from Levinas's essay "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition.":
"...the totality of truth is made out of the contributions of a multiplicity of people: the uniquness of each act of listening carries the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation in precisely the inflection lent by each person's ear, is necessary for the truth of the Whole. The fact that God's living word can be heard in a variety of ways does not only mean that the Revelation adopts the measure of the people listening to it; rather, that measure becomes, itself, the measure of the Revelation. The multiplicity of people, each one of them indispensable, is necessary to produce all the dimensions of meaning; the multiplicity of meanings is due to the multiplicity of people."
Seems of self-evident and simple.
It does seem simple but then ther's always the conflict people create between their god and the other guy's god. I wrote a couple poems (My God is God--Your God is the Devil) about it a while ago, after sept 11.
My God is God
My God lives in heaven and He lives here
In my heart and the hearts of those around me.
His thoughts are pure and true and gentle,
and his truest wish is to dream of babies
playing in water soft as white roses.
When His lips come together in a smile
The heavens smile too and the rains say
“Goodbye, goodbye, the sun is coming”
And when He smiles men are never hungry
and their wives have eyes as soft as roses too.
And where my God is, there are no strangers,
only brothers who will take our hands
And kiss our cheeks for luck along the road,
No matter how hard it is, no matter how long.
Your God is the Devil
He wears a broken hat and dead men’s clothes
and he comes from a place where men are hungry
and children die in the dirt waiting for dawn.
Nothing your stupid god wishes for comes true:
If he prays for peace he gets cyclones,
twisters that shred his skin like razors
and rain sorrow on all who pray to him.
If he wishes for love among brothers
he gets brothers who spit at each other,
fathers who beat their sons on their weddings days,
daughters who flaunt their evil shoes and dresses
before their mothers and holy grandmothers.
Your god is a straw thing who fears my boot
And what I can do to him with my hands.
Posted by: john guzlowski | July 16, 2009 at 12:24 PM
This is a great poem, John. Where are the others from this series?
Posted by: Leonard Kress | July 16, 2009 at 02:54 PM