Book Review: In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict

Religion remains one of the most powerful forces motivating human beings, and indeed entire societies and nations. Its influence is in many ways transformed, but is still unbroken, despite advances in science and insight. Its study has fascinated scholars of many stripes, and psychoanalysis has continually tried to deal with its many manifestations and varied history; developments in religious studies have always evoked a profound interest among analysts. The last few years have opened up new insights into the development of Western religion. I will mention but two German contributions that could profoundly influence our understanding of Judaism and Christianity. One pertains to the introduction of monotheism in human history, a topic that moved Freud to write his last book, Moses and Monotheism, and is the subject of two important works by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann: the religion of ancient Egypt showed in its later development a strong tendency to merge all the gods into the one God Amun, the “Hidden One,” and thus to become monotheistic, even before the great Pharaoh Echnaton established during his brief reign a rigorous monotheistic system focused on Aton, the sun god (c. 1350 b.c.). A thousand years later something very similar happened in Greek and Roman antiquity: religion became imbued with a belief in “the One and All—to Hen kai Pan.” And yet, there was a dramatic difference between such an inclusive monotheism, which encompassed all the pagan divinities within its one God, and the Biblical deity: the latter’s exclusivity.

Assmann (2003) starts out with the “psychohistorical aspect,” stressed above all by Freud: “The turn to monotheism with its ethical demands, its emphasis on the inner man and its character as ‘father religion’ is joined with a new mental attitude and new ‘nature of soul,’ that have decisively shaped the Western view of mankind” (p. 12). He adds: “I call the crucial point of this turn ‘The Mosaic Distinction.’ It is not the distinction between the One God and the many gods that seems to me decisive, but the distinction between true and false in religion, between the true God and the false gods, the true teaching and the erroneous teachings, between knowledge and ignorance, between faith and wrong belief” (pp. 12–13). Specifically, this development “coincides with the ‘invention of inner man.’ The distinction between truth and lie does not only divide the outer space, but it cuts midway through the human heart which now truly becomes the arena of religious dynamics” (p. 156). The discovery of the inner person is also the discovery of inner conflict as something deeply constitutive of mental life. Dynamics means inner conflict. This distinction, however, is intimately conjoined with what Assmann (2006) calls “the language of violence.”

A second scholar, Bernhard Lang (2010), traces the figure and teaching of Jesus back to a powerful stream in the Judaism of late Biblical and post-Biblical times that is deeply influenced by the philosophy of the Greek Cynics, a school leading back to Socrates and Diogenes. It emphasizes the renunciation of all possession and luxury, even having a home and family, coupled with active caring for other human beings and even animals, and especially helping those who suffer. Lang’s book has the provocative title Jesus the Dog—the Cynics aspired to a simple way of living like dogs (“kyon” in Greek, hence the name of the school Kynikoi, “those like dogs”), in contrast to the pompous lion.

In the Whirlwind, the book to be reviewed here, is very different from these works by Assmann and Lang. Important in its own right, it is based not on traditional Biblical research, but on something more akin to psychoanalytic exegesis, though its author is not an analyst. Robert Burt, who offers us this thoughtful, intriguing, and demanding work, is instead a professor of law at Yale University; his book is a strikingly original analysis of the Bible, almost an extended commenting midrash of great depth and often poetically enthralling passages. He puts Biblical research and historical context largely aside, in brackets as it were, and studies the text of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament as well, piece by piece, as if it were the work of a single authorial mind. Its inner contradictions are not seen as ill-fitting juxtapositions of manuscripts of heterogeneous origin, as traditional Bible critique does, but rather as evincing the inner conflicts of the authorial mind, almost like a psychoanalytic case history: since “no narrative detail, no matter how small, is without significance, . . . we are obliged to dig beneath the surface of every detail” (p. 62). “The Hebrew Bible contains many puzzling omissions and apparent contradictions. But the text is nonetheless organized on the premise that, taken together, its narratives have an underlying coherent unity” (p. 250). This is, by the way, a perspective that resembles the traditional Jewish view of the Hebrew Bible: that of a unitary, God-given document, existing outside of history and allowing cross references and proofs, regardless of conventional connections of meanings.

The overarching interpretation proffered by Burt is that of an ongoing, yet often interrupted and disrupted dialogue between God and mankind, of a relationship “as it evolved from complete harmony at the outset, even before God created the Garden of Eden, to a mutual struggle over authority on both sides, with God insisting on unconditional obedience to his commands and humanity insisting that God keep his promises to them or else they would withhold obedience” (pp. xi–xii).

Late in the book Burt summarizes this encompassing arc of meaning, with its traumatic ruptures: “From humanity’s perspective, the central question [of the Hebrew Bible] had been whether God would keep his protective promises or abandon us. From God’s perspective, the reciprocal question had been whether humanity would abandon him and, if so, whether he should keep his promises to us. The basic theme of Jesus’s teaching is that the relationship between humanity and God had repeatedly foundered because of mistrust on both sides, so that both felt continually driven to test the other’s confidence in and love for them. This mutual mistrust first appeared in the interval between the first and second creations in Genesis, and Jesus taught that humanity and God could find their way back to the goal that each desired—the goal of the harmonious communion that was actualized in the first creation—only by an initial act of transcending mistrust, only by a whole-hearted prior offer of unconditional love and loyalty. The demand for definitive proof of love and loyalty as a precondition for repairing the broken relationship was precisely the demand that caused the breach. The demand for prior proof is thus self-defeating; it locks both humanity and God into an endlessly recurring cycle of approach and abandonment” (pp. 248–249).

