【橘猫推书】
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
by David Brooks
TWENTY-ONE
A Most Unexpected Turn of Events
Some people have dramatic stories of how they came to faith. A blinding light appeared! A voice called forth! The trumpets blared! I don't have that. I am telling you the story of my journey to faith because even though every leap of faith is mystical and absurd by any normal logic, I want to illustrate how normal it can be. It can happen to the most spiritually average person. But you wind up in an astonishing place, believing that God is, in Paul Tillich's phrase, the ground of being.
I first heard the biblical stories as a kid—Noah and the ark, David and Goliath, Esther and Haman, Abraham and Isaac. These tales were just part of the architecture of my childhood. In my life, and even in Hebrew school, they were myth, performing the functions of myth—helping me understand right and wrong, helping me to grapple with my emotions, helping me to understand heroism and all the rest of that Bruno Bettelheim stuff. They also helped me understand my group, the Jewish people. Those stories, starting with biblical stories and then blending up through historical stories of Hanukkah and the Holocaust, were the stories of our people and our identity. They helped me understand the consistency of my group across the vast horizon of time.
Then, in college and early adulthood, I began to use them as wisdom literature, as tools for understanding and solving the problems of life. The characters in the Bible are normal, mottled human beings who are confronted with moral challenges. The key question is whether they respond to the challenge with the right inner posture—whether they express charity when it is called for, forgiveness when it is necessary, and great humility before goodness. David shows us what bravery looks like in the face of Goliath. Solomon illustrates wisdom before the women and the baby. Boaz exemplifies loving-kindness toward Ruth. During this phase I held these stories at arm's length, to see what useful information they might have. I was big, and the stories were small, just an old book in my hands to be used by me in leading my life.
Over the decades things began to change imperceptibly. Life happened and, as Wiman puts it, “My old ideas were not adequate for the extremes of joy and grief I experienced.” These stories kept coming back, but they changed, as if re-formed by the alchemy of time. They grew bigger and deeper, more fantastical and more astonishing. Wait, God asked Abraham to kill his own son?
I suppose this happens to most of us as we age: We get smaller, and our dependencies get bigger. We become less fascinating to ourselves, less inclined to think of ourselves as the author of all that we are, and at the same time we realize how we have been the ones shaped—by history, by family, by forces beyond awareness. And I think what changed, in the most incremental, boring way possible, is that at some point I had the sensation that these stories are not fabricated tales happening to other, possibly fictional, people: They are the underlying shape of reality. They are renditions of the recurring patterns of life. They are the scripts we repeat.
Adam and Eve experienced temptation and a fall from grace, and we experience temptation and a fall from grace. Moses led his people from bondage meanderingly toward a promised land, and we take a similar spiritual journey. The psalmist looked into himself and asked, “Soul, why are you so downcast?” and we still do that. The prodigal son returned, and his father, infused by grace and love, ran out to meet him. Sometimes we, too, are outrageously forgiven. These stories are not just about common things that happen to people. They are representations of ongoing moral life. We are alive in the natural world, and we use science to understand that layer of aliveness. We are also alive in another dimension, the dimension of spirit and meaning. We use the biblical stories to understand that dimension of aliveness.
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?' ” Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, “if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' ” If there are no overarching stories, then life is meaningless. Life does not feel meaningless. These stories provide, in their simple yet endlessly complex ways, a living script. They provide the horizon of meaning in which we live our lives—not just our individual lives, but our lives together. These stories describe a great moral drama, which is not an individual drama but a shared drama. We are still a part of this drama, as Jayber Crow put it, created and being created still.
A PILGRIMAGE TOWARD FAITH
A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in response to a story. I was raised in a Jewish home, which means I was raised within the Exodus myth. The amazing thing about Exodus is that, as the great Torah scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg observes, it was a story that happened in order to be told. God commands Moses to tell the story of the liberation before He actually performs the liberation.
As a young man, I didn't know if there ever was a man named Moses or if Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt. I tended to doubt it. There'd be more archeological evidence, I figured.
But Jews have been telling this story to one another for thousands of years, and in the telling it has become true. In the telling and passing down, Exodus has become the shaping reality of Jewish life, how Jews understand and fashion their lives. It's how Jews understood exile. It's why, year after year, Jews continue to dream: Next year in Jerusalem! The Jewish migration to America was the ultimate Exodus story. So was the return home, to the state of Israel. In all of these cases, Exodus was reenacted. The story was the landscape, the living creation, on which Jews lived out their lives.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook put it clearly: “With a penetrating consciousness, we come to realize that the essential event of the Exodus is one that never ceases at all. The public and manifest revelation of God's hand in world history is an explosion of light of the divine soul which lives and acts throughout the world.”
Exodus is a journey of spiritual formation. Slaves in Egypt, the Jews are not capable of running their own lives. They were not even capable of being saved by others. They are described as hopeless, dejected, passive, apathetic, and in despair. Fear has caused them to close in on themselves, to become secretive, inert, and weak. Reduced to a childlike state by oppression, they are unable to accept responsibility for themselves.
God must build a people capable of upholding His covenant, capable of exercising agency and accepting responsibility for their own lives. He yanks them out of Egypt, and He keeps them moving even when they want to crawl back into slavery. He forces Moses to take on the mantle of leadership, even though Moses tries to evade this responsibility. He forces the diverse tribes into relationship with one another and compels them to overcome the normal human fear of being judged and rejected. He sends His people into the wasteland. Difficulty, as Rabbi Nachman of Breslov notes, can have a paradoxical effect. It doesn't always make a people more passive; it sometimes arouses a desire to fight back. Obstacles can arouse desire. Slowly the Israelites begin to show signs of life.
The trek through the wilderness is not only an ordeal that gives them strength. They are living out a narrative that gives them identity. Before long, they are singing. They are crossing the Red Sea, and Miriam and the other women are leading them in song. Soon, they are able to trust again. People who have been betrayed and oppressed cannot trust and therefore cannot have faith. But eventually the Jews, even with all their constant kvetching and whining, do learn that sometimes promises are kept, that God abides. They become a people capable of faith, capable of receiving law, obeying law, and upholding their end of the covenant.
It's interesting that Moses descended from Sinai at the exact moment his people were worshipping the golden calf. He was bringing them the law that would make them an adult people at the exact moment they were behaving like children.