I'm Ruined: Follow Me, Like Me, Emulate Me
The Theology and Psychology of Performative Failure
Now I am quietly waiting for/ the catastrophe of my personality/ to seem beautiful again,/ and interesting, and modern. (Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky”)
The Talmud (Brachot 3a) offers three reasons one should not enter a ruin:
Suspicion
Collapse
Demons
On the face of it, this is a simple rule: ruins are shady places where untoward, under-the-table activity occurs; ruins are physically dangerous; ruins are spiritually and supernaturally “haunted.”
But the rule comes in the context of a story about a sage—Rabbi Yosei—who does enter the ruin, and who does so to pray. Not only that, but when he enters the ruin, he hears God weeping or cooing. So his instincts are in some sense justified. The ruin is a fitting place to pray or to connect to God. The ruin is also a place of nostalgia—this isn’t any ruin, but the ruin of Jerusalem, a vestige of a time of power, a place where once the Temple stood. Who wouldn’t want to go back? But Elijah the Prophet tells the sage—and us—that we should rather recite an abbreviated prayer on the road than a full one in a ruin. The point of prayer, post-destruction, may be less to commune than to move forward. Spiritual authenticity must take a back seat to practicality. Or rather, the prayer cut short is authentic. The prayer on the road is not a mere compromise. It is the new pilgrimage. Home is to be found on the journey. After catastrophe, it is best to focus on rebuilding, not “Why.”
That is the heart of Elijah’s critique of the ruin-fetish, itself a metaphor for those who prefer brokenness and melancholy to decorum and regularity because they are raw. In the age in which personal confession of vulnerability is now de rigeur, and we are accustomed to hearing from CEOs on social media about their insecurities and social anxieties, the ruin commands a high price. Ruined people—the right kind of ruined people—are prestigious. Not unlike Greek and Roman ruins in the 19th century, which nation-states like England raced to import. Public confession of vulnerability, rightly calibrated to be socially acceptable, is the ultimate flex. Look at me, writing this, over-coming my internalized logophobia; did I mention I’m also afraid of reader response; aren’t I brave? The histrionic, image-conscious, Nietzschean celebration of unvarnished strength and the cult of body-building is no better than the cultural embrace of weakness—the middle way is the abbreviated prayer uttered on the road, an admission of necessity rather than an attempt to transcend it. Don’t wallow in the ruin, but don’t deny it or repress it either. Acknowledge the ruin, then keep walking.
The deeper meaning of the text is that it is impossible to explain why calamities happen without committing a theological faux-pas. You can ascribe the ruin or evil to God (suspicion), which turns God into a criminal or accomplice. You can ascribe the ruin or evil to natural cause (which just means atheism). Or you can attribute it to demons, thereby suggesting dualism, polytheism, or some impotence on God’s part. Thus, you can say God caused the Holocaust, the Holocaust was just the way of the world, or the result of the demonic. Each one begs the question. The abbreviated prayer, the prayer uttered on the road, focuses on a spiritual life that sees the problem of evil peripherally, but doesn’t accept the burden of solving it or resolving it in words and concepts. We know from the story that Rabbi Yosei, in fact, does hear God, and does witness God accepting responsibility for the destruction, but most people can’t handle that—the idea that God causes what feels like evil—and we shouldn’t expect them, too. The goal of religion is not fundamentally to explain, but to make due. In the language of Merold Westphal, the goal is to be righteous, not necessarily to get it right. Of course, we want “getting it right” to matter and to help us in living righteously. But the teaching of Elijah—who signifies the messianic, utopian future—is that in the here and now there is a tension. One can be right and wrong at the same time. The ruin may be a place of divine truth. But it’s not a place of human flourishing. The road is nowhere to make a life, either, but at least it promises to lead us somewhere habitable.