“Theodicy: Ça se déconstruit”
Those words were too much,
too little was said, understood, imagined.
Win your peace, vindicate your god,
it is pyrrhic, brittle.
I thumb the pages of that same old text,
and hope—quelled to bare velleity, dim
and frail—whimpers o’er another
field of fallen sparrows.
God the All-Powerful, All-Passive,
rendered now a vacant notion
shorn of love, full of strength:
God omni(im)potent!
There are many other such cairns;
these ersatz gods will have their reckoning.
By a curious twist of history, one of the fragments of Lamentations found among the Dead Sea Scrolls switches the order of a few lines. The poems ofʾeikhah (the official title comes from the first Hebrew word, evoking something like a desperate sigh) are arranged acrostically, so this particular difference simply means changing the sequence of two letters in the alphabet. Scholars quibble about why this happened, but basically, it means that Lamentations 1:15-18 as it appears in our modern bibles also existed as Lamentations 1:15, then followed by verses 17, 16, and 18. Not unlike most of the Scrolls, this scrap is badly damaged and riddled with lacunae, but the last line is particularly interesting:
My children are desolate [because] the enemy prevailed;
the L[ord] is righteous, [because]...
(4QLam, col. III: frg. 3, line 10 = Lam 1:16c, 18aα)
The line is meant to end, “The Lord is righteous, because I have rebelled against his word.” But what if we were to be openly tendentious in our reading? We might capitalize on this coincidence of history and decay: In the midst of slaughtered children, dare we whisper of a righteous deity? The very ink itself has been effaced, unwritten: “The L[ord] is righteous, [because]…” Because…why? The Scroll can only partially name this God and offers no reason, no justification, as though to do so has become an unspeakable act. Perhaps Irving Greenberg was right to exclaim, “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.”[1]
And yet…
Download Lamentations and Antitheodicy
[1]Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” in Eva Fleischner, ed., Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1977), p. 23.
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