Explorations in Reconciliation

New Directions in Theology

Joseph Liechty, David Tombs, Joseph Liechty, David Tombs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781032099842
• eBook ISBN: 9781317137559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Theologians and scholars of religion draw on rich resources to address the complex issues raised by political reconciliation in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. The questions addressed include: Can truth set a person, or a society, free? How is political forgiveness possible? Are political, personal, and spiritual reconciliation essentially related? Explorations in Reconciliation brings Catholic, Protestant, Mennonite, Jewish and Islamic perspectives together within a single volume to present some of the most relevant theological work today.

The Open Access version of this book, available at
http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/ISBN, has been made available under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The support of the Irish School of Ecumenics Trust in making this OA version possible is gratefully acknowledged.

PART I

RELIGIOUS RESOURCES FOR RECONCILIATION

CHAPTER 1

The Heart of the Stranger¹

Marc Gopin

The concept of stranger in human experience is relevant to almost all relationships. We human beings constantly create both very large and very small societies in which someone is a stranger to that society. Simultaneously we ourselves frequently experience varying degrees of estrangement in one setting or another. From a religious point of view, there is always the question hovering over our experience as to whether we are in close relation to or estranged from God at any given time.

The centrality of the stranger in both law and metaphor in biblical religions is at least one key to how a believer is supposed to love the other who is different and how the believer may also be loved by others or by God. The idea of a stranger who is also beloved holds in tension the ethical experience of love together with the ontological reality of human differences and separation. The concept of stranger, the living reality of strangers, and the laws obligating love for the stranger are therefore highly suggestive as to how believers can create community without consuming unique identities, how we can be both strangers to each other in our uniqueness and differences but also beloved, and how we, through our ability to meet and coexist, thereby embrace and welcome home the ultimate Stranger to this world, the Divine Presence. The God of the Bible seems to be occasionally at home in the midst of human beings and occasionally alienated by our abominable behaviour, but always hoping that our own embrace of strangers becomes the basis for welcoming the Divine stranger into the community of human beings.

In this chapter I explore the theological centrality of the stranger or sojourner, the ger, in the Hebrew Bible. I also explore theological approaches to boundaries between self and the ultimate Other, the Divine Presence, and the nature of coexistence between different beings. These themes are all dealt with extensively in the Hebrew Bible. It is a Bible that Jews and Christians share, even if I see it through the overarching lens of rabbinic Judaism’s 2000-year-old religious constructs whereas Christians see it through the lens of the New Testament and 2000 years of Christian traditions. In the final pages I turn to some pragmatic integration of these theological concepts with theories of conflict analysis and resolution in the context of complex cultural situations.

God, the Stranger, and the Boundaries of Coexistence

When I use the term ‘the Other’ I am, of course, engaged with Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and many others attempting to understand this space or boundary between the individual and the person or the world, including the God or the Sacred, that the individual encounters. In addition, much of what I say about the self and the Other refers to collective selves as well, to whole ethnic, religious or national groups in their encounters with ‘other’ distinct groups. I acknowledge, of course, that identity in the real world is more ambiguous than any of these categories; we see ourselves as part of more than one collective identity – the human race, the nation, the clan, the family, the religion – and this complicates the question of self, other and boundaries.

The biblical creation story in Genesis is perhaps the most fundamental blueprint of biblically based cultures for everything that is right and wrong about human existence. It offers us a window into the biblical version of how, as human beings, we can create or destroy, construct society anew or perpetuate a morass of violence. The creation story also reveals God as Creator from out of this world, as the first biblical stranger who reaches across impassable boundaries to give birth, to nurture life, even as He or She is not completely part of it but rather in some undefined relationship.

Before we explore God the Stranger, however, we must engage a more fundamental discussion about of the nature of God. We think so often of an expansive and limitless concept of God, both in time and in space. Traditional Judaism, through the Hebrew Bible, shared with the world the concepts of a Divine Being who is prior to the universe, a Creator who is eternal and beyond this world. And yet we cannot conceive of divinity without reference to this very universe.

