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note: Nitza Ben-Dov, ‘The Dead Do Not Praise the Lord’: Alter’s Psalms, Agnon’s ‘Tehilla’, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (Hebrew Studies, LI)

January 23, 2011 by David Baer

The abstract of this article reads as follows:

Life in this world is the only life, according to the ancient biblical belief. Robert Alter (Uri) in the introduction to his translation of the book of Psalms (2007) explains why he sometimes chose one word and not another to remain faithful to the biblical belief of Psalms, and discarded here and there the excess baggage of belief in the world to come, which throughout the generatins has clung to certain words and expressions that appear in the psalms. Two texts from Modern literature, one Hebrew, the other Russian, exemplify in this article the tension between belief in this world and belief in the world to come of two female protagonists, independently of each other. The last part of the article relates to a personal event that illumines something about Robert Alter, the man and the translator.

The author’s poignant tribute to the great Robert Alter’s method and legacy highlights Alter’s option for shedding the ‘baggage’ attributable to Christian quotation, doctrine, and eschatology in favor of the concreteness that is arguably native to the Hebrew psalms themselves. Ben-Dov’s development of two moments in literature in which the protagonists found it necessary to negotiate ‘this-worldliy’ and ‘other-worldly’ reception of the psalms frames Alter’s choice of the former in the introduction to his celebrated translation of the biblical psalms.

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unimpressive prophets: Matthew 7

January 20, 2011 by David Baer

It is too easy to imagine that God is in the fire.

He is often absent there.

Though it is wrong to fear the extraordinary, it is equally misguided to crave it. We lust after raised voices and clenched fists when our nourishment comes cradled in whisper and caress.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15–20, NRSV)

Jesus routinely follows precedent in biblical wisdom by privileging simple, steady obedience over its ambitious alternatives.

Prophets will come, he warns his followers. No doubt they will be impressive, disturbing, and spiritually invigorating. Such prophetic voices, raised in anger or illumination, are for Jesus a dime a dozen.

‘Show me their fruit’, he says, reducing their appeal to that feature of human behavior that is most difficult both to produce and to reproduce: righteous deeds.

One must not forget that Jesus and the tradition that treasures his words and brings them to our ears revere, to name just one, a John the Baptist. Jesus and his earliest witnesses are not opposed to sizzling flame on the tongue of a prophet. Indeed, they tell us, one must not dare the mistake of ignoring such a heavenly torch.

Yet if simple righteousness is absent from their conduct, they are like a fruitless tree. Fire goes there, but not the spoken, impressive kind. Just fire. Consuming fire. No glory there.

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note: Christopher B. Ansberry, ‘What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? The moral vision of the book of Proverbs and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’ (Hebrew Studies, LI)

January 20, 2011 by David Baer

The abstract of this article reads as follows:

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics serve as a more useful heuristic model for understanding the moral vision of the book of Proverbs than Socrates’ ethical theory. While Socratic ethics provide a general guide to portions of the sapiential material, Aristotle’s emphasis on the organic relationship between the moral and intellectual virtues as well as the role of character in ethical decisions accounts for the variegated materials within the book as a whole. In the view of the differences between Aristotle and Socrates’ ethical theory and their relationship to the book of Proverbs, Aristotle’s ethics illuminate the moral dimensions of the document. Similar to Aristotle, the sages present the collaboration of character and intellect as the acme of moral development: character proves the constitutional base for the appropriation of wisdom and determines the goal of virtuous activity, while wisdom identifies the means for achieving that goal in a particular situation. This teleological thesis captures the fundamental features of sapiential ethics.

Ansberry discerns in ‘virtue ethics’ or ‘character ethics’ an amenable spirit vis-à-vis the Old Testament’s sapiential materials. Yet the author finds Aristotle’s emphasis upon character in knowing and doing right to be closer to the biblical Proverbs than the more purely intellectual approach of Socrates. Socrates—arguably over against not only Aristotle but also biblical wisdom—is more sanguine about the path from knowledge to virtue, since—per a Socratic axiom—virtue is almost equivalent to knowledge.

