"Remember me, O my God, for good."

Tonight in the Resource Room at ESR, I hung out with Ezra and Nehemiah.  I would call them my friends, but I am only beginning to get acquainted with them.

For my Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah class, I am writing a paper on Ezra and Nehemiah.  As thrilling as Chronicles is, Ezra and Nehemiah have compelled me.  The most moving sections of Ezra and Nehemiah to me are what scholars call the memoirs.  One writer, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, says the memoir form is unique to Ezra-Nehemiah in the Hebrew Scriptures.  For example, Ezra writes, "When I heard this, I tore my garment and my mantle, and pulled the hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled" (Ezra 9:3).  It's a shocking action, but one that clearly defines Ezra's character and emotions.  Throughout his book, Nehemiah repeats variations of the following line:  "Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people" (Neh. 5:19).

Other writers in the Hebrew Scriptures write in the first person; for instance, the authors of Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs.  Because their writing in the first person welcomes me to occupy their words, I am drawn to these books.  But these books are not memoirs because they are not autobiographical accounts of someone's life; rather, they are poetry, praise, prayer, wisdom.  (Although the Teacher's observations in Ecclesiastes sound like memoir:  "I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind" [Ecclesiastes 1:14].)

Telling other people about our lives is, for most of us, the most common way we speak.  When we tell each other how our day is going, it is memoir-ish.  The first sentence of this blog post is memoir-ish.  Many of peoples' Facebook posts are memoir-ish. 

Memoir shares the same root as memory, whose base "men-"/"mon-" means "think."  This suggests that when we think, we are remembering.  I remember, therefore I am.  When I think, I am remembering experiences, whether in the form of words, thoughts, emotions, or something else, and perhaps sometimes I create new experiences in my rearranging those memories.  When I think, I re-member scattered pieces into a living whole.

That's what I do when I tell stories, or so I think.  I connect various memories of my life into a cohesive narrative.  Often stories are not told chronologically.  The purpose of telling many stories is not so much to give the facts about what happened, but to understand what happened, and I can understand what happened by how I arrange those events.  Each event means something different in a different context, and so by changing the order of the events, I change the context, thus discovering and creating new meanings from those events.

For example, I recently wrote a story about a road trip I went on with friends to Kansas.  If my purpose was simply to tell what happened as it happened, the most accurate way I could have ended the story would probably have been with our parking in front of the Redemption House in San Diego.  But my goal was not to recite the facts; I was telling a story, and in telling the story, I wanted to focus on my experience of being welcomed by strangers.  It's not that I changed the facts; I tried to be as accurate as possible.  Instead, I rearranged the facts.  I could rearrange the facts in a different order and the facts would be the same, but the story would be different.

Ezra and Nehemiah are a scattered collection of documents, memoirs, prayers, genealogies, and other forms.  Reading the books feels like walking on an uneven sidewalk, with some blocks slanted upward beside tree roots.  Tamara Cohn Eskenazi believes the editor of the books arranged these documents intentionally, and the trick, or the challenge, is to discover what the editor was trying to say.

In the story I wrote, the meaning becomes clear at the end, in which I say good bye to Ryan, who had welcomed us, and drive myself back into Guymon, Oklahoma, in the rental car for the first and last time.  Ezra-Nehemiah ends with Nehemiah summarizing the work he did for God, and writing, "Remember me, O my God, for good" (Neh. 13:30).  This suggests that, if we connect Ezra and Nehemiah as one work, the entire book is an account of the efforts of the people of God, especially Ezra and Nehemiah, presented to God as a prayer.  Ezra-Nehemiah is a Psalm, perhaps the first recorded prose poem.  Ezra-Nehemiah are not just editors, compiling this history of God's people, but priests, offering them to God to remember, to arrange, to reunite, to have the final say about the meaning of the story. 

The Tearing of the Temple Curtain

Lately I have been thinking about the tearing of the temple curtain at Jesus' crucifixion.  In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, at the moment Jesus cries with a loud voice and breathes his last breath, the curtain of the temple is torn in two.  It is torn "from top to bottom" (Matt. 27:51, Mark 15:38), suggesting that God tears it.  In Luke's Gospel, the curtain is torn in two before Jesus cries with a loud voice "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46) and before he breathes his last breath.  Luke mentions the tearing of the curtain in the same sentence as a description of darkness covering the land.  John's Gospel does not mention the tearing of the temple curtain. 

Growing up, the way I understood the tearing of the curtain was that, as soon as Jesus died, God split the curtain in two, showing that God and humanity are no longer separated.  The curtain in the temple enclosed the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant, which signified God's presence, was once placed; only the high priest could enter that space once a year. With the curtain split, and with Jesus' death, now all people could have direct access to God.

When writer Peter Rollins spoke at ESR this week, he gave his interpretation of the curtain's split.  For him, the curtain represents a prohibition, whose very presence creates in us a desire for something to give us fulfillment.  But the things we desire lead to our death, as we learn from Adam and Eve.  Thus, Jesus' death and the split curtain reveal emptiness; God is not in the Holy of Holies, as we believed.  Instead, God is on the cross.  Looking into an empty temple directs our eyes back to the cross, which can fill us with remorse over our sin of killing an innocent man, our crucifying God, a sin we continue whenever we scapegoat other people, whenever we condemn strangers.

Here is a third interpretation of the torn veil.  The first place in the Bible in which clothing is torn is in Genesis 37.  Joseph's brothers are so jealous of him that they strip him of the robe his father Jacob had given him as a gift, throw him in a pit, and then sell him to a caravan of Ishmaelites.  When his brother Reuben looks in the pit and finds Joseph missing, he tears his clothes (Gen. 37:29).  The brothers then kill a goat and dip Joseph's robe in its blood, and show the robe to their father, Jacob.  When Jacob sees the robe, he tears his garments and mourns (37:34).

Just as he thinks Joseph was torn to pieces by a wild animal, Jacob tears his garments to pieces.  Tearing one's clothes thus signified grief; in this case, mourning over a loved one's violent, undeserved death.  Because the curtain of the temple clothed the presence of God, the tearing of the curtain can be understood as God mourning the death of God's son Jesus who, like Joseph, was stripped of his clothes.  Unlike Joseph, though, Jesus was killed.  Jesus' death so grieved God that, like Jacob, God tore God's garments and wept.