May Their Memories Be A Blessing

With so many deaths from London to Tel Aviv to Orlando in the last week alone, it’s important to remember that violence is never holy. In the memory of those lives lost, I thought I would include this excerpt from a chapter that I wrote about gun violence for a forthcoming volume.

…The priest does not shudder at the vivid descriptions of blood and sinew, fat and flesh in his guide book. The carnality of the infection, the horror of the altar dripping with blood calls forth no disgust for the him. It is the world in which he lives and teaches. It is he who declares what is fit and unfit, what is clean and unclean. Who is "in" and who is "out." And it is into that teeming world of ritual the priest finds in his special guide, the Book of Leviticus, the installation of an ethical centerpiece called the “Holiness Code.”  It is his code of life surrounded by death.  It is the sound of God amongst the noise asking us to rise out of the muck and “Be holy for the LORD God is Holy.” (Lev. 19:2).

But Leviticus does not give over its ethics easily.  One must wade through pages of sacrifices and offerings for the entire spectrum of human existence. For every sin there is a ritual.  For every transgression there is a path back into the community.  All under the shadow of the great Mountain of God. The most striking of these offerings to me is in the fourth chapter where it is written, “If the whole congregation of Israel commits a sin unwittingly and the thing is hidden from the eyes of the nation, and they do any one of the things which the LORD has commanded not to be done and they realize their guilt – when the sin becomes known, the congregation shall offer a bull of the herd as a sin offering and bring it before the Tent of Meeting. (Lev. 4:13-14)

What does “unwittingly” mean?  It’s hard as a person of privilege to look into that metaphysical space.  Sometimes as a white male I feel like a bumbling giant that breaks everything just by moving around. I hate that feeling. Yet, that’s the lesson the Levitical priest is teaching me. We are all responsible not only for our known actions (that’s obvious) we are held accountable to that which is unknown to us. There is a penumbra of the conscience in which our guilt lies, and it’s our unwitting sins that seem to be the Levitical obsession. We must make that which is not into that which is. Our sins need to be made known: our biases and our bigotries. Those inadvertent actions which draw some towards life and others to death. Our unconscious racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Our unwitting actions that break the bodies of other people. It’s at the intersection of the unknown and known where guilt becomes sin and sacrifice is issued its greatest warrant.

Since 1909 scientists and soldiers have been obsessed with the minimum velocity that a bullet requires to perforate our skin. Based on thousands of tests shooting at pigs, oxen, and human cadavers—not to mention a special ballistics gel, the experts on bullet velocity declared it impossible to calculate the exact speed needed to penetrate our bodies. However, scientists have a basic rule saying that the terminal velocity of a bullet must be traveling at least two-hundred feet per second in order to break the skin, although in some circumstances bullets traveling much faster (say, three hundred feet per second or a little more) might bounce off my body. It really depends on a number of things including how pointy the bullet is, and where it strikes the body.  Upper-lip skin, for example is much thicker than cheek skin. Babies have thinner skin. The elderly have skin which is less elastic, making it easier to puncture. I wonder how many lips they shot to find out how fast a bullet needs to go to enter there compared to a cheek. Anything less than two hundred feet per second my body might be able to repel it, not without damage of course. But once a bullet accelerates to this ferocious speed, the micrometers of fat and protein that separate us from the world are pierced. The distinction between “me” and “everything else” is pierced. My tabernacle is destroyed, my altar desecrated. There is no more “in” and “out.”  The unclean is mixed with the clean. The impure with the pure. I would crash down like a rag doll, like an angel crumpled under the weight of the world.

It is fatal to think that God as omnipotent. It makes no sense to me to live life in such a way as to say that God caused all things. The price is too high and the expectations are too great upon us. Omnipotence and power together makes something immoral out of a God who says that suffering is good for us or that we deserve it because of some sin we wittingly or unwittingly committed. Leviticus does not know of such a God either. The priest tells us to come in from the outside, to mend our ways. For every sin there is a path back to the center through sacrifice and expiation. God is not the cause of suffering because God causes nothing. It’s as ludicrous to think that God is hiding from us and that is why we suffer. It's as if God decided to go the bathroom at the most tragic part of the movie. Why would God have the urge to miss out on the scene where we pour our hearts out? Really smart and good people quit on God because they felt God quit on us. It’s not hard to believe that to be true.  

But in the age of mechanical reproduction we’ve imagined ourselves to be gods who have mastered the world and its myriad instruments of life and death. We’ve committed ourselves to our own salvation and destruction, often conscripting the youth or the poor to do it for us. We pour out our pain, our grief, our ferocity onto each other. We are overcome by the dread of scarcity. We are still marked like Cain. The god we make ourselves into is as jealous as the God of the Torah, in some cases more so. The gods we believe ourselves to be murder by the millions those who don't fit the mold of what we think is right and good. The God of Abraham never killed someone over pair of tennis shoes. We name ourselves god and we pull the trigger.

Violence threatens everything that is holy. It makes the world profane. The priest commands us to look into our unconscious and label them as our sins. To look at the structure of society and see what causes pain and to atone for it. He tells us to be holy. He tells us to bring others into our sanctuary and incur our own unwitting sins against each other lest we tear it all down. Our world-sanctuary is fragile and we need all the help we can get. God causes no suffering but begs us to not let suffering be the theme of being. The Book of Leviticus ends "These are the commandments that the LORD gave Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai" (Lev. 27:34)

May their memories be a blessing.