Eugene Peterson and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Strange Bedfellows, Wise Voices

Two passages I've been reflecting on:

First:
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness."

--Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

Second:

[This is the final part of an article, "Markets and Morals," that I use in my ethics class. It is by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth. http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2654

While it's main focus is on economics, I think it has something to say to our situation at VCC. How will we be formed spiritually, as persons and as Christ's Body? Right now there is a struggle over visions for the future: shall we be tourists/consumers, or pilgrims? What will our ecclesiology be? One based on market and satisfying the self, or one based on virtue and imitation of Christ? Does Jesus give us Life, or lifestyle? Will our relationships be driven by our desires or by discipleship to Jesus Christ?

Ironically (or maybe it is God's providential sense of humor!) I think Sack's five "features of Judaism" can also function as signs of our life in Christ:

1) Sabbath
2) Marriage and Family (if understood more broadly as Body of Christ)
3) Education
4) the concept of Property
5) tradition/Law (if understood more broadly as Scripture)

These are some ways that the Body of Christ says to the world: "thus far and no farther. There are realms in which you may not intrude." They are also some of the ways the Body of Christ says to the world: "Come unto Me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." A few folks might even call them (gasp!) institutions.]

"I want to draw attention to five features of Judaism, essential to its way of life, that on the face of it stand utterly opposed to the market ethic.

The first, of course, is the Sabbath and its related institutions, the sabbatical year and the jubilee. The Sabbath is the boundary Judaism draws around economic activity. What marked the Sabbath off from all other religious celebrations in the ancient world was its concept of a day of rest. So unintelligible was this to the writers of ancient Greece that they accused Jews of observing it merely out of laziness. But of course what was at the heart of the Sabbath was and is the idea that there are important truths about the human condition that cannot be accounted for in terms of work or economics. [BETH ADDS: or amusement.] The Sabbath is the day on which we neither work nor employ others to do our work, on which we neither buy nor sell, in which all manipulation of nature for creative ends is forbidden, in which all hierarchies of power or wealth are suspended.

The Sabbath is one of those phenomena-incomprehensible from the outside-that you have to live in order to understand. For countless generations of Jews it was the still point in the turning world, the moment at which we renew our attachment to family and community, during which we live the truth that the world is not wholly ours to bend to our will but something given to us in trust to conserve for future generations, and in which the inequalities of a market economy are counterbalanced by a world in which money does not count, in which we are all equal citizens. The Jewish writer Achad Ha-am was surely correct when he said that more than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews. It was and is the one day in seven in which we live out all those values that are in danger of being obscured in the daily rush of events; the day in which we stop making a living and learn instead simply how to live.

Secondly, consider marriage and the family. Judaism is one of the great familial traditions, and this despite the fact that in strict legal terms a Jewish marriage has the form of a contract; that Judaism has never prohibited divorce by mutual consent; and that it is quite relaxed about that modern development, the prenuptial agreement, and indeed sees it as a useful device in alleviating the stress of separation. The reason Judaism has often succeeded in sustaining strong marriages and families has little to do with the structure of Jewish marriage law, and a great deal to do with its ritual life, the way in which many of the supreme religious moments take place in the home as a dialogue between husband and wife, or between parents and children. Ultimately, Judaism saw marriage not as a contract but as the supreme example of a covenant, namely a commitment based not on mutual benefit but on mutual belonging, whose key value is fidelity, holding fast to one another especially during difficult times because you are part of who I am. The Jewish family survived because, in the graphic phrase of the sages, it was surrounded by a hedge of roses,an elaborate network of rituals that bound individuals together in a matrix of mutual giving that was utterly at odds with a market ethic.

Thirdly, consider education. I have already mentioned that Jewish law favors competition in the provision of teaching. What it did not do, however, was to leave access to education to the market and to the ability to pay. Even in the days of Moses, Jews were instructed to set the highest religious value on education-as one of our most famous prayers, taken from the book of Deuteronomy, puts it: You shall teach these things diligently to your children, speaking of them when you sit at home or travel on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.And by the first century, Jews had constructed the world's first system of universal compulsory education, funded by collective taxation. Education, the life of the mind, an ability to follow a train of thought and see the alternative possibilities that give rise to argument, are essential features of Jewish spirituality, and ones to which everyone, however poor, must be given access.

