Canter Bridge

Nehemiah’s memoir shows signs of paranoia. This is not unusual in women and men who undertake great tasks at formidable cost. It does not take preternatural focus and a grand project’s fatigue to create enemies, only to render them the principle fact on the ground.

Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem could no doubt speak as reasonable men. Their request, in fact, was to counsel together with Nehemiah. They were not strangers to the Jewish community. Indeed, they had their advocates on the inside.

Yet Nehemiah, probably correctly, perceived that they were at the core opponents of the restoration project to which he had bent his energies, to say nothing of the wellbeing of those enthusiasts, true believers, and fence-sitters who had climbed down to throw in their lot with him. The prospects that would follow upon failure were unattractive.

The text has him finish the work against all odds. People who have done so understand the emotional floodgates that open upon such a conclusion. Not all currents run in the same direction.

For a moment, the prominent place is Ezra’s, not Nehemiah’s. In a complex moment aided by translator-interpreters, Ezra brings his scribal prowess and the ancient word of Mosaic law to bear upon a situation that is not only new but also self-evidently precarious.

The people, listening and understanding, weep.

It might have been a powerful moment of communal penitence for all that had gone wrong, all those compromises that in the light of retrospect appeared undeniably self-interested, all that Israel had once been but this cliff-hanging experiment would never resemble.

That would have been proper, perhaps.

Instead, Ezra and Nehemiah look forward. ‘Do not mourn or weep’, they instruct a people that has already given itself over to such ritual gloom.

Instead, they celebrate because they have understood.

Passover is normally a moment for looking back, for gratitude cultivated by the memory of past liberations, for a celebration of what YHWH had been for the fathers. Wandering the desert, Israel past had found YHWH interested and adequate.

In the days following the reading of this ancient Law, Nehemiah’s little people celebrated and feasted as they had perhaps never done since Persian bureaucracy decreed their right of return. They lived in booths, a graphic little image of their fragility and their survivability.

There would be times for weeping, to be sure.

This day was a moment for good food, for laughter, for hope.

It was a day for thoughts of survival, of the generations that would follow.