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Why
be Good?: Response to The Reasons of the Scriptures
Laurie
Zoloth
Northwestern University
My student asks: Dr. Zoloth, why do I have to be
so good? I am teaching young obstetrics &
gynecology residents why they should not take bribes from drug companies,
something I thought I could wrap up in 10 minutes, but it is not going well.
They all know the name, for example, of the Ortho-Nova drug rep, "CHRISTI!
"they chorus, their hands up in the
air, white coats rustling, but they do not know the name of our Dean, for it is
Christi who leaves free drug samples and they and their girlfriends take them.
The drugs are for the poor, theoretically, and when I point this out, they tell
me that are poor residents.
It was August and in the cycle of the Torah the
Jews of the world were reading our way through Deuteronomy, thinking of poverty
and residents aliens and I am a Scriptural Reasoner, and then there is
that whole Christi problem, and I think, textually, about this irony for a
moment, pausing, thinking: "if your
brother grows poor and his hand falters with you, you shall support him, as
though he is a resident alien, do that he shall live with you,"(Leviticus
25:35). And my student asks again. "Like, when I see a
beggar on Michigan Avenue, and he comes to me, why do I have to give him my
money?"
I say, "You are going to be a
doctor, and if I have anything to do with it, a moral agent." And, thinking of Bashit
Koshul, I say, "there is a link between economy and a moral life, and the
link between the two is such that engaging in a particular type of economic
activity either facilitates or hinders the possibility of morality." And not
just your salvation, I mutter, but the possibility of mine.
I am an ethicist, and the call to tell of
scripture, which turns us toward the past, and towards the task of the recovery
of the past, always makes me slightly guilty, for text study is always a task done with a deep joy that is
tempered by the sound of the present, and that is a sound like the shattering
of glass. It is the sound of the army in the temple (and I might add, today, in
the mosque.) One studies the text of
debt and release and of forgiveness in a world pulled away from such a call,
and one reads the response, from the Jew, and the Muslim and the Christian, and
this stops the world, as these radical world-stopping texts were meant to. But
the texts are about the future, of course—we are here, right now, but our
problem is how to make the future fair, a future moment that begins when you
walk out that door, at the moment when you hear the first cry of the poor, and
stretches all the way out to Moshiach. But are we, perhaps, possessive
of a contingency? Perhaps our stuff is
ours, and our way is singular, or perhaps shared only with other contented,
successful people, the ones who work hard, and take personal responsibility for
their fate. Perhaps the world, suggest my students, is like this—perhaps it is
for us, ours, in the ways that are most important—ownership, control, autonomy.
So as an ethicist, and a guilty one at that—and
my warrant for reading is that it must be an ethical gesture—I want us to stay
with the text, for it is literal, and I have literal questions to ask of it,
and of my colleagues: mostly, do we really mean it? How can we live it? What
does the theory we create do for the actual practices in which we find
ourselves? It is not entirely the
medical resident's fault, it is a problem in the academy—we have made them
little businessmen, and given them ethics as secular autonomy, in which bodies
are a kind of property, in which we contract not to violate rights.—and we have
taught them that a person is a bundle of rights. We do not teach them duty, nor hospitality,
so they cannot think clearly about justice. It keeps coming out as a weak,
sappy, sort of pious charity—a Christianity with the gift giving drug rep
"Christi" at its core instead of the cross or the Akedah.Not to mention scripture, not to mention God,
is to allow them to think it is all a matter of personal, inchoate niceness.
But the student has asked a real question—"I've worked hard—he hasn't—what does
justice have to do with it?" Luckily, I can say—well, let me ask Gibbs, Hardy
and Koshul: and my colleagues on the panel answer for me—
First: The shared past is slavery, and in its name
we are responsible to undo slavery. But before slavery? What is that? Our pasts
are the stories of critical betrayals between brothers—times when a kinsman has
come to you in his need, and you have turned away. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and
Isaac, Jacob and Esau; Laban has sold you into a sort of slavery, Jacob; and
Jacobs's sons have sold their brother into slavery, and that is how we are in
Egypt in the first place.The consequent
economy is based not only on exchange but repair, not only on liberation from
slavery, but a covenant based on being forgiven for having failed precisely in
this way.
Second: What is the problem that the text worries
its way through? It is, our papers
argue, the Kantian problem—that one might get confused and make a critical
ethical error: one might think that people are things. But why could such a confusion possibly
occur—that you might think your sister, whose baby word named you, or your
brother, who taught you to count, might suddenly become a stranger's body to
you? I think this is possible, of
course, after war—when bodies lie on the ground as so much kindling. Think about the kinds of times in which the
need for a law about the crisis of debt occurs. In all three texts, it is a
time of reordering after war, wars in which what is at stake is God in the
world. Soldiers were everywhere, and their swords—yet the conflict is
completed, or paused and now the task is to remake a world beyond victory—but
there has been so much loss, so much death, perhaps, one might think, that is
merely the way of the world? Might you not think, well, all this stuff, I,
chosen of God, I must deserve it?
In the Hebrew text, we are stopping
at thresholds. Looking across at new terrain, Moses worries if the future will
be fair, and if the community of children he has watched grow into men and
women can both do the difficult work of daily life and the far harder work of
caring for each other. What must I do about the suffering of the other? The
ideal of justice—just words until now, since the children did not really have
to share anything—is also transformed into a tangible physical reality. Every
family is to have its particular plot of land. But the world is a chancy thing,
as this law reminds us. Your own family, your best friend may lose faith, your neighbor may fail and come to you
wearing nothing but his last coat, having nothing but her desperation—having
nothing but her open hands.
