Paying Attention To The Sky

The Bible In Life
Many times I have sat by the bedside of someone who is sick and read the Psalms. Psalms are the personal prayers addressed to God, often by one who is in trouble or peril. They act as a remarkable channel for the anxieties and hopes of one who is ill.

When the time came for me to be the one in the bed, not beside the bed, I turned to the same source: Knocked out by the chemotherapy and unable to carry on the usual tasks of the day, one verse kept recurring in my mind, Psalm 118:5. It is usually translated “from out of the depths I called unto God; He answered me and set me free.” But the “depths” can be translated as “narrowness” and free as “expansively.” A literal translation is – “From my narrowness I called to God and I was answered by breadth, O God.” My world grew through pain and the increasing recognition of the ways in which it both opened my heart and helped me draw closer to others in pain. A single verse offered a world and way of seeing that gave me strength and the breadth promised by the verse itself.

My spirit opened to an infinitely larger Spirit. When in pain, we tighten up like a fist. It is easy to push others away — after all, they are not feeling the pain — and to turn increasingly inward. Only I matter; only my pain is real. The Psalm urged me to expand, allowing me to embrace others, to understand that pain need not always be private, unshared. Open up, the Psalmist taught; both in heaven and on earth you are not alone.

The Psalmist also connected my pain to the human community throughout the ages. Thousands of years ago a poet gave words to what was deep within me. A hand reached across the generations to take my own. That, too, seemed like more than just a human gift; it was a gift from God.

Biblical sufferers touch us through their shared pain. In our fractured and difficult lives, reading a chronicle of difficulty and failure can be encouraging and even healing. The heroes of the Bible are not perfect, their marriages are not storybook, their relations with children not friction-less. All of us who struggle with real problems of families, of work, can look to the Bible not as one looks at a fairy tale, but with the recognition that everything has changed since the time of Abraham and Sarah except human nature

Great Readers
Walt Whitman wrote that in order for there to be great books there must be great readers.

For a book to remain powerful throughout generations it cannot have a single meaning. Scripture, like great poetry, is not reducible to other words; that is, one cannot paraphrase it and capture the totality of its meaning. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil” simply does not mean the same thing as “even if I come close to dying I am not worried that something bad will happen.” The words, particularly in their original Hebrew, contain nuances and resonance that go beyond any attempt to simplify them. T. S. Eliot was once asked by a woman the meaning of the following line in his poem ‘Ash Wednesday”: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree.” Eliot’s response was “Madame, what the line means is ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree.” Eliot must have known that any explanation of meaning would make the line less than it was, so he resisted all explanation. Interpreters of scripture, understanding the infinitude of meanings, take the opposite approach from Eliot. Instead of refusing to interpret, they never stop.

Nor do the commentators always read the Bible literally. For example, the militarism of the Bible’s language has not been taken at face value. The exhortations to conquer the land of Israel did not incite violent plots or wars throughout the middle ages.

Those who decided that settlement and, if necessary, armed conflict would restore the Jews to their land were the early Zionists, very few of whom were religious. In other words, those Jews who took the Bible most literally were not themselves observant Jews. And those who most revered the Bible did not read it literally. When war broke out, religious communities were vastly underrepresented in the army. Rather, those who were far more influenced by secular society — while nourished by the biblical vision of the Jews resettling in their land to be sure — were the ones who ended up fighting.

If you read only the Bible you would not expect such a result. The secularists should be the pacifists and the traditionalists should be the ones prepared to fight. That the reverse is true tells us something we already know — the Bible offers different messages depending upon the care with which it is read and upon the reader’s approach.

Another example of how the Bible must be read in the context of the culture is offered by Matthew 10: 35-36: “For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”

Someone who reads this verse in isolation will assume that Christians have very poor family relations. Moreover, they will assume that it is considered laudable by Christianity to have poor family relations. I have yet to find a serious interpreter who believes the desire of Jesus in this passage is to cause families to fall apart. Many contend that it is a sometimes sad and inevitable result of one following a path of faith of which others disapprove. Whether that is the correct interpretation matters little.

What does matter is that all traditions agree that in order to read scripture there must be some understanding of the overall intent of the Bible. With the question of war above and family here, the Bible is not Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a place where a single verse can be isolated from all that precedes and follows it. The Bible both reflects the culture in which it is read and helps shape that culture. One sentence is no more reflective of the whole Bible than one gesture is of an entire personality.

At times it appears religion’s detractors believe nothing in the Bible except for accounts of cruelty. But in order to understand any book or any idea we have to see what it means as it is reflected through lived lives, through an individual’s and a people’s journey.

