Purity is a Disease, not a Cure.

Our impulse to purity, to wall building, to securing an unchanging identity isn’t going to be destroyed by “external” enemies. It will be destroyed from within by God’s own hand.

Those of you who aren’t obsessing about the president’s bizarre waffling on his relationship with the Russians may have heard that Israel passed a new “Basic Law,” essentially a change in its constitution. Here is the text. https://www.timesofisrael.com/final-text-of-jewish-nation-state-bill-set-to-become-law/.

And the AJC here in the US has issued a statement about this law. https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-criticizes-knesset-adoption-of-nation-state-bill. 

You’ll find plenty of commentary online. But this isn’t just a Jewish issue, and it isn’t something that arose in the last few weeks. Christians need to also consider what it tells us about ourselves, recognizing that the Jewish community will have to face its issues within the integrity of its own tradition of a distinctive calling and identity. 

In a way this new Israeli basic law, and in particular its affirmation of the settlements as a thinly veiled (because we know the original wording) way of having Jewish only communities, is reflective of a self-destructive influence sweeping across many parts of the world, not least the US. In this sense criticism from the EU about this new law is both justified and hypocritical. The EU has plenty of member states whose national governments would also try to maintain some kind of ethnic/religious/cultural purity. Criticizing Israel in this regard in the climate of rising anti-semitism and islamophobia at home rings kind of hollow.

Criticism from US Christians whose churches remain (whatever their theoretical commitments) ethnically pure are equally hypocritical. Its easy from an all-white liberal enclave to criticize those who find diversity threatening. 

Living with genuine diversity is always a hard thing, because it means living with the inevitability of change through time and thus the inevitable slow death of “the world as I know it” and “my people as I know them.”

The impulse toward etho-religious purity runs through the Christian Old Testament and indeed the whole Christian tradition; fueled by a fear of foreign gods and ritual pollution. But of course the latter is tightly inter-twined with the former. And that is underwritten, at least in the Christian interpretation, by the concept of the holiness of God. As long as God’s holiness demands human purity we’ll move quickly from avoiding mixing the fibers in our clothes to avoiding mixing the genes in our blood. How any of us avoid taking that step too far has always been a problem, and never just a Jewish problem. 

But it is, as I noted, ultimately self-destructive. No one, no people, no culture, no religion is or can remain pure. Indeed that impulse is contrary to God’s most basic command to humanity: be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth.The story of the wall around Babel makes clear that it is fundamentally in defiance of God’s command to build walled city. The people of Babel wanted to “make a name for ourselves” (ie a fixed identity) and keep themselves from being “scattered over the face of the earth” and thus lose that identity.

Our impulse to purity, to wall building, to making a name isn’t going to be destroyed by “external” enemies is a defiance of God. Read on in Genesis 11. It will be destroyed from within by God’s own hand. Which is less judgment on our defiance than the grace to bring us into conformity with our true nature as God’s children. 

We can build our walls. God will always tear them down. Thank God.