Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2003-2004
Session #2

Scripture Forum
Session #2
Goucher College
November 21, 2003

This session of the Scripture Forum picked up the discussion of Psalm 137 from Session #1:

   Introductory statement: There are aspects of our tra-ditions that encourage, reward, and/or demand violence. Moreover, there is a tremendous act of violence at the core of the Christian tradition. The Passion narratives were written by Jews from Jewish sources. The plan for this year's Scripture Forum is to look at those sources, particularly the psalms of lament.
   Before doing so, however, we want to take up again the question of prayer as a performative act. The psalms of lament come out of situations of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of some kind of threat. The cursing psalms are an extreme form of the lament genre. Can Psalm 137, which is a cursing psalm, inspire vio-lence?

Free-flowing discussion (sometimes disorganized, sometimes a bit heated):

• Question: What happens when someone with power and/or means takes Psalm 137 as a mandate, particularly when this individual has
  no knowledge or understanding of the context
  and background of the psalm?
• The ability to capture the desperation of the person praying is essential to the power of the prayer, but there is a huge difference between speaking out of helplessness and speaking out of malice.
• Reference was made to an article by Amos Oz, who was asked to account for Sharon's popularity. His response was that Sharon's policy is "providing emotional satisfaction to our frustration over the bodies of our shattered children." The need for emotional satisfaction is more important right now than a consideration of the wisdom of Sharon's policy.
• There is a section of the Passover Haggadah that asks God to "pour out wrath" ("Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that know Thee not, and upon the kingdoms that call not upon Thy name. For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his habitation" [Psalm 79:6-7].). This passage, like Psalm 137, taps into some sense of powerlessness. When people are relatively secure, however, this psalm causes discomfort, and there is a reluctance to use it as part of the Haggadah it because it seems inappropriate.
• Mainline Protestants can use psalms like these to pray for God to "win a war," but not to pray for God to perform violence against the enemy.
• This is a way to honor the fact that these prayers are in the canon, but there is a liberal move that treats them as metaphorical or poetic.
• One participant explained that she is not part of a "book tradition," so every week she needs to craft prayers that in humility ask God for justice. Using Psalm 137 is asking God for justice, not dead babies. This psalm is a strategy, not a mandate
  to go out and kill.
• Response: But how does the person sitting in the pew know that? This is a subtle hermeneutical move that tries to keep all the texts in the tradi-tion while at the same time defanging them. But this strategy may be too subtle.
• Verse 9 ("a blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks!") is not a call for God to do something, not a call on God to act, but a call for God to bless a third party's acting.
• There is a "law of the pursuer (rodef)" in Judaism that saves an innocent person by permitting the killing of the pursuer if he cannot be disarmed. There were people in certain circles in Israel bandying the word "rodef" around in reference
  to Rabin before his assassination. Afterwards
  they said that Rabin was like a "rodef"; they
  didn't mean that somebody should kill him.
• So how do we make this clear? We cannot control what happens when this psalm is in the public domain. Suggestion: Presbyterians believe that scripture is meant to interpret scripture in the lectionary, so another psalm should be found to show that Psalm 137 is not meant to be per-formative.
• In Judaism a distinction is made between what
  the rabbi teaches for the joy of Talmud study (theoretical law that is not to be implemented) and what the rabbi tells people to do. The sanc-tity of one reading is the sanctity of the other.
• If you try to interpret a psalm like Psalm 137 with another psalm, a person may get hung up on the one psalm and not pay attention to the other one. It's more important to talk about the dangerous text.
• This (Psalm 137) is the word of the living God, so we ask, "What is its instruction?" We need to broaden people's way of reading intertextually, to show people that this isn't all that God says. We also need to do the hard work of teaching the psalm because these words [about dashing babies] can be a living word for someone who has descended to the level of utter powerlessness.
• Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict feel the same way, but the leaders on both sides don't want to acknowledge that.
• Violence in sacred text goes beyond a feeling of powerlessness; powerlessness is not the only root of violence. (At this point a reference was made to Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of the Biblical Narratives, by Phyllis Trible.) Honesty about our sacred texts would lead to different ways of approaching and appropriating them.
  We have to name violence in sacred texts as a problem and deal with it.
• The violence expressed in the texts was not a problem when the texts were written, but such ways of acting are not acceptable now.