How Did They Judge The Bible?
How did ancient readers judge the Bible? The answer is — by the Bible.

Let us take the infamous verse of the rebellious son of Deuteronomy chapter 21. The Bible instructs parents of a gluttonous, drunkard, disobedient son, who will not listen to his parents, to declare his rebelliousness before the community and stone him as punishment. The ancient rabbis, whose entire lives were defined by immersion in the biblical text, could not abide the idea that a parent could be responsible for the stoning of his own child. They knew quite well that in ancient societies children were routinely stoned and sacrificed, the idea that parents would never put their own children to death is contradicted by the ancient world as well as innumerable dynastic struggles where family was often the first to be killed.

But the rabbis were conditioned by the morality of the Bible itself. Other cultures did sacrifice children but not those shaped by scripture. When confronted with the question of a rebellious child, the Talmud unambiguously states, “A rebellious son (as defined by the Torah) never was and never will be.”

The Bible’s most devoted readers understood that the Bible as a whole forbids the savagery of children being stoned for disobedience. So they declared it should not be taken literally. For the Bible was then as now to be understood as a guide to God’s goodness in this world. Those sections that seemed to contradict such a reading were considered improperly understood, and had to be reinterpreted to enhance the Bible’s message of holiness.

Among the most notorious of all the troublesome passages in the Bible is the narrowly averted sacrifice of a child. The binding of Isaac (a more accurate name than “the sacrifice of Isaac” since Isaac indeed lives) is one of the most commented-upon stories in biblical history. In the twenty-second chapter of Genesis, God calls upon Abraham to take his son up to an altar and offer him as a burnt sacrifice. Abraham: gets up early in the morning, walks three days with his son, climbs with him up the mountain, binds him, and lifts the knife when he is stopped just in time by an angel. This story, reflected in the story of Jesus in the New Testament (carrying the cross as Isaac carried the wood up the mountain, each about to be sacrificed) and retold (with changes) in the Koran, is central to all the Western monotheistic traditions.

Christopher Hitchens adverts to it as follows: “There is no softening the plain meaning of this frightful story.” Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion elaborates, “By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense. “I was only obeying orders.”

Let us leave aside that Abraham never makes any such claim or feels the need to do so. What strikes me is Hitchens’s almost offhand comment leading up to his condemnation of this story: “Before monotheism arose, the altars of primitive society reeked with blood, much of it human and some of it infant.” Just so. That infamous practice ended with monotheism, and the binding of Isaac tells us how it happened.

The story is about the willingness of a believer to admit that the One who created all can ultimately decide the fate of everything in the created world. Abraham is not by nature slavish or cowardly; in a previous chapter he vigorously argued with God to spare the inhabitants of Sodom, who have no moral claim on him save that they are fellow human beings (Genesis 19). But he takes Isaac to the altar. In this he acted as did all the pagans around him, showing that this new God, the real God, the intangible God whom one cannot see or carve of stone, can command the same devotion as the ancient pagan gods. He does this only to learn, however, that while his passion is honored, the action is not permitted. The true God would not claim such a sacrifice. As both ancient and modern scholars of the Bible explain, the story teaches that one does not need to offer the ultimate sacrifice to feel the ultimate sense of devotion.

Sacrifice is at the heart of religious ideology. It can be perverted into cruelty or a misguided martyrdom. But it can equally prove to be the mainspring of goodness and nobility. It is instructive to hear Bertrand Russell and Martin Luther King Jr., an atheist and a preacher, respectively, on the willingness to be sacrificed. When asked in an interview once if there is anything for which he would be willing to die, Russell wryly answered, “Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.” King, on the other hand, said, “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.” Sacrifice is not about a foolish willingness to give up one’s life, or the life of another, for oppressive ideology; that is simple tyranny. Sacrifice is the belief that one has duties to the world that go beyond simply existing in it.

The bible presses upon us core issues of life, which we too often choose to evade: the relation of parents and children, what we cherish and what we sacrifice, whether there are ideals for which we are willing to give our lives. Reading the Bible moves us to deepen our lives by reflecting on ultimate issues. Part of the resistance to religion, and to the Bible, is that it entails grappling with profound questions. It is unlike any other book; not only eternal but urgent, a book that returns us to the world more alive to its wonder and more compassionate for its pain.

Who Wrote The Bible?
Some understand the bible as collaboration, as a record of how human beings experienced God. For others it is the literal word of God. In no case is it the only path to knowledge of God.

God speaks through nature, including human nature and through history as well as through scripture. Science helps us understand God by unraveling the subtleties of nature. Sociology and history help us understand God by looking at patterns through time. Psychology and art illuminate human character and experience. Scripture enables us to understand the way in which these insights can contribute to the Divine mandate to live with compassion and seek; peace.

