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Post #5

Richard Dreyfuss to Susannah Black

July 7, 2015

Now I think you’re going to LOVE the 1632 series–and it’s all about the Germanies, and the people who were German then, and it’s an eye-popper…Your friend would love those stories.

You mentioned a periodical a while ago; I’ll try to find one also, and don’t forget we’re looking for a religious magazine, something, oh, let’s say, with the Catholic or conservative Christian

bouquet, yes?

R

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Susannah Black to Richard Dreyfuss

July 12, 2015

My dear,

So I sat down yesterday FULLY intending to dive back into the Big Question of Cities and God, and respond to your last long email, but then I read a little more of 1632, and ran into Rebecca Abulafia reciting Nagrela’s battle poetry to herself… Such a strange experience to read these poems, and to think about that world, that time of security and peace… because so many of the poems are beautiful. But not all of them. And then I was thinking about the precious fragility of not engaging in religious war… even Nagrela, who was living in what we think of as the religiously peaceful world of the Sepharad, writes poems that include fairly bloodthirsty prayers…

And that made me think about how Christians read the “warfare” psalms. It’s something that C.S. Lewis has written about in his Reflections on the Psalms, and it’s one of the things I’m most grateful for in this monotheistic tradition as opposed to the others. How it works is this: Paul, in his letter to the church at Ephesus, writes that when Christians fight, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts [i.e.armies] of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

With that basic understanding– that our fellow human beings are not our real enemies–we can’t read the warfare psalms as blanket invitations to violence. And with the example of Jesus who, rather than physically fighting against those who wanted to hurt him, let them kill him, and (we believe) did so out of love for them in order to reconcile even his killers to God… it really makes me baffled as to how the 30 years’ war ever happened.

People are messed up, I tell you. We call that original sin.

More later,

S

P.S. IF you weren’t such an anti-nonprofit spoilsport, one element of the nonprofit I invented for you would be practical training in the “arts of association” specifically in the Jewish tradition of derech eretz, which as I understand it basically translates as “not being a jerk.”

XOXOXO

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Susannah Black to Richard Dreyfuss

July 13, 2015

Rebecca Abrabanel, I mean. Not Abulafia. Conflated Sephardic names in my head.:)

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Richard Dreyfuss to Susannah Black

July 13, 2015

Dumdeedumdeedumdeedumdeedumdeedumdumdee

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Susannah Black to Richard Dreyfuss

August 21, 2015

OK, here’s my response– long overdue– to your email of July 2nd .

First thing I would say is that while I very much want– yearn, even, sometimes– to be the kind of eudaimonic person that Aristotle talked about, and who Jefferson counted on as the type of person who’d be a good citizen of this new republic– this new “public thing”– that he was helping to make, and while I very much want you (and dad, and everyone else) to be those sorts of men (and women), I don’t actually think any of us are. I think we approximate that man to a greater or lesser degree, but I think there was really only one truly good-spirited man, who truly pursued happiness, and that was Jesus.

In Christian theology, he’s the Son of God, of course, and God the Son, but he’s also called the Son of Man. This refers to a specific prophecy in the book of Daniel, but it also refers to the idea that Christ is the “second Adam,” the man who really got being a human man right, who really did it right, in the way we all don’t. And that “in Him” we have a way into getting it right ourselves– being human right, not missing the mark. And that the first thing that this entails is being forgiven for all the ways that we have, willfully, missed that mark. Each of us is offered this forgiveness on the basis of Christ’s death; we had, the Christian tradition teaches, turned away from God and from being human according to the way that we ought to be human, loving him and each other. This isn’t just unfortunate or sad– it’s wrong; it’s an injustice that we did, a cruelty. And the justice that is another part of the good of the world was fulfilled by Christ’s death, opening the way back for us to be human the way we were supposed to be.

“All men, without exception, seek happiness,” said Aristotle, and the thing is, we do– but we do it really unskillfully, and we let ourselves get palmed off on crap substitutes. We want a great romance and settle for a night with a hooker, we want to make a big difference in the world for the benefit of our fellow-humans and we settle for political projects of dubious merit that end up bringing a lot of people to the guillotine. We are bad at being happy. Christ was not. And when we look at what his real happiness consisted of, we’ll be surprised– Aristotle would have been less so.

