Post modern: Joseph Jones’ Thought for the week
‘What we are in one moment is not what we are for all time.’
‘Thank God we have Jewish ethics available to us’, says Elizabeth Coleman in her piece about the Bible (page 12). I took a deep breath when I read it.
I didn’t pause out of disagreement. I believe Elizabeth is right. But, following a week of horrific violence in the Middle East, I imagined what kind of letters we’d get in response, and didn’t relish the prospect. Mention Judaism at all in the Friend and correspondence on contemporary Israel will inevitably follow, as if the two were obviously synonymous.
Our letters page is not like the rest of the magazine. It’s a space where we allow a little more laxity of expression, and some freedom from perhaps overweening editorial control. Every piece we publish offers the perspective of just one particular Friend, but it’s fair to say that our margins get a little wider in the correspondence section. Things get said there that aren’t allowed elsewhere.
We do remind contributors of a phrase that Philip Schaff, the nineteenth-century church historian, called ‘the watchword of Christian peacemakers’: ‘In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.’ This phrase did not originate with Quakers (or with Augustine, to whom it is often attributed) but with a seventeenth-century Catholic bishop: Marco Antonio de Dominis. Dominis used it in his denunciation of the papal system in 1617, having fled to England under threat of the Inquisition. His words, however, do not seem to have been wholly peaceful. The unity he seeks comes after the ‘evil of abomination’ is ‘purged’ from the ‘throne of Rome’. For the phrase to be valuable to us today, we have to carefully extricate it from its original context. Does it matter that, according to his contempories, Dominis demonstrated irascibility, pretentiousness and serious avarice? Losing support in England, he recanted his attacks on the pope and returned to Rome. Perhaps he had just one short occasion of insight; either way, what we are in one moment is not what we are for all time.
As we go to press, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency is saying that ‘there are not enough body bags for the dead in Gaza’. Meanwhile, in the UK, as people talk of ‘root causes’ and make other miserable palliations of horror, the Metropolitan Police reports a ‘massive increase’ in antisemitic incidents. I am not immune to the facility of humankind to identify our enemies more quickly than we do our allies – it’s a cheap way of building solidarity – but I believe it does me good to recognise that as the worst part of myself.
Letters will still arrive on this and other difficult subjects, of course. You can have a moment. It’s an editor’s irony that the more impossible an issue seems to be to resolve, the more people seem ready to offer their solutions. Friends, I admire your confidence. But please forgive me if I sometimes wish you had a little less of it.
Joe is the editor of the Friend.
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