Clergy and Educators

Fighting Words from the Bible
Need Explanation

This article was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on September 30, 2001.

The following essay was written by Rabbi Charles Arian, Rosann Catalano, and Christopher Leighton, staff scholars at the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies in Baltimore.

O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!
-- Psalm 137:8-9

The eruption of religiously motivated violence is not a peculiarly Muslim problem. Jews and Christians also belong to traditions well versed in the art of manipulating sacred Scripture, prayer, and religious conviction in the service of rage and vengeance. The soil of Western civilization is saturated with the blood of those caught in the onslaught of religious zealotry, and our world remains disfigured by those who claim that they are simply doing God's will. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the challenge is the same: Will our prayers give birth to life or give license to death? The answer turns on how we read and pray our sacred texts and on how we translate them into action.

The destruction and desolation of Sept. 11 unleashed a torrent of prayers that have a familiar biblical echo. The innocent have been slaughtered. We are on the side of freedom and justice. We are aligned with the forces of light and good. We are ready to confront an elusive and demonic evil. With God on our side, we are prepared to make great sacrifices. "We will bring our enemies to justice or justice to our enemies."

Some may be surprised, others repulsed, to find that buried deep in the Book of Psalms are a number of prayers that seem to give voice to these feelings. Filled with vitriol and hate for those who have done us harm, these prayers of imprecation call upon God to act against those who have brought us low. Yet many of us are uncomfortable with such prayers. Confident that these outbursts belong to a more primitive age and a more savage piety, we either skip over them in favor of something sweeter and nicer, or go to great lengths to sanitize and tame them.

The Psalms of Lament, and most especially the cursing psalms, were written in the throes of personal and national crises, and they appear at first glance to sanctify our quest for vengeance. So understood, these prayers are freighted with an emotional payload that readies us for war, activating and intensifying a thirst for slaughter.

No wonder many clergy scramble to disarm these divine appeals before they are launched. No surprise that many religious leaders fear an outpouring of faith that sanctions hate and mirrors the piety of the fanatic. If our prayer seeks comfort in the annihilation of our enemies, do we not become the very thing we hate?

The embarrassment many feel for this way of praying reflects our sense that the role of prayer should be to build up and not to destroy.

Are the only alternatives, then, a literalistic reading which prods us to violence, or a political correctness that leads us to purge our tradition of these ancient texts? No. There is a way to read and pray these Psalms that allows them to function as a means of healing and restoration.

First, the Psalms of Lament do not squelch our frustration, our desperation, or our rage. Rather, they clear a path that allows the most unruly of desires and most deadly of passions to spill into speech. They express our hunger for revenge and our thirst for blood. They acknowledge our anger, affirm our outrage, and fuel our desire to restore order.

Second, what is most astonishing is that the biblical tradition identifies such speech as legitimate prayer. In this act of praying, we hand over to God the full range and power of our thoughts and feelings and give to God the responsibility of acting on our outrage.

Does this mean that we relinquish our responsibility for self-defense and the obligation to pursue justice? Not at all. Yet the task to set right what is wrong requires an aptitude unclouded by terror and hate. To find the enemy demands a balanced and prudent temperament. To administer justice requires more than cruise missiles and Special Forces.

When our religious traditions serve a just cause, they drain the vitriol from our marrow. They shelter us -- and our neighbors -- from the terror of acting out of unchecked passions.

To avoid the dangerous excesses of the fanatic and to hold in check the compulsion to demonize those with whom we disagree, perhaps our country will need to learn to sing its laments in a new key. It is in this spirit of cursing that we may find ourselves saved from our basest impulses and better equipped to fight the terror of injustice.

©Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc.

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