October 7 and the World’s Narrative

For decades, people spoke of knowing exactly where they were when they learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Later generations have reflected in much the same way on the attacks of 9/11, which most of us watched in live, or nearly live, horror. Now the current day of infamy is October 7.

But while I remember hearing that something bad had happened at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering that morning—by the time it was morning on the East Coast of the United States, it was of course afternoon in western Israel—I did not realize until hours later that this was not just another skirmish in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the reason I wasn’t paying attention to world affairs was that my wife’s grandmother, who was also my beloved godmother, died that morning, two days after suffering a debilitating stroke.

My family has regularly said over the past year that it’s a blessing that Mimi, as we called her, did not live to know about October 7 or about the astonishing aftermath of anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas responses on campuses across the country, including just blocks from her home in Princeton, New Jersey. But had she lived, it is certain that she would have spoken, passionately, of the world’s “narrative.” This was a favorite word of both her and her late husband, the Christian theologian Robert W. Jenson, who wrote extensively for specialists about “the triune God of the historical narrative” and whose most famous essay for general readers is probably “How the World Lost Its Story,” published in First Things.

As a student and teacher of language and literature, I like to think that I have long known a thing or two about narrative arcs. But it was only when I was in my late forties that I began to understand, thanks to conversations with Mimi, that there is a good reason why many churches have a three-part liturgy, beginning with a reading from the Hebrew Bible before moving on to an epistle and the Gospel. Simply put, if you are a Christian, the first part of the Bible is an essential part of the story. You must not neglect it; you must not neglect the Jews.

The book of the Bible that Mimi and I talked about the most is not one of the Gospels. Rather, it is Ezekiel, on which Jenson wrote with particular eloquence in his Brazos commentary (2009) and in a wonderful little book based on an undergraduate course he had taught at Princeton, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (2016). The subtitle of the latter, which also became the title of the sermon that Victor Lee Austin preached at Jenson’s funeral in 2017, is, of course, a quotation from Ezek. 37:3.

Here is what Jenson writes in his commentary on this fiery book:

There is no plotted sequence of events that arrives at its end without conflict on the way . . . . For anyone to claim that God is on one side of a conflict appears to late modernity as a despicable error; God, supposing he exists at all, must stand above the fray. But we must hope that this is not so . . . . [I]n the conflicts of actual history, there is never a moral equivalency, however flawed and infected both sides may be; and we must pray that God fights for the better side.

These are fighting words. Mimi would have reminded me of them a year ago and every day since. We all need to be reminded of them.

Joshua T. Katz is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image by William Blake, from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.