Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews

[Amazing Rando]

For my Old Testament: Text in Context class, I was required to read Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews and to interact with it guided by a few study questions. It's a brilliantly written book covering the 4,000 year history of the Jewish people told through the eyes of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and novelist. It's very compelling! This is my response to Book I of Potok's Wanderings:

Chaim Potok’s walk through the history of his people at once strikes this reader as both faithful to the traditions and God of his people and wise in its quest for truth. His Wanderings: The History of the Jews is the story of his people, told simultaneously through the eyes of faith as well as the lens of scholarship, and as such, it presents a striking and captivating perspective on the Hebrew Bible.

Potok is, judging only by what he has written, a devout Jew, perhaps of the Orthodox persuasion, but is by no means a fundamentalist. He deeply believes in not only the existence of God, but also the true actions of God in breaking through to humanity. At the same time, he is quite receptive to the discoveries and insights offered by modern scholarship, from the Documentary Hypothesis to the very mixed evidence regarding the destruction of the Canaanite cities as reported in Joshua.

More than just an “ethnic Jew,” he calls Abraham his “ancestor” at the outset of Book I, and feels a deep kinship to the wanderings of Abraham and the other patriarchs. At the same time, he would most likely not be considered a Zionist by modern terms; he is understandably disturbed at the atrocities reported in Joshua and unlike many Zionists, doesn’t seem to believe that the Jews have any inherent God-given right to possess the land of Canaan forever. “But what of the immorality involved in the horrors inflicted upon the previous population?” Potok asks on pages 109-110, “Tribal movements, like earthquakes, appear to have no anxieties about their reputation.”

Potok’s unique perspective as a scholarly Orthodox rabbi (and brilliant storyteller) brings a great deal of unique insight to his retelling of the Jewish story. In many points throughout the narrative, Potok engages in “imaginative remembering” in which he builds upon his bedrock of biblical tradition and begins to wonder. This ability to wonder, question, and contemplate enhances his narrative at several key points. For example, on page 86, Potok uses his skill as a novelist and storyteller to get inside Moses’ mind and imagine some of the thoughts racing through his head at having encountered the Living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the burning bush: “He must be a god of life if he so abominates death; he must be a god of freedom if he so abominates slavery. But what is his name...?” Reverent wondering like this is a life-injecting stimulus to the Christian reader of the Old Testament. We come to appreciate, love, and learn from the text as the word of God in much greater depth when we just learn to imagine the events behind the biblical text instead of just reading it.

Or course, as a Christian reader of the Old Testament, I view the Hebrew Bible through a very different lens than does Potok. I believe that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, and that they all point to and illuminate the coming Messiah. This is the good news that I would love to share with him- that his Messiah has come, and the Hebrew Bible can been seen in a radically different light once this Messiah has been revealed. For example, in Potok’s discussion of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac found on pages 42-43 (a passage Potok elsewhere describes as “chilling”), I believe Potok would be interested in hearing how we Christians see this as indicative and predictive of the sacrifice of God’s “only begotten Son.” On page 43, Potok notes that “God blesses Abraham and promises that a great nation will emerge from his seed.” It would be a great joy to me to share just how the promise that this great nation would touch and transform all the nations of the world was fulfilled through Abraham’s seed in the person of Jesus Christ.

Finally, through Potok’s work, I learned how intelligent, thinking people of faith interpret the message of the Bible. Potok is first and foremost concerned with loving his God in his studies and a measure of deep faith in God and the truths conveyed in the Hebrew Bible throughout his work bears witness to this. But at the same time, Potok is also a truth-seeker, and he is not afraid to allow the insights of scholarship rattle the foundations of his deeply held assumptions. Potok draws from a host of scholarly and popular sources to aid him in his task of interpreting the history of the Jewish people through his particular lens of faith and truth. Periodicals such as World History and the Jewish People and the work of preeminent scholars of culture, archaeology, and language inform his interpretive task in was too numerous to mention. Personally, I find his particular method of truth seeking rather inspiring; he grounds his knowledge of the world in the revelation of God to mankind, and yet wisely informs it with the best that science, history, and cultural scholars have to offer.

[Amazing Rando]

We continued our discussion on Potok's book a few weeks ago. Here's another short reflection paper I wrote after reading the second half of the book prior to a visit to our seminary class by a Conservative Jewish rabbi.

