Jon D. Levenson Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

Transcription

1 RBL 05/2009 Sweeney, Marvin Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah: Engaging Holocaust Theology Minneapolis: Fortress, Pp. xiii Paper. $ ISBN Jon D. Levenson Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts This volume is a learned and searching investigation of theological claims central to the Hebrew Bible that in the author s view have become deeply problematic in light of the Shoah, or Holocaust. The claims in question involve the power and justice of God, the guilt or innocence of the victims, and the ethical message to be inferred from God s apparent silence and inaction in the face of the near-annihilation of European Jewry. Marvin A. Sweeney s own approach seems to doubt God s power and justice, vigorously upholds the innocence of the victims and thus the outrageousness of God s failure to act, and argues that the problems posed by the Shoah call for human beings to take on greater responsibility for the sanctity, well-being, and fundamental justice of the world in which we live (22). After introducing his subject, Sweeney provides a succinct survey of the responses to the Shoah in a range of Jewish theologians who do not work in the critical study of the Hebrew, followed by a briefer discussion of the failure of the highly influential Christian biblical theologians, Walther Eichrodt and Gerhard von Rad, to face the challenge of the Shoah. The failure appears all the worse today, he shows, in light of the subsequent explosion of interest, on the part of both Jewish and Gentile scholars, not only in the Shoah itself but also in the role of anti-judaism in Christian theology. Particularly

2 problematic to Sweeney is von Rad s utter neglect of postbiblical Judaism and his corollary belief that the New Testament constitutes the basic substance of the future and the unexamined presuppositions of these titans of mid-twentieth-century Old Testament theology that both destructions [i.e., in 587 BCE and 70 CE] represented the righteous judgment of G-d (19). The countervailing themes of innocent suffering, victimization of the righteous, and God-abandonment prominent in the Gospel narratives were too often neglected in the Hebrew Bible, for reasons that are indefensible. The bulk of Sweeney s book proceeds in the order of the Jewish canon, with substantial discussions of the figures of Abraham and Moses, followed by an examination of selected passages from the Historical Books (with special attention to Jeroboam I, Manasseh, and Josiah), the Prophets, and the Writings. The volume then offers very short and rather thin examinations of the Gospels and rabbinic literature to show that the former are built on a problematic conviction of the righteousness and irreversibility of the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and that the latter contains valuable resources for moving beyond what is usually taken to be the standard Israelite view of the rewarding and punishing God. Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah is the work of a masterful senior scholar, impressively versed in scholarship on the Hebrew Bible (including German works not well enough known on this side of the Atlantic). Having thought long and hard about a wide range of texts and issues, its author now not only offers a worthy challenge to most biblical theologians but also illuminates many texts along the way. Even apart from the light Sweeney sheds on the biblico-theological problem of the Shoah, scholars and clergy interested in the Hebrew Bible should find his new book well worth reading. In a number of fields, the Shoah has provoked a reexamination of presuppositions and common attitudes, a process this book furthers by applying it to the critical study of the Hebrew Bible, where anti-judaism has, alas, not been lacking. Particularly striking is Sweeney s observation about the distaste some scholars feel for the book of Nahum on the grounds that its celebration of the fall of Nineveh evidences a love of violence and Judean hostility to foreign nations. What such scholars have forgotten, he insists, is that [s]uch an event would be akin to the downfall of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. Nahum is hardly a book about vengeance as many contend; it is a book about liberation from oppression (158). He demonstrates a similar wisdom in countering those who see the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah as motivated by hostility to Gentiles and by legalism and those who likewise set Third Isaiah and the book of Ruth in opposition to Ezra and Nehemiah. In all these cases, exegesis is too often influenced by distaste for Judaism rather than a clear view of the historical situations, the position of the texts within them, and precise nature of the relevant legal material.