When we say something is limitless we delimit it by adjectives of space and time. Thus, every traditional name of God refers in some way to a Divine relationship to the physical world. Even the most obscure name, eyn-sof, literally ‘without end’, used in classical Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, to refer to the utterly unknowable aspect of God, is conditioned by concepts of space and time. Talk of limitlessness has as its referent the limitations of physical dimensions.

Nevertheless, tradition does affirm a concept of God beyond physical existence. Maimonides, certainly, was the most keenly aware of the problematic nature of Divine address and attribution precisely because that attribution cannot move beyond the physical universe. In his The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides realised that the attribution of positive qualities to God, such as kindness, implies a kind of limitation of God to the physical universe. And he was very conscious that a Jewish God cannot be collapsed into the universe.

It appears, then, that we have an inescapable paradox in the relationship of God to the world. This has been encapsulated traditionally by the terms ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’. But this is an uncomfortable paradox and each term or way of describing God is fraught with problems. God as transcendent means little, because we have no way to intellectualise what is beyond space and time. God as immanent is scandalous when analysed carefully, at least from a strictly Jewish monotheistic view; it seems to either justify earthly idolatry, or render the concepts of Creation and Creator meaningless. How can a Creator create Himself if He is immanent in the universe? How can an Immanent Presence, solely defined in such a way, and completely identified with an object, be itself the Creator of that object? Furthermore, traditional Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah have understood well the perils of over-identifying God and the world. If God is defined only as immanent in the world or identified with it, then the entire conception of good and evil, virtue and sin, falls apart. In the modern period, no one understood as well as Hermann Cohen, the German idealist philosopher, that the ethical ‘ought’ has no reality, and the political ought of messianic Judaism, that is, the ideal of creating the good society on earth, has no reality unless they are distinguished from the immanent ‘is’. God must be the source of the ethical ought and the political ought, and in order to play that role, to give those oughts ontological reality, God must be even more transcendent than those very oughts. The dream of what should take place in the human relationship to the universe must have reality if virtue and sin, mitsvah and averah, are to be meaningful categories. But they cannot be real unless they are given a source in Transcendence. Either the dream of what is not yet real has reality or it is simply the play of neural transmitters, synapses and the reconstruction of emotional states. If it is the latter one could argue that this can make no serious claim on the human conscience. In order for it to be more than that, it must in some way reflect what is not quite of this world. If God exists in Transcendence then it is possible for Good to exist in Transcendence, and then it can make a claim on the physical world. It can say to members of the physical world, ‘Strive to reach beyond yourselves and your current moral level of behaviour.’

Here is the paradox, however. If God is not immanent in at least some sense of that term then the practice and experience of religion – as the vast majority of human beings have understood it – is impossible. If God is not immanent then prayer means nothing because no one is listening in any real sense; the soul as an image of God, or an expression of Divine Presence, is a figment of the imagination; hope in Divine aid to change oneself or change the world is foolhardy; and the idea of Divine truths occurring to human minds at some critical juncture, in the forms of prophecy or inspiration, is a pipe dream. This does not preclude a serious commitment to the idea of the Good (or to the idea of mitsvah and averah, which emanate from a concept of the Good) that emerges from a posited faith in or knowledge of Divine transcendence. But most of deep religious experience is gone, leaving the emotional life of the individual without spiritual moorings.

