Here is a very interesting link from John to an essay inspired by The Trial of God. It concerns ‘Theodicy’ i.e. the theology concerned with how to justify (if it is possible), God or the belief in God in the light of extraordinary suffering.
Protest or Process. Theodicy Responses to Elie Wiesel’s The Trial of God:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dcrdtr06lo2s4p9/Faulstick%20-%20Dustin.pdf?n=66773213
The following link below which I have just found today I think goes a good way to help illuminate what Wiesel was trying to do in the play we read, and the vital role that story and drama itself have in helping him (and others) battle with the crisis of faith and the struggle to retain belief that many Jews brought up religiously in Europe like him experienced post-holocaust, (although of course the play is set in the pogroms).
This however below is my take on it:
A notion of G-d who would look after humanity on any level now had to be abandoned. Only humanity can look after humanity as the play implies. We have to take responsibility for ourselves on earth and no notion of G-d will do it in Wiesel’s type of post-holocaust struggle to retain faith when it often looked like G-d had given up on him and his own people!
Even if we do not feel Wiesel does it that well or that accessibly in the genre/ form he chose; that was part of his stated struggle to find a form for his crisis of faith when his faith was rocked by the thought that saving humanity (especially for him in this context the Jews of course) and a notion G-d do not necessarily go together. I feel he also tries to show how art as a shared process itself even a funny little Purim play can help people especially survivors explore their trauma and doubts about God, as well as their sense of community and hope in the sharing of it. The Purim play itself enables them to express their own crisis of faith.
Berish and Mendele, both survivors of their families and communities who still want to contribute to the Purim drama even though it is through expression of doubt, anger and anguish. The main thing is they come together as a group and through their community can explore this now topsy-turvy version of faith and doubt. Mendele and Berish through the genre of the play, can tell their own stories of genocide; Berish talks too much and Mendele has not talked enough yet they are opposite sides of the same coin in expressing faith and doubt post-Holocaust.
By end of play both have told their stories plainly for the first time. The fact it takes so long is the point!
Eve Rubin
Jonathan Haidt’s book is a synthesis of evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, sociology and anecdote, aimed to explaining why people hold so tenaciously to moral positions and point the finger of blame at others who hold contrary views. The word Righteous in the title is deliberately ambiguous, implying that we are evolved / programmed to hold moral positions (instincts for moral positions), but also that this very programming makes us righteous as in self-righteous, judgemental, unable to hear the contrary positions. ‘Morality’, he says, ‘binds and blinds’.
Jonathan Haidt is an evolutionary biologist. He wants to explain human behaviour in terms of its evolutionary function. Particular behaviour, instincts and intuitions, including moral and religious intuitions he argues, have developed as a means of survival and propagation, and continues to play this role today. He uses this approach to explain political as well as moral and religious differences in the contemporary (American) context. His approach also influences the kind of recommendations he makes. In explaining cultural differences in terms of human biological evolution he is very much following a current intellectual trend (socio-biology), which has been used by, among others, Richard Dwarkins (who nevertheless comes to different conclusions). Readers may find this approach problematic as it downplays the effect of cultural forces operating in history in favour of relatively fixed human traits that are slowly evolving ‘for the best’. Maybe this approach pre-empts our political and moral choices, and accounts for (in my mind) the somewhat anti-intellectual tone of the book.
Our session on Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, on Friday 14th February, seemed to mark a departure from our discussion of political / philosophical texts in favour of a discussion of a novel. Yet this novel, by a Nobel prize winning author, deals with issues of politics, ethics and personal identity in an immediate dramatic and appealing way. It places these issues against the backdrop of an urgent situation – the struggle of an isolated group of activists against the South African apartheid regime in the nineteen seventies – and in the context of the wider political and social developments of that time.
The protagonist of the story is Rosa Burger, the daughter of Lionel Burger, an Afrikaner doctor who has also been a member of the banned communist party and an activist against apartheid. At the start of the novel we see young Rosa visiting her father in prison, where he has been sentenced to life imprisonment for his activities, in a way analogous to Nelson Mandela. Lionel belongs to a small group of whites from the privileged Afrikaner community who go against the values of their own upbringing and culture to fight against the political system and to be regarded as champions of an evil ideology.