When the full range of Old Testament proverbial wisdom is taken into account, knowledge does not per se produce wisdom. Rather, a virtuous disposition is required for that alchemy to have its way in the cultivation of moral activity.

Particularly in the ‘sentence literature’ is the close relationship of moral virtue and intellectual virtue placed in evidence. Socrates’ dictum that no one willingly does evil is here called into question. For both Aristotle and the biblical sages ‘unethical behavior is not simply the product of ignorance’.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, according to Ansberry, moral virtues are cultivated by both habituation and instruction, a two-fold path to virtue that finds echo in the Proverbs. So too does the importance of perception keep virtue in both texts from becoming a mere set of universal principles. Sensitivity, contextualization, and shrewd judgment are required for the human actor to act righteously. Though Aristotle’s ethics do not required divine disclosure, they agree with biblical wisdom in these respects (but see also approaches to the biblical proverbs as ‘secular’ material).

Whereas Socrates usefulness as a heuristic model for understanding the biblical proverbs is distinctly limited, Aristotle’s ethics excel by comparison.

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sufficient trouble: Matthew 6

January 14, 2011 by David Baer

Everywhere, we are told to plan for the future. This is no idle counsel. Tomorrow relentlessly and suddenly becomes today.

Yet Jesus’ radical counsel removes the demands of the future from the licit objects of our fretting. Tomorrow? Fuggedaboudit.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing?

Such teaching exercises upon us an influence that oscillates between great release and immense frustration.

We want to live carefree. Yet we cannot. We know neither the language nor the rhythm of such trust.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

Jesus bring us closer, here, to the engine of such existential ease. Indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

Here, at least, our need is legitimated. We are not fools to imagine that we require these things.

Foolishness is banished to the space occupied by worry about them. It is there that we are not to stand, there that our feet and hands find themselves unfit for an alien task, there that we stumble over obstacles we cannot see. But our heavenly Father knows, thus we can rest.

Jesus’ summons is not to mental relaxation for its own sake. We are not relieved of effort. Rather, we are directed to marshal our energies towards a particularly focused project.

What we are to abandon is not the irrefutable, economic sine qua non of life on earth. That would be gnostic self-deception. Rather, we are to trust our heavenly Father with all of that, if Jesus is to believed, while we bend our shoulder to this.

But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

Jesus does not here call his own to self-abandonment or an excessively other-worldly state of mind. In fact, with stunning realism, today is defined in terms of its freight of trouble.

Jesus calls us to focus on the one thing we can do something about. Remarkably, it is a project that, in bearing his Father’s own name, seems as though it might have been the one thing that lies beyond our reach: the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

Before us lies one of the Christian story’s great reversals. We are told that the one thing we might be reasonably expected to accomplish—providing for our future—lies outside our control and in better hands than ours. Jesus’ Father and ours has that one covered. Paradoxically, the matter toward which we are to give ourselves heart and soul is owned entirely by God, in fact named after him: his kingdom and his righteousness.

Things are—ever, always—not as they appear.

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proper warehousing: Matthew 6

January 9, 2011 by David Baer

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
(Matthew 6:19–21 NRSV)

Jesus appears to have exercised a utilitarian view of wealth. He had little of the stuff we use to define the term and appeared not not to miss much what he did not possess. He was also severe about the ability of wealth to distract, detour, and corrupt.

‘How can this be?’, one asks in a world where accumulated resources feel as though they’re the important bulwark against calamity.

For starters, Jesus seemed to find the greatest beauty in what his Father himself had created. Not to make a romantic naturalist of him, he found in the lilies and birds of the field not only beauty but also a bit of instruction.

And then Jesus appears to have found the little he needed, when it arrived, to be gift rather than achievement or prerogative.

