Whatever your personal cosmogony, the Jewish-Christian scriptures place great emphasis on the idea of creation. Literate Jews, Catholics, and main-line Protestants have little time or patience for the repartee between rigid fundamentalist Christians and omniscient scientists about how the cosmos came to be since it is an argument based on a false dichotomy. The creation accounts in scripture are not science but proclamations of faith.
And the primary proclamation, what Abraham Heschel insists is one of the central and most compelling ideas in Judaism (and we can extrapolate in Christianity as well), is that freedom, not necessity, is the source of all being. What is paramount in this worldview (weltanschauung) is the understanding that the universe is created not caused. The Bible, claims Rabbi Heschel, is not interested in ontology as metaphysics but rather in creation as history freely initiated by God. Creation is not an ontological necessity but a divine decision, and when translated into an eternal principle, creation means the freedom of God.
As the first creation account in Genesis portrays, the original creative act as the exercise of divine freedom reveals the deep desire and deliberate trajectory of God’s heart. That is, it is always freedom for the other, whatever or whomever that other might be. In the Jewish-Christian tradition, God is the One who is “conscious” of and interested in the other. And the familiar refrain, “And God saw that it was good,” after each wildly imaginative moment, takes the freedom of God a step further by disclosing God’s irrepressible delight in all things NOT GOD coming into being. In this sense, the original foolishness is the foolishness of God, and there as the divine decision to make room for, honor, and take delight in the other as other.
Stood against the wants and ways of contemporary culture, this desire and direction of God’s heart appears as utter foolishness. At our last H&H gathering we began to contrast holy foolishness with the agenda of the dominant culture that is peddled by the spin doctors who have the power, pretense, and microphone to package and sell it as wisdom. Our list included the usual culprits.
What most if not all of these diagnoses of the culture had in common is that they could be traced back to a worldview and way of life that is centered on the self. In a world driven by self-interest, the other – be it a person, a place, an animal, a public policy, a natural resource, or the earth itself – is viewed first and foremost as existing for MY benefit and as serving MY interests. By contrast, the way of practicing holy foolishness begins by acknowledging the significance and making room for the presence of the other, that is, the NOT ME.
Perhaps the simplest and clearest way of understanding holy foolishness, then, is to make clear that it necessarily involves the shift from being self-centered to being other-centered as was the Source and Giver of life in the first, free, and generative act of creation. The intersection of freedom and foolishness in the creative act whereby the divine chooses to make room for the previously non-existent other is seen even more vividly in another creation story.
Within Jewish mysticism there is an alternative cosmogony different from the one introduced in the Bible. It is as complex as it is elegant. Its origins and historical context are too intricate to go into here but it was formulated in response to the question, “If at the beginning all there was was God (more specifically, Ein Sof, or the Infinite), then how did the universe or anything else come into existence?” And the response that Isaac Luria, one of the greatest of all Jewish mystics, formulated was that the birthday of the universe occurred by an intentional act of withdrawal or contraction on the part of the divine, of Ein Sof, so that a space was made for something other-than-God to come into being. Although interpretations vary as to the motivation for this original divine withdrawal (tzimtzum), one valid (though less conventional explanation) understands this action as the original act of divine hospitality. In the primal act of creation, God exercises freedom by making room for the other. By doing so God dignifies the other while demarcating the Godness of God.
Instead of living by conventional wisdom that begins with self-centeredness and ends with self-interest, “full, conscious, and active” Jews and Christians choose to center and concern their lives with God who is the Original Other. All “others,” human and non-human, exist within the otherness of the Original Other who is God. For Christians (to borrow the words of Bonhoeffer), Jesus is “the man for others” who not only preaches and teaches this divine foolishness but embodies it as well. This cost him his life since in calling forth the otherness of each he called them to the oneness of all. It was, we remember, Jesus’ insistence on relating to women in public, to lepers, prostitutes, IRS men, and adulterers, in a way that indicated not only that he dignified them as persons but also treated them as equal to all other persons deemed more important by the societal mores of his day. It is “this man for others” who recognizes, calls forth, and blesses the distinctness and preciousness of each creature who paradoxically reveals all “otherness” is in reality grounded in Divine Oneness. The Original Other is the Original One in whom we live and move and have our being on account of the freedom that is gifted us by the ongoing act of Divine hospitality.♦
Wishing you blessed foolishness,
Dan
REFLECTION:
Catholic social teaching, rooted in the gospel of Jesus, orients us as the body of Christ to think in terms and act on behalf of the common good. As a way of practicing holy foolishness, pay particular attention to opinions or beliefs you hold and decisions you make that are based on whether or not it will benefit you and/or serve your interests as opposed to what might be best for all, especially the anawim (the ones most vulnerable).
Pay attention to the other this week, to the not-me. Imagine what life is like for these others. Act in some way, however small, to acknowledge, make room for, and honor their otherness keeping in mind “the other and I are one.”.