Violence, Judith, Gandhi, and Sean Bell
Ancient Testimony ~ Isaiah 65: 1-2; Judith 15: 9-10
April 27, 2008
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

We are concluding a month of services based in the Gandhi concept of Satyagraha, the truth force of nonviolence, which we believe is an alternative to a world of violence.  I have begun to have a nagging fear about this month-long enterprise.  My fear is that we have turned ourselves into tricky fundamentalists.  You know I usually call fundamentalists punishmentalists, and the reason is that punishment is at the bottom of the bottom of their theology.  I see no reason to give them the positive description of fundamental or foundational or basic. Permit me to show you how punishmentalism works.  You come out whipped.  You come out humiliated.  You come out with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and only personal derision as your bottom. 

Watch my fear work.  Violence is bad bad bad, and it is naughty.  And if you ever do anything violent, or think about doing something violent, you are bad.  Therefore, you must repress your badness.  You must try to be another person.  The word “Must” is big in the punishmentalist lexicon.  “May” is not its word.  Must is its word.  Finger wagging is its body language.  And I fear we have been finger wagging in the name of Gandhi. 

We can do better.  But first we have to get a little more real about violence.  Violence is everywhere: in our hearts, in our homes, and in our bottoms.  Consider the violence done against Sean Bell, which the court and the city have decided merits “acquittal.”  What a word, “acquittal.”  It is rarely used for black men who populate prisons in ridiculous numbers.  My first, second, and third reaction to the acquittal is rage.  I know how complex the matter is―but I still don’t want policemen using 50 bullets on anyone.  Amadou Diallo received 41.  One is plenty.  And even one is too much. You see, I do believe in Satyagraha.  I know there are ways beyond violence to maintain law and order.  I even like law and order.  And I’m not just talking about the TV show.  But when the powerful shoot those who are not―and then are told by the legitimate systems of oversight that it is okay for them to shoot those who are not―I boil.  Many people boil, but we also get the message.  Violence is okay for the powerful to use against the not powerful.  It is not okay for violence to rise up from the bottom.  That will not be permitted.  And I fear I am not such a good person.  I am not a pacifist.  I do believe in the use of violence, especially on behalf of the powerless against the powerful.  I am naughty.  By violence I mean the whole range of negative emotions that let people know you don’t want their behavior around.

The acquittal of power is the reality of violence.  The government gets to torture people.  The government gets to shoot people.  The people are to practice nonviolence.  This is not acceptable, at least not in my view.  Jesus and Gandhi could both do better.  Even King at times could do better.  I cannot. 

One of you sent me a beautifully written reflection on nonviolence after last week’s service.  It started like this, “I get tired and frustrated when I hear white middle class people extol the virtues of non-violence.”  The full document will follow below, but for now let me summarize your complaint.  Women are encouraged to fight back if sexually violated. “Kick ‘em in the balls.”  Nice.  The struggle against racism both in this country and in South Africa combined violence and nonviolence.  And you go on.  You did not tell me about what you thought about Jesus.  But you made your point anyway.

In this conundrum of bad violence and good nonviolence, in this mess of misuse of our power to love and our power to hate, I want to introduce Judith.  It is one of the hardest texts I know.  It also utterly fascinates me, and it has fascinated many people for a long time.  It is the story of Judith, a rich, powerful widow who vanquishes some of Israel’s enemies, is rewarded for it, and carries the head of one person she personal beheads around in her hand.  Again, nice.  Somehow she escapes the usual inheritance laws, has money and a knife, and uses both of them against Israel’s enemies.

Judith fits the bill of permission to the powerful to use violence.  She is oddly powerful―and most scholars want to know how.  How did she get to be so powerful?  How did she keep her money?  How did she get to be in charge of the military?  She is odd.  And she is rewarded for her power.  Most women, by the way, are not.  I think of Carmen, whose song we sing today.  Or I think of the theme of most literature about powerful women: they have to be run over by a train, crawl back to their husbands, or have a baby.  Lily Bart in The House of Mirth is the paradigm:  Lily is drawn from one wrong turning to another one, without perceiving the right road until it is too late.

Check out Elaine Showalter’s review of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying in The Chronicle or in her forthcoming book, A Jury of Her Peers: A Literary History of American Women Writers.  Basically the theme is the horror of being a powerful or gifted woman, and how by winning what men have women usually lose.

My closest friends have often criticized my own leadership style.  Too soft.  Nobody’s afraid of you.  I am constantly pulled by this critique.  Just last night I got into an interesting conversation with a new friend about how leadership is bending people toward the organizational goal and how we use discipline and threats, as well as rewards, to make things happen.  Judith knew how to make people afraid of her―and was rewarded with power.  She also used violence the way the powerful do, as though it was necessary, legitimate, their call to make.

