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205 11. religious freedom Preserving the Salt of the Earth The history of the Jewish people is, in large measure, a history of exile, captivity, and diaspora, but it is also a story of redemption. The book of exodus reports the tribulations endured by the Jews during their exile in egypt, before they were led into the wilderness by moses, but it also speaks of a promised land and of the “steadfast love” with which God guides the people to his “holy abode” (exodus 15:13). The tribulations did not end with the Jews’ arrival in their new home; their troubles returned with even greater intensity after the fall of the two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. The books of Jeremiah and Lamentations tell us about the assaults of the assyrians and Babylonians, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the ensuing Babylonian captivity of the Jewish people. Lamentations is particularly eloquent, bitterly mourning the loss of “the city that was full of people” but has become “like a widow” and a “vassal.” yet both texts also speak in a different voice. Jeremiah exhorts Israel “not to be dismayed,” for the Lord “will save you from afar, and your offspring from the land of their captivity” (Jeremiah 30:10). and Lamentations holds out the prospect that the Lord “will not cast off people for ever, but, though he cause grief, will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love” (Lamentations 3:31–32). This combination of, or alternation between, grief and promise has continued throughout the long period of the diaspora and up to the climactic events of the Holocaust and a return to the biblical land. This entire history is replete with lessons and guideposts. one such lesson—too often or too readily sidelined—concerns the role of suffering in what is called “salvation history,” the role of transformative seasoning as a prerequisite for any kind of redemption. another 206 a Pedagogy for our Troubled Times lesson has to do with the difference between—or the difficult mutual implication of—land and promised land, of any given city and the holy city seen as that Lord’s “holy abode.” The problem is that the latter cannot be just any empirical location; in that case, it would be meaningless to speak of its special holiness. Nor can it be completely extraterritorial, for in that case, it could not be called a city. But the psalmist explicitly states: “Jerusalem aedificata sicut civitas” (Jerusalem built like a city; Psalms 122:3). Thus, the holy city, seen as the lodestar of religious faith, exhibits a peculiar ambivalence, finding itself at the cusp of territory and extraterritoriality, of place and no place (or utopia). Christian scripture recognizes this ambivalence, or this location beyond location, when it exhorts faithful people to be “the salt of the earth” (matthew 5:13). If the salt remained outside or aloof from the earth, it could not exert its seasoning or transformative role; at the same time, if it fused or coincided with the earth, its “saltiness” would be lost. This ambivalence was well captured by Paul ricoeur when he wrote, in a somewhat hopeful vein: “after several centuries during which Christians have been preoccupied with the inner life of personal salvation, we are discovering afresh what is meant by ‘the salt of the earth.’ We are discovering that the salt is meant for salting, the light for illuminating, and that the church exists for the sake of those outside itself.”1 ricoeur’s reference to the “inner life of personal salvation” points to a momentous development in modern religion, and especially in post-reformation Christianity: the growing withdrawal of religious faith from worldly institutions and its retreat into a realm of inwardness . This development, sometimes labeled the “privatization of faith,” is surely one of the major achievements of Western modernity, but it is also one of its most dubious and problematic legacies. on the one side, the turn to inwardness involved a decisive process of liberation , that is, the exodus of religious faith from the stranglehold of secular powers and potentates; under the rubric of “religious liberty” or “free exercise of religion,” most modern democratic societies pay tribute to this achievement of individual liberation. on the other side, by allowing itself to be “privatized,” religious faith paved the way to its own social obsolescence in the face of the surging tide of materialism and consumerism. In response to the latter danger, efforts have been afoot to rescue religion from...

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