3 Especially valuable as well are the places in which Sweeney shows that the presumed correlation of righteousness and well-being, on the one hand, and of sin and misfortune, on the other, bespeaks only one of several conceptions found in the Hebrew Bible. In the wake of the Shoah, the credibility of this correlation has disappeared (if it had any beforehand), and other conceptions, especially the one that underlies the lament literature, assume greater importance. Sweeney s analysis of the laments in his eighth chapter is thus a major service to those who study, teach, or preach the Hebrew Bible in light of the Shoah. I would only add that the correlation in question may be even less widespread than is usually thought. Some of the texts, such as the blessings and curses in Lev 26, Deut 28, and kindred passages, are not intended to answer the abstract question of why some people prosper and others fail but rather to induce obedience in their hearers and readers. The absence of the correlation of deed and consequence is still a formidable challenge to such rhetoric, to be sure, but I suspect the practitioners of this rhetoric would not have been so shocked by that absence as we usually think. Similarly, Sweeney s own view that Proverbs envisions a secure, stable, and moral world order that is readily discerned and understood by those who wisely observe the world (194) may be a bit overstated. The wisdom in question is hard won in Proverbs it requires skilled and forceful teachers and assiduous study and many are those who fail to find it. Were the world a place in which justice was uninterrupted and transparent, this would not be the case. And in a very few places, Proverbs openly acknowledges the empirical reality that deed and consequence do not always match (e.g., 15:16). There are, of course, places where Sweeney s framework or specific interpretations can be queried. As I have indicated, the fundamental problem for him is the old one of the suffering of the innocent in a world supposedly governed by a beneficent, omniscient, and all-powerful God. To Sweeney, the very fact of the suffering is evidence, pure and simple, of the failure of God or of the theology that construes him so. He proposes no alternative theological construction but rather shifts the focus quickly away from the divine-human relationship to human beings alone (though, oddly, still in partnership with God), whose role becomes all the more crucial in light of the unmasking of God or his abdication of responsibility. Perhaps an analogy with the Death of God movement of the 1960s suggests itself. At times, this reviewer was left with the sense that this theological framework was too schematic, too dominated by a cold and abstract logic, to deal adequately with the dynamics of the living God-human relationship in the texts that Sweeney discusses. He writes, for example, that in the narrative of Abram s migrations in Gen 12:1 14:24 the narrator portrays Abram as an obedient and exemplary servant of YHWH, whereas

4 YHWH emerges as a questionable character who continues to make demands of Abram and whose willingness or ability to stand by promises made to Abram remains in doubt in the perspective of the reader (35). Here the unstated assumption is that an obedient servant will neither experience moments of doubt about the master nor confront a continuing series of demands and challenges from him; to the extent that doubts and demands appear in the story of Abram, they reflect not on the dynamics of obedience and faith but solely on God s character. But what if the relationship in its fullness is constituted not only by the rare moments of instantaneous and transparent fulfillment but also or even primarily by the more familiar ones of doubt, delay, and loss? It does not seem to be the case that Sweeney s reliance on the logical problem of innocent suffering and the beneficent, omniscient, and all-powerful God deals adequately with this possibility one that is common in the Hebrew Bible, especially so in the Abrahamic narratives. Given Sweeney s notion of adversity as an unambiguous sign of God s bad character, it is not surprising that he finds in the binding of Isaac, or Akedah (Gen 22:1 19) another sign of divine failure. There is, he writes, an irony to this test in that Abraham has never disobeyed YHWH throughout the entire narrative sequence beginning in Gen 11:17, but YHWH s integrity is once again subject to question. Although YHWH stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, the reader might wonder whether Abraham is tested in this narrative or YHWH (40). But, as commentators have long recognized, the Akedah is the supreme and culminating test of Abraham precisely because it involves the son whom he loves and who incarnates the very promise on which he has staked his life. What is tested here is not his integrity in the sense of his moral character but the absoluteness and purity of his commitment to God. That Abraham has never disobeyed God is not, as Sweeney would have it, an indication that he should not be tested. Rather, it is, as the midrash, citing Ps 11:5, notes, precisely the reason he was singled out for the test (Gen. Rab. 55:2). That suffering can be probative in the Hebrew Bible, as this midrash indicates, is not a possibility with which this volume sufficiently reckons. Another indication of this is Sweeney s remark on page 197 that in the prologue to Job we find human suffering without moral cause (which is arguable) because an exemplary righteous man will suffer punishment (which is not: Job s afflictions are not punitive). Perhaps Sweeney s punitive understanding of the suffering of the innocent accounts for his striking omission of a discussion of the so-called Suffering Servant poems in the book of Isaiah, a book to which he devotes considerable attention, with impressive results. In other cases, Sweeney finds innocent suffering where the Bible does not because he allows a historical-critical perspective to trump the narrative world of the text itself. Jeroboam s establishment of the sanctuaries at Beth El and Dan is hardly a sinful act in and of itself, he tells us (69). Rather, the Israelite king was simply renewing sanctuaries of