Jesus said a couple of things about his own pursuit of his own happiness. This is a weird way to think and talk about Him, because He was after all “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with suffering.” But he was passionately committed to his own joy, far more passionately than we are. And this is a good thing. One element– the primary element– of his joy is to “do his Father’s will,” to unite with God in wanting and loving what God wants and loves, and acting on that. And the second element– what it turns out God’s will is– is that God has made it a condition of his own joy that we share in His own joy, his own life. And this isn’t arbitrary. It turns out it’s the nature of God to want to bring others into His own joy.

So Christ’s greatest sorrow– the Cross, his unimaginable separation from His father– we are told he chose to endure “for the sake of the joy set before him.” And that joy is being reunited with us, being — in this very weird mystical sense– “married” to the Church, the new Israel.

Any city that we live in now– New York, say– is a picture, a little model, a practice version, of the real deal, which in the Bible is called the New Jerusalem. What we do here we do in order to learn to do it there, and in order to send good works ahead of us to furnish our homes there; our homes and public places. And one major thing that we learn to do is to live with “derech eretz,” as I said; to live with civility, to live courteously.

(And in the New Jerusalem, civility which is the manner of the city, and courtesy which are the manners of the court, are shown to be one unified code, because the city turns out to be the same as the court: it’s a royal city, after all– as even the first Jerusalem was; it was, as the Christmas carol says, “Royal David’s city.”)

Responding piece by piece to your email:

You wrote:

City is not village, which you use as if in some sense it a valid choice when it is in reality yesterday’s picture of a Golden Age, sighed for as Jerusalem was sighed for in the Exile, but reachable by present day Humanity only by and for bloody and ungenerous means and ends.

(Are we still friends?)

“City is not village,” you said, pointedly– you’re referring to my little romantic addiction to small, local communities, to self-sustaining households even? And you’re right. I would be very sad if there were no self-sustaining households left in the world, and no villages. But that’s not the direction we’re going in, and it shouldn’t be.

We are and will always be still friends!

Bloody and ungenerous means: tell me more– do you mean deliberately calling a halt on development & globalization, or reversing them, which would mean billions of people sliding back into poverty and early death and all the bad that the romance of the pre-modern covers up?

You wrote:

It seems to me that thinking about God’s desire for our perfection sometimes disregards the understanding that a wise God certainly feels that getting there is a journey of a trillion steps, thousands of opinions. Where are we all on that journey? Are we wise enough to know or feel how young we are, how to us new the behavior is that imitates God’s perfection, how we must try to forgive ourselves our trespasses, in the belief that one day we will actually be able to stop trespassing, a hope that, I think, will take a million years or more to realize? Still, will not a patient God be more than happy to supply us with that time?

Are we not, Suze, in some way at a beginning, at the start of a long childhood that graduates into a bootcamp for Godhood, as is implied in so many sages’ thoughts when they speak of Oneness with God?

I guess what I’d say is this:

The human telos, the human end, is not to become gods or angels– it is to become fully and completely human, and further, for each of us to become fully and completely ourselves. Yes, there is a Christian doctrine of theosis– divinization. We don’t talk about it a lot, mainly because we don’t really understand it but partly because it is so, so easily misunderstood. The Eastern Orthodox talk about it more. We’re not a hundred percent sure what it means, or at least I’m not, but we know a couple of things about what it definitely doesn’t mean.

We are told that what God has in mind for us is a “sharing in the divine nature.” We’re told that what we were made for is to grow up into responsible viceroys to him, little images of Him, to present Him and represent Him to creation. That’s what it means when we are told that “God made Man in His image,” and that men and women are to “rule over” the Garden, and the world.

But we also know that the temptation we faced and failed at was to grasp at this in the wrong way– to try to become “as gods” on our own account, without reference to Him. That’s the sin of pride– to forget in whose image you’re made and to start to think that you can dispense with God because you can be your own God, define good and bad according to your unfulfilling caprices or desire to lord it over others, and not according to the patterns of His love in the world.

So yes, we have this idea of divinization. But it is completely and inextricably connected with being actually filled with God’s Spirit, who– in Christian theology– is actually a person of the Trinity, and so is God Himself. You can’t be godlike without being properly related to the actual God himself.

And the other thing to say– now and always, is Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad. The Lord is one. Christians would add, And three– three Persons in the Godhead– but despite popular rumor, we are completely, utterly, and uncompromisingly monotheistic. There is only one God, and He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and you know what? You are not Him. That is just as central to Christianity as it is to Judaism. And you can be quite sure that the moment you forget that, and start being under the impression that maybe you are, …in some sense, somehow… actually kinda the same as God, and you just have to realize that, and that what Jesus came to teach is that we are all God… all that vague un-pin-downable Gnostic stuff that I’m sure you’ve heard enough of, which populates the New Age sections of the Strand– as soon as you are thinking THAT way, you are off track, boy.

