Pádraig McCarthy: Learning from Babylon
There has been much anger and hurt and grief and bitterness expressed around the appalling actions of Hamas and of Israeli authorities since 7 October. These expressions could be seen as aggravating the level of violence and suffering. Could they be a help to resolving the aggression?
The people of Israel have records of their history, with accounts of times of terrible suffering and anguish and hopelessness. Psalm 137 (138) expresses such anguish when Jerusalem was destroyed and the people were exiled to Babylon about 2,600 years ago, and concludes with a terrifying wish:
“By Babylon’s streams
there we sat, oh we wept
when we recalled Zion …
Should I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand wither …
Daughter of Babylon the despoiler,
happy who pays you back in kind
for what you did to us.
Happy who seizes and smashes
your infants against the rock.”
The 2019 translation of the Hebrew Bible is by Robert Alter, Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Berkeley. He notes about those closing words: “No moral justification can be offered for this notorious concluding line.”
Understandably, the closing curse is often omitted when Psalm 137 is used in prayer, as it is in the Breviary. It is omitted in the “Va pensiero” (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) in Verdi’s Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar) which is inspired by the psalm. It is omitted in the songs “The Waters/Rivers of Babylon” in the versions by Don McLean and Boney M. We would hope that nobody would ever act on such an expression.
And yet there is a difficult truth in it: the truth of the awful despair and desperation and darkness and anguish of a people who have suffered terribly and have lost all hope. A people who in our times have been subjected to the Shoah (Holocaust).
It is difficult to listen to such expressions of deep anguish and the anger to which it gives rise. But we need to hear it, while doing all in our power to find another response rather than the closing words of the psalm.
What seems to be often lost in this is the anguish and desperation of the people of Palestine who have lost their land and suffered so much since the foundation of the State of Israel, imposed on them by foreign powers who did little to hear or support them in this injustice. Imprisoned in an anguish and desperation which results in their seeing no other way of making their voices heard except by violence which they know will lead to an appalling multiplication of destruction and suffering. An anguish and desperation which it seems those in authority in Israel are entirely incapable of recognising.
Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, quoted a familiar line from the Book of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), 3:8, to argue justification for the war he is waging: “A time for war and a time for peace.” He seems unaware that this line, the conclusion of a poem of seven doublets, does not necessarily imply that they are approved or mandated by God. Rather, “Recall your Creator in the days of your prime …” (12:1; Alter). The poem in its place in Qohelet illustrates a frequently repeated mantra in that book bringing home the wisdom that so much of human life, like “A time to be born and a time to die” (v.2) is in itself empty: “Merest breath, merest breath. All is mere breath.” Or, in the translation we usually hear: “Vanity of vanities: all is vanity.” The devastation we see today in this war powerfully embodies the truth of this.
Olaf Scholtz, the prime minister of Germany, put his finger on a central issue, apparently without realising the significance, when he said (26 Oct) in Brussels: “We need to make it clear that we support Israel in the defence of its own territory against the awful attack by Hamas.” This is at the nub of the enmity: “its own territory”; territory from which the people of Palestine have been dispossessed.
It seems to be the case that there is no solution unless the anguish of each side is realistically heard and acknowledged by the other. That would be a first step on the way to real peace. The alternative, seen in the actions of both sides, is seen in the closing wish of Psalm 137.
‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,’ said James Joyce – and that nightmare continues today in what we Catholics call the Holy Land.
Teaching history and current affairs for three decades has left me now with the conviction that our central human problem is the tyranny of the ego – that part of us that fears above all to be shamed, and desires above all to be applauded.
Witness the rage of Adolf Hitler at Germany’s defeat in 1918 and the Versailles Treaty that followed – and then the Nazi scapegoating of the Jews that led to the Holocaust, to the state of Israel, to the unjust siege of Gaza and the reciprocal rage of Hamas… and now?
‘All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem,’ said James Gilligan, the US prison psychiatrist.
Notice the recurrence in all eras of the theme of captivity – of Pharaonic enslavement of the people of Moses, of the Babylonian conquest of Israel, of Roman occupation of Palestine in Jesus’ time, of Gaza today – and of James Gilligan’s insight into prison violence everywhere in our own time.