• These texts are not meant to be prayed; they are meant to be studied, which is why you don't clean them up. When such texts are used in liturgy they become fixed and unchangeable in their liturgical contexts. Because of the liturgical contexts in which they are used, the texts take on certain meanings that foreclose other possibilities. This
  is a problem inherent in liturgy.
• This may be a huge difference in our two traditions: Christians have a scripture-based liturgy.
• When Psalm 137 is studied, it is put into its histori-cal context. The end of the psalm is understood as an appeal that the cosmic scales be balanced.
• Texts like these may be studied in adult education programs, making it possible to "name the beast."
• This is not the best text to argue over because Jews and Christians view the source of the psalms differently, viz., human versus divine. Jews under-stand that people wrote the psalms.
• A Christian response to the last point: All the words of scripture are human words, but this is the divine word in human words in a way that nothing else is; this is the revealed word of God.
• In the psalm text you can talk about powerless-ness as opposed to divinely commanded violence. The text in Samuel that talks about taking revenge against Amalek is not about powerlessness.
• When people reach the level of powerless despair [expressed in Psalm 137], our tradition tells us that the thing to do is to pray. But what kind of prayer wants vengeance in the name of justice? What does reading this text within the Christian tradition do and say?
• There are all kinds of questionable things in the Amidah.
• Is vengeance ever a part of justice?
• Response: It depends on how you define "venge-ance." If "vengeance" is dashing babies against rocks, whether that is justice depends on what the enemy did to you. Is there a benefit for society?
• Judaism tries to take the emotion out of a response to another's action: One should follow the system, not one's own anger. ("If you feel good, it's not good.")
• There is a fine line between vengeance and retributive justice.
• What is the motivation for retributive justice: Is it intended to be a deterrent or is it meant to put the cosmos back into balance?
• Is retributive justice the best we can do?
• Justice is the beginning of building community.
• Justice comes before love. When what love is seen as becomes justice, then society has progressed.
• In Judaism the breaking of a law represents an individual human act that tilts the universe; a societal act has to tilt it back. But how this is done is very regulated.
• That describes the understanding of the Incar-nation dominant during the Middle Ages: The Incarnation was necessary because the universe was tilted so far out of whack that society couldn't fix it.
• There is justice, and then there is apocalyptic justice. Fundamentalist Christianity says that we should wait for God to fix what's wrong. But, in the meantime, there's no justice.
• There is nothing that can avenge horrible deeds like dashing babies against rocks.
• What happens to the rage in our communities?
  Is there any kind of communal service that acknowledges it? Such a service would put the problem in God's domain and implicate God by setting up a dialogic relationship that acknowl-edges that there is an Other and that Other has an obligation. This is what the lament tradition does: It reminds God of who God has been and what God has done and then waits for God's response. We have no liturgies of lament. People need ritual to deal with pain, anger, and fear.
• People can't hear unless you acknowledge their feelings, tell them you feel [the problem] the same way, and then wallow in the anger with them for a while. The canonical stuff acknowledges these feelings. The difference between Judaism and Christianity is what happens at the end: [Judaism believes that] God isn't going to take care of the problem alone. If you act justly, God will act with you.
• It's possible to deal with anger/rage problems in sermons. There you can swim around in it for a while (but don't stay in the pool!).
• One participant then spoke of a sense of "commu-nal silence," when we are so overwhelmed by violence and bear such a burden of violence that nothing can be said.
• Response: People think that the tradition is equipped to meet every need liturgically and to do so immediately, but communities only respond to problems over time. Sometimes silence is the most appropriate response. It's better to be silent than to say something stupid, but Americans are not comfortable with silence.
• Part of the problem lies in images of God: God was first a warrior and only later became a merciful God.
• In the second chapter of Job, when Job's three friends came to comfort him, they realized that he was suffering so much that they simply sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights and didn't say a word to him. Religious profes-sionals need to understand that there are times when they should keep silent and just be present.
• It is customary in Judaism when one goes to visit a person sitting shiva to keep silent until the mourner speaks.



• This session came to an end with a brief discus-sion of a saying in Judaism that the person who fulfills the commandment because he is commanded is greater than the one who fulfills
  the commandment without being commanded. (Jews are not into doing "random acts of kind-ness.") God commanded, and the people of Israel accepted. Therefore, certain responsibilities came to the community (although they are laid on the individual). If you accept the burden of the commandments, you become responsible.

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