Canter Bridge

A friend looked up at the diseased leaves of the crab apple tree in my back garden this afternoon, one of its limbs hanging down after last week’s storm like an untreated broken arm.

‘Not good’, she intoned with a solemnity so grave that we laughed at ourselves as soon as we had stepped back from the terminal diagnosis it conveyed.

Not good.

It is difficult to know whether the Hebrew Bible’s first לא טוב (Not good!) echoes in the speaking of Proverbs 17.26. Spoken by the Creator of the first man’s solitude, it wrapped its verbal arms around the deep awkwardness of being alone in a beautiful world. Now, in a much less known proverb, it encases a similar awkwardness, a misalignment with the Creator’s good intentions so severe as to risk both communal disintegration and heaven’s anger.

It is not good to punish an innocent man, or to flog officials for their integrity. (Proverbs 17:26 NIV)

When a dictum like this appears so simple as to state the obvious or risk mere truism, one can be sure that he has not considered the context(s) that lend it poignance and render it worthy.

One such context may come to us in the deep truth rather than the superficial meaning of not good (לא טוב). The simple phrase may have accrued to itself a connotation of profound aberrance, of taboo, even of abhorrence. For the anthologist of Israel’s taught and learned wisdom, לא טוב might have been a far more alarming statement than ‘not good’ in English is ever likely to suggest.

However that may be, it is more likely that the proverb intends for us to imagine that fining or otherwise punishing an innocent man might have come to be regarded as not such a serious matter after all. Indeed, the intent may be to shake us from our complacency to consider that such a horror may be practiced among us right here, right now. The second line hints even more ominously at a scenario that occurs all too unremarkably at that state in a culture’s decay when it becomes commonplace to ‘honor fools and despise the honorable’.

The difficulty in dealing with such conduct is that we spot it easily in the abstract when it’s laid before us in words but we struggle under our cultural anesthesia to recognize it when it’s taking place in its nuanced and self-excusing manner under our very noses. The proverb may well find its context in behavior that we would once easily have recognized and proceeded to condemn at a stage before we became complicit in it.

If the wisdom tradition is to be respected and given the benefit of reasonable doubt while it works its way toward shaping our minds and our lives, then it is unlikely that this proverb makes an observation so obvious that any reasonable person would concede his assent. It likely says more.

It asks for due consideration, for diagnosis, for a disturbing ‘what if …?’.

Only after this can we stand corrected.