For our first meeting of wellredjews in 2014, we will be reading ‘Burger’s Daughter’ by the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer.
The meeting will be on Friday 14th February, deatails to follow via the mailing list. To be added to the mailing list, or for more details, email info@wellredjews.net
Our discussion covered the usually unexplored topic of anarchism, unexplored because it has been in the recent past, written off as a serious alternative to our present situation. Yet, Emma Goldman deserves more serious attention at a time of global economic crisis, and the increasing polarisation in wealth and power between the minority and the majority. Also very reminiscent of what Emma Goldman was saying ninety years ago, is the failure of the traditional left to provide any alternative, and its co-option into being what seems like just a faction of one dominant neo-liberal party.
Emma Goldman was an anarchist, that is she rejected not society itself, but a hierarchically organised society run by a small number of individuals, through their control of property, government and religion. By property she included the means of production. Emma Goldman thought that private property was unnecessary in the present age, which was an age potentially or actually of plenty as a result of industrialisation and the mass production of goods. Property, she thought, might have been justified at a time of scarcity, but now it effectively divided society into a few very wealthy, very powerful, and the majority who were condemned to selling their labour, having to endure greater and greater control and oppression.
Our discussion at the last meeting of wellredjews centred around the work of the Palestinian American literary critic and cultural and political writer Edward Said. Said was important for being one of the few voices to champion Palestinian rights in the US, when the discourse about the Middle East was mostly one way, but also in that in books like Orientalism he developed a detailed analysis of the tradition in the west of writing about the Orient, and the cultural and political effects of this down to our own day.
In Orientalism, Said describes a literary and scholarly tradition (‘Discourse’) in describing the Orient whose origins can be traced to the earliest encounter between Europe and Asia: the Persian Wars, and then continued during the centuries of struggle between Christianity and Islam, the military threats from the Arabs, the Crusades, and the threat to the west from the Ottoman Empire. The Orient came to mean the East in general, including India and China and then more particularly the Middle East and North Africa: the Moslem world. A key turning point in the modern period was the political, military and economic penetration of Asia by European powers from the end of the eighteenth century onwards: the British hegemony over India, increasing involvement especially by Britain and France in the Middle East and rivalry between them, in the wake of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and because the Middle East was central to communication with territories further east. In Said’s account, a major milestone was the expedition by Napoleon to Egypt in 1798, which combined strategic and military considerations (the war with Britain) with the initiation of a major scholarly project: the detailed European description and mapping of the country. The fact that these two aspects – the political / strategic / economic, and the scholarly / academic / scientific coincide in time and were part of the same project – is for him extremely significant.
The next meeting of wellredjews will be on Friday 13th December.
We will be discussing the writings of Emma Goldman, in particular her critique of socialism, contained in the collection of essays compiled and edited by Alix Kates Shulman entitled ‘Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader’. The disucssion will focus on Part 1: Organization of Society.
Details will be emailed nearer the time. To be added to the mailing list, please email info@wellredjews.net
For the next meeting of wellredjews we will be screening ‘Commissar’, a 1967 Soviet film based on one of Vasily Grossman’s first short stories, “In the Town of Berdichev”. No need to read a book; just come along and enjoy the film, the snacks and the good company!
Thursday 29th August at 7pm (location will be emailed)
Our next book for discussion (date and location tbc) will be Edward W. Said’s ‘Orientalism’. The meeting will most likely be held some time in October, so there’s plenty of time to get reading!
For further details or to be added to the mailing list, please email info@wellredjews.net
The format of the discussion was different to our other sessions. In the past we have agreed on a book which everyone reads, and then the meeting consists of an in-depth discussion of that book. This time, partly because we could not agree on a book, we decided that each member of the group choose their own book (within the limits of the overall project: that the writer should have some connection with Judaism or a Jewish tradition of writing, and that the work should be in some sense ‘red’ or radical). In the end there were only four of us at Cathy’s house: Cathy herself, John, Sef, and me. This turned out to be an advantage because it gave us an opportunity to talk at some length about our chosen works and discuss them with the others.
wellredjews 