We will also not have our individual selfhood swallowed up into some kind of universal “god-consciousness,” as other bits of the New Age section would have us believe. God likes individuality and variety and sharp edges to things; He likes diversity and multiplicity and the vivid selves that we are. We will if anything become more unlike each other as we become more who we ought to be: more complementary to each other because we are more distinct. He made us as individual persons, and it is no part of our job to shed human nature, but rather to inhabit it more fully, to live into our natures as humans and into our individual, distinct natures– Susannah, Richard– as thoroughly and boisterously as we can. In the New Jerusalem, you will be more you– more distinctly, solidly, recognizably Richard– than you ever have been. I will be more me.

However. There is another however. We human people will not become the God of Abraham. But we believe that– astonishingly– He became one of us. And that He remains one of us. Jesus, we are told in the New Testament, rose bodily– the tomb, after all, was empty– and he, that body, that male human Jewish body, that man, was caught up after meeting with His disciples. He “ascended”– he went somewhere else, in that body, and he remains, and will always remain, in that body even after He returns.

You wrote:

And isn’t it, to bring it home a bit, a progress to know the realistic need for a house that will stand up to the winds of feelings that certainly have the shape of Faith but are demonic, so that we can continue to shape ourselves under the safety the sturdy house affords the seeking man among the sturdy houses of the Beautiful City?

This is almost a question about whether civic structures– i.e. the US Constitution, the modest but firm guidelines of republican government– can be a safehouse in which human progress can happen, a progress away from barbarity. What I’d say in response is that I have a kind of bemused affection for the Constitution, and for the liberal/republican/Madisonian program in general, and I’m not against the idea that progress is possible. But I am cautious about the idea that you can guarantee it through a commitment to structures, while dispensing with the natural law traditions out of which those structures grew, and especially while dispensing with the conception of human nature and the inherent value of human beings that we get from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

We talked after the Appomattox reading about slavery: how it was, when it began again in the 16th century, like something reanimated after it had died, something that we thought we had taken care of, had gotten beyond, but it came back– like a revenant, a vampire, after having been dying and then dead in the West for a thousand years.

For what it’s worth, that’s how we pro-lifers feel about abortion too– and the infanticide from which it can’t really be distinguished. And we are afraid that this barbarism is coming back (after it was banished from the West by the Church which rejected the Roman practice of exposing infants on hillsides if you didn’t want them or they were imperfect) because we have, quite recently but quite thoroughly, forgotten what the idea of “human nature” means: it’s not about capabilities, what a baby can or can’t do; it’s about something that all humans, whatever their developmental level or degree of education or skin color, share, and which is astonishingly sacred, almost frighteningly holy, and to be cherished.

It’s the absence of this awe at human nature that we think is at the back of a lot of modern issues, and this absence of awe and understanding can’t be supplemented by a non-philosophical commitment to civic procedures… Because the procedures themselves grew out of a worldview that included this awe.

Anyway. That’s a lot– sorry! One other bit: I’ve decided it’s not too early to be thinking about Halloween costumes, and I think I’m going to go as Rebecca Abrabanel. Am considering various costuming concepts, except that after she married Mike I bet she wore jeans a lot.

Love,

S

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Susannah Black received her BA from Amherst College and her MA from Boston University. Her work has been published in First Things, The Distributist Review, Front Porch Republic, Ethika Politika, and elsewhere; she is a founding editor of Solidarity Hall.  She blogs at radiofreethulcandra.wordpress.com and tweets at @suzania. A native Manhattanite, she is now living in Queens.

Richard Dreyfuss was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1947 and began his acting career at the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center when he was eight years old. He began doing features in roles of size in the early 1970s in films such as American Graffiti, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Jaws. He won the Oscar in 1978 for his performance in The Goodbye Girl. He has been acting in American theatre, television and film for over 45 years. In his personal life, Dreyfuss has undertaken a nation-wide enterprise to encourage, revive, and enhance the teaching of civics in American schools. He has become a spokesperson on the issue of media informing policy, legislation, and public opinion, speaking and writing to promote privacy rights, freedom of speech, democracy, and individual accountability.

 

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Image: Lorenzetti, “Effects of Good Government on the City Life” 1380