Wrestling with the idea of meaning

In this world it is not hard to be outside - and imagine others on the inside, and vice versa. B K Blount whom I think I may have met or at least heard in a distant life, has this statement about otherness (Blount, B. (2019). The Souls of Biblical Folks and the Potential for Meaning. Journal of Biblical Literature, 138(1), 6-21. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15699/jbl.1381.2019.1382)

Those who hold interpretive power establish those outside their circle as Other and assign to them the status of Problem and subsequently the problematic task of working their way out of their Otherness by becoming less like themselves and more like those holding such power.

You don't need to be visibly different from the crowd to feel this way.

In this article, Blount uses two words I avoid, soul, and meaning. Can I redeem those words for myself?

I continue to read the Bible. How could I do otherwise even if I never lifted a book again. It is embedded within me. I recognize both what I was first taught and what I reject as being without foundation, and the faith that enabled me to read this text. Truth is there somewhere, but should I try to name it? For me to 'put my finger on it' will untruth someone else. I have already put to one side some of those who taught me, both early and late.

Such rejection was not a part of my birth. It was bred in me by a residential school experience, uncertainty at home, growing up under the shadow of the Holocaust, a scientific background, and the usual slings and arrows. A recipe for implosion if I ever heard one! Early teachers taught with a stick and hid their own needs. As for family, who keeps a family together easily in any age? How did Christendom produce such bitter fruit, such unholy prejudice? When science conflicts with reading, which one should win? I was converted by one who, having died, probably knows better now.

Meaning is one of those words I avoid because it reduces sense to a mean. There is sense. And there is signification, but there is not just 'potential for meaning', but rather a multiplicity of potential meanings. The need to reduce them to one is an act of power rather than of love.

Curiously, I was just reading an English first world war novel with a scene in a small French town at a café. Someone asks: Is this chair taken? The Anglais could not understand the French question. The chair was there and empty. It isn't just the language that is a problem. It would have been equally silly to ask, Is this chair occupied? What was the meaning? That the questioner wanted to take or occupy the chair? Or was there an unseen person temporarily absent or expected shortly? Or, is it a reflection of social custom not to express one's own need first. May I have this chair? or May I sit here? Was the chair implicitly assigned to another table? Or did it belong to the one sitting at that table?

Then a few minutes later, talking to an old friend, an empty chair between them seemed to contain another mutual friend. So unoccupied, it was nevertheless occupied by a ghost. What is the ghost in this case but that part of the absent person's soul which she could never have known of. Yet is it a part of her soul as surely as she is in the minds of the two who are present? And as her soul is connected to them, are they also connected to her soul? The nature of the connection? Is everyone whom I have encountered a part of me as I am a part of them? If so, then we are one organism, one integral group. The soul is bigger than the individual.

The idea of this one body is implicit in the Shema. But perhaps I jump from rock to rock too quickly and maybe lose my balance. Ah well, someone will pick me up. I don't think this is a bad start for mutual responsibility and interdependence. I have already noted how dependent my project has been on people I have never met, especially noting the complexity of the technical environment I use.

On another front, one only has to think about the food we eat to know how dependent we are for every day needs on whole interacting systems of people. Who planted it, grew it, picked it, packaged it, sent it, bought it, sold it, prepared it, and who made what we can eat it with, and who built the house and its facilities that will receive our waste, and manage our cleanliness, and ensure that all these systems work on our behalf.

Are all these people part of us? And the people who fall by the wayside for whom the systems do not work, refugees, people near and far, whole and damaged, equally in need. Are they too part of my soul?

I cannot eliminate those who are past, saints or otherwise. One vast communion. Sheep and goats together. If Hitler had not persecuted Jews, then Haïk-Vantoura would not have had the same questions of her father... and I would not have written my program to run her key against the Leningrad codex. Even those in error have played a role.

So though, as a local individual in a small borough, I have to defend myself within a confined space and be defended by law and enforcement of law, I cannot allow this local culture to define a rigid other who is outside. My gates must remain open regardless of who is outside. Perhaps they have othered themselves, but perhaps they can also become other than what they seem to be to me now. And I may not be the keeper of the gates. Perhaps there are yet gates I must enter and overcome the otherness in myself from another's vantage point.

I don't have my copy of the JBL yet. It is thoroughly delayed by systems that are currently not working, so I have been reduced to scanning it online. My take from Blount may be quite peripheral to his intent. I hope he will forgive me for taking the empty chair next to him without asking.