About Blank

They are all plain to the discerning and straightforward to those who find knowledge.  Proverbs 8:9  Robert Alter

Plain – Wisdom cries in the streets: “My ways are all completely clear to those who seek.”  But when I think seriously about this claim, I feel like those times I’ve tried to open a web page and got the message “about blank.”  The more I study the history of religions and the development of the biblical text, the less I find anything nākōaḥ (straightforward, plain).  Perhaps it’s no accident that a slight modification in the consonant (nākal) means “crafty, deceitful.”  Oh, how I often pine off the “simple faith,” the kind that never got involved in any questions about how or where or when.  Perhaps Wisdom’s claim is only good for those who are blissfully ignorant, for it seems that as soon as we pry under the surface of any of these ancient spiritual texts we come across all kinds of problems.

Or maybe I’m just looking at this the wrong way.  Maybe my penchant for questioning is really a roadblock to being confident about what I believe because it forces me to look at things from the outside.  I do know what I believe.  I believe that most of what we call religion is the accumulation of centuries of tradition and revelation, massaged by the believing community itself to provide a guide to a way of life.  That’s a long way of saying that men and women do have some kind of experience of the divine, and they interpret that experience according to the cultural traditions of their age, trying their best to understand the implications of the experience in ways that enable them to behave accordingly.  So the precise applications of the revelation at Sinai for those recent ex-slaves present at the event will not be the same as the application of the revelation for us, three thousand years later.  Our interpretation of their experience will be viewed in terms of our traditions, our history, our temporal framework.  What was plain for them won’t be plain for us, but our application might still be quite straightforward in our paradigm.  Thus, for example, not eating a kid boiled in the mother’s milk might be just a straightforward prohibition against some pagan Canaanite ritual for the ex-slaves of Egypt, while it means that separation of meat and dairy in our paradigm.  From either perspective, it’s nākōaḥ.  It just isn’t nākōaḥ if I’m standing in the wrong paradigm.

This is so confusing.

What it means is that my faith is really a function not of the text but rather of the tradition and paradigm that interprets the text.  Since I am not the direct recipient of the experience, I have to rely on the text to tell me about the experience but even if I can somehow enter into the paradigm of those who had the experience, I will still have to rely on theirinterpretation of the experience as recorded in the text.  My faith, then, is not in the text.  It is in the integrity of the original author’s transmission of his or her experience through the text.  And that, it should be obvious, leave a lot of wiggle room.  What it comes down to is this: I believe because I trust that these original members of the audience communicated something very important to me via the text.  Exactly what that means to me will depend on my own paradigm perspective, but it starts with them.  That is at the core of my beliefs.  Something happened to them.  They tried to communicate what happened.  Their communication was, as it must be, couched in their own paradigm.  I can do my very best to try to enter that paradigm, but if I want to apply what they tried to communicate, it will have to be in my paradigm since that’s the only paradigm I really occupy.  If I want to hear what they heard and see what they saw, I’ll have to gain that perspective through the vehicle they provide me—what they wrote about it.  That’s the best I can do—until God shows up for me, and then I will have to try to communicate what that is like to you.

In the end, faith isn’t facts.  It’s shared experience, filtered by personal and communal conditions.  That’s why we can all reach for the Bible, claim it as our spiritual guide, and still come up with different answers.  It’s only plain from the inside.  Otherwise it’s “about blank.”

Topical Index: nākōaḥ, straightforward, plain, paradigm, Proverbs 8:9