In the Jewish tradition, the texts of Deuteronomy
and debt release are read frequently—they are read on the second day of the
pilgrimage holidays to which they refer, in perhaps the most difficult part of
the law. You must take the poor into your homes, and you must take them with
you to Jerusalem, the whole pack of you. You must include, at the end, even the
gerim, the widows, the orphan, all into the deal. The poor surround you
at all times, they stand in the edges of the field like it is their field,
surround the sharp corners, rounding the place you live, encircling you in the
need of others. They are there when you cheerily celebrate your stuff, and eat,
there in your joy, because the world is not a thing that you personally were
given. Neither your riches or your neighbor's need belongs to them alone, both
of these are the exchanged in all of these economies.
In this relationship, as an adult, not a child
munching on manna, but one who now must pray for daily bread, you will need
both courage to proceed to the place that will be yours in the future—the "sort
of yours" future, and the "really yours" future—and the terrible wisdom to
forgive terrible failure. With the Islamic texts, Koshul
reminds us: the roles landholder and land loser might be at anytime reversed.
Third:
But the problem is not only how to give freely. It is not only about how to have the complex, failed, messed up person
in your crowded living room, sleeping on the couch, it is even harder—it is
how to forgive debts, after you have done all that you have done, when she
still cannot repay you. How to return to the original position, despite all
that is true of her failure? When you
were born, says the text, or reborn as My People, you were idol worshippers and
you were enslaved. And only with these laws can you avoid a return to these
terrible curses, can you avoid being thrown into jail—or perhaps it is an iron
cage?—with no real possibility for repayment. You hang between re-capture and
abundance, but only if you can make the pilgrimage with everyone. And now, the
task of forgiveness will be the first job for people interested in second
chances, in a fair future. Debt occurs because human beings make horrible
mistakes, because crops fail and insects are also hungry. To loan money is
to give a kinsman your hope that she can work her way back into the community
with this chance. The thing about
forgiveness of debt, and release of slaves is that it asks for both remembering
and forgetting at the same time for both parties to the loan—remember your
obligations to the poor, act on them, remember that you remember to pay back
with your work this debt you have incurred. But there are limits to this
essentially marketplace, capitalist exchange. In part what is exchanged is also
memory—of oppression, redemption, relationship and of God. For French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the
point is to leave the logic of scarcity and move to the logic of
abundance. Koshul
reminds us that such an interaction is also based on the reality that the
ledgers of the economy at every scaled level are based in far more than the seen
exchange—and the hiddenness of the exchange enhances it, but also might recall
for us how deeply other aspect of loan and reward might go.
What of a debt that is endless, asks Daniel
Hardy? What of a man who owes you everything? What is at stake here seemed to be yet
another missed truth: the parables of owing impossible amounts are precisely
the ones that are most in the realm of a spiritual economy. One can easily
misunderstand, as my student does, as the servant in the Luke parable does. For
the debt the patient owes the physician is enormous—his life, literally. (And
thus, understandably she might think herself as having given a great deal to
him.) But the debt that the physician owes the patient is far
larger—unimaginably larger, for it is only by and through the bodies of the
patient that the doctor is a doctor at all—both in an ontological way, and in
the tangible way at the heart of practice. When one comes to you in their
nakedness, having failed at everything, needed help or they will die that day,
one might be tempted to use them as things, and their life and death might come
to mean nothing. But the field of responsibility, Hardy reminds us, is a
particular sort of exchange of goods. Let me parable the parable: the student
is the one in debt, who ought to fall on her knees before the patient, who is
of course, the bearer of the face of the Holy One,which perhaps the student does not know she
has been seeking. When the patient's
body has been given over, and the student is now a doctor, and her debt is
forgiven, and forgotten (or this story would not seem so strange to us, so
inverted) then the doctor has an obligation to be transformed—to transform
solidarity into living by mercy.
Whose hands are open? The hands of the poor, who carry nothing, who
have given you the last covering for their skin; the hands of the Jew on the
Sabbath who can carry nothing into the world; the hands of patients, from whom
all is taken, whose bodies are naked—their rings taken off before the surgeon's
knife can begin, or the MRI is
taken and captured, they too have given to the doctor all but their skin as
guarantee for their need. Also the giver
is open handed—"you must open your hand"—for look—presto chango—nothing is
there! You have nothing, and you must
see that before you can really give, for this is an economy in which the
autonomy of wealth is an illusion, a magic trick from the magicians of Egypt
perhaps, the real deal being that the open hand you offer is full of the goods
and grace of the Lord. And when even the
slave serves her time, she will be set both free and free with not-empty-hands,
and that will be the alchemy of Exodus.
I have asked the texts in the hands of my friends
to do several jobs—to be read word by word, so we remember the story; to be
remembered into the word of God, theology, and then to go back out to the
clinic, where the particulars matter—which call to answer. My student is not an
Enron executive, both because she is herself an immigrant, an actual alien,
from a poor family on their small plot, and also because medical residents are
rather like a recently freed slaves—out of grad school, and needing to know how
to become a person at each quotidian moment—this one on the street, this one in
the clinic, this sister on my doorstep. I want her to desire the terrain of sociability and to understand that
if she opens her hands—the place of her skill, the place she will catch babies
and learn to cut and repair—she must know the poor have the right to take what
they need from her. The economy of
medicine, but not more or less, these texts remind, is not merely an economy,
but a theo-political exchange.
What does our study of scripture offer her? In a
way, my three friends have told her: it is a circular argument, an argument
about a circular economy, and about an encircled economy—an economy for right
now that has in mind a spiral upwards—a blinding eschatology, a Jubilee. You
must be good because we must still live in a world where it still could be true
that your brother is freed directly from your empty hands.
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