Page 50
But they will say, ‘It’s hopeless! For we are going to follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart.’ Jeremiah 18:12 NASB
It’s hopeless! – Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s book, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, is a difficult read. Just so we clear up the title, it is not about the Christian idea of rapture. It’s about the midrashic material surrounding the book of Exodus. I’ve read all her books, but this one is tough, not because it isn’t a brilliant exposé of midrash but because it is complicated. Nevertheless, there are moments when her insights simply can’t be ignored. Pages 48 to 50 virtually leap with pregnant womb kicks in their application to our society, the Western debacle. Just listen:
Demonstrating the connection between Jeremiah 18:12 and Exodus 3:7, she writes:
“‘Ve’omru no’ash—they will say, ‘It is no use. We will keep following our own plans; each of us will act in the willfulness of his evil heart’ (Jer 18:12). God here predicts that their response will be a kind of autism: they will simply continue walking in the wake of their own thoughts, sunk into the old structures, like Winnie-the-Pooh pursuing the fabulous Heffalump round and round the same tree.”[1]
If I were politically and religiously incorrect (I’m sure you’ve noticed), I would point out that this is precisely what I see in both society and the Church. Walking in circles because they want to continue to follow their own plans, their own views. For society, business as usual. For the Church, theological autism.
But this isn’t the end. No, not at all. She follows with:
“Nadezhda Mandelstam, for instance, writes of the ‘sickness—lethargy, plague, hypnotic trance or whatever one calls it—that affected all those who committed terrible deeds in the name of the “New Era,” . . . They . . . imagined that time had stopped—this, indeed, was the chief symptom of their sickness. We had, you see, been led to believe that in our country nothing would ever change again.’”[2]
Isn’t this also our society and the Church? If Wyschogrod is right (remember him?), the Church has completely mistaken (perhaps deliberately) God’s election of Israel, and, furthermore, misunderstood the basic idea of sin. If Heschel is right, the Church has called its mother damned or blind and has abandoned the God of Israel for the “Universal Christ.” And it continues to hold on to these ideas because it has been taught, and blindly accepts, that “nothing need ever change.” After all, how could all those Church fathers and so many great theologians through the centuries have been mistaken? God Himself would not have allowed such error, right? (Ah, but we conveniently forget about Copernicus.)
Zornberg continues:
“‘Living with a lie’ is a denial of responsibility, it is a token of a demoralized person. ‘The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.’ . . . Living within the truth, on the other hand, is a moral act, uncalculating, generously responsible. The hidden ferment in the semidarkness is ‘difficult to chart or analyze.’ When it bursts through the moribund surface of life within the lie, it has a shock effect on those embedded within that system.”[3]
For years those who attend my lectures have been shocked when we look deeply into the text. Why should that happen? Can it be that seeing is a function of a priori assumptions, and since their past assumptions included the doctrine that God would not have allowed the Church to commit major errors (since the Church is God’s elect now), the shock of realizing you got it wrong is just too much to bear? Can it be that the Church deliberately did not educate its parishioners in exegesis, teaching dogma instead? Can it be that you never asked, or were told you weren’t allowed to ask? And all along we lived within the lie. Without even recognizing it, we were Mitzrayim.
“An automatism, in which the possibility of living within the truth has been driven underground, into a ‘hidden sphere’: this, existentially, is what Egypt (Heb. Mitzrayim similar to meitzarim—that ‘world within straits’) represents, . . . All who are involved in ‘building’ become the system, serve its automatism.”[4]
“To build, in this sense, is to shore up the system; ultimately, it is to be impoverished, endangered. . . The effect of Egypt, mitzrayim, on language is, likewise, to erode meaning in communication, in the interest of slogans that no one reads, or even sees. Language is absorbed into the panorama of ‘the way it has to be’—the ‘auto-totality of society.’”[5]
Do you now realize that you and I were impoverished, endangered, actually put to death by the system we so naively embraced? We grew up in Egypt and never left, despite God’s attempts to break us from the habit. Our ability to communicate with God and others was turned into slogans (“Jesus died for my sins,” “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” “You can’t get to heaven unless you accept Jesus”) that no one cares about, because, as the doctrine says, this is the way it has to be.
Really? Does it really have to be this way? Or are you dying from the Egyptian disease?
Topical Index: mitzrayim, Egypt, Zornberg, lie, truth, Jeremiah 18:12
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus(Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 48.
