Ethical and Theological Responses for the Crisis of our Time

I rarely permit myself to ask, “What my expertise- Jewish history, culture and practice- might offer the crisis of our time. 

My despair about our current condition originates in my sense that, above all, we are in the grip of a communication crisis. We are no longer able to arrive at a common, descriptive account of a situation, to identify core needs and to collaborate around meeting them. We also inhabit a widespread emotional/mental crisis; so many of us remain in prolonged states of fear and anger.  How can we make our way through the gridlock and violence of this time? 

Description is my new religion

Sometimes I get to dreaming about what might provide some guidance during this time. The first refrain that comes to mind is a short one- one that has become a sacred chant for me: description is my new religion. Indeed, description might be the one healing modality that the academy can offer the current crisis. Can we help support the production of descriptive accounts of phenomena? Can we learn to stay so close to the texture of a thing, such that anyone familiar with the phenomenon would sign off and say, “Yes! Yes, that was it, precisely.” Of course, even description is selective. Even description is positioned. The capacity to linger in the descriptive mode, however, has been severely reduced of late, in favor of the evaluative mode. The dominant mode of public discourse is evaluative, that is, it tends to report on what something means. This premature leap to evaluation is our point of departure from one another, and from the possibility of common ground. So, description is my new religion. 

The household is my sanctuary

And, I would like add another point: The household is my new sanctuary. When I say “household” I refer to the primary environment within which human beings operate, a critical site in the social, economic, and cultural formations of life. Bell Hooks coined the term “homeplace” to summon the vital image of the household as a site for resistance and refuge in the conditions of African-American enslavement and racial oppression. Hook’s “homeplace” retrieves the critical role of family relations, and especially the work of women, in the making of wellbeing. As Hooks describes it, “In our young minds houses belonged to women, were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly mattered in life took place—the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeling of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls.”ⁱ 

Our basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, education, health, and safety are provided to us largely within household contexts. But households are struggling; they are rarely host to the skills of food production (even cooking skills), hospitality, care, and even conversation. Perhaps the most significant activity to take place within the household is childrearing. Childrearing is the procedure by which children become the people whom they will be lifelong. As twentieth-century psychologist and biologist Jean Piaget has stated, “Any adult you choose, whether cave man or Aristotle, began as a child and for the rest of his life used the instruments he created in his earliest years.”ⁱⁱ Unlike animals who are born with many of their basic faculties already in full swing, human beings must learn even their most basic operations, and this learning takes place in the household context. More recently, Alison Gopnik put it thusly: “Our most distinctive and important human abilities- our capacities for learning, invention, and innovation; and for tradition, culture and morality- are rooted in relations between parents and children.”ⁱⁱⁱ Furthermore, this learning does not take place in a neutral mode. Child-rearing takes place in highly stylized and culturally specific ways. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz noted a half century ago, all human beings are finished through culture: “not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it.”^iv The learning that takes place in early childhood not only is critical to the acquisition of basic human functions but is also the mechanism by which specific human cultures are made. The household is a critical site in human development. 

Schools assumed themselves to be supplements to this primary site of learning. Dare I say, hospitals assumed themselves to be supplements to this primary site of health care provision. Now both schools and hospitals are struggling to supply people with the range of inputs and care that were once the purview of the household and the neighborhood. Can they succeed? Have we put young children at the top of our list of our social and national agenda? Let us center the household, and children in our approach to policy. 

Mother is my new divine

And, lastly, if could add one last perspective, I would say that the mother is my new divine.  

A universal feature of early human life is the necessary, constant presence of another person for survival. An infant survives only by means of such a person. To quote D. W. Winnicott, “There is no such thing as a baby—meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.”^v This steady, constant relationship is the means by which the child receives basic needs such as food, water, and shelter, as well as the engagement necessary for the acquisition of learned functions such as volitional movement, speech, a sense of self, and others. The caregiver is often the mother, but the maternal figure is anyone charged with the task of constant responsiveness to the needs and communications of the infant.  

Constancy is neither the most glamorous nor the most celebrated of maternal qualities. It is, by definition, a quality to be assumed, not noticed. We are at a point in human history, however, in which this lacuna in our cultural imagination, our collective elision of the necessary constants on which we rely for life (the erasure or even demonization of the mother), has begun to damage the very structures, both social and natural, that sustain us. The absence of maternal imagery in many contemporary cultural and religious frameworks has contributed to the deficit in our awareness of the constant matters on which we depend for our very breath. Such matters have moved to the background of our historical, religious, and political imaginations. I would propose that we pull such matters from the background to the foreground of our consciousness. If we can repopulate the landscape of our imaginations with maternal imagery, along with the many constants that sustain life, we might better integrate such constant matters into our actions, our ethos, and our religion. 

Furthermore, our condition of dependence includes not only the relations that provide our earliest care but also the fresh air that we breathe, the nutrient-rich soil that produces our food, and the clean water needed for life itself. Indeed, the crisis that we are approaching, both environmentally and culturally, can be understood, in part, as a result of our collective turning away from this state of dependence on others and on the natural world for sustenance. The intricate networks of care and cooperation on which we rely as humans can no longer provide an assumed background for the more interesting foreground of our individual trajectories. We are at a point in human history in which the forgetting of our first phase of life, in all its milky dependence, and our favoring of the later sensations of autonomy and individuation have run their course; we must now reckon with the web of relations, human and natural, that sustain us, and from which our patterns of self and belonging emerge.  

To summarize:  

• Description is my new religion 
• The household, my sanctuary 
• The maternal, divine 

Center the mother and you will immediately restore the visibility of life itself. The maternal image will affirm life and move us towards empathy. Functionally, the maternal image moves us towards providing for others.  

Center the household and you will move towards the common human concerns that defy the boundaries set up between groups, and even between institutions such as school, work, hospital, industry, and even the boundaries of state and country. 

Proceed with a communication style that is descriptive in its character and you reveal a common ground upon which we might stand together.