Were not the Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and the Caesars and Napoleon – and Hitler – all trapped in their own egos – that part of them that insisted ‘you must be glorified, not shamed’?
‘This must not happen to you,’ said Peter to Jesus also, on the way to Jerusalem. He hadn’t signed on for disaster.
Is not this the root of all evil that Jesus then overthrew – by trusting in a higher court than the human one that condemned him?
And was his Resurrection not therefore for all of us a release from the fear of what others think – the fear that underlies all ambition, all tyranny, all violence, all secrecy and all scandal?
Is this not what the Creed is about – the overthrow of the tyranny of the ego by the one who is now the only judge we need finally trust? The judge who forgives?
The Catechism is reticent in naming the evil that Jesus overthrew by his self-sacrifice, but both the human past and the human present surely name it for us.
We are egotistical beings, and give way to ego – for fear of shame – and others suffer the consequences: this surely is the prison – and the nightmare – from which we all need to awake.
That scandalous line is beautifully sung in The Psalms of David (King’s College, Cambridge), as if it denoted some mystery to be contemplated in hushed awe. But yes, we must face up to the horrendous genocidal passages in Scripture, which are by no means a dead letter (as we see in Netanyahu’s mention of Amalek, and in the long record of mass slaughters of whole populations, as in a 1580 herem involving Sir Walter Raleigh and glorified by his friend Christopher Marlowe in the play Tamburlaine the Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Smerwick ; Spenser was involved as well — the three greatest poets of their time). I challenged an American fundamentalist here in Japan on how one could justify killing innocent babes and his answer was prompt: “Three points: 1. how do you know they were innocent? 2. does God not appoint humans as agents of his vengeance? 3. who are you, a sinner, to criticize the word of God?
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/violence-and-grief-are-overwhelming
A clear warning of how vicious the circle of retaliation has long been recognised, but rarely heeded. The Hebrew tradition in the Book of Genesis illustrates the multiplication of evil in our world. Where Cain sought divine backing for his own protection by seven-fold retribution, the sixth generation from Cain brings Lamech, who boasts of far more in the words of an ancient poem:
“I killed a man just for wounding me,
a boy for striking me.
For sevenfold Cain is avenged,
and Lamech seventy and seven.”
Genesis Ch.4, Verses 13 & 23.
Lamech seems unaware of what this would bring when the ones on whom he visits retribution claim their right to vengeance on the same terms. Where we later read, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, this is an injunction to restrict the savagery voiced by Lamech rather than justification for parity of retaliation. Today we still hear the threat of annihilation in response to injury.
In Ireland we have our history in the “Plantations”, described on the TCD website for the Down Survey as “an ambitious project of social engineering, underpinned by a massive transfer in landownership from Irish Catholics to English Protestants.” Connaught (including Clare) became our Gaza. The 1641 Rebellion against this brought savagery from both sides. 400 years later we are still dealing with this. Our Civil War story tells of similar retaliation, each side seeing no better way to achieve their ends.
When St Augustine, in times of violence and disorder, wrote of “just war”, he sought to restrict the resort to war to very narrow circumstances under which one might be entitled to use war as a method of defence; not as a ploy to give a moral veneer to a war. Christians have often failed to follow the challenge of Jesus to love our enemies and, turning Lamech’s policy on its head, to forgive seventy seven times (i.e., always; Matthew 18:23).
An article in The Irish Times by Oliver Sears, founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland (Opinion, 18 Oct) gives hope. Despite the fear and disempowerment he experiences in the Israeli military action in response to the awful attack by Hamas on Oct 7, his closing paragraph reads: “I am an optimist. The Palestinians and the Israelis will reach a point where they understand that making peace with each other is their only option. Then they will need decades of their own Encounters to repair their trust in the human condition.”
May it not take 400 years. Isaiah (Ch.2) 2,700 years ago, had an extraordinary vision of Jerusalem as a sign of peace and unity for all peoples. A sculpture presented to the UN (by the Soviet Union!) in 1959 illustrates the words of Isaiah: “Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares.”