Whose Burden, Exactly, Are We Sharing?

Abstract

I am deeply appreciative to Geoffrey Claussen for allowing me a peek into a world I would not have spent as much time in as I did with this fine book. The Musar movement is an endlessly fascinating and intriguing world for a Christian theologian to learn from, and I admire Israel Salanter, Simḥah Zissel Ziv, and those who would follow them in performing spiritual and moral formation as an art. Simḥah Zissel pursued his moral vision in the heartfelt belief that the moral journey is not marked for us by a set of rules, but a joyful willingness to let ourselves be shaped by God's spirit working through reason and imagination. This alone, which rebuts Luther's spurious distinction between the law and gospel, offers the reader rich treasure to contemplate when considering moral life.I must also confess, however, that I found myself more perplexed at the end of the book than I was before I started the journey (though if Maimonides wrote a guide for me I'm not sure it would help). My perplexity emerges from my deep suspicion of all ethical and theological systems. This wariness stems from my belief that we are ultimately unable to understand the world in its totality, though we often proceed as if this knowledge were available to us. Thus, and I am not alone in thinking this, all moral and ethical systems actually are manifestations of our particular interpretations of the good in any moment of time and as such do not necessarily reflect anything greater than our own historically conditioned space in the world. The constituent connection between morality and divine command is not as given as we might assume, which, I realize, may be a scandalous claim for some.That said, I found myself nodding my head at the working heart of Simḥah Zissel's vision of moral goodness as empathy in response to the suffering of others, perceiving their pain, and sharing their burden. Recalling Irving Greenberg's profound and compelling observation that to talk of love and a God who cares in the presence of children burning in ovens is obscene and incredible,1 Simḥah Zissel challenges us to consider that it is action in the face of suffering that defines the moral act. Given his understanding that reason, rightly formed, calls us to righteous action, the profound promise of his vision is that the moral world extends widely and the burdens of those we share is a circle cast wide beyond our own community into the communities of others, perhaps even our own enemies.Though I cannot do justice to the complexity and depth of Professor Claussen's account of the Musar movement, from what I understand Simḥah Zissel argued that the beginning of wisdom is an honest appraisal of the human soul as a thing that is tainted, caught in a material world that makes us fragile, even wicked to a certain extent. Our “natural” state (who could possibly know such a thing as a “natural state”?) is a type of self-incurvature that cares only about the self to such an extent that one loses compassion for others (Claussen 2015, 41ff.). This curving into the self and away from others constitutes the initial moral conflict, which can only be overcome by the recognition that every single one of us suffers a primal moral flaw that needs to be overcome. We are not left here, however, because we have been graced with a faculty, reason, which is our most important ally in the struggle with the cruelties of our evil inclinations. The intuition that we are flawed helps us to escape from the gravity of self-absorption. Cloaked in forgetfulness or darkness as we are, reason is the one faculty we possess that allows us to see things otherwise hidden from us, the most important of which is the recognition that rational and moral perfection is buried within the human soul and this recognition is the experience of knowing God.Even in the material fragility and evilness of our “natural” state we can transcend ourselves on the basis of the immaterial faculty of reason that allows us to shape ourselves in accordance with the will of God. Indeed, reason properly trained can even lead us to imitating God's central attribute of love for all creatures. This spiritually disciplined reason allows us to cultivate virtues that eventually change our animal nature to something more holy.If I understand correctly, undergirding Simḥah Zissel's ethics is the belief that there is a moral structure that exists in the universe that he sees as created and commanded by God; and if we conform to what reason, informed by God, points us to, we can know divine goodness, though that knowledge will always be limited to some extent. If we give ourselves to the wisdom of true reason we have access to the moral structure that we are both embedded within and embeds itself within us, though this is fragmentary. This journey to authentic moral agency is an unending pilgrimage of allowing the inner world of God's spirit, which rests in us, to work its way to the surface of human lives, making manifest divine virtue in the midst of corrupted materiality. Even if I did feel at times as if I were being whipsawed between Aristotle and Plato, I will grant this; Simḥah Zissel seems much less interested in metaphysical speculation than he is in what moral goods and behaviors serve the world in order to manifest the presence of God.But this is where I find myself in peril of being one of the wicked ones because I find my “natural” skepticism—a thing I may need to rid myself of to be truly moral—forces me to critique the claims that are being