The twice-used phrase (do not) store up for yourselves treasures and the following—third—reference to treasures (Greek θεσαῦροι) probably points to excess rather than modest provision against hunger and the evil day. Yet this observation does not relieve the would-be follower of Jesus from asking how much that might be.

One is faced down here with a conventional division of reality into ‘heaven’ and earth’. Unconventionally, we are asked to invest our productive capacity in the former, because it endures. The world, we read, makes a poor investment for our limited and precious energies because it is so impermanent.

Only a fool would stock up on perishables that are surely to be rotten long before the anticipated need of them has been exhausted.

Appearances as to what endures and what is most real savage us with their persuasive deception.

‘Find heaven’, Jesus might tell us, ‘and do not mess around with diversifying your portfolio beyond that rather expansive category. Your enthusiasm will follow your allocation like a well-loved puppy. Trust me.’

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lethal folly: Proverbs 1

January 7, 2011 by David Baer

If it is true that folly for a season fills life up with irrefutable pleasures, it soon manifests its nature as a lethal disease.

Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices. For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster. (Proverbs 1:29–33 NRSV)

Folly lacks one of the constituent elements of wisdom: it does not self-correct.

Wisdom has a governor, to speak in mechanical terms. Wisdom is self-critical. It thrives on a feedback loop that provides the tools for subtle course corrections and, for that matter, radical ones.

Folly lacks this sophistication. It is bound to proceed in the direction of its own logical extremity. One begins to enjoy its delicacies but finishes the night gorged and puking.

The biblical proverbs understand this dynamic and instruct those who would learn with the most realistic of voices.

The variants of folly kill and destroy.

Wisdom, as we it and its voice personified in the first chapter of Proverbs, turns normal descriptors on their head. ‘Ease’ is often in the prophetic and sapiential currents of biblical literature, associated with facile wealth, corruption, and foolishness. Here, in what becomes almost a hymn to wisdom’s virtues, it is those who listen to Wisdom who will be secure and … live at ease.

Wisdom’s pleasures require a long growing season. They are not quick, indeed they are nearly always the product of long waiting and a chosen patience.

When they ripen, they are very sweet. By then, the fool has met his destruction, his name barely remembered.

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the simpleton’s passion, the fool’s rage: Proverbs 1

January 6, 2011 by David Baer

We do not often marry matters of wisdom and folly to those of love and hatred.

The biblical proverbs do not suffer this hesitation.

Not only does the Book of Proverbs rather daringly personify both wisdom and folly as appealing women in the street, calling out to passersby. It also sketches out the young man’s choice in terms of the strongest emotions of the heart.

Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: ‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.’ (Proverbs 1:20–23 NRSV)

Biblical wisdom understands that its alternative is, in the short term, both attractive and rewarding. It is quite normal for the simpleton—the one who will neither take the time nor invest the energy required to discern right from wrong and health from disease—to love his immediate gratification. The simpleton’s life does gratify. Wisdom makes no bones about this.

Likewise, Lady Wisdom knows the personal buzz that the scoffer enjoys as well as the tight-knit kinship that bonds together those who thrive on what has lately been called ‘ironic detachment’. Such a life is, within the limits of its own myopias, a good life. For the moment, it satisfies deep needs.

Not without reason do scoffers acquire an aura of coolness about them. To claim it does not exist or fails to allure is, in its own way, a virtuous but misguided blindness.

We learn also, if we accept Wisdom’s plea to listen to her words, that fools hate knowledge. Theirs is no dispassionate choice in favor of self-entrancing ignorance with no offense intended towards the wisdom they passed over. The affections of the heart are very much in play when we choose a path that over the long run hollows out our soul and cripples our community.

Wisdom and folly are no white-bread choices from among a menu of options, none of which matters terribly.

Our choice does matter, and terribly, no less than love and hatred which ignite the bones and fire the soul.

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fates and prayers: Psalm 5

January 6, 2011 by David Baer

We blanch at the clarity of suffering.

