The Dialectic of Forgiveness

This long read defines self determination as a dialectic of forgiveness and rejects a "universal right to self determination" as a political construct that intentionally subverts a natural process.

I.
How on earth do you talk about the Middle East right now? I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to think about situations that have such complexities as a single person is unlikely ever to understand all of, in a sea of information, most of which — even when well intended — is somewhere between partially to completely untrue. That is the nature of war, after all, and “he bombed, she bombed” is a little a lot.

They’re the same. Genetically, historically, biblically - this is one family at war with itself. This fact is inescapable to me. Even as the images role in of discreet children, I understand in my bones that Hagar is in the desert, now. Not long ago, she was having sex with Abraham.

Could it be they are repugnant to each other because they are the same; what is it that they cannot abide? I do not believe that Allah or Adonai can speak to the ancient hatred, older than Jews and older than Ishmael, older than man’s conception of God, the hatred of the blubbering child who cries plaintively in every human chest, tell me that I am enough.

Oh, you say, this is a simple reading, did you not know about this war or that war; surely you understand that England had this planned all along, the holocaust was just the excuse. The white Jews just pranced on in, protected by European guns, Ari Shavit’s black box. Look what they did to the people, to the land and look — look how Europe took the white Jews and rose them up. But Joanna, that would be 2023 white. 1948 white, let’s not look. Have you heard what they scream. Intifada Intifada! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! They wouldn’t understand “Never Again” if Hamas wrote Auschwitz across the thousands of missiles it launches every day into Israel, as it hides behind its own children.

There are so many claims to debunk, but I am tired of pretending that what needs debunking are narratives of What Happened. What needs debunking are all narratives of How Things Happen. American Jews yell “Not in my name!” They also find themselves trapped, cornered, murdered, marching, or explaining, what they are not doing is what someone whose name it is not in can afford to do: nothing.

So let me start by stating the obvious. I am Jewish, Israel is a Jewish state, and just as the U.S. government represents me, so does Israel. These things are done in my name. What follows reflects Jewish experience, and I use Jewish stories to think about self determination. I have approached it in a literary way and not a religious one; throughout this piece I will make assertions that are heretical, or at least radical, because I think the relationship between man and [God] is natural and not religious, that is it exists before and beyond choice. Religion makes the God figure a certain form, develops a character. For me, religion is an author that interprets the God figure a particular way. We can choose to take, interpret, retell or discard the story but we cannot throw out the a priori relationship upon which it is built. There is no such thing as atheism.

II.

I don’t want to be patted on the back for saying things like “What’s really antisemitic is assuming that all Jews support Israel,” certainly not by some undiscerning zoomer. I am Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and I must find it within myself to accept what that means without insisting that I can change it. I cannot.

I am Sarah. My children are not a mark of my shame, they are the people Israel. I will contend with Hagar on my terms, and not yours. It was I, Sarah, who sent Hagar to Abraham in the first place; for I was old and I knew I would have no children. At night I woke, consumed with the knowledge that I was not enough. Ishmael, a baby who lay at the crossroads of so much grief, and anger, and longing, growing from the roots of impenetrable, unbreakable love. This story cannot be told as moral fable and it could never be told by someone who was not there. If it was not in your name, be silent.

What do you know of great power and great doubt? Have you never hated your hands?

Hagar have I loved you badly, my first and most trusted handmaiden, have I placed upon your shoulders a burden so heavy you cried out to God; did I crown you only with the midnight whispers of my own self doubt? When I cast you into the desert with the same hand that pointed to my husband’s bed, did you know that you were the goat upon the cliff; the shunned trembling, the repugnant reflection rippling in the water of the well as I looked down upon myself?

The stories of your redemption bring you home as someone else, you are a stranger to me. I do not know you except by the sound of your voice at night reminding me: I am not enough.

A canteen of water, and a crying child, and the voice of God. God who held you when I could not. Get out, Hagar. How can I forgive you?

