Give to me your wisdom, your keen bearing, your vision. One of the main themes of the Old Testament is: Leave what you have; free yourself from all fetters; be! The history of Hebrew tribes begins with the command to the first Hebrew hero, Abraham, to give up his country and his clan: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” reports Genesis 12.1. Abraham is to leave what he has—land and family—and go to the unknown. Yet his descendants settle on a new soil, and new clannishness develops. This process leads to more severe bondage. Precisely because they become rich and powerful in Egypt, they become slaves; they lose the vision of the one God, the Go of their nomadic ancestors, and they worship idols, the gods of rich turned later into their masters. The second hero is Moses. He is charged by God to liberate his people, to lead them out of the country that has become their home (even though eventually a home for slaves), and to go into the desert to celebrate. Reluctantly and with great misgiving, the Hebrews follow their leader Moses—into the desert. The desert is the key symbol in this liberation. The desert is no home: it has no cities; it has no riches; it is the place of nomads who own what they need, an what they need are the necessities of life, not possessions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Historically, nomadic traditions are interwoven in the report of the Exodus, and it may very well be that these nomadic traditions have determined the tendency against all nonfunctional property and the choice of life in the desert as preparation for the life of freedom. However, these historical factors only strengthen the meaning of the desert as a symbol of the unfettered, nonpropertied life. Some of the main symbols of the Jewish festivals have their origin in the connection with the desert. The unlearned bread of the wanderers. The suka (tabernacle) is the home of the wanderer: the equivalent of the tent, easily built and easily taken down. As defined in the Talmud it is the transitory abode, to be lived in, instead of the fixed abode one owns. The Hebrews yearn for the fleshpots of Egypt: for the fixed home, for the poor yet guaranteed food: for the visible idols. They fear the uncertainty of the propertyless desert life. They say: “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger,” reports Exodus 16.3. God, as in the whole story of liberation, responds to the moral frailty of the people. He promises to feed them: in the morning with bread, in the evening with quail. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

God adds two important injunctions: each should gather according to their needs: “And the people of Israel did so; they gathered, some more, some less. However, when they measured it with an omer, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; each gathered according to what he could eat,” reports Exodus 16.17-18. For the first time, a principle is formulated here they became famous through Marx: to each according to their needs. The right to be fed was established without qualification. God here the nourishing father who feeds his children, who do not have to achieve anything in order to establish their right to be fed. The second injunction is one against hoarding, greed, and possessiveness. The people of Israel were enjoined not to save anything till the next morning. “But they did not listen to Moses; some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and became foul; and Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the Sun grew hot, it melted,” reports Exodus 16.20-21. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

In connection with the collection of food the concept of the observation of the Sabbat (Sabbath) is introduced. Moses tells the Hebrews to collect twice the usual amount of food on Friday: “Six days you shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none,” reports Genesis 16.26. The Shabbat is the most important of the biblical concepts, and later of Judaism. It is the only strictly religious command in the Ten Commandments: its fulfillment is insisted upon by the otherwise antiritualistic prophets; it was a most strictly observed commandment throughout 2000 years of Diaspora life, wherein its observation often was hard and difficult. It can hardly be doubted that the Shabbat was the fountain of life for the Jews, who, scattered, powerless, and often despised and persecuted, renewed their pride and dignity when the kings they celebrated the Shabbat. It the Shabbat nothing but a day of rest in the mundane sense of freeing people, at least on one day, from the burden of work? To be sure it is that, and this function gives it the dignity of one of the great innovations in human evolution. Yet if this were all that it was, the Shabbat would hardly have played the central role I have just described. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