If we have not experienced direct attack on our lives, our livelihoods, our family, or our faith, the slashing verbal knives of those who lament seem uncivilized, unsafe, and awkward. When we read, we skip over such language, whether our audience be our children, our congregation, or ourselves.

Truth be told, the clarity of the besieged is not a perspicuity that works well in all contexts. We understand that reality and human hearts are too complex and nuanced to fit into a good guys/bad guys bifurcation of our race. Wasn’t it a voice as suppressed as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s that taught us where the line between good and evil lies?: not between peoples or even people but through the heart of every human being.

Yet we must not quiet the voice of the martyrs or the cries of those who find themselves vulnerable to a painful and unjust end. Even if self-interest is the highest motive we can muster, one must remember this: I may one day need these words.

For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction;
|their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues.
Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels;
because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you. (Psalm 5:9–10 NRSV)

The poet has known enough of suffering to place a pungent prayer on the lips of those who have lost all recourse except YHWH himself.

The fifth psalm, as so many of its peers, cries out for ruin to be the fate of those who pound its author’s life into the ground. For the duration of his lucid moment, the pray-er knows his persecutors to be rebelling against God himself. He knows what ought to, what must, what—please, God, do it!—cannot but fall upon the heads of such assassins, whose fingers are stained with my life’s blood.

At the same time, the faithful lose their limp, their homely frailty, their vulnerable lips so capable of hypocrisy, their hearts so wandering, the seed of evil that germinates in their soul and but for YHWH’s providence and a long accrual of small, righteous decisions should place them quickly on the other side of life. Of this prayer.

But let all who take refuge in you rejoice;
let them ever sing for joy.
Spread your protection over them,
so that those who love your name may exult in you.
For you bless the righteous, O LORD;
you cover them with favor as with a shield. (Psalm 5:11–12 NRSV)

The definition of this fortunate population is the definition of the sufferer himself. Like him, they take refuge in you.

In desperation, they are family. The clarity of the suffering not only profiles with uncommon sharpness the silhouette of one’s enemy. It also labels this one ‘brother’, that one ‘sister’, this child ‘m’ijo’, this aged lady ‘abuelita’.

The psalmist wishes for his kin not only the protection that is obviously needful. He wants more.

He wants laughter. Deep, joyous, exultant, belly-rocking laughter.

In the clarity of unjust affliction, one prays with no footnotes: Make these ones wander alone like living dead. Make these, in safe and tear-stained embrace, laugh until they can hardly remember why.

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the hermeneutic of hell: Matthew 4

January 4, 2011 by David Baer

When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River, a heavenly voice identifies him as the Father’s beloved son. Paradoxically, he is then led (or, as the gospel of Mark has it, driven or banished) into the desert to be tested by the devil.

While it may still be an open question whether the devil wears Prada, it is an established fact in the gospels’ presentation that the accuser quotes Scripture. His hermeneutic, that is to say his interpretive tactic, is sophisticated but very bad.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you,” and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”‘ Jesus said to him, ‘Again it is written, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”‘ (Matthew 4:5–7 NRSV)

The devil cites the ninety-first psalm. The poem ranks high among the favorites of Bible readers and lies open, almost as a protective amulet, by the bedsides of many sleepers around the world. They treasure its promise that YHWH’s hidden forces, his uncounted angels, are more than sufficient protection for his hard-pressed child who finds himself exposed to lethal invisibilities over which he holds no control.

For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked. Because you have made the LORD your refuge, the Most High your dwelling place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. (Psalm 91:3–10 NRSV)

The satanic way with Scripture is to quote text without context. This simple maneuver ably converts the word of God into the voice of hell.

The devil comes quickly—as contextless citation allows one efficiently to do—to his point. He engages Jesus in a conversation that leaves the best film directors flailing just a bit. The psalm from which he quotes reads in this place as follows:

For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot. (Psalm 91:11–13 NRSV)

It seems a note custom-made for the hungry abandonment of the beloved son in a desert not of his choosing.