But, the author adds later, “this same pattern in the Hebrew Bible repeats itself in the Christian Bible, with the progression from unconditional love to reciprocal commandments as the basis for the relationship between God and humanity. This progression is evident in the successive depictions of Jesus’s teachings from the Synoptic Gospels, starting with Mark and gradually moving through Matthew and Luke (a progression apparent in the internal conflict in Paul’s letters) until we reach a virtual transformation to a punitively enforced command-based relationship in John and its apotheosis in Revelation. On God’s side, this progressive transformation is as apparent in the Christian as in the Hebrew Bible. On humanity’s side, the increasingly explicit command that God is bound to comply with his promises is less starkly presented in the Christian Bible, but it arises implicitly nonetheless from Jesus’s promise that faith in him will lead to the reward of eternal life” (p. 273).

Throughout both Bibles, the fundamental premise is “that God and humanity do in fact need each other, that they are psychologically constructed to need each other—and yet both God and humanity resist acknowledging, and often entirely lose sight of, this fact about themselves” (pp. 288–289).

Jesus’s parables continue the underlying message of the Hebrew Bible: “Cain reappears as Abraham, as Judah, as Saul; each of them succumbs to wrongdoing toward his younger brother and struggles with his guilt and the possibility of redemptive reconciliation. Taken together, all of these struggles portray the same underlying political problem: how can terrible breaches in relationships be resolved so that the shared longing for return to the original state of harmony can be acknowledged and pursued?” (p. 336).

One of the presuppositions of this work is cited by Burt in an endnote, in the form of a comment by the great translator and interpreter of the Bible as poetic and literary document, Robert Alter: “The [positivist] cognitive model for the whole modern enterprise of Biblical commentary [going back to nineteenth-century Germany] is, I think, the textual crux. One encounters a difficult place in the text, something that does not make sense. With great patience and a little luck . . . the crux may be solved. . . . The Bible as a whole is conceived as [an] intricate edifice of puzzlements—philological, compositional, historical—that one by one require solutions and with a combination of ingenuity and serendipity will get them. What these commentators and their many modern forerunners do not readily imagine is that much biblical writing . . . might have been devised precisely not to yield a solution, or to yield multiple and contradictory solutions, and that this might be the very hallmark of its greatness” (p. 363). Burt adds that he sees the contradictions as “purposefully embedded in the text. The proper way to translate from Hebrew into a modern language would be to preserve the contradictions, not to resolve them one way or the other,” and he gives as example the conclusion of the book of Job (the fulcrum of Burt’s book, as shown by its title): “to insist on Job’s self-abhorrence and recantation or on his abhorrence of God’s misconduct” (p. 165). He proposes therefore the following translation of Job 42:5–6: “I had heard of you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you. Of all that I have said to you with my mouth I am appalled. Therefore in dust and ashes, I withdraw.” Burt comments: “The virtue of this translation . . . is its uncertainty. Was Job appalled at his own presumptuousness in what he had said to God in charging him with injustice? Or was he appalled at God’s injustice which he had described as such?”—God’s callous willingness to engage in a wager with Satan and to sacrifice the well-being of a good man. “Was Job withdrawing his indictment? Or was he withdrawing from further relations with God?” (p. 165).

But Burt’s analysis goes beyond that of the biblical dialogue, as it were, beyond Buber’s “I-You” relatedness, by adding that “the central political virtue in the biblical theory is not obedience to a ruler or respect for the rights of the ruled but the capacity for forgiveness on both sides following the breach of a relationship” (p. 171). In fact, the entire analysis is framed by the political and legal issues of justice and injustice—the question “about the legitimacy of God’s authority in demanding obedience” (p. xiii). There is, on the one side, an absolutist demand for justice, exemplified by Emperor Ferdinand I’s “Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus” (“Let justice be done, though the world perish”) (p. 17); this is, on the other side, opposed by a recognition that perfect justice is not only impossible, but that its pursuit is world-destroying.

Burt does not quote any of the midrashim that reflect this idea. I conclude with one of them. It refers to the scene, discussed by Burt in chapter 4, when Abraham pleads with God for mercy toward the people of Sodom. The starting verse in the Torah is this: “Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18.25). The midrash comments, in the name of Rabbi Levi: “If You desire the world to endure, there can be no justice; if You desire justice, the world cannot endure. Yet You would hold the cord by both ends, desiring both the world and justice. Unless You forgo a little, the world cannot endure” (Midrash Rabbah; Bereishit 39.6).

Burt’s analysis is a work of great value and general interest, sweeping in its compass, brilliant in its questioning, and wise in its conclusions.