Fourthly, the concept of property. I mentioned earlier that Judaism has a high regard for private property as an institution governing the relations between human beings. At the same time, though, governing the relationship between humanity and God, there has been an equal insistence that what we have we do not unconditionally own. Ultimately everything belongs to God. What we have, we hold in trust. And there are conditions to that trust-or as the great Victorian Jew Sir Moses Montefiore put it, We are worth what we are willing to share with others.

And finally, there is the Jewish tradition of law itself. It was a non-Jew, William Rees-Mogg, who first drew my attention to the connection between Jewish law and the control of inflation, a link that I confess I never thought of making. His argument is contained in The Reigning Error, a book he wrote in 1974, a time of high inflation. It was simply this: Inflation is a disease of inordinacy.It comes about through a failure to understand that energy, to be channeled, needs restraints. It was the constant discipline of law, he says, that provided the boundaries within which Jewish creativity could flow. The law, to quote his words, has acted as a bottle inside which this spiritual and intellectual energy could be held; only because it could be held has it been possible to make use of it. It has not merely exploded or been dispersed; it has been harnessed as a continuous power.Jews, for Rees-Mogg, were a model of acquired self-restraint, and it was the failure of societies to practice self-restraint that led to runaway inflation [BETH would add: also moral and theological error.]

And with this I come back to Hayek and The Fatal Conceit. It was Hayek's view that moral systems produced their results, not directly or by conscious intention, but rather in the long run and often in ways that could not have been foreseen. Certainly Jews believed that their way of life would lead to the blessings of prosperity. That, after all, is the substance of many of Moses' prophecies. But there was no direct connection between institutions like the Sabbath and economic growth. How could there be? The Sabbath, the family, the educational system, the concept of ownership as trusteeship, and the disciplines of the law were not constructed on the basis of economic calculation. To the contrary, they were ways in which Judaism in effect said to the market: thus far and no farther. There are realms in which you may not intrude.

The concept of the holy is precisely the domain in which the worth of things is not judged by their market price or economic value.
[BETH WOULD ADD: or by their appeal or entertainment value].And this fundamental insight of Judaism is all the more striking given its respect for the market within the marketplace. The fatal conceit for Judaism is to believe that the market governs the totality of our lives, when it in fact governs only a limited part of it, that which concerns the goods we think of as being subject to production and exchange. There are things fundamental to being human that we do not produce; instead we receive from those who came before us and from God Himself. And there are things that we may not exchange, however high the price.

Socialism is not the only enemy of the market economy. Another enemy, all the more powerful for its recent global triumph, is the market economy itself. When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, [BETH would add: when what we take to be real is only what we can feel] then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends. That, not the return of socialism, is the danger that advanced economies now face. And in these times, when markets seem to hold out the promise of uninterrupted growth in our satisfaction of desires, the voice of our great religious traditions needs to be heard, warning us of the gods that devour their own children, and of the temples that stand today as relics of civilizations that once seemed invincible.

The market, in my view, has already gone too far: not indeed as an economic system, but as a cast of thought governing relationships and the image we have of ourselves. A great rabbi once taught this lesson to a successful but unhappy businessman. He took him to the window and asked him, What do you see? The man replied, I see the world. He then took him to a mirror and asked, What do you see? He replied, I see myself. That, said the rabbi, is what happens when silver covers glass. Instead of seeing the world you see only yourself. The idea that human happiness can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of things we can buy, exchange, and replace is one of the great corrosive acids that eat away the foundations on which society rests; and by the time we have discovered this, it is already too late.

The market does not survive by market forces alone. It depends on respect for institutions, which are themselves expressions of our reverence for the human individual as the image and likeness of God

--Jonathan Sacks, "Markets and Morals"