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Political Authority Comes from the Bottom Up? (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Thomas Farrell
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"A world confined to the visible is an impersonal world" (page 74).

"Judaism, by contrast, is the supreme example of a person-centered civilization - and persons communicate by words. They speak and listen. Conversation joins soul to soul. We communicate, therefore we commune" (page 74).

"The patriarchs and prophets of ancient Israel were the first to understand that God is not part of the visible world but beyond. Hence the prohibition against graven images, visual representations, and icons" (page 74).

"Hearing is the basis of both justice and compassion" (page 76).

"[T]o this day, a court case is called 'a hearing'" (page 76).

Now, in Rabbi Sacks' chapter titled "Covenant and Conversation" (pages 247-251), he says, "The Mosaic books are, among other things, a deep set of reflections on the nature and power of language. This may have to do with the fact that the Israelites of Moses' day would have encountered the first alphabet, the Proto-Semitic script from which all subsequent alphabets are directly or indirectly derived. Judaism marks the world's first transition on a national scale from an oral to a literate culture. Hence the unique significance it attaches to the spoken and written word" (page 250; also see 103).

Rabbi Sacks also says, "There is a radical statement of this at the very beginning of the Torah. God spoke and the world came into being. Unlike every ancient myth about the beginning of things, there was no struggle, no use of force. Instead, the key verb is simply leimor, 'God said' [vayomer], Let there be . . . and there was.' This is the use of language to create worlds" (page 250; his bracketed material; his ellipsis).

In Rabbi Sacks' chapter "End Without an Ending" (pages 381-386), he also says, "The Bible is a battle against myth. In myth, time is as it is in nature. It is cyclical. It goes through phases - spring, summer, autumn, winter; birth growth, decline, death - but it always returns to where it began. The standard plot of myth is that order is threatened by the forces of chaos. In ancient times these were the gods of destruction. In modern times they are the dark forces of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. The hero battles against them. He slips, falls, almost dies, but ultimately succeeds. Order is restored. The world is once again as it was. Hence 'they all lived happily ever after.' The future is the restoration of the past. There is a return to order, to the way things were before the threat, but there is no history, no progress, no development, no unanticipated outcome.

"Judaism is a radical break with this way of seeing things. Instead, time becomes the arena of human growth. The future is not like the past. Nor can it be predicted, foreseen, the way the end of any myth can be foreseen" (pages 383-384; also see 223). In addition, he says, "God is the call from the future to the present, from the destination to us who are still on the journey" (page 385).

For further reading about cyclical concepts of time, see Ong's essay "Evolution and Cyclicism in Our Time" in his book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (1967, pages 61-82), mentioned above.

In Rabbi Sacks' chapter "Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown" (pages 169-174), he says, "Political authority, for the Torah, comes from the bottom up; it is not imposed top down (as in the doctrine of the 'divine right of kings')" (page 173).

In Rabbi Sacks' chapter "Listening and Moral Growth" (pages 227-232), he says that "God is not a tyrant, but a teacher" (page 232; also see 8). However, it remains for each of us to discover God as a teacher and then become a disciple of God to the best of our ability.

In Ong's Jesuit tradition of spirituality, the process of becoming a disciple of God to the best of one's ability involves what is known as discernment of spirits, particularly in making decisions. See Ong's article "'A.M.D.G.' [Abbreviation for Ad majorem Dei Gloriam/For the greater glory of God]: Dedication or Directive?" in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Review for Religious, volume 11, number 5 (September 15, 1952): pages 257-264 and reprinted in the same journal volume 50, number 1 (1991): pages 35-42 (now available online). But also see Ong's book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986, pages 78-81 and 87), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

In Rabbi Sacks' chapter "Covenant and Conversation" (pages 247-251, he says, "The supreme example of an open-ended mutual pledge between human beings and God is a covenant" (page 250).

According to Rabbi Sacks, "There are no conversations between God and human beings in either the New Testament or the Koran that echo the dialogues in Tanakh between God and Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Hosea, Jeremiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, and Job" (page 251).

Finally, because I discussed Ong's pioneering 1958 book about print culture above, I should mention here that Rabbi Sacks also adverts explicitly to the importance of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in Western culture in the mid-1450s (pages 28, 60, and 174).

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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