Sunday, September 21, 2003
(6:24 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Internet Addiction, part 2
After a weekend given mainly to dissipation -- long IM conversations, an abortive trip to see the Bonhoeffer film in Chicago which turned into a two-hour tour of the city with an alarmingly small amount of gas, sleep, etc. -- I made a firm resolution this morning. First of all, I would go without coffee today as part of my periodic detox periods that help me to convince myself I'm not addicted. Second, I determined that I would go as long as possible without touching the computer. That lasted from 8:00 AM until 5:00 PM, at which point I needed to e-mail Richard to tell him how much I had spent on groceries. Now, clearly, my resolve has declined somewhat ever since that first "hit" of computer time, as evidenced by the fact that I'm even posting this. However, when I saw to my dismay that my two fellow bloggers, one of whom is currently unemployed, haven't written anything for the whole weekend, I thought I needed to keep this moving, if only to keep a technical discussion of Zizek from being the top post on here forever.
While I was not using the Internet, I read Exodus and Numbers, in their entirety, several parallel texts from the ancient world, articles in the Women's Bible Commentary on those two books (they had a little trouble digging up women's issues in these two), one brief snippet each from Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius, and roughly a third of the first volume of Justo Gonzalez's History of Christian Thought. I don't know if that sounds like a lot to you, but it actually came out to be less than what I thought it would be -- that's why I try to avoid "buckling down" and "putting my nose to the grindstone" and "taking the bull by the horns," because I prefer to fantasize about superlative results rather than achieve merely good results.
Reading Exodus and Numbers, I was amazed by just how casually they threw around the death penalty back then. I was also retroactively appalled by the argument that if we had only practiced slavery like the ancient Hebrews did, it would somehow have been "okay." Yes, there was a predetermined release date, but if the slave got married during his mandatory six years of service, he had to choose between perpetual slavery or abandoning his family to perpetual slavery. That strikes me as slightly morally problematic and as obviously open to abuse. Also, if the master strikes the slave and he dies immediately, then the master is guilty of murder, but if he clings to life for a day or so, then the master is let off -- after all, the slave is his property. As my professor says: sometimes we just need to admit that we don't share the values of the biblical writers. This means that it will require (shiver) more thought to come up with the reasons that scripture is to be preserved and proclaimed in the contemporary world, but I think we'll all be better people for it.
I did find one teaching in Numbers that I thought the US could learn from (especially in the light of this previous post). Here it is, in the good old King James:
And if a stranger shall sojourn among you, and will keep the passover unto the LORD; according to the ordinance of the passover, and according to the manner thereof, so shall he do: ye shall have one ordinance, both for the stranger, and for him that was born in the land. (Numbers 9:14)
This is a fairly persistent theme: you are to have one law that covers both the native and the resident alien. Here it is proclaimed in the context of one of the very holiest of Israel's feasts, so I take that to mean that they took the idea pretty seriously. Of course, one has to balance this against the requirement that they utterly destroy everything in the land that they are to occupy, but I would argue that this can be understood (though not excused) as a way of clearing the space for a new kind of nation where this kind of radical hospitality can take place. Perhaps -- and this is only a theory, because I am constantly told by people who know more than I do that Jesus absolutely did not constitute any kind of break with or criticism of Israel's religion at all -- Jesus Christ might provide us with an example of how to practice the radical hospitality without clearing the way by mass murder and genocide. It would appear that even for Christians, the example of ancient Israel has usually been much more tempting than that of Christ, and understandably so.
In the light of this argument, though, the Hebrew Bible could (should?) be read as an account of the many ways in which the path clearing, never fully accomplished, eventually ends up completely distracting Israel from the noble goal of radical hospitality -- so much so that sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is for everyone to be deported from the Promised Land so that the next generation will once again know what it means to be an alien. Between the first entry to the Promised Land and the deportation, there's a hell of a lot of bloodshed and betrayal.