In order to understand this role we must penetrate to the core of the Shabbat institution. It is not rest per se, in the sense of not making an effort, physically or mentally. It is rest in the sense of the re-establishment of complete harmony between human beings and between them and nature. Nothing must be destroyed and nothing be built: the Shabbat is a day of truce in the human battle with the World. Neither must social change occur. Even tearing up a blade of grass is looked upon as a breach of this harmony, as is lighting a match. It is for this reason that carrying anything on the street is forbidden (even if it weighs as little as a handkerchief), while carrying a heavy load in one’s garden is permitted. The point is that not the effort of carrying a load is forbidden, but the transfer of any object from one privately owned piece of land to another, because such transfer constituted, originally, a transfer of property. On the Shabbat one likes as if one as nothing, pursuing no aim except being, that is, expressing one’s essential powers: praying, studying, eating, drinking, singing, relaxing. The Shabbat is a day of joy because on that day one is fully oneself. This is the reason the Talmud calls a Shabbat the anticipation of the Messianic Time, and the Messianic Time the unending Shabbat: the day on which property and money as well as mourning and sadness are tabu; a day on which time is defeated and pure being rules. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The historical predecessors, the Babylonian Shapatu, was a day of sadness and fear. The modern Sunday is a day of fun, consumption, and running away from oneself. One might ask if it is not time to re-establish the Shabbat as a universal day of harmony and peace, as the human day that anticipates the human future. The vision of the Messianic Time is the other specifically Jewish contribution to World culture, and one essentially identical with that of the Shabbat. This vision, like the Shabbat, was the life-sustaining hope of the Jews, never given up in spite of the severe disappointments that came with the false messiahs, from Bar Kochba in the second century to our days. Like the Shabbat it was a vision of a historical period in which possession will have become meaningless, fear and war will have ended, and the expression of our essential powers will have become the aim of living. The history of the Exodus moves to a tragic end. The Hebrews cannot bear to live without having. Although they can live without a fixed abode, and without food except that sent by God every day, they cannot live without a visible, present leader. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Thus when Moses disappears on the mountain, the desperate Hebrews get Arron to make them a visible manifestation of something they can worship: the Golden Calf. Here, one may say, they pay for God’s error in having permitted them to take gold and jewelry out of Egypt. With the gold, they carried within themselves the craving for wealth; and when the hour of despair came, the possessive structure of their existence reasserted itself. Aaron makes them a calf from their gold, and the people say: “There are your Gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt,” reports Exodus 32.4. A whole generation had died and even Moses was not permitted to enter the new land. However, the new generation was as little capable of being unfettered and of living on a land without being bound to it as were their fathers. They conquer new land, exterminate their enemies, settle on their soil, and worship their idols. They transform their democratic tribal life into that of Eastern despotism—small, indeed, but not less eager to imitate the great powers of the day. The revolution has failed; its only achievement was, if it was one, that the Hebrews were now masters and not slaves. They might not even be remembered today, except as a learned footnote in a history of the Near East, has the new message not found expression through revolutionary thinkers and visionaries who were not tainted, as was Moses, by the Burden of leadership and specifically by the need to use dictatorial power methods (for instance the wholesale destruction of the rebels under Korach). #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

These revolutionary thinkers, the Hebrew prophets, renewed the vision of human freedom—of being unfettered of things—and the protest against submitting to idols—the work of the people’s own hands. They were uncompromising and predicted that te people would have to be expelled from the land again if they became incestuously fixated to it and incapable of living in it as free people—that is, not able to love it without losing themselves in it. To the prophets the expulsions from the land was a tragedy, but the only way to final liberation; the new desert was to lost not for one but for many generations. Even while predicting the new desert, the prophets were sustaining the faith of the Jews, and eventually of the whole human race, by the Messianic vision that promised peace and abundance without requiring the expulsion or extermination of the land’s old inhabitants. The real successors to the Hebrew prophets were the great scholars, the rabbis, and none more clearly so than the founder of the Diaspora: Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakai. When the leaders of the war against Romans (A.D. 70) had decided that it was better for all to die than to be defeated and lose their state, Rabbi Sakai committed treason. He secretly left Jerusalem, surrendered to the Roman general, and asked permission to found a Jewish university. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

This was the beginning of a rich Jewish tradition and, at the same time, of the loss of everything the Jews had had: their state, their temple, their priestly and military bureaucracy, their sacrificial animals, and their rituals. All were lost and they were left (as a group) with nothing except the ideal of being: knowing, learning, thinking, and hoping for the Messiah. Historical truth has a character quite different from that of scientific truth. History reports unique events, not repetitious processes which can be tested again and again. Historical events are not subject to experiment. The only analogy in history to a physical experiment is the comparison of documents. If documents of an independent origin agree, a historical assertion is verified within its own limits. However, history does not only tell a series of facts. It also tries to understand these facts in their origins, their relations, their meaning. History describes, explains, and understands. And understandings presupposes participation. This is the difference between historical and scientific truth. In historical truth the interpreting subject is involved; in scientific truth it is detached. Since the truth of faith means total involvement, historical truth has often been compared with the truth of faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