III.

I was a Canaanite before I was a Hebrew; they called me Sarai. Nobody ever asked me what kind of land you must live in to believe in one God and no others. What strange fruit must grow on your acres to believe in something bigger than the impulses of idols. Even now, so many of you reach for and cannot grasp the ephemeral hills upon which I built my home, I and Avram. For having done it nonetheless, we were given our names: Sarah. Abraham.

You never did ask me, nobody asked - how could this land that was beholden to pagan eyes be the same land under one God? If a state is an idea, if a home is what we make, then how can I be indigenous to a state that ceased to exist, to a home never realized? I am indigenous to Israel because I have searched the plains of my own soul for the truth and Israel is what I found. There is one God and He has made me as numerous as the stars while your small minds draw imaginary lines. The force of my claim is not a divine force; it is stronger. Behold: the righteous path is found not in the eyes of God, but in the actions of a man who has traversed that secret commonwealth endowed to him by the creator at the drawing of his first breath and who may act in accordance with what he there discovered. This is faith, and it is my faith that binds me to Israel; not my God, not my religion but faith in myself. I do not need or desire your acknowledgment to call this place my home. My right to self determination was justified by the existence of my self; the question of forgiveness is my question, it is not yours.

IV.
It is uncouth to suggest that the arc of history bends along the whispers of self doubt, or the petty whims of experience; it is not sufficiently versed to suggest that self determination begins at a subatomic scale. Speak of nation states as if they are products of rational processes made by rational objects called “humans.”

“The universal right to self determination” is incredibly deceptive language. A right is a political term, and the language is a politicization of something whose nature ought to resist politics and any systems which are social, meaning systems that are represented by relationships between the internal and the external. Self determination is the relationship between something and itself.

We neither have nor need a right to self determination, we couldn’t avoid determining ourselves if we wanted to (lord knows many try). This “universal right to self determination” is a manufactured part of a larger movement aimed at suggesting that people are produced, that their experiences and choices are defined by things beyond their control. In effect, the right to self determination is actually the right for everyone else to determine who you are. But you have never needed the recognition of someone else to know yourself; the relationship between one and oneself is already a dialectic.

The so-called universal right to self determination obfuscates the degree to which free will is bound by encountering one’s nature. For surely there is a self that you do not choose, but instead that you meet, and while you have some choices as to how you relate to that self, the relationship is mutually constitutive. It is not a direct molding, rather you are constituted through your relationship to the still small voice. That is the dialectic; it is you and your self. Such a relationship is hard to envision when both sides exist within your experience of being, and it would seem perfectly obvious that therefore they are you and you get to decide who you are. And to some extent, you do, but obscured by the alleged right to self determination is the fact that you don’t get to decide your nature; you get to decide how you relate to your nature.

Abraham and Sarah’s seemingly strange — and certainly strange for the time — commitment to monotheism in this context is explained as the revelation of this dialectic. Certainly not the beginning of it, but perhaps the first or first widely documented recognition of it.

The right to self determination is sold as yours but is really the premise upon which it becomes the domain of social consensus, it is then easy for the parameters to be set by anyone except you. It is your right to determine yourself but there’s only one right way to do it: evince the correct political opinions, and orient yourself towards manifesting the corresponding norms, policies, and so forth. For the sake of clarity, let’s assume for the time being that these opinions and goals are in good faith and not, for example, about promoting the profits of particular industries or realizing foreign interests; let’s assume this “universal right to self determination” manipulation is designed to get you to pursue goals that are genuinely held to be better for everyone. Still, to suggest that this is the case — that the process of self determination does not, in this formulation, have to do with the self — is now a violation of human rights. It is a political opinion that you cannot evince if you want to still be eligible for the universal right to self determination, a right that does not and cannot exist. A mirage.