Throughout Chaim Potok’s retelling of his people’s history, the Jewish people are consistently marginalized, oppressed, and persecuted. Since they finally lost their autonomy and centralized place of worship in 70 CE, the Jewish people have lived a transformed existence from that of their forefathers.
Throughout their history as a people ever since that time, they’ve lived as strangers in a strange land, often away from their country and their people, but always in touch with their covenant faith and their God. Take for instance, the perceptions of the Jews living in Medieval Spain under the occupation of the Umayyads and other Muslim rulers. While they were still afforded a measure of religious tolerance not granted to them under the rule of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, the Jews of Muslim Spain still felt a profound disconnect from the land of their ancestors. Still, they appreciated the ability to practice the rituals of their faith and live out their covenant existence. Potok writes about them: “The crescent of the Spanish Umayyads had been a sun and a song. Beneath that crescent the Jews had remained within the embrace of that ancient covenant and had also reached out to new worlds of beauty and truth” (360). But the sense of alienation remained. These Jews were not home and struggled to make sense of life in a world in which their home had been taken from them.

This awareness of alienation bears a striking resemblance to that of the early Christian church. For example, Peter exhorted his readers to remember that they were “strangers” and “aliens” living in the world (1 Peter 1:17, 2:11). Later Christian writers like Justin Martyr would perpetuate this idea that Christians were not to be “at home” in this world, but that rather their real home was in heaven. This idea largely died out with the institutionalization of Christianity under Constantine and his successors in which Christianity melded with the empire and Christians were no longer strangers, but perfectly at home in the empire. In this way, the experiences of early Christianity and the Jewish people out of which the church grew were remarkably similar. Neither had a place to call their own, but instead lived as aliens, as foreigners amidst the pagans.

Potok goes on to describe the experiences of the Jew in America and Europe under the umbrella of what he calls “modern paganism.” It was surprising to see the candidly honest assessment Potok has of modern secularism from the perspective of the Jewish people. For instance, he notes on page 466 that so-called “secular humanism” is, “probably the most creative, the most liberated, the wealthiest, most dehumanizing, and most murderous civilization in the history of our species. Among those who suffered the most from its excesses is the Jew.” This quote in particular came as a great surprise to me- Potok is honest in noticing the virtues of secularism, but is also quite astute in noticing its shortcomings. These days we wrestle with the separation between church and state and just how to determine the proper balance between keeping the two institutions out of each other’s hair. If we swing too far to the secular and crush all forms of religious expression, the value of human life is lost and ethics become meaningless. If we allow the church too much influence over the state, all sorts of abuses can occur.

The differences in the way Potok relates the experiences of Judaism amidst Christianity and Islam also opened my eyes to the reality of the injustices and outright atrocities perpetuated by Christians, tarnishing the holy name of Jesus Christ. Potok mentions a sort of peripheral syncretism on page 336 in which the Jews living under Muslim-dominated Spain adopted Arabic practices and customs, even to the point of speaking Arabic in their liturgies, while remaining distinctly Jewish in their core religious practices. I wonder how much this last bit is an idealization of his people’s faithfulness on Potok’s part. Still, the picture we get from Medieval Spain under Muslim domination is one of a tolerance that makes the profound intolerance of the Christian rulers who followed even more pronounced.

In addition to expelling the Jews from Spain, the Jews living under Christian rulers faced some very uncertain times. On one hand, there were periods of peace, love, and tolerance extended to the Jewish people in certain regions e.g. the tombstone with the inscription shalom al Yisrael found in 7th century France (page 385). But they also suffered periods of contempt, suspicion, and persecution as when the medieval trade guilds were closed to them, or when they were suspected of using their secret Jewish ritual arts to summon golems to terrorize the villages. Christians have surprisingly been historically less tolerant and respectful toward the Jewish people than have the Muslims- at least in Europe.

A major question I would wish to pose to our visiting rabbi is about Potok’s assessment of the founding of Christianity. I would like to know his opinion of Potok’s theory that the resurrection appearances as recorded in the gospels were mere visions and that Paul was the one responsible for “transforming the founder of Christianity into its object of worship” (367). Or does he share the Jewish leaders’ belief that the disciples stole the body as reported in Matthew’s gospel?