai donc mis ici.

Un grand merci à Dominique Mahé pour avoir publié ces lettres de son frère Jean-Claude. On y reconnaît bien sûr au début les lettres hebdomadaires toutes simples que nous écrivions tous à nos parents le dimanche et qui étaient sinon lues par le préfet de discipline, du moins en mal d’imprimatur ou de visa préfectoral. Vers la fin de ses études, puis à l’armée, et surtout dans les années soixante, par exemple de 1966 à 68, les lettres deviennent remarquables. Elles sont beaucoup plus longues et réfléchies—ses lectures impressionantes y sont probablement pour beaucoup—mais le ton de respect, de reconnaissance et d’affection envers ses parents ne change jamais, sauf peut-être dans une seule lettre vers la fin, toujours aussi respectueuse et affectueuse mais au ton décidé, où il réagit à une situation probablement très difficile. Au fil des ans, il continue à partager avec ses parents ses efforts pour construire une société plus juste (syndicats, communautés de vie, profondes amitiés), ses hésitations morales, ses jugements sur la société et la religion, ses visites, les beaux paysages qu’il découvre au fil de ses nombreux voyages, et surtout ses emplois et travaux de menuiserie très variés qu’il décrit souvent pour son père, sans oublier de mentionner ici ou là sa précieuse boîte à outils… Il était émouvant de lire toutes ces lettres aujourd’hui et de se voir secoué par cet effort impressionnant pour vivre une vie en accord avec son idéal d’amour, de justice, de vérité, et de paix.

chatbot

I’m trying ChatGPT on a sample of historical and theological questions (one is below, in italics). The answers are well phrased and nearly immediate. They tend to be prudent and reflect common wisdom, for instance the insistance on Jesus as a spiritual and ethical leader and the eschewing of a political side. The machine uses simple devices to keep options available: multiplicity of interpretations, for one, symbolic approach, for another, and reformulations of questions, for instance. Even the costs of human life are not shirked if one pursues the question of suffering. The engine is structured to learn, for instance regarding the epithet of “good” that Christianity has long affixed to the Samaritan of Luke 10 as a summary of the good neighbor. The machine or chatbot accepted my correction that the word “good” does not appear in Luke 10. It apologized for the oversight and thanked me for bringing it up. It then rephrased my own formulations. Another surprise was to realize that my own style changed rapidly—for instance my use of qualifiers—as I thought, perhaps wrongly, that there was no moral intention behind the answers.

What will happen to knowing when this paid farming of information and creativity overpowers all other tools of knowledge, say extensive and thoroughly edited tools like wikipedia and standard encyclopedias? What will the ever so acceptable lack of evidence and sources lead to? An ever smaller common denominator?

I tried a very general historical question:
Is monotheism a historical event? When did it happen?
This is what the machine answered as of today and without any feedback on my part (there would be much to say!):

Monotheism is a belief in a single, all-powerful deity or God. It is not a specific historical event, but rather a concept that has been present in various forms in various cultures throughout history. The origins of monotheism are not fully understood, but it is thought to have emerged in different parts of the world at different times.

One of the earliest examples of monotheism is believed to be the ancient Egyptian religion, which featured a single, supreme deity named Amun. Other ancient cultures that practiced monotheism include the ancient Hebrews, who worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the ancient Persians, who worshipped the supreme deity Ahura Mazda.

Monotheism has also played a significant role in the development of modern world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions all believe in a single, all-powerful God and have had a major influence on the development of Western culture and thought.

Gildas Hamel