What is ethical in war?  Though answering this question would require far more space than I have in this blog, I ask it as I think one, about posting about Eli Wiesel yesterday; and two, Dawn, a novel he wrote that takes place during Israel's struggle to overcome the British mandate for Palestine and wrest its independence from Great Britain.  Dawn tells of the plight of a young Israeli soldier, Elisha, who has been ordered, at dawn, to execute an equally young British soldier, John Dawson, who has been captured, tried, and sentenced by an Israeli military court.

    For page after page, Elisha struggles:  should he or shouldn't he?  On the one hand, he must follow orders.  On the other hand, he realizes that John Dawson has hopes and dreams, too.  Executing Dawson is a pragmatic decision, one dictated solely by the prevailing circumstances.  Morally, it is neither right nor wrong.  It's just what must be done.

    Now sparing him involves, yes, deciding what is right and wrong.  Yet the most difficult aspect of this decision is not deciding whether it is right or wrong.  It is rather accepting that such a notion exists.  For once we do, we bump squarely into the limits--and possibilities--of our humanness.  Life becomes infinitely more complicated.

    And that's the point.  We may live pragmatically, but we cannot die with it only.

 

     Have you read Elie Weisel's Night?  If you have not, please take a moment to find it and read it.  Carefully.  It's the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner's memoir of his time at Auschwitz.  Although I find many of its passages singularly disturbing, perhaps one of the most painful is one that describes Weisel's reaction to the hanging of a fifteen year old Dutch boy who had been caught collaborating with the Resistance.

    Before the entire camp, the German overlords of Auschwitz hanged this unfortunate young man.  Everyone had to watch.  As he did so, Weisel recounts hearing one of the onlookers say, "Where is God?  Where is He?" Then, Weisel remembers, "For more than half an hour the child stayed there struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes.  And we had to look him full in the face . . . Behind me I heard the same man asking, 'Where is God now?'  And I heard a voice within me answer him, 'Where is He? Here He is--He is hanging here on this gallows.'"

    Weisel's account might push some us of faith to the very brink of that faith.  If God is hanging on the gallows, of what use can he possibly be to us?  What is God really doing?

    Yet that's the point.  God isn't about power; he's about weakness.  So why would we wish for a weak God?  It is this:  it is in suffering our suffering that God speaks to us most clearly.  If God cannot descend into our suffering, he becomes the God of Deism:  there, but not.

    Yet even if a suffering God seems to make little sense in this situation, absent him, there's no sense at all:  our lives are simply running into an endless sea.

    Can you swim?

     In Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a set of interviews with the American artist Robert Irwin, Irwin describes at length how he sees the process of making art.  One of them involves, as the title of the book implies, beginning to paint without any memory of what one has done before.  Or to look at a blank canvas, then cover it with white paint and say that it is speaking more than it ever did before.

    Both points bear thinking about.  In large part, memory drives what we do as human beings.  So what would it be like to move forward without any memory of the past?  Would we be creating a blank slate?  Or would a blank slate be creating us?

    Similarly, although white as applied to a life makes it seem entirely opaque and of limited potential, it may really be doing the opposite:  we just need to look harder.

    And that's Irwin's point.  It's also the point of life in a material world infused with transcendent possibility.  Even if memory vanishes, and even if everything is white, it is for this very reason that transcendence exists.  It reminds us of what, shorn of all rational limits, life really can be.

     I recently finished reading Defiance, by Nachama Tec.  A true story, Defiance relates how a Jewish man, Tuvia Bielski who, along with his brothers Asael and Zus, saved over 1200 Jews from being murdered by the Nazis when they occupied Belorussia during the Second World War.  It was also made into a movie starring Daniel Craig.

    The Bielski brothers were not educated people, but they understood life better than most intellectuals.  In particular, Tuvia made it his life ambition to rescue as many Jews as he could and to do so by killing as few opponents as possible.  Moreover, once he had rescued them, he organized them into a community, the Bielski Otriad, in the forests (Nalibocka) of eastern Belorussia.  In order to evade prowling Nazis, the Bielskis realized they'd need to base their community in the forest, and a swampy portion of the forest at that.  For two years, this community of Jews lived outside, dealing with the vicissitudes of the weather in eastern Europe.  Life wasn't always easy.  At times it was extraordinarily difficult.  Yet because of Tuvia's capable leadership, most people survived.