5 venerable antiquity and patriarchal origin, and the golden calves he set up there were hardly the gods he is reported to have called them in 1 Kgs 12:28. They are actually old Canaanite and Israelite symbols that are appropriately applied to YHWH and cannot be, as the Deuteronomistic Historian (DtrH) would have it, idols. Given Jeroboam s spotless motivation and his record of innocence, Sweeney argues, the description of him as an arch-sinner results from an apologetic effort to avoid[] the charge that Israel fell due to weakness or moral failing in YHWH (72) yet another example of the dreary and worrisome tendency of the Hebrew Bible to blame the victim. Even on historical-critical grounds, however, it is unlikely that this familiar interpretation of Jeroboam s golden calves is so persuasive as it has long been taken to be. Surely, if the innocence of the symbol and the utter impossibility of its ever being taken for more than that were so clear and unambiguous, the polemic of the DtrH could never have been conceived. Even if we assume, as Sweeney argues, that the real motivation for the anticalf polemic was political rather than religious, there must have been some basis in the culture for the polemic to be made in the first place, or it would have gained no traction. And, without the eminently disputable (but, alas, currently ubiquitous) assumption that religious claims are au fond mere mystifications of power realities and ambitions, could we ever know that the real motivation was only political? A more credible approach would acknowledge the existence of different norms in ancient Israelite culture, including the vigorously anti-iconic norm and the proscription of sanctuaries other than Jerusalem that are hallmarks of Deuteronomic tradition. That Jeroboam I did not know of these norms can almost certainly be granted on historical grounds, but within the narrative world of DtrH, he should have: they are as old as Moses himself and had been unforgettably proclaimed in the sight and hearing of all Israel. DtrH s goal is not so much to vilify Jeroboam as it is to commend and secure the norms of which he is presented as the paradigmatic flouter. Within a historical-critical paradigm, then, it is unfair to attribute the fall of the kingdom he founded to the wrath of a just God, but within the narrative world of the book of Kings, it makes good sense. And on either paradigm, it seems highly unlikely that the Deuteronomic norms were concocted purely to exonerate the Deity of his failure to deliver the kingdom of Israel from Assyrian aggression. This eagerness to excuse Israelites and Judahites of the sins of which they are charged in the Hebrew Bible is in plentiful evidence in Sweeney s book, and some instances are less credible on historical grounds than that involving Jeroboam I. That the women bewailing the loss of the Babylonian god Tammuz in Ezek 8:14 were really just engaged in mourning rituals typical of Israel and Judah in the [dry months of] late summer (136), to give but one example, rules out the possibility that there was syncretism even a few years

6 after the Babylonian exile of Jehoiachin. The operative assumption is now the opposite of the one employed in the discussion of Jeroboam; here, we are to believe that YHWHistic purism was the empirical reality, and not just one position current in the society. But why? For Sweeney, as we saw at the outset, the problems posed by the Shoah call for human beings to take on greater responsibility (22), although in partnership with the very God whose moral integrity the Shoah has cast into deep doubt. I wonder, though, whether there would be less injustice in the world if people relied on themselves more and on God less. Surely, the Nazi perpetrators of the Shoah and their collaborators were not characterized by excessive reliance on the Deity; they were anything but quietistic. Perhaps they would have acted more responsibly if they had thought they would face the judgment of God the God of Israel, no less. A fuller treatment of the Hebrew Bible in the light of the Shoah would thus have to reckon not only with God s silence and inaction but also with the full measure of evil within the human heart and the measures the Hebrew Bible prescribes to counter it. The Shoah has called more than just optimism about God into question; it has called optimism about human nature and human moral judgment into question no less. No one can argue with exhortations for humankind to act more responsibly, but without being embedded in larger communal structures of belief and practice, such exhortations do not have much effect. If the fundamental theological claims of the Hebrew Bible have been dealt a mortal blow, it really should no longer make much difference what that discredited collection of ancient writings teaches. In a few places, however, Sweeney seems to hint ever so briefly and ever so tantalizingly that the situation is not that grim, that the ancient relationship of God and the Jewish people can and should continue. His chapter on Complaints to G-D in Psalms and Lamentations ends with the observation that despite everything, neither YHWH nor the people abandon the dialog, but instead look for the means to ensure its continuity (187; see also 169). Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah shows how difficult that dialogue has become, but it also shows that resources to continue it can be found in the Hebrew Bible after all.