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she defended the poor 'Vichyists' against the final and unqualified
anathema fulminated by certain emigrants [who chose to condemn
Vichy from a safe distance]." Like Socrates and her beloved Spinoza, she
was in essence an excommunicant. "I am not a person," she once said,
"with whom it is advisable to link one's fate . Human beings have
always more or less sensed this.... "
Like Brenner and Courtine-Denamy, Wyschogrod cannot forgive Weil
her ("unJewish") focus on the
spiritual,
at the expense of the "body" (the
people, "the body," of Israel). Judaism, by his lights, is "the election of a
biological people rather than, as in Christianity, of a community of
faith."
It
is not for us, he argues, to demand of God that he always act
out of goodness . "Ethical Judaism," he writes, "[in which the good
reigns supreme] is
housebroken Judaism .
...Ethics is the Judaism of the
assimilated." Indeed, "since God created heaven and earth, he has the
right to give [the land] to whomever he sees fit and to deprive one nation
of it and bestow it on another." For Wyschogrod, then, we must make a
choice-to accept either God or the good as the ultimate authority.
For Weil, by contrast, "the essential truth concerning God is that He
is good . To believe that God can order men to commit atrocious acts of
injustice and cruelty is the greatest mistake it is possible to make with
regard to Him." Is it, then, one must ask, simply a
lucky accident
that
God happens to be good-that the divine command coincides with the
ethical? For Simone Weil, to worship a God who is not bound by the
good would be to succumb to the idolatry of power. "God gives himself
to men," she writes in
Gravity and Grace,
"either as powerful or as per–
fect-it is for them to choose."
Can we afford simply to ignore-as Brenner, Courtine-Denamy and
Wyschogrod would appear to-what Weil says here? James Carroll, for
one, agrees with Weil when he writes in
Constantine's Sword,
"A new
Christology will banish from Christian faith . . .the inhuman idea that any–
one's death can be the fulfillment of a plan of God's." Are the passages in
the Hebrew Bible, then, that Wyschogrod adduces proof that Weil is sim–
ply wrong about the essential truth concerning God, or, on the contrary,
is the apparent dissonance of such Biblical passages with the goodness
Weil demands of God evidence of the lack of divine authority of such
writings?
If
this is indeed the crucial question, then the crucial text must
surely be Plato's dialogue
The Euthyphro.
In this dialogue Socrates asks, "What is piety?" or more generally,
"What is it to be good in the light of God?" Euthyphro answers that
piety, or goodness, consists in being loved by God. To test this answer,
Socrates proposed a question: does God love the good
because
it is
