The role play we were asked to perform in our first module struck a deep chord with me as it played on some of the ideas I’ve been rehearsing in my head for a while now. How do you square your activist instincts with reconciling ones? One tends to be more aggressive and focused on direct action. The other can be perceived as abandoning all hope of justice in order to achieve the goal of ending conflicts. One is focused on the bigger picture of institutional injustice and the need for revolution. The other tends to focus on tiny gains, seemingly at the detriment of any call to look for the wood amidst the trees.
The other reason it struck a chord was because I felt like I had read this story before. And in a way I had. I am currently in the midst of a co-creating/compiling a Jewish-Christian glossary where we use dialogue around one word or phrase. The dialogue uses an interview technique to uncover the various Jewish and Christian meanings of the word, the impact it has on identity, the various importance of the word in history etc. When we held a discussion of the word peace, the rabbi told the following story:
A story from the Genesis Rabah 85:8 stanza 7 (Midrash, which is an ancient commentary on the Hebrew scriptures) illustrating the relationship between truth, righteousness, justice and peace. In it we find the ministry of angels divided over whether or not God should create Adam. “Mercy and truth collided, righteousness and peace clashed”. Mercy and righteousness both argued for Adam to be created saying that he will do merciful and righteous deeds. Truth and peace, however, said ‘let him not be created for he will be full of falsehood and will never stop quarrelling’. In this story God took truth and ‘threw it to the ground’. God sacrifices truth for the sake of peace. This story shows the tensions between all four values and gives us a sense of how sometimes truth needs to be seen as plural rather than singular, by fragmenting it, no single human can claim to possess it.
The story is incomplete as it focusses on truth and peace for the sake of the glossary entry but here we find a very similar conflict emerging to the one we read out in groups last Friday. In that sense I am comforted to learn that humans have been wondering how to reconcile these values seemingly for eternity and they go right to the heard of what it is to be human and to exist on this earth with other humans as well as to hold contradictory truths at the same time. In conflicts over narrative this is a supremely helpful story to bear in mind. It relaxes entitlement and gives equal voice to what is ‘my truth’ versus ‘your truth’ and stretches us towards what are we accountable to as a result of both.