Without discrediting our month-long and life-long commitment to nonviolence, I want to at least raise the possibility that the reason justice has so little power is not just that they are wrong.  By “they,” I mean the police, the government, the powerful.  They are wrong.  They are even naughty.  But we are not necessarily right because they are wrong.  Nor is nonviolence right because it is effective.  I don’t really think it is that effective.  I think something different.  I think a little threat of violence goes a long way.  Here I mean not just the violence of guns but also the rage of anger and the threat to law and order implied by both anger and threat.  I like soft and tender, but I am not impressed with its track record.  Soft has not won the victories hard has won. 

Examples include the civil rights movement, where Dr. King was quite able to threaten the government with the loss of law and order.  The Santa Clausification of King has gone way too far.  It has created the banality of Jeremiah Wright’s legitimate anger at his nation being used against a political candidate.  Message: You be nice, leader.  You be real nice, and we’ll make sure not to kill you and also that nothing happens.  Excruciating is the name for this problem.  Why excruciating? Because it means ex cruces, “on the cross.”  I do think Jesus’ trip to the cross was a nonviolent act and therein lies an enormous conundrum.

I believe Jesus made people uncomfortable and the raising of the temperature is the trick to change.  Do we need to go all the way to violence in order to raise the temperature?  Maybe.  Or at least we have to threaten to do so.

The innocence in the conversation so far about nonviolence is naive.  And innocence is our main problem.  When we act as punishmentalists about violence and nonviolence (one wrong, the other right) we are actually entering a grave danger. It is the danger of not caring enough.  It is the danger of internalizing the power of the government.  It is a kind of idolatry.  Remember, idolatry is when your God is too small. 

Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, is a gripping investigation into both the homicide of an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and a review of the overall policies condoning indefinite detention, torture, and abuse.

Why did Gibney choose Ditawar, the taxi driver, as his subject?  He wanted the story of a pure innocent, someone who had been plucked from a village, a world in which he had never spent a night away from home, literally.  He has a two-year-old daughter and a wife.  Gibney choose Ditawar precisely because he was so innocent.

The torturers who killed Dilawar knew he was innocent of any crime after day three of a five-day interrogation.  They continued the interrogation for the fun of it.  They tortured him until he was dead.

He was being hung, shackled to the ceiling of an isolation cell.  They used an interesting form of sleep deprivation.  As soon as you nod off, the handcuff would gnaw at your wrists.  They then kneed him over and over again until his legs, as the coroner said, were pulpified.  Ultimately he died from a pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot that moved into his lungs.

He was a young, innocent kid, hooded, asthmatic, desperately calling out to his mother and father, to no avail.  I have a 22-year-old son.  Some of you do, too.

By the way, Alex Gibney is Harriet Coffin’s son, Bill Coffin’s stepson.  He is a fine man.

The violent and powerful seem especially to like to use violence against the small and the innocent.  Some scholars even try to soften Judith by comparing her to Mary!  The beautiful hymn of the people honoring Judith (Judith 15: 9 – 10) is often applied to Mary (the complete innocent) in the liturgy.

But even these softening attempts can’t keep the truth out.  God is often understood as using violence and military interventions to aid the people.  Progressive anti-war points of view to the contrary, the scriptures often show God as warrior, protecting people with the use of violence.  Along with Rebekah, Tamar does covert military actions and guerilla warfare.  Abraham’s potential sacrifice of Isaac in the Aqedah, or binding story, in Genesis 22 actually shows God toying with violence as a method of loyalty.

Ronald D. Witherup, S.S., encapsulates the relevant themes into The Bible Companion: A Handbook for Beginners:

The main point of the story is that oppression requires both reliance upon God and human cunning to defeat it. The existence of inspiring heroines like Judith in the male-dominated Jewish tradition is of great importance. It provided role models for anyone in oppressive circumstances, and it testified to God’s ability to raise up the least likely heroes in times of difficulties.  In some ways, Judith’s story is a feminized version of David and Goliath, written on behalf of the underdogs, who can indeed vanquish…

Further reading on Judith:

• J.H. van Henten, "Judith as Alternative Leader. A Rereading of Judith 7-13", A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna (The Feminist Companion to the Bible 7; Sheffield Academic Press,1995)
  
  
• Amy-Jill Levine, “Sacrifice and Salvation: Otherness and Domestication in the Book of Judith,” A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna (The Feminist Companion to the Bible 7; Sheffield Academic Press,1995)

Reflections on Non-Violence
By Jill Williams

It is a wise man who advocates non-violence to his enemies.
~ Anonymous

I get tired and frustrated when I hear white middle class people extol the virtues of non-violence.  Most of us invoke Gandhi and King when we preach on the topic, with the absolutely noble intention of advocating for an end to the war in Iraq.  What I know about Gandhi and King leads me to believe that they would also advocate an end to that war (and would have advocated for not starting the war in the first place).  But to conflate advocacy for ending an unjust war with a call for oppressed people not to defend themselves against their oppressors is to ignore the power differentials between the government, military, and business interests of the most powerful country in the world and those who have been victimized by this same country―both domestically and internationally―and everything it represents.

