Wrestling With God And Self

 Marilynne Robinson's insights in her essays on faith illuminate the heart of Judaism, reframing the Old Testament as the private act of a people striving to make sense of themselves and the world around them...

Even pious critics seem never to remember that, in the Old Testament, the Jews were talking among themselves, interpreting their own experience to themselves.  Every negative thing we know about them, every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgement.  Who but the ancient Jews would have thought to blame themselves for, in effect, lying along the invasion route of the Babylonians?  They preserved and magnified their vision of the high holiness of God by absorbing into themselves responsibility for their sufferings, and this made them passionately self-accusatory, in ways no other people would have thought of being. This incomparable literature would surely have been lost if they had imagined the use it would be put to, and had written to justify themselves and to defend their descendants in the eyes of the nations rather than to ponder their life in openness toward God.  By what standard but their own could Israel have been considered ungrateful or rebellious or corrupt?  Granting crimes and errors, which they recorded, and preserved and pondered the records of for centuries, and which were otherwise so historically minor that no one would ever have heard of them – how do these crimes compare with those of other peoples, their contemporaries and ours? The grandeur of the Old Testament, and the fact that such great significance is attached to it, distracts readers from a sense of its unique communal inwardness.  It is an endless reconciliation achieved at great cost by a people whose relation to God is astonishingly brave and generous.  To misappropriate it as a damning witness against the Jews and “the Jewish God” is vulgar beyond belief.  And not at all uncommon.  It is useful to consider how the New Testament would read, if it had gone on to chronicle the Crusades and the Inquisition.

The artwork of Gerald Chukwuma, a contemporary Nigerian artist, beautifully captures for me what it means to tangle with history and self understanding.