20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Catastrophe

Catastrophe Alan Mintz C atastrophe may be defined as a national calamity that undermines the received paradigms of meaning concerning the relationship between God and Israel. The national, collective nature of catastrophe distinguishes it from the related but separate problem of evil, the theme of Job and the Wisdom Literature, which pertains to the justification of individual suffering detached from historical events. The catastrophic potential in historical events can be gauged not by the quantum of pain, death, and material destruction but rather by the degree of damage to the cognitive, theological frameworks that bind the people to their God. In its historical aspect, the problem of catastrophe involves the study of how in different periods of Jewish history these frameworks of explanation were reconstructed or transformed. In biblical and midrashic literature the explanation for catastrophe is rooted in the conception of the covenant developed by the Deuteronomist and later focused by the classical prophets. The provisions of the covenant attempted to anticipate and defuse the grave theological dangers triggered by the temptation to interpret massive political-military reversals in one of 42 CATASTROPHE several ways: as an eclipse of God's power in the world arenas, as a permanent and willful abandonment of the people, or as an insufficiently motivated act of anger. The idea of the covenant, by contrast, required that historical destruction be understood as a deserved and necessary punishment for sins committed, and one carried out by means strictly controlled by God. Catastrophe therefore constituted a corrective moment in an on going relationship; it signaled the perseverance of divine concern rather than its withdrawal. If Israel would accept catastrophe as punishment and return to God, then the surviving remnant would serve as the basis for renewed national fortune. When the destruction occurred in fact in 587-586 B.C.E., this covenantal paradigm was submitted to extraordinary stress. The stunned anguish recorded in the Book of Lamentations reveals how tenuous was the hold of the prophetic theology on the people and on the cultic establishment . For it was widely believed that God's commitment to the Davidic succession of the monarchy and to the inviolability of the Jerusalem Temple was absolute. With the wiping out of these institutions came severe disorientation : What sins could have been so heinous, it was asked, to have warranted the visitation of so massive a destruction? The poets of Lamentations strive to defuse such questions by attending to the literary representation of suffering and by working toward a newly felt connection between suffering and sin. The dimensions of this theological crisis are indicated by the nature of the text of Second Isaiah. Isaiah preached a message of imminent restoration to the exiles of the Destruction based upon God's appointment of Cyrus as the nemesis of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The main burden of Isaiah's prophecy, however, is more fundamental. The very faculty of belief had atrophied. Through strategies of rhetorical brilliance, the prophet labors to restore the predisposition to accept God as capable once again of directing history and renewing the covenant. When it comes to the destruction of the Second Temple, it is impossible to separate the issue of the rabbis' complex attitudes to the Jerusalem cult from the formation of the entire edifice of rabbinic Judaism. Although such institutions as the system of migvot, the role of the sage, and the doctrine of the afterlife all developed before the Destruction, they can be interpreted as anticipatory responses to that loss and as functional compensations in its aftermath. In a more strictly theological framework, the explanation of the catastrophe offered by the rabbis was roughly of a piece with the covenantal paradigm of the prophetS-With the exception that the rabbis deferred the moment of restoration and redemption to a messianic era after the end of history. Although the paradigm was the same, the means available of recon- CATASTROPHE 43 firming it were very different. In the Bible, God speaks to the prophets and reveals his intentions to them; for the rabbis, God's will is manifest only in the texts of the Bible and recoverable only through the work of exegesis. As the central biblical text concerning destruction, Lamentations required interpretation. Yet at the same time it was an exceedingly difficult text to assimilate into the covenant paradigm: the depiction of God's victimization of his people is gruesome, Israel's consciousness of wrongdoing is...