I remember regular arguments with an ex-boyfriend on this topic.  He is such a strong advocate of non-violence that he has a tattoo of a broken automatic rifle and a dove on his upper arm.  I was frustrated with the way he glibly lumped everyone who would practice violence of any kind―from governments who would engage in pre-emptive military strikes for the purpose of gaining control over oil reserves to individuals who would arm themselves to try to defend their families against lynch mobs―and summarily dismiss all of their decisions as similarly unethical.  One day near the end of my relationship with this man, an AWOL U.S. soldier struck up a brief conversation with me on the subway and subsequently tracked me down at work and proceeded to make a few somewhat threatening calls to my office.  When I told my then-boyfriend about the calls, he was upset and urged me to carry mace and to take a self-defense course.  In the meantime, he said, "Kick him in the balls if he approaches you on the street."

My ex-boyfriend's expression of concern certainly wasn't surprising.  As a woman, I’d heard such advice on so many occasions that I didn't realize until after our relationship was over just how convoluted his ethics―and most of our ethics―are.  And this is why I think that, for white middle class people, the vulnerability we feel when we imagine being raped or when we imagine our loved ones being raped is about as close as we come to understanding what it might feel like to be completely vulnerable or to have someone we love be vulnerable to forces we generally can't control.

And yet I've never had anyone―even the most radical practitioner of non-violence―encourage me to passively allow myself to be raped if that situation should arise.  Most of us would agree that the idea that somehow, by not defending myself against a would-be rapist, I might actually be ending the cycle of sexual violence is preposterous.  The idea that I could somehow shame a sexual predator by not defending myself against his advances and that the shame would cause him to stop is similarly bizarre.  Furthermore, even the most ardent non-violent evangelist is likely to question my morals and intentions if I claim to have been raped and yet did nothing to protect myself.  The assumption among most, I believe, would be that I wanted to be raped in the first place, or at least that I didn’t mind it too much as it was happening.

So why are we so quick to believe that facing other types of violence with non-violence will do anything to end the cycle of violence?  At a recent service in a congregation that is quickly starting to feel like a home to me, I heard someone I respect extolling the virtues of non-violence by reading a quote from Gandhi about the ways non-violence and truth are inextricably linked.  It was a compelling quote and even swayed me for a moment.  But then I started thinking about the lies we perpetuate and the truths we don't tell about our own country's history of the struggle against oppression.  We talk about the pieces of Martin Luther King's speeches that deal with non-violence, but we rarely quote his critiques of capitalism and imperialism.  When Black history month rolls around, we reluctantly teach about the Underground Railroad, but we don't tell our children about John Brown.  We represent Native Americans in one of two stereotypes―as a peaceful or otherwise non-threatening presence or as merciless killers.

How can a version of non-violence that ignores the complexity of power dynamics and lumps the most powerful oppressors in with those whom they have oppressed lead to anything resembling truth?  How can we uncritically accept the premise that non-violence has single-handedly led to liberation from oppression when a more accurate accounting of history shows a much more complex picture of that truth?  How can we claim that violence never leads to anything resembling justice and then quote Nelson Mandela, calling to mind the combination of non-violent and violent struggles against Apartheid in South Africa?  How can those of us whose interests are largely protected by armed agents of the state possibly understand, much less judge, the decision of a person or group who have been consistently vulnerable to these same forces to arm themselves for protection?

I am not negatively judging those who choose to practice non-violence.  In my own sheltered life, I try to practice it myself, but I recognize that I can’t possibly imagine what it would be like to make such a choice if I had children or if my family had a history of not being protected by the state.  I have great respect for, but not a deep understanding of, poor people of color whose experience is exactly this and who still choose to practice non-violence.  I am merely saying that I think it may be time for us (liberal, progressive white folks in particular) to talk about violence and non-violence in a way that more accurately resembles the truth of our own history and present reality.  Otherwise our calls for non-violence at best ring hollow and, at worst, perpetuate the culture of oppression that we purport to challenge.