Reconstructionism

• Today
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  9:17pm
  

  BB
  

  
  

  i often find myself thinking about your dickinson quote, "tell all the truth but tell it slant, success in circuit lies." i think this article helped me make sense of why this is the case -- http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/tell-all-the-truth/

  So, I'm just going to copy/paste something I wrote for Tikvah that I think relates to your question. Anything I write would be some variation of the principle that you will extract from what follows --

  I was in attendance last year for Christine Hayes’ presentation of the rabbinical discussion of the passage in Leviticus about the stoning of the rebellious son. She showed how the authorial intent in those verses—written at a time when the patriarch of a household could kill his children without consequence—was to add several obstacles that would make it more difficult for him to do so. The rabbis seized on this intent and found ways to cryptically interpret out of the text another series of obstacles extreme enough to eliminate the practice altogether. Professor Hayes called this interpreting with the principle of charity.

  But why the charade? Why not just admit the passage was morally flawed? This is a question I was forced to confront as an undergrad, when I gave lectures on philosophy and faith in high school religion departments. One of my biggest challenges was to find a way to talk about divine revelation as sacred and central to our lives to students who had a knack for paraphrasing a few unseemly passages from Leviticus or the Epistles of Paul.

  Professor Hayes explained that we read and interpret this way because we have a special relationship with the text. When we find it unconscionable, we don’t just get to toss it aside like we might with any other book. As with our closest relationships to other people, sometimes we have to change ourselves in order to make sense of the text, and other times we have to interpret the text with as much charity as we can muster. “The Scriptures make us sparring partners with God,” she said. Or, as Rabbi Yehoshua averred, “The Torah is ‘not in heaven’” (Deut 30:12).
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  9:22pm
  

  BB
  

  
  

  In other words, the prophets are probably contradicting the letter of the Torah. But they would still see themselves as being faithful to the text. Heschel has a great quote on what the prophets are doing to the tradition in his chapter titled "Dissent" that I will write out for you as soon as I am reunited with the book.
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  9:42pm
  

  CG
  

  
  

  Seems like it could be used to excuse any text with which you have a special relationship.

  Much like any object of faith.
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  9:50pm
  

  CG
  

  
  

  I was once trying to write an essay about how charity in interpretation can be used to transform a text. We often excuse authors the odd incongruity here and there by making reference to the spirit of the work. Apply the principle with enough tenacity, and it is unclear where it stops. With enough love in one's heart one could divine scripture out of a computer manual. I am only half kidding. The same principle was applied by the deconstructionists only in the reverse direction. Any text can be teased apart with sufficient mendacity of intention. But this leaves one with the conundrum of what any text really means, since it could mean almost anything to anyone willing to forgive or to requite sufficiently. Which is one reason I do not put much stock in texts.
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  9:56pm
  

  BB
  

  
  

  this is the conclusion that I am left with. but i think the text agrees -- even after the giving the the law, judges are appointed over the people who are "wise and experienced," because it is understood that, at the end of the day, we do not have a text that tells us what to do. what we have is people who have to do their best to live between the tensions with honesty and integrity. there's a lot more i'd like to say but this dunkin donuts closes in 4 minutes. i will write again soon.

Expatriation

One of the many effects of living in exile—even in a country so much like home as Canada—must be that the longer one stays away the more one loses the desire to return. I feel this not because I am developing any patriotic affections for my new place. Nor do I lack homesickness, though in me that feeling is more associated with a region than it is with something so large as the country the United States, which I find too large to love. I mean first that it is easy to lose track of current events back home, so that when one does receive recent news it cannot be understood in its connection with the events that came immediately before, in a chain of cause to effect. I am simply no longer aware of what came immediately before, so I am forced to see any recent news in the light of longer-term trends, which I do remember. I have gained distance on my home, and the distance is in this case critical distance. Trends are things that can be evaluated as good or bad, whereas when I previously received news in its usual sequence of cause to immediate consequence, it was too difficult to discern any pattern. It is best for a critical understanding not to sample the news too frequently, for the same reason mathematically that it is of no value to sample a stochastic process beyond a certain frequency: all you see is noise.

Now I flatter myself to imagine that in living elsewhere I have regressed to a less modern, less nationalist psychology and instead possess more of the feelings of a medieval citizen of an old imperial state. The feeling is enhanced, I believe, because I live in a country so similar to my previous country. Were Canada too different it would be easy to react against the locale with a renewed sense of difference and identity and to develop a desire to return home and be with one's people. Here there are only small differences, numerous but expressed in shades and matters of degree. I am not quite at ease yet have nothing definite to react against. This must have been how many a medieval peasant felt about nearby towns that were yet affiliated with the same jurisdiction. A peasant could be a lover of his place but not of his country and king, merely legal realities. In his fellow citizens he recognized a family resemblance but did not emphasize the ties of a common language and political history, so valuable to dislocated moderns. Ironically to feel less modern it was essential for me to become more dislocated! It is because the modern nation-state has become more homogenous.

Travel is good for the heart in so many ways. Living abroad doubly so. I find I have lost a few of political passions living here and seeing how little laws matter relative to the importance I accorded to them. In addition to losing some politics I have also gained a political sense, a Burkean one and I suppose one that is conservative in the older sense, that it is more the locale (the little platoon) than the country that matters to an individual and that provides him with support and meaning.