If you’re up on the language of universal rights, you will know that the universal right to self determination as defined by the U.N. is meant in the context of nation states, not of individuals. I am maintaining that no human group is unaffected by individual self determination. What the war rooms have figured out that the theorists haven’t quite caught up with is that by subverting the process of individual self determination, the orientation of whole groups (states) can be directed.

So. Within this context, Israel Palestine exists as two things: an extremely personal and passionate conflict occurring between two groups of people who are historically and currently confronting the difference between the contrived universal right to self determination and the natural process that is actual self determination, and it is also one axis upon which the subversion of self determination rotates for everybody else.

The mechanic of this subversion is shame. In fact, social justice as a framework is pursued primarily through the violence of shame; it is violent because it subverts the natural process of self determination — that original dialectic. It is surely an unforgivable violence upon any person to erase their personhood, but it is often called justice because it can prevent physical violence — the erasure of life itself.

I hope that I have thoroughly skewered the current conception of self determination, but I do not want to leave the question of self determination as a vacuum to be filled by the next strategist. In this piece I will argue that self determination is a dialectic of forgiveness between oneself and one’s nature, and that one’s nature is God. It is unnecessary to specify a particular God from a particular narrative because each person has access within them the same universals of human nature, and each person must find them and figure out how to relate to them on his own. I call them “God,” what matters is that each person in order to determine himself must forgive his nature and find forgiveness in his nature. It is forgiveness that interrupts shame, the dialectic of self determination is a dialectic of forgiveness, and forgiveness is constitutive.

V.
The old testament God is, if not capricious, then inconsistently angry and often merciless. The justice in the idea that peace will not come until Israel reconciles its own actions with its current experience is too sensible, too gentle, it lacks the ferocity of the divinity that we cannot make sense of, the seemingly unusual cruelty that we justify as “a perspective we are too small to inhabit.” Ani Ma’amin.

For Jews, thousands of years ago, God was a lot more direct. He promised Sarah a child; Sarah did not believe Him. What a thing, to recognize God and hear what He says out loud in her native language and not believe Him.

So she laughed silently to herself and said, “How could a worn-out woman like me enjoy such pleasure, especially when my master—my husband—is also so old?”

¹³ Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh? Why did she say, ‘Can an old woman like me have a baby?’ ¹⁴ Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return about this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”

¹⁵ Sarah was afraid, so she denied it, saying, “I didn’t laugh.”

But the Lord said, “No, you did laugh.”

So she laughed silently to herself, and said — Sarah talks to herself, and God answers. That other side which we participate in forming and which helps form us, has within its capacity breathtaking cruelty and also what we might perceive as miracles. It is something inside us that we meet, that we talk to, that we relate to, and through these interactions, we constitute each other, but not in the way that we choose to pursue careers or who to marry or whether to have children; as with all relationships, the ways we are shaped are somewhat outside of our control.

I love this dialog from the Torah for the literary insight it has on that relationship. There is Sarah’s reflexive belief that she herself is not enough, and that her circumstances will not sustain the possibility of her happiness. A worn-out woman like me is at first glance, Sarah talking about herself, but in fact, in the phrase like me, she is taking herself and ascribing the social identity of worn-out woman to it. Here, me is constrained by this chosen identity, and God says, do you think I, the Lord your God, am limited by something as small as this - God’s perspective is bigger, and in His perspective, there is still room for Sarah the mother.

Sarah is afraid when God says this, because there is room in her perspective for God’s cruelty, but not for His ability to give her “such pleasure,” attached as she is to her belief that she is not enough, and that in addition, she is seen as not enough within the recognizable identity of worn-out woman.

It is obvious to Sarah that God can kill her, it is not obvious that God can bridge the gap between the the self she can measure and the immeasurable inside her. Would that it were enough to say, and that relationship is faith, and with this faith we can bridge the gap between two sides of the same family.

But it would be foolish to say so, because the same God which gives Sarah Isaac and saves Hagar and Ishmael in the desert also shows what at least we can only perceive as cruelty throughout the old testament; He is not the God of Hallmark cards. He is the God of the Holocaust and the Nakba. When we ask how can God allow, we are asking how can our nature allow?