In the past few hundred years, biblical criticism has challenged the idea that the Bible is the literal word of God. Powerful arguments have been advanced based on new techniques of analyzing texts and other discoveries from archeology and social sciences. Whatever one’s conclusion, reading the Bible can still be an experience unlike any other in literature. It is simply not equivalent to reading Gilgamesh and Homer, Milton and Shakespeare. The Bible speaks from a particular historical moment, but also from beyond the ages. As I experience this with the Hebrew Bible so does the Christian with the New Testament and a Muslim with the Koran. For thousands of years people read the Bible with a deep sense of wisdom imparted and peace granted. They returned to it, as millions across the world do today, again and again, knowing that there was more to understand than they had yet understood.

Strange and powerful sections of the Bible, rather than being candidates for ridicule, are opportunities for insight. Such possibilities may not unfold to the casual reader and indeed there are things that take a lifetime to understand. Quite often, different understandings of the book are appropriate for different stages of life. For much of the world the Bible calls to mind what the Greeks said of Plato — whatever road of life you walk down, you find him on the way back. To take one example: Several of the anti-theistic works ridicule the final commandment “Thou shalt not covet.” It is reckoned tyrannical because one cannot legislate emotions. In the Hebrew Bible the famous commandments are not termed commandments but sayings (Devarim). That permits a nineteenth-century rabbi to explain it as follows:

Thou shalt not covet is not a command, but a promise. Observe the other nine and you will live a life that is not wracked by desire for things you cannot have. You will be at peace with what you were given. Once again the Bible yields wisdom and serenity when approached not as an “ordinary book” characterized by what Sam Harris calls “obscene celebrations of violence” but as a guide through the obstacles of life. The Bible can be mocked, just as all seriousness and insight can be mocked. The mockery does not advance the skills we need to live; cynicism makes a good sword but a poor shield.

Anthropomorphism
Philosopher Daniel Dennett writes that some believers think that to ask questions like “Does God have eyelids?” is to be insulting. Meaning no disrespect, I don’t find it disrespectful. It is simpleminded, however. People who pledge allegiance to the physical world may not appreciate that everything nonphysical requires metaphors. The Bible’s descriptions of God are not intended literally. To ask if God has eyelids is as sensible as asking if kindness has a pancreas.

There is no escaping physical description; in talking about spiritual matters we use words taken from the physical world, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his essay “Nature”:

Every word which is used to express, a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature.

God communicates with human beings, so we speak of God having a mouth. God shows love, so we speak of God having a heart. Faith is the reality that can only be spoken of in poetry.

The Bible’s poetry encourages us to see the world in super mundane — more than material or physical — terms. Religious perception is a poetic faculty, keeping alive within us the reality of a world that cannot be understood by logic or reason alone. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” writes the Psalmist (Psalms 19), encouraging. us to see the stars as conveying something of the grandeur and beauty of the world. They do not literally speak, of course, but the world has been re-enchanted through the poetry of faith.

The Bright Book Of Life
The bible tells of carnage, cruelty, inexplicable evil. In part this is because the Bible is in fact what D. H. Lawrence called the novel — the big bright book of life. Everything is here: Stories of heroism and pettiness. Selfishness and deceit. Desperation and triumph. It is not always clear what derives from the dark heart of humanity and what is a teaching from God.

Underneath the tumult is the lived reality of God. Through warfare and family relations, lawgiving and discipleship, inspiration and disappointment, the current of God’s will pulses through the lives of biblical characters. The Bible presents God but does not seek to “prove” God. Faith is not a proposition but an orientation to the universe, a certainty that accompanies the characters through their days and nights, and if he is fortunate, accompanies the reader as well. Recall the first time childhood friends made an observation about your family. Or perhaps when you were married and your spouse began to tell you what your family of origin seemed like to her or to him. Some of their observations were eye-opening. You never noticed before how your mother shut down when asked personal questions or how your father’s reminiscences did not correspond with your own. But at the same time, there were things you could not explain that you understood: why your sister was treated differently by your parents, or the undercurrent of love beneath apparent conflict.

Why is your understanding different? It is not only because you are part of the family. Being raised in the family has given you a perspective that cannot be achieved from the outside.

Those who read the Bible inattentively do not understand that the Bible equips its readers with the means to under-stand it. To read through it once is not to know it. Immersion allows a new kind of understanding. The same is true of religious system: one can’t evaluate them on first acquaintance. Tourists visiting a foreign country easily find flaws or oddities: The way people eat, the food they serve, their dress or speech, or their child-raising techniques may seem alien and unorthodox. In time, however, one begins to see it with different eyes. Theory gives way to experience. Knowledge becomes personal. We can only see with our own eyes.

