THE RIGHT QUESTION.  In the 1970's and 1980's, Robert McAfee Brown contributed frequently to the Christian Century magazine.  He referred often to an episode in Elie Wiesel's Night that runs more or less as follows.

Among the prisoners at Auschwitz was a particular boy who was a favorite of all the other inmates.  Wiesel goes to some length about how this boy  endeared himself to others.

Then occasion came when the Nazis determined to inflict a particularly harsh punishment on the population for some infraction.  They built a platform with three gallows on it, side by side.  They randomly seized two men and hung them on the gallows to the left and right.  They seized that boy and hung him in the middle.

They compelled all the prisoners to line up and pass before the platform to look at the hung men.  As they approached, the man in line before Wiesel's narrator said, "Where is God?  Where is God now?"  The narrator answered, "There he is — up there on the gallows."

No doubt the story's Christian overtones impressed Brown.  Nonetheless, here are the right question and right answer.  Where is God?  In any instance of victimization, God is right there, with the victim, suffering as the victim suffers.

Christian mythology has this mediated by the incarnation and kenosis.  We say God condescended to become a human being, inter alia to redeem us from events like this.  One errs to underestimate the enormity of this condescension.  We say, indeed, that God willingly took on the humiliation of entry into the world of blood and feces, sweat and tears.  One who wants it to be otherwise may turn one's face away.  If you want me to look straight on at the various atrocities enumerated previously on this thread, I say one must look straight on at what we say God did —
for you.  For you.

The right question and right answer don't depend on mythological mediation.


          EIN SOF.  If God is all, and knows all, it follows that God must also feel all. How can One who knows intimately the inward workings of every single atom in the universe, fail to know also the vexations of a human soul? Or is God without compassion for God's children?


          RESPONSIBILITY.  I am composing this after worship Sunday 08/07/11, and these questions were on my mind throughout the service. The appointed texts — 1 Kings 19:9-18, Romans 10:5-15, and Matthew 14:22-33 — all stress the need to keep one's attention here-and-now, and on God's Word in the here-and-now; without distraction by storm or earthquake, wind or fire. The Romans passage includes Paul's quotation of Deuteronomy 30:11-14.

In this congregation, in the worship service at times the spirit of altruism is palpable. It seems infinite and will not recognize any boundary of race, sex, class, ethnicity or sect. Each person present faces myriad opportunities to do good in the here-and-now.

One can wish that the fabric of existence would rise up to resist anyone's yetzer hara, but this does not happen. I don't know why. But the angst of wishing what isn't were so, if I dwell on it, will distract me from the opportunities I have to do good here-and-now.

My responsibility extends only to that which is within my reach. I cannot reach into the past and undo others' misdeeds; they are literally out of my hands. But the angst of wishing I could what I can't, if I dwell on it, will distract me from the opportunities I have to do good here-and-now.


          PRECOGNITION.  One can wish that precognition were possible to the extent that one can be certain of God's plan for one's life. Then one would never again have to take risks or make decisions; one would never again be the victim of anyone's errors. But this does not happen. Whatever victories one may meet along the way, the wheel turns round to the point where we began, with the right question and the right answer.
 

P.

“What I admire is honesty and truth, no matter who, or what, the sources are.”
— Uri Yosef