Terror

I am taking a course called Women in the Biblical World this semester.  It has been so enlightening and exciting to dismantle misconceptions and learn more about some familiar characters like Eve and Ruth and Naomi, and a lot about unfamiliar ones.  But his past week has been more of a challenge, and not just because it contained horrors within our own contemporary world (more on that in a minute).  Our professor called this week "Texts of Terror" as we looked at four Biblical women whose stories are, well, terrifying.   Hagar was a slave of Sarah, wife of Abraham.  She was given to Abraham to conceive a child (presumably against her will), harshly abused by Sarah, banished to the desert with her son, and left to die until God intervened.  Tamar was a daughter of King David who was raped by her brother.  The "unnamed concubine" was voluntarily given to a "perverse" crowd to be gang raped all night, left to die, and then dismembered by her husband.  The daughter of Jephthah was the victim of a foolhardy deal that Jephthah made with God that resulted in her death.  In all of these stories, the women's voices are silent.  They have no say or control over what happens to them, they are treated as objects rather than people, they are physically and/or sexually abused, and God has little to nothing to say about it all.  To find stories like this in the Bible is unsettling and truly terrifying.

My classmates and I have been wrestling with our responses all week.  Where is God in the midst of horrifying tragedies?  Whether thousands of years ago or three days ago, God's silence is absolutely maddening.  But if you can set that aside and look at horrific tragedies from another perspective, what about all the other people involved in stories of terror that have the ability to change them?  All the men in these Biblical stories could have made different choices to honor these women, but they lived in a very different, patriarchal society that drove their understanding of the world and the decisions they made within it.  They were victims of their social consciousness that existed in a broken world, and it is still broken today.

And that brings me to this week, to three days ago, when yet another school shooting occurred.  All of those students were victims to the social consciousness of the perpetrator but also to the social consciousness of all of us.  We collectively bear responsibility for an American society that utilizes violence for entertainment, that is incapable of having any kind of conversation about guns, that is incapable of effectively addressing the mental health issues that affect so many people, that has sown so much discord among itself.  As my friend said in her reflection paper this week, "We are responsible for the killing of 17 school children in Florida when we uphold laws that defend powers that pervert a constitutional right. When these laws and rights become more important than the lives of children, we are not very different from the oppressors in each one of these stories."  Many get frustrated that the conversation immediately goes to gun control when these incidents happen but I believe it's a legitimate response because guns are part of the problem. 

So here is my plea - please, let's talk about gun control.  Let's talk about it because even though you might have other ideas that you think might solve this problem (let's teach kids to treat each other better, let's have tighter school security, let's arm teachers), I think restricting access to semi-automatic weapons and bump stocks has the potential to at least make these incident less bad, and if there's a chance it could help, shouldn't we try it?  And if you continue to hold onto your Second Amendment rights with an iron fist, then I would challenge you to consider if you are placing your right to bear arms above the commandment to love your God and love your neighbor.  Because this society that we have created and perpetuate doesn't love its neighbor.  And yes, teaching everyone to treat each other better would make for a better society, but it's not going to solve this problem of mass shootings by itself.  Please, try to loosen your grip just a little bit, realize that sometimes it is appropriate to sacrifice something that is important to you for the sake of the greater good.  And then let's talk about your ideas too because the solution to mass-shootings in America isn't either-or.  The students and employees in that school were in it together, and we're all in this together too.

"Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone."  Deuteronomy 6: 4