If God is familiar enough to Sarah that she can consider Him wrong, is He familiar enough to her that she can forgive Him?

VI.

What does Sarah have to forgive God for? In this literary analysis, God is one half the dialectic that is the relationship between one and oneself.

The justice of God is not the kind that wins wars; that is social justice, and the word “justice” in the phrase “social justice” would be better changed to “social shame,” because “social” and “just” are two competing ways to evaluate the world. From a social perspective, fault is essential, because change requires ownership. In order for there to be a change, someone has to make it. They have to have control over a phenomenon in order to change it, and so it has to be their responsibility. There are two kinds of violence that distribute fault: war and shame - arguably war is just the executable aspect of a dialectic of shaming or othering, but that I do not have the space or desire to argue here. Suffice it to say, both war and shame are unjust because they subvert the natural dialectic of self determination, a dialectic of forgiveness. In this case, the word is meant as in “a very forgiving person,” not the forgiveness for a specific wrong, but the forgiveness for being flawed. It bears mentioning that from existential and practical perspectives, we absolutely depend upon each other, and so it is not incidental to the project of being to forgive each other our shared, flawed nature. It is simply that we start with ourselves.

From the perspective of justice, there is no need for fault; the ramifications of an unjust act remain the same and play out quietly in the everyday experience. Quietly in that there’s no social ritual to point to the myriad of unjust acts that permeate existence, and have permeated experience at least since the Garden. If all of these inevitable consequences shape the dialectic that constructs a person’s worldview, then God’s justice is lived quietly in experience, without catharsis or vindication. I do not mean to suggest the God figure as presented specifically in the Torah, but rather God, the piece of human nature which each human meets inside himself and to which he must figure out his own relationship.

The history of humanity is not only one of violence, but it is one in which we use violence to make change. We accept it not as justified but in fact as unjust before God — unjust to our very nature. In so doing, we also accept that the consequences of this injustice will not be lightning from the sky and pronouncements from the heavens; they will only be quiet constraints on experience. We commit the heresy of forgiving Him for this, and in return, He forgives us for eating the fruit — for employing our own justice as the primary mechanic of social change — instead of God’s justice, which is meted out in experience. As concerned as many are with accountability for specific acts, please understand that I am stressing here a forgiveness for something larger — a post-fruit world which gives rise to the very forms and events which we now use primarily shame to address. I am proposing that instead, beginning with ourselves and our natures, and moving outward, we use forgiveness.

This back and forth between God and man can find its place in the same dialectic of the individual encountering himself as God, which exists throughout the old testament every time a character argues with God, as Sarah did when she spoke to herself but also as Abraham and Moses did when they argued with God and Jonah did when he ran from God.

The Torah has many examples of people arguing with God, but no conversations about forgiveness. Placing divine justice into the quiet experience of everyday living is itself an attempt to forgive God by showing that His justice – divine justice – is not human justice and will not meet the standards of human justice. When we seek the forgiveness in and from our nature, let us — all of us, from Isaac or Ishmael, still descendants of Abraham — use Sarah’s familiarity to forgive our nature, too.

VII.
On Yom Kippur, ten days after the Jewish new year, Jews gather at synagogue to atone. They atone for the wrongs committed against each other, by their communities, and wrongs against God. No religion considers a converse situation, in which we forgive God for making us this way — forgiving our nature for being us, and still not something we can control. This would be considered religious heresy but I am not offering a religious understanding of self determination; I am offering a literary one. We allow that God has flaws, and God allows that we act in flawed ways. We forgive our own nature and in return, it forgives us, and this forgiveness is mutually constitutive.

Let forgiveness into the dialectic that forms a person, and let those people form nation states, and let those nation states find in this varied, inconsistent, roughly hewn forgiveness an end to the self doubt that began, in this story anyway, in Canaan. Let Hagar come home.