A compete dependence of this historical truth on the truth of fair has been derived from such an identification. In this way it has been derived from such an identification. In this way it has been asserted that faith can guarantee the truth of a questionable historical statement. However, one who makes such assertions forgets that in a genuine historical work detached and controlled observation is as much used as in the observation of physical or biological processes. Historical truth is first of all factual truth; in this it is distinguished from the poetic truth of epics or from mythical truth of legend. This difference is decisive for the relation of the truth of faith to the truth of history. Faith cannot guarantee factual truth. However, faith can and must interpret the meaning of facts from the point of view of mortal’s ultimate concern. In doing so it transfers historical truth into the dimension of the truth of faith. This problem has come into the foreground of much popular and theological thought since historical research has discovered the literary character of the Biblical writings. It has shown that in their narrative parts of the Old and the New Testament combine historical, legendary and mythological elements and that in many cases it is impossible to separate these elements from each other with any degree of probability. Historical research has made it obvious that there is no way to get at the historical events which have produced the Biblical picture of Jesus who is called the Christ with more than a degree of probability. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Similar research in this historical character of the holy writings and the legendary traditions of non-Christian religions has discovered the same situation. The truth of faith cannot be made dependent on the historical truth of the stories and legends in which faith has expressed itself. It is a disastrous distortion of the meaning of faith to identify it with the belief in the historical validity of the Biblical stories. This, however, happens on high as well as on low levels of sophistication. People say that others or they themselves are without Christian faith, because they do not believe that the New Testament miracle stories are reliably documented. Certainly they are not, and the search for the degree of probability or improbability of a Biblical story has to be made with all the tools of a solid philological and historical method. It is not a matter of faith to decide if the presently used edition of the Moslemic Koran is identical with the original text, although this is the fervent belief of most of the adherents of Mohammed. It is not a matter of faith to decide that large parts of the Pentateuch are priestly wisdom of the period after the Babylonic exile, or that the Book of Genesis contains more myths and sacred legend than actual history. It is not a matter of faith to decide whether or not the expectation of the final catastrophe of the Universe as envisaged in the late books of the Old and in the New Testament originated in the Persian religion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

It is not a matter of faith to decide how much legendary, mythological and historical material is amalgamated in the stories about the birth and the resurrection of the Christ. It is not a matter of faith to decide which version of the reports about the early says of the Church has the greatest probability. All of these questions must be decided, in terms of more or less probability, by historical research. They are questions of historical truth, not of the truth of faith. Faith can say that something of ultimate concern has happened in history because the question of the ultimate in being and meaning is involved. Faith can say that the Old Testament law which is given as the law of Moses has unconditional validity for those who are grasped by it, no matter how much or how little can be traced to a historical figure of that name. Faith can say that the reality which is manifest in the New Testament picture of Jesus as the Christ has saving power for those who are grasped by it, no matter how much or how little can be traced to this historical figure who is called Jesus of Nazareth. Faith can ascertain its own foundation, the Mosaic law, or Jesus as the Christ, Mohammed the prophet, or Buddha the illuminated. However, faith cannot ascertain the historical conditions which made it possible for these beings to become matters of ultimate concern for large sections of humanity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Faith includes certitude about its own foundation—for example, an event in history which as transformed history—for the faithful. However, even faith does not include historical knowledge about the way in which this event took place. Therefore, faith cannot be shaken by historical research even if its results are critical of the traditions in which the event is reported. This independence of historical truth is one of the most important consequences of the understanding of faith as the state of ultimate concern. It liberates the faithful from a burden they cannot carry after the demands of scholarly honesty have shaped their conscience. If such honesty were in a necessary conflict with what has been called the obedience of faith, God would be seen as split himself, as having demonic traits; and the concern about it would not be ultimate concern, but the conflict of two limited concerns. Such faith, in the last analysis, is idolatrous. When the Apostle Paul was imprisioned for spreading the Good News, his captors thought they were containing him. Paul could have become discouraged and given up. Instead, he proceeded to write much of the New Testament from a prison cell and is still profoundly influencing us today. What does it mean to you that God has made you uncontainable? What seeds of greatness are waiting to take root and flourish in your life? Take new ground for God’s Kingdom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13