Last fall the Quincy University Office of University Advancement helped me set up a website/blog on QU's computer site. They named it "friarzimm.org." You should be able to type in those letters, maybe with "www." preceding, and get the result.
The new site is my attempt to arrange some of the things I have written by topic rather than by date when I published them. My goal is to migrate more of the "ivyrosary" pieces to the new site as I get time to decide what is worth migrating.
John Joe Lakers, my friar friend and philosopher who died over ten years ago, spent a good part of his life proposing that we approach moral and ethical problems wrongly. “We” means us Christians, but potentially everybody else.
John Joe said that
there are two ways—he calls them “metaphors”—that we think about morality. Both
are rooted in our biblical tradition. One is what he called “judgment and
power,” and the other he called “intimacy.”
Definitions:
Judgment is deciding
whether something is good or bad.
Punishment is
deliberately inflicting pain.
Power is the
ability to punish.
Forgiveness is
deciding not to punish.
Intimacy is being
involved with other people respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully.
Both “judgment and
power” and “intimacy” can be traced to our scriptures—and “our” means us Jews
and Christians. Islam is another story. Islam grew out of Judaism and
Christianity, so our thinking may fit Muslims too, but we should let the people
of Islam speak for themselves.
The best
illustrations of the metaphors of power and judgment are in stories of what
happened to people when they disobeyed the commands of the Lord. For example, in
chapter 16 of the book of Numbers, Korah, Dathan and Abiram had rebelled
against Moses. Moses put the legitimacy of his leadership to a test:
Moses said, “This is how you
shall know that the LORD sent me to do all I have done, and that it was
not of my own devising: if these die an ordinary death,
merely suffering the fate common to all humanity, the LORD has not sent me. But if the LORD makes
a chasm, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them with all belonging to
them, and they go down alive to Sheol, then you will know that these men
have spurned the LORD.”
No sooner had he finished saying all this than the ground
beneath them split open, and the earth opened its mouth and
swallowed them and their families and all of Korah’s people with all their
possessions.
The story is the composition of
people describing how the Lord treats people. Imagine what kind of God would do
such things. The story describes a God who judges that some of these people did
wrong, and then punishes all of them by swallowing them up in the earth.
That’s judgment and power and
punishment in action.
Judgment and punishment are the
foundation of the public morality that is dominant in our country. The shelves
of our lawyers are covered with law books. The laws in those books describe judgments of
what we consider bad behavior and how we promise to punish people who break the
laws.
Our toolbox of punishments has
steadily shrunk over the years. We moved from executing people, to exotic ways
of causing pain, both physical and emotional (think of the torture rack and the
scarlet letter) to our modern ways: fines and imprisonment. None of them prevent
all bad behavior, but we keep at it. What else can we do?
But, says John Joe, beginning
with the Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah and Hosea, a different approach to
morality began to emerge, based on a metaphor of intimacy. Hosea compared God
to a spouse, a forgiving spouse, who takes an unfaithful partner back again and
again. That metaphor becomes the center of the story of Jesus, whose message
centered on repentance and forgiveness. Jesus refused to punish a woman caught
in the act of adultery, and promised paradise to a criminal on the verge of
death. Jesus described God not so much as a judge as a parent.
I cannot find an instance in
the gospels where Jesus himself personally punished someone.
Our public sense of morality
has gone the same way. We have gone from “spare the rod and spoil the child” to
charging teachers with battery if they so much as lay a hand on a child. We try
to avoid causing physical pain, and even emotional pain. At least that is the
way we like to think of ourselves.
Why can’t we have a similar
sense of morality in our public affairs?
An application to the conflict
in Gaza
The country of Israel grew out
of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the genocide practiced by the Nazi regime in
Germany in the 1930s and 40s. That genocide had a long history of Christian antisemitism,
with its segregation and pogroms. The Nazi ideology found fertile Christian soil
in which it could grow.
Survivors of the Holocaust got
the world community to legitimize a homeland for people of Jewish background, a
place where they could be safe from persecution. But unfortunately, there were
already people living on the land that the world community deeded to the Jewish
people. Those people, the Palestinians, reacted furiously with judgment and
punishment. But not all of them. Some Palestinians, and some of their new Jewish
neighbors, lived by the principle that violence was not the only way to deal
with the situation. Such people were in the minority. The Israeli governments felt
obliged to segregate the Palestinians and treat them with distrust and
disrespect. In recent years they even built a wall to separate the West Bank
from Israel. They sealed off the tiny territory of Gaza. In return, Palestinian
leaders kept alive the dream of getting back all the land they used to have,
“from the river to the sea,” as Hamas puts it.
The violent are always more
visible than the peaceful. Nonviolent movements succeed so seldom because
people grow impatient and decide that only violence will achieve their
objectives. The “First Intifada,” the first large-scale movement by
Palestinians to oppose Israeli policies, began as a nonvokiolent movement, but
it was overtaken by leaders choosing violence.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are
governed by people determined to judge and punish. But still there are people on
both sides who are open to approaching the other with respect, vulnerability
and faithfulness.
Maybe people on both sides will
find leaders with the courage to forgive the other—to let go of the right to
punish.
In South Africa, everyone
expected the black population would demand retribution for the years of
apartheid that the white government had inflicted on them. Nelson Mandela was a
leader of the black population who was able to lead the entire nation to avoid
retribution.
Both sides need such leaders
now.