There is one way to solve this dilemma, and that is to hold Divine Immanence and Divine Transcendence in dramatic tension. Since at least one pole of that dramatic tension involves a reality that is unknowable then the only way to understand this is by use of metaphor, which the Torah (meant here as the Hebrew Bible, but also the texts of rabbinic Judaism) provides through one of its most prominent themes and concerns: the sojourner or guest, also called a stranger or the ger. From Abraham to Ruth, from the Exodus stories to countless laws of interpersonal aid, from remonstrations in the five books of Moses to the social criticism of the prophets, there is no person of greater concern in the Bible than the stranger who is with us but not with us, whom we know but do not know, who is a source of great mystery and yet ancestral familiarity, whose treatment by us is ultimately a litmus test of whether we and our culture have succeeded or not in the eyes of God, and whose experience is essentially a yardstick of our moral stature. If we love the stranger, protect him and see to his needs, then our society passes a kind of Divine test, and we also have the emotional and spiritual fulfilment of identifying completely with an echo of ourselves. The admonition in Exodus 23:9 to not oppress the stranger is given poignant emotional depth by saying to the listeners that you know the heart of the stranger having been strangers in the Land of Egypt, having experienced what the worst kind of estrangement is when one human being makes another into an object, into a slave. Loving the stranger in the present becomes an opportunity to heal yourselves, heal your history, and also heal others through the existential meeting with and moral care for the Other who lives across a clear cultural, economic or political boundary.

The stranger or sojourner is the classic Other in monotheism. The sojourner is also, I would argue, a not so thinly veiled metaphor for God in this world. The God of the Bible loves the stranger intensely because it is He/She. In Jewish theology the she’khinah, the Divine Presence, can be both part of the innermost workings of our physical existence, and yet simultaneously hold from view Her mysterious identity. The she’khinah is immanent even though the true nature of God is distant, unknowable and estranged. We cannot find God or see God or even know how to do so without meeting the human stranger through love. The stranger is the key to the Divine paradox.

Before we can fully understand the relationship between God and the concept of stranger, however, we must ask, what is a stranger? A stranger is one who is foreign to us in many ways, utterly unknowable in some fashion, and yet is in some potential relation to us at the same time – someone who I at least begin to know in some way. We pass a stranger on the street, and we have no idea who she is; in the crowded cities we pass thousands of people whom we will never know; at the airport in some foreign city we will never know these strangers whom we have seen in a fleeting glimpse. We will never know their history, their habits, their dreams and their failures, no matter how we may long to know them. But at some moment we occupy the same space and time of the stranger. If a spectacular event had occurred as we passed these strangers, if the building had been hit by an earthquake and we had been trapped together, or if we together had helped save the life of a person suddenly gone into cardiac arrest, we might have created an intimate relationship transforming us from complete strangers into lifelong friends. But such is usually not meant to be. There is some element of tragedy in the fleeting encounter with strangers: an opportunity lost perhaps for the greater unity of the human spirit on this earth that is achieved when strangers become committed to each other through some shared experience. In Jewish theology there is an element of the Divine in every human being, in every stranger, and at the moment of the brief encounter of strangers who meet is the possibility of the reunion of the Divine with itself, but it remains unfulfilled. There is some element of divine tragedy in strangers who have failed to be reunited, though the reunion seemed so possible at that instant. But the public space – between families and groups, at the border of the lives of strangers, especially where there is tragedy – also presents an immense opportunity for spiritual discovery and ultimate moral fulfilment.

Estrangement is insidiously pervasive in human experience. Let’s return to the strangers passing in the airport. Even if we had met those strangers in the airport, would they have ever ceased completely to be strangers? Who knows another human being so well that he cannot say of the other that he is a stranger? I have lived with and loved my wife for twenty years now, and I have not begun to recount to her all the events of my life, and it is not for lack of trying. If she cannot see all that I see in my mind’s eye, if she cannot have my memories, feel my longings and my traumas, feel my sources of shame or see the history of my fantasies (thank God!), will she ever really know me? Do I ever completely cease to be a stranger?

There is an elastic quality to the concept of stranger that allows it to elude definition. For example, can you love a stranger? The biblical tradition repeatedly demands the most intimate care for the ger, the stranger, including the command to love the ger (Deut. 10:19). But how can we feel these love emotions even as we are estranged from another, or even as we perceive the other as stranger? It seems logical on a certain level that at the moment in which we experience love for the stranger, the category of stranger must become absurd. Yet the biblical text holds love and the stranger in paradoxical tension. As we ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Religious Resources for Reconciliation
• Part II The Dynamics of Reconciliation and Christian Theology
• Part III The Ongoing Challenges of Reconciliation
• Index