Like Fire in the Bones: Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah

Chapter Nine. A Shattered Transcendence: Exile and Restoration

chapter nine A Shattered Transcendence Exile and Restoration The Exile—as event, experience, memory, and paradigm—looms large over the literature and faith of the Old Testament. Together with the restoration, the Exile emerged as the decisive shaping reference point for the self-understanding of Judaism.1 Moreover the power of exile and restoration as an imaginative construct exercised enormous impact on subsequent Christian understandings of faith and life as they were recast in terms of crucifixion and resurrection. I We may take as foundational for our theological reflection three propositions that are beyond dispute: 1. The Exile was indeed a real historical experience that can be located and understood in terms of public history.2 It is clear that a considerable number of persons were deported by the Babylonians, though different accounts yield different results. In any case, much of the leadership of the community was deported. It is conventional to conclude that the sociopolitical situation of the exiles was not terribly difficult, though Daniel Smith has made a strong case for the notion that, in fact, the deported Jews in exile faced enormous hardship.3 2. While the actual number of persons exiled must have been relatively modest, the Exile as a theological datum became a governing paradigm for all successive Jewish faith.4 That is, the experience, articulation, and memory of the Exile came to exercise influence upon the faith, imagination , and self-perception of Judaism quite disproportionate to its factual actuality. As a result, the Exile became definitional for all Jews, many of 116 whom were never deported. Part of the reason that a modest historical fact became a dominant paradigm for self-understanding can, no doubt, be understood in terms of the exercise of social imagination and social power by the Jews who were in exile, who insisted upon and imposed their experience on Judaism as normative for all Jewishness. The community of the deported established ideological, interpretive hegemony in Judaism, insisting that its experience counted the most. Such a sociopolitical explanation, however, does not fully account for this interpretive turn in Judaism. In addition to the interpretive authority of the exilic community in the political process, the intrinsic power and significance of the Exile must be acknowledged. Since the Mosaic articulation of covenantal faith, built as it is around stipulation and blessing and curse—an articulation appropriated in the prophetic tradition—Israel has been subject to the moral seriousness of its own covenantal-ethical enterprise. Thus, power politics notwithstanding, the Exile required construal in Israel in terms of those covenantal categories. As a result, the Exile is an event not only of historical displacement but also of profound moral, theological fracture. That moral, theological fracture generated two primary responses. On the one hand, the paradigm of exile/restoration is concerned with the moral failure of Israel, so that exile is punishment and judgment from God. This is a dominant stream of “exile [golah] theology,” voiced especially in the tradition of Deuteronomy. On the other hand, however, it is clear that the crisis of exile cannot be contained in the categories of covenantal sanctions. Thus there was also the posing of urgent questions concerning the fidelity of God that are more profound than a simple moral calculus of blessing and curse. These questions are voiced, for example, in the prophets, in the priestly tradition, and perhaps in Job. The immediate questions of moral symmetry and the more subtle question of theological fidelity, therefore, created a large arena for Israel’s venturesome theological reflection.5 3. The experience and paradigmatic power of the Exile evoked in Israel a surge of theological reflection and a remarkable production of fresh theological literature.6 The Exile decisively shattered the old, settled categories of Israel’s faith. It did not, however, lead either to abandonment or despair.7 Israel was driven to reflect on the moral, theological significance of exile. The characteristic tension between acknowledgment of shattering on the one hand and the refusal of despair and abandonment on the other hand, required, permitted, and authorized in Israel daring theological energy that began to probe faith in wholly new categories that are daring and A Shattered Transcendence d 117 118 D Like Fire in the Bones venturesome. Indeed it is not an overstatement to say that exile became the matrix in which the canonical shape of Old Testament faith is formed and evoked.8 In that context, the...