made. To put it bluntly, what is this reason that Simḥah Zissel speaks of? He argues that “reason does the divine work of integrating the virtues, which may seem to conflict, into a seamless whole” (Claussen 2015, 59). Maybe. Or reason may be a form of our material and constructed selves that allows us to justify our own desires, even the desire that virtue be a universal category and not one shaped by social location, received tradition, and communal assumption. It could even be the case that the evil inclination that rests in us is so cunning it uses an appeal to reason to claim space it wants to colonize within the human soul. I find it difficult to claim a status for reason that is not already found in the desire of the reasoned. Reason is always embodied and subject to suspicion of projection.Simḥah Zissel contends that reason not only allows us to escape the pull of the appetites and emotions that roil us; it is able to mitigate and shape those appetites and emotions as well as corral our messy imaginations. Indeed, reason can take control of destabilizing forces in our lives, dispositions such as emotion that lead us into deception, and repair the imagination to such an extent it will enable us to develop the virtues that are so crucial to moral decision (Claussen 2015, 55). What happens, though, when reason takes us beyond the bounds of our imagination, or stretches those boundaries to embrace the unexpected? For example, could reasonable imagination, fashioned to expect the new, lead us to question the morality and ethics we find in sacred texts? Perhaps the disciplined imagination calls for us to question the very morality of God inscribed in sacred texts themselves, or at the very least the ways those texts are employed to talk about moral life.I'm thinking here specifically of Simḥah Zissel's struggle with the shadow side of his program, the necessity to “cultivate a wide spectrum of dispositions within one's soul” (Claussen 2015, 57). Using the images of God depicted in the Torah, Simḥah Zissel argues that perfection means embracing the “contrary powers,” even when those powers lead to the deaths of others. Of course, authentic and spiritually formed reason will allow us to judge whether the exercise of the contrary powers is done in true humility, like Moses when he cuts down so many Midianites. Professor Claussen points to where Simḥah Zissel argues that Moses is not submissive in Israel's war with Midian (Numbers 31) but instead finds the golden mean of humility between submissiveness and arrogance. In fact, Moses commands women and children to be slaughtered in this story. How, exactly, is the homicidal command reconciled with Simḥah Zissel's exquisite account of the development of virtue? Simḥah Zissel tells us that Moses is able to compassionately “share his fellow's burden” (Claussen 2015, 142). In the face of slaughter one wonders who is included in the circle of burden. Is the oppressor ever the recipient of our cultivated wisdom, which is ostensibly directed toward love? Simḥah Zissel's ideal of greeting the “idolater in the marketplace” is an easy moral move; making a space for the enemy is far more difficult (Claussen 2015, 145). In Simḥah Zissel's rendering, practical wisdom and informed imagination justified this slaughter on the basis of the threat that Midian posed to Israel, as well as the fact that one should never bow the knee to evil. Professor Claussen rightly, I think, takes to task his conversation partner in this instance for not being more skeptical about the commandment of God and perhaps not assuming the perfection of the Torah such that every command narrated within it is divine (Claussen 2015, 194–95). In the face of this dilemma Hillel takes us deeper into the moral terrain with the admonition to not do to your neighbor what is hateful to you (Claussen 2015, 56–57). Even though Simḥah Zissel is careful to say that commandments to engage in mass slaughter should not be followed in practice in his day, I still protest. The very fact that Simḥah Zissel justifies Moses in some measure by appeal to the moral “mean” reveals his, and perhaps our, inability to truly use our moral imagination to transform the terms of the conversation. How do I reconcile the moral vision of goodness as empathetic response to the suffering of others, perceiving their pain, with the sovereign God who demands the destruction of my enemies? It is a thin and deficient morality that can discern the evil in others while justifying their erasure.What if my reason and disciplined imagination leads me to the virtue of atheism in the face of such a thing? Confronted with the commandment to slaughter, my moral imagination says we must grab God by the shoulders and fiercely protest, “Even though you command me to destroy one of your creation, that I will not do! I defy you on behalf of the daughters and sons you have created.” This would be accounted for disobedience in Simḥah Zissel's reading I think (I am ready to be relieved of this assumption), but from where I sit this disobedience would be the very height of virtue, for it is not the rebellion of the petulant or privileged; rather it is done from the integrity of a soul shaped by another virtue—that it is important to love God's creation more than God appears to do sometimes. This is surely a type of protest present elsewhere in Jewish tradition.Here we find the difficulty of the command. Simḥah Zissel told the story of the sage who would rather fulfill a commandment even though he knew he was going to Gehinnom, even