Yet Jesus supplies a context that is latent in the ninety-first psalm itself, but visible and explicit in the Torah text that he quotes:

Do not put the LORD your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah. (Deuteronomy 6:16 NRSV)

Jesus is, after all, the beloved son. The devil’s favorite psalm begins and ends with words directed to the faithful and besieged sufferer, who has nowhere to place his trust but in YHWH himself. Their plight is the same one. The devil conveniently overlooks this contextual bedrock, as it suits his purpose to do.

You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’ (Psalm 91:1–2 NRSV)

Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name. When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble, I will rescue them and honor them. With long life I will satisfy them, and show them my salvation. (Psalm 91:14–16 NRSV)

On the devil’s lips, Scripture thus becomes the voice of hell. The threatened believer is turned by demand against his divine Protector. Trust becomes insolent challenge. Scripture is ostensibly honored but in reality debased.

We who are quick with a Bible, craving simplicity, learn too well hell’s pragmatic and horrible hermeneutic.

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the guardings: Genesis 2-4

January 3, 2011 by David Baer

The Bible’s primeval history, as this is found in the early chapters of the book of Genesis, is arguably the most supple and satisfactory explanation of human experience ever written.

One aspect of this paradigmatic story involves the matter of guarding (Hebrew שׁמר).

The second panel of the two-paneled creation story sees ‘YHWH Elohim’ (commonly in English, ‘the Lord God’) planting a garden in the east and installing the man there. Although the text speaks here only of the man, the joint commissioning of man and woman in chapter one and the organic and relational union of the man and the woman subsequently in the second panel provide a more inclusive context. Significantly ha-adam (האדאם, commonly in English ‘Adam’ or ‘the man’) suggests ‘humanity’ and is linked in the text to ha-adamah (האדמה), meaning the soil.

When YHWH Elohim places the man in the garden, the latter is assigned to that place with a double purpose: to serve it and to guard it. Some readers, not unreasonably, discern priestly resonances in this assignment and relate garden and temple as almost interchangeable features of YHWH’s living space on earth. More straight-forward—if not exactly prosaic—translations choose words like till and keep.

And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Genesis 2:8–15 NRSV)

Famously, the first couple fails at this task. The appearance of an astute serpent invades the garden’s equanimity with deceptive guile, so fracturing the relational web that might have developed it as a paradise. It is plausible to assume that the couple possessed both the authority and the means to guard the garden from the usurping presence. Sadly, they did not do so.

In consequence the man and the woman find themselves exiled not only from each other but also from the garden itself. Like their eventual Israelite successors, the community divides and the people are expelled to a place of wandering that lies to the east of the soil that had been promised to them.

Then the LORD God said, See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’— therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:22–24 NRSV)

Humanity, in the persons of its progenitors, finds itself the object rather than the subject of guarding. Insofar as access to and care of YHWH’s living space is concerned, they are no longer the guards but now the intruders. In addition, the guarding role no longer appears in their relationship to the place. They now simply serve or till it. They have become, in a sense, the enemy, albeit one clothed and watched over by YHWH in an arrangement that has become decidedly distant.

Yet even east of Eden, the dignity of humankind’s commission has not become entirely lost. After one of the couple’s sons (Cain, lance) murders another (Abel, a vapor) in a jealous rage related to the now mediated access to their Maker, YHWH questions the fratricide.

Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Genesis 4:8–9 NRSV)

With tragic pathos, the son of a couple doomed by their illicit acquisition of knowledge professes ignorance about the community’s most basic fact: the whereabouts of one of its own. What is more, he rejects the very purpose of his race. Virtually de-humanizing himself in the act, Cain spits damning words in the face of his Creator: ‘I will not be my brother’s guard!’.

Cain chooses bitter solitude. His shadow falls heavy upon us.

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