See also the review for Holy Resilience.
In 2018, I wrote a book called Patience. It's a sort of strange book, most of which I can't remember right now. I've tried to re-read my old books in the last few years, but I haven't gotten around to reading that one. But I am aware of one part of it that opened up a big new area in my thinking.
Someone I knew back in the middle of the 2010s was a secular Jew around my age who was a history student. He pointed me to a book by Yosef Yerushalmi called Zakhor which claimed that "history was the faith of fallen Jews". What impressed me was a claim that Yerushalmi was using as background for his argument, which is I would guess not original to him, that the Hebrew Bible was the "cultural memory" of the Jews, and not history.
It struck me that the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament was something "remembered from" a position. Even as a non-scholar, it really looked to me like a lot of the Old Testament was written down in captivity. That's when the history books (1 Samuel through 2 Kings / 2 Chronicles) leave off. My naive theory is that a lot of the content of the Old Testament was oral tradition, and the editors or canonizers of the Old Testament chose which oral tradition to preserve and trust. The Old Testament could be historically accurate, but it's more like the past of the people in captivity, which makes them who they are, and only secondarily history in a secular sense (what literally happened in time). I don't think this takes away from the possibility that they are inspired. Maybe God wanted his people to remember their past a certain way. Maybe the events of the Old Testament literally happened in a kind of spiritual world, which is somehow in parallel with our own and which we have lived and will live again in our own secular way.
I thought that the Jews ended up being admirable because they were losers when they wrote down the Old Testament. They were losers who survived.
At the time, and still to this day, I don't feel a strong sense of identification with a people group. Some people are very nationalistic -- some in ways that seem good, others in ways that seem bad (like the Nazis). Nationalism is a great way to start wars; motivate genocide and ethnic cleansing; suppress, shame, or dehumanize people; or waste time getting and feeling angry. Nationalism (as I used it in my book) doesn't have to just be about nation-states, but could operate at different levels -- it operates at the level of the individual with his or her own personal nation, as well as in the family or friend group, and in the church or workplace, and in various identities (races, sexes/genders, and sexual orientations as identities rather than as accidental physical facts, political or religious affiliations, fandoms), all of them nationalisms. The love that we have for ourselves and others is often (or usually?) nationalism. So every affiliation that draws persons into distinct people groups (one meaning of "political"), we could call nationalism. So that "nationalism" (which can include nation-state level nationalism) can make people brothers and sisters of each other, emotionally bonded, can give them spiritual nourishment, can give them a sense of being a person, can motivate whatever it is that causes people to help each other.
I don't think that that "good nationalism" is a good god, in fact, I think it is a tempting idol. But, "bad nationalism" is an obviously bad god that can also be an idol. And good nationalism, like all really good temptations, is a good thing in itself. Perhaps we need good nationalism (of a sort that is really good and non-tempting) so that bad nationalism or bad anationalism doesn't cause us to get desperate for good-nationalism-of-whatever-sort, leading us to idolize good nationalism.
So there are two questions: can we split good nationalism from bad nationalism, and how? And, can we make nationalism an inherently God-worshiping thing instead of a very good thing which turns us away from God? I don't know the answer to the second question right off the top of my head right now, but I have a suggestion for the first, based in the sort of notable moment of insight or inspiration I had when I wrote Patience.
Being ignorant of most of Jewish history, I saw the Jews as being the people group who wrote and remembered the Old Testament. So what kind of people wrote and remembered the Old Testament? Losers. So I thought, if I'm going to be part of a people group, part of a chain of cultural memory, if I'm going to adopt an identity as a person who belongs to other people based on their collective self-concept and "past", and in this way become a "thick" person who connected with people, what group should I choose? The Jews (the people who wrote and remembered the Old Testament) have claim to being the people of God's word. They certainly have a "past" (the Old Testament itself), which I could adopt. But, notably, they are also the losers of history, dispossessed, looking back on how they messed up, how they fell away from God, how they mistreated each other. I thought that if I intentionally identified with this, even strongly, I would not fall into the temptations of bad nationalism.
At that point I thought that if I was ever going to join a people group, for real, on the level of "rootedness", it should be to the Jews who wrote down and remembered the Old Testament, or people who could be considered sufficiently like them, although not necessarily to the Jews in general.
Recently, I heard on this episode of the Israel Bible Podcast an introduction to David M. Carr's Holy Resilience which claims that the Bible (both Old and New Testament) came out of response to trauma, and that that origin enables it to speak to people in difficult times. This is why it has staying power over time, where more triumphalistic texts have failed. (At least, that's what I remember from the episode -- I may have misinterpreted or misremembered it.) If that is Carr's argument, it's akin to what I believe, but also maybe strangely askew to it. It sounds like maybe Carr will have the people of the Bible be winners after all, the winners who use non-triumphalism about their failed "battles" to help them win the longer-term "war" of survival. Survival is good, and "pays the rent" for the truth, but survival itself isn't the point -- it's a very good thing and therefore a very compelling temptation to idolatry.
I expect Carr to have interesting arguments, some of which may support my own point of view. I'm also perhaps expecting that he could say things which flesh out his point of view in a way that makes my own less attractive to me. (Sometimes seeing your reflection in a mirror does that.) So, I've bought a copy of the book, and intend to start reading it soon.
(I read the preface and it somewhat makes me think that Carr will not be in favor of triumphalism, but will also not be arguing for exactly what I would argue for.)
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