Not even science, contrary to what many think; strips away this subjectivity. As the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi notes, all knowledge is inevitably personal knowledge. Knowledge gets filtered through individuals, all of whom were brought up in a certain family, culture, language, and place. There is no perfectly objective view. Religious traditions do not just offer propositions to evaluate by the light of reason. To embrace a tradition is to stand in a new place. Each of us brings to the tradition our own matrix of understanding and the tradition alters and colors it, creating something new. Standing inside a tradition, the world looks different. To call it simply “true” or “false” is to reduce a world view to a multiple-choice exam.

As a junior in college, I spent a year in Scotland at Edinburgh University. One of the first days of walking to class there was a small, steady drizzle. I did not yet know that there was almost always a small, steady drizzle. I grabbed an umbrella and started on my way.

The Scottish students with whom 1 walked, once they stopped laughing, ripped the umbrella from my hands. They explained that the drizzle was simply part of the world, and soon would be part of my world. Only an outsider would carry an umbrella.

Naturally I thought that was ridiculous. Rain, after all, is rain. Wet is a fact. You cannot pretend wet is dry—at least not if you are sane. But I was new and wanted to be liked, so I went along. Sure enough, in a short time I was walking with everyone else and not noticing the rain. It had become part of the world in which I lived, and seemed natural.

There are two ways to see this sort of experience. I could be sadly deceived—these Scottish rakes fooled the naïve American. Or you could imagine that in fact the world began to look different because I was given new eyes. Reality did not change, but my understanding of it and adjustment to it changed. I was not now “wrong” when I had been “right.”

When we read the Bible, there are some passages that sound savage to our ears. Still, a lot depends upon how we are taught to read the Bible, and whether we allow the Bible’s own voice to condition our reading. What seems at first wild and fraught proves to be a window through which we can take the measure of our own world. We have to decide how the Bible fits in our lives; as the Scottish poet Andrew Lang said about facts, some people use them as a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than for illumination, You can find much in the Bible to support any reading of it, but if you read it for illumination, the world changes.

The Talmud tells of an idolater who is interested in converting to Judaism. He approaches the Rabbi Shammai with the request that the rabbi teach him Judaism while standing on one foot. Shammai, believing that he is being mocked, or his faith belittled, chases the man away. The same man then approaches Hillel. Hillel lived more than half a century before the birth of Jesus, and he spent his life immersed in the Bible and rabbinic interpretations.

What for this rabbi is the essence of the tradition? Here is his response: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole of Torah — the rest is commentary. Now go and learn.”

With all we hear about the presumed cruelty and barbarity of scripture, how could someone whose entire life was the Bible answer in such a way? Where did Hillel learn that this was “the whole of Torah”? Hillel is one of the two or three greatest authorities of the rabbinic period. This is the word of a great sage who did not read simply a sentence or story or pluck at random from a sacred text, but lived the full text. Even the greatest book relies on being read with an understanding heart. Hillel demonstrated what the book can mean.

One who reads the characterizations of the Koran, similarly, may not realize that the five pillars of Islam are belief, prayer, giving (tithing to the needy), fasting, and pilgrimage. The test will always be how the book plays out in life. For Jews, Christians, and today most poignantly for Muslims, the measure of meaning for scripture will be the way in which its adherents act in the world. Whatever gifts God gives us have value in life only as they are filtered through a human soul.

The Bible is preeminently a book about righteousness. Again and again we hear concern for the widow, the orphan, the one who is bereaved, bereft, hopeless, alone, No one can say the Bible is meaningful to them if they do not feel a mandate to lessen poverty and alleviate suffering. When the prophets criticize Israel it is in the name of Israel that they speak — what Israel should be, what faith demands. For all the assaults of unbelievers, the ones who are hardest on the faithful are the faithful, for the world sorely needs passionate goodness, and we so often fall short.

More than thirty years have passed since I left the empty synagogue sanctuary of my youth. I thought I was closing the door forever on its teachings. A part of me needed to do just that; faith seemed too childish and I thought myself an adult.

Even more, I could not truly come to faith until I had left. The Bible was to me a fairy tale because I had not lived long enough to catch up with some of its teachings. Coming to it anew years later, having lived, having accumulated some scars and drawn close to others who were far wiser than I, the words of the prophet appeared as a challenge to me, explaining what God asks of us: “To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Decades after walking out of the sanctuary, I have grown to believe faith enables us to do this, and so I have gratefully returned.