A Christmas Story (with a cameo appearance by Maimonides)
Tyranny, atomization, and the search for a communal narrative
When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I agree wholeheartedly. One story — and one story only — reeks of tyranny.
But here’s a related question:
What is the danger of celebrating eight billion individual stories?
From “Six Narratives in Search of a Truth: The Georgian ‘Rave Revolution,’” by Vivian S. Walker, USC Center for Public Diplomacy, May 28, 2018:
Many experts assert that we are living in a post-fact environment, in which truth is obscured by divisive political agendas. As illustrated by the recent “rave revolution” in Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian Republic, a discrete event, action or policy can produce multiple narratives that provide competing explanations for what happened — and why. These narratives, in turn, have the power to exploit, or be exploited by, basic disagreements about national identity, values and state legitimacy. Possibilities for a sustaining narrative convergence disappear. And that’s a big problem.
Indeed it is.
But this lack of “narrative convergence” — the absence of a Story that can animate and unify a community or a nation — should come as no surprise. For generations, we’ve been told that each of us has a story to share. That my “lived experience” should inform “my truth.” That “stories create meaning” and “narrative is everything.”
Absolutely right, you say. We don’t need any narrative convergence. We are all individuals. Diversity is our strength!
If so, what happens when eight billion people tell eight billion different stories that simultaneously circulate in every conceivable direction?
We get a social and cultural whirlwind — a narrative tornado that breaks our world apart.
The Jewish carpenter from Nazareth
I’m not a Christian (obviously), but narrative convergence — the possibility that we all might be embedded in the same divine drama — is what makes Christmas so magical and miraculous to me. The holiday is a reminder that maybe we are all living inside the same Story — one emanating from a singular Source and pointing us toward the same redemptive destination.
Or to put this in a Jewish vernacular: We are all heading toward the Promised Land, and either we’ll arrive together… or we won’t arrive at all.
Am I a Jewish heretic for admitting that the carpenter from Nazareth has an essential role to play in human history and in the story of the Jewish people? I don’t think so. Just listen to Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), aka Maimonides, a Sephardic rabbi and philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages.
In his Laws of Kings (11,4), Maimonides writes :
… But the thoughts of G-d cannot be fathomed by human minds. For our ways are not like His, and our thoughts are not like His. All these activities of Jesus the Christian, and the Ishmaelite who came after him, are all for the purpose of paving the way for the true King Messiah, and preparing the entire world to worship G-d together, as is written (Tzefaniah 3,9): “For then I will convert the nations to a pure language, that they may all call in the name of G-d and serve Him together.”
Most modern people probably think Maimonides is spewing gibberish. Because there is no “pure language.” There is no day of universal redemption. There is no hope for humanity because there is no G*d. We humans are destined to keep muddling along, stumbling through time, going nowhere in particular. In the end, we’re just apes with iPhones.
[Correction: We’re just apes with iPhones that can now shoot video in Apple ProRes Log to create more cinematic images!]
Maimonides or Shakespeare?
Maimonides sounds like gibberish to most sophisticated people today because our modern, technological, secular world is animated not by the Bible, but by the spirit of Shakespeare, who wrote in Macbeth:
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
To which Maimonides might reply: “Hey, Bill! What’s got you so down, buddy? Why so gloomy?”
For Maimonides, and for Jews and Christians, life is not “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Life is our brief moment in a long-running, awe-inspiring tale told by those who believe there’s a meaningful Story to share and inhabit, generation after generation. It’s a drama that includes Abraham and Sarah… Isaac and Ishmael… Moses and Miriam… King David and Bathsheba… “Jesus the Christian, and the Ishmaelite who came after him”… and billions of other individuals. It’s a Story that’s really a challenge and a choice:
Team Shakespeare OR Team Maimonides?
“Sound and fury, signifying nothing” OR “To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be…”
Stay in Babel and worship at the local ziggurat OR follow in the footsteps of Abraham and Sarah?
Merry Christmas… and Happy Hanukkah… to all who make this Story their own.