    Tuvia's leadership was one that fused strict adherence to the rules of the camp with applying the utmost fairness in decision making.  He had to make some hard choices.  But he also made some highly gracious ones.  Yet in many ways, Tuvia's approach mirrors how many of us might wish for a God to be:  highly moral but entirely fair.  Though Tuvia was far from perfect, his persistence in following this approach succeeded in sustaining the camp through its two years in the forest.

    Moral and fair seem to countermand each other.  Set into transcendence, however, they fit perfectly.

    There is freedom, and there is freedom.  One day, while talking to a group of his opponents, Jesus remarked, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). 

    What did Jesus mean?  We all desire personal freedom, yes, and we all deserve to know truth.  Both are within our grasp as human beings.  

    Genuine freedom, however, is more than either one.  Genuine freedom is understanding why we can even entertain the idea of freedom at all, why we are beings who are capable of comprehending such a thing.  Genuine freedom is knowing why we are here, why we are how we are, and why one day we will no longer be around.  And these are questions that, finite and limited that we are, we will never understand on our own.  How can we?

    Be it July 1, July 4, July 14, or any other day of independence around the planet, we do well to remember that although we're free to be free, we are not free to be free to be free.

    It's a fragile thing, freedom:  treasure it as nothing else.  It's a gift we cannot give to ourselves.

      "Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

    It's here:  the autumnal equinox.  It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining resplendently; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays its glory once more.

    In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, the autumn was a significant moment.  It marks the time of harvest, of thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumnal rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and celebration.

    So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, and it's equally good to meditate on beginnings; it's good to remember the ceaselessness of unceasing rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to think about the certitude still embedded in a mercurial and capricious world.

    In autumn's transforming predictability, we also catch a deeper glimpse of the creator God.  In a finite and fractured world, change, some good, some bad, is inevitable. Certainty, however, remains.  Amidst our many seasons of life, these days of malleability and shifting sands, God's love, guidance, and presence reign firm.  Take heart in autumn's changes, and realize, once more, the face and necessity of an eternal God.

    Have you been to the Smokies?  Although I do not frequent parks with relatively low elevation, I know that such parks have a beauty all their own.  Bastions of deciduous forests and lowland wildflowers, reflectors of immense color come the autumn, and lovely in the snow, the Smokies hold much treasure for those who enter into them.

     

    Why the Smokies?  The alpine heights offer ample opportunity for challenge and adventure, yes, but the Smokies, with their more aged peaks and longer history of exploration, provide us with different windows into why we are who we are.  Not only are we creatures who crave boldness, we are creatures who long for stillness.

    Like most animals.  And God.

    By the way, as I said yesterday, I'll be traveling for the next week or so and will not be posting.  Talk to you upon my return.  Thanks for reading!

    After a good backpack in the mountains of California, I am back in town, but only for a few days.  For I'm preparing to go away again, this time to a mountain range in Nevada, to hike, camp, and explore.  I guess the adage about "making hay while the sun shines" applies here:  once snow starts falling in the mountains, backpacking opportunities, apart from those generated by snowshoeing, begin to diminish, largely ending until the following spring.

    Nonetheless, as I share this photo from my most recent backpack, I comment on one of the conversations my younger sister and I had in the course of our journey.  Although my sister doesn't share my spiritual starting points, particularly in regard to the fact of a supreme being, she, as so many others in the West do today, is very open to the idea of a spiritual experience.  Fair enough:  we're spiritual beings. 

    As I was remarking in a recent lecture, however, spirituality needs an anchor to be genuinely meaningful.  We camped by this lake for a couple of days and spent much time contemplating its wonder and beauty.  Yet all the while I did so I realized, over and over, that the awe I felt, I felt because I am a personal being who lives in a personal world.  A personal world rendered personal because it is in turn created by a personal God.

    Otherwise, spirituality vanishes as soon as we sense it.