if the transgression of the commandment meant life in the world to come. This is the “ideal vision of loving God: a dedication to doing the right thing that is so deeply embedded in one's character that one would not hesitate to endure the worst suffering on account of one's virtue” (Claussen 2015, 70). This resignatio ad infernum needs to be turned on its head. If, in the name of protecting God's good creation, we transgress the commandment to destroy, can this not be the most virtuous response of all? From my space of purgation or even destruction I will at least be able to say, “I did not add to the suffering of your people.” This would not come from the prideful space of self-righteousness, but from the willingness to suffer on behalf of God's good creation.If it is not possible to truly love in such a way that all provisional allegiances are transcended, can we truly call it love? We are all embedded within materiality that Simḥah Zissel says distorts our moral vision, but being located within the material world is a situation we cannot escape and all attempts to transcend it on the basis of a disembodied reason alone are fraught with the danger that when we talk of morals or God we are only talking of ourselves in a loud voice. What if the authentic freedom from material constraints in the moral life is the jettisoning of any ethic or morality that justifies the destruction of the Other? I read Simḥah Zissel to say very clearly that love is not a feeling; it is a decision informed by disciplined practice of cultivating the virtues. But one wonders if we are ever able to discern the origin of those virtues.Indeed, the story of God silencing the celebrating angels who were rejoicing while Pharaoh's army drowned in the Sea of Reeds with the statement, “The works of my hands are drowning in the sea and you are singing?” (Claussen 2015, 149) portrays God as the one who mourns deepest; and true Musar, as I grasp it, is to stand by God in God's time of suffering, a comment remarkably in line with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writing in his Nazi prison that humanity's task is to stand by God in God's hour of suffering.2But this image of the sovereign Master of the Universe grieving the destruction of God's own handiwork points to some of my deepest problems with Simḥah Zissel's moral vision. I say this because ultimately it is hard for me to reconcile the elegant and beautiful account of cultivating virtue with the account of reason, materiality, and contrary powers in Simḥah Zissel's work. To put it bluntly, how can I trust the commands of the sovereign God who establishes moral structure in the universe when I have to twist myself up into knots justifying the immoral behavior of the massive deaths of innocents?Simḥah Zissel says that love “for the wicked does not, however, require forgoing their proper punishment” (Claussen 2015, 149). One can consent to the idea that love does not always lead to mercy, and punishment is a justified response to the evils we as humans do. Reason can surely entertain this idea within the bounds of morality, but what purpose does the slaughter of thousands of women, children, and animals such as we see in I Samuel 15 or Numbers 31 serve? How can this be glossed with claims of divine command and not call into question the character and virtue of God? Professor Claussen himself acknowledges the tensions here between divine love and utter violence. Perhaps the violence prevents further harm to the victims. This would be sharing the burden in the sense that one is willing to take upon oneself the guilt of killing for the sake of the other, a position not unknown to other religious traditions.This is certainly the case when Simḥah Zissel justifies Moses's killing of the Egyptian taskmaster. The execution of the taskmaster was justice acting in love, or perhaps the other way around. But other paths existed short of killing in this story. He doesn't kill one of the men when he sees two Hebrews fighting (Ex. 2:13) (Claussen 2015, 159). In fact it is perplexing to me (there's that word again) that the moral imagination in Judaism and Christianity has not embraced the practice of nonviolence as the response most in accord with divine will. When faced with the claim, “I had to do it; I had no choice,” authentic moral vision should respond that there are always other choices, we just don't want to take them.Pushing the point even further, if the notion of proper reason and imagination shape our moral universe, they also shape the images of God that we inscribe in sacred texts and traditions. Simḥah Zissel says that imagination allows us to visualize the rewards and punishment in store for one's soul after death. But could imagination give us a moral order and a God who does not account reward and punishment as the primary motivations for our behavior? Simḥah Zissel moves us somewhat in that direction, but I wonder if he pushes this nearly far enough.So, let me push this a bit further. The disinterested pursuit of moral excellence, the desire to embrace equanimity in moral decision-making, is meant to free us from self-interest, but the God that we construct to serve our moralities is the height of self-interest. What if the greatest empathy and sharing the burden of humankind's many victims means the abandonment of the divine? In the pursuit of the moral vision and life that Musar calls us to it may well be the case that, as the mystic Meister Eckhart claimed, our last and most noble parting is to take leave of God, for God's own sake.