Deuteronomy 20: Moses gives instruction to the nation of the Israelites toward the end of their long sojourn in the wilderness; an enormous crowd of men is given the law of God regulating the process of warfare, the means for taking possession of the Promised Land. There are four specific instructions for individual soldiers; which one does not quite fit?
Has anyone built a new house and not yet begun to live in it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else may begin to live in it. Has anyone planted a vineyard and not begun to enjoy it? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else enjoy it. Has anyone become pledged to a woman and not married her? Let him go home, or he may die in battle and someone else marry her.” Then the officers shall add, “Is anyone afraid or fainthearted? Let him go home so that his fellow soldiers will not become disheartened too.The last exemption is about a negative: fear. The first three, however, are different, and somewhat surprising. Isn't warfare about self-sacrifice, even in the face of these kinds of losses? Aren't the best soldiers the young men with 'nothing to lose' beyond their lives? Studying with an insightful rabbi (Rabbi Fuhrman of Aleph Beta) can train one's mind to see the places in the Torah where there are rich layers of soil in the verses; often, these are noticeable by their surprising twists.
Indeed, these three exemptions have rich soil for understanding God and His relationship with us, even if just a little bit more. More than this, however, is a fascinating connection with Luke 14:15-24, the Parable of the Great Banquet, which we will unpack downstream a bit. First is to understand the grounding in the Torah: the more studying one does, the more one realizes two things: just how often Our Lord references the Torah either explicitly or implicitly, and how He is teaching, on a deeper level, a message of transcendence, of theosis that was in the time of Jesus' sojourn on earth, and perhaps still is, not part of the Jewish imaginative vision. Thus, a vision of the Torah through the lens of the Good News of the Kingdom of God reveals a beautiful, holistic, imaginative vision, The Imaginative Vision that should ground and inform and correct all others.
An imaginative vision, or a cultural paradigm, is explained well in From Christendom to Apostolic Mission; however, it is a common concept, something most people will recognize when articulated: an imaginative vision is a group grounding for action, a grounding most individuals in the group do not even "see" but rather see through in order to narrate their lives. It often becomes a settled, un-examined set of principles by which ethical character and action is judged; it gives meaning to life. When disordered, it can also become a source of tremendous disorder: it is the raw nerve that Socrates set on fire, when he sought to teach Athenians to live an "examined life."
The three exemptions for the warfare that would result in possession of the Promised Land are signs of much greater Objects, these Objects being part of the God-given imaginative vision for human life, the one I believe Socrates was seeking when he sought the truth. As Rabbi Fuhrman explains, the first exemption is the new home; a man faces death, the end of all things for him, without the perfection (completion) of something basic to the meaning of his existence: a home. The same applies to the planting of the vineyard, and to the marrying of a wife. How are these eve-of-battle exemptions signs for the deeper imaginative vision of God? Rabbi Fuhrman, to explain this, turns to Genesis. God first built a home, the cosmos, for human beings; He then planted a garden and asked Adam to steward it, to tend it, along with a spouse, Eve; finally, God "walked in the garden in the cool of the day" and related to Adam and Eve in that garden, a kind of feasting and enjoyment together of the fruits of their collective labor. This, the rabbi states, gives meaning to the analogous human actions of building a home, planting a vineyard, and sharing the fruits of all this with a wife and the family flowering from the abundance. In these activities, we are, in J.R.R. Tolkien's phrasing, "sub-creators," in Rabbi Fuhrman's phrasing, "little creators," and the rabbi defines this ability as an acting out of the image of God in us.
How are we different from animals, then? Don't beavers, for example, build homes, gather food, and share all with mate and offspring? The difference has to do with the human intellect, that faculty in us that sees beyond our smaller world of signs, the ability to see signs as signs pointing to a larger, greater imaginative vision, to abstract common experience beyond instinct and to find not only universal human meaning and joy, but to see analogously that God is communicating and relating to us in similar ways, that there is a perfection, a transcendence, a love beyond instinct and survival that our human activities participate in: to synthesize with a Platonic idea, this is the participation of lower realities in higher ones, creating a "ladder" of relation, such as the beautiful flower participating in the same concept of beauty as beautiful ideas, or moral beauty---just at lower and higher levels of transcendence, moving ever higher towards Beauty Himself---reminiscent of Jacob's ladder, in a sense. C.S. Lewis puts an even more layered spin on this in his essay, "Transposition," in which he explains that the higher can make sense of the lower participations, but the lower is always only a partial, imperfect articulation of the higher, and so very easy mistaken as an end in itself, because it is more directly experienced by those who live at that level, becoming a stunted imaginative vision, so to speak.
In giving humans the intellect with the potential to see and experience transcendent, higher, spiritual realities, God has imbued with supernatural, eternal love the making of a home, the planting of a garden, and the sharing of that; these signs also call us, as humans, to relate with Him, to desire a home with Him, to desire to work with Him to plant and reap, to relate to each other with Him at the subsequent wedding feast: such was the Temple, both the portable, wandering one and the permanent one, the one Jesus looked upon. All is pointing to being together with God.
However, Rabbi Fuhrman does not go beyond the human imitation, imaging, of God; this seems to be the ultimate meaning of life for a human. Is there anything beyond, or are we stuck in the supplementation from the original? Is there any return, at least to Eden?
Jesus' entry onto the Jewish scene, one heavy-laden with tradition, teaching, and layered symbolism, was a break-in. It is not surprising that He compares Himself to a thief in the night, or as the bridegroom showing up in the middle of the night: one unexpected, one who disrupts the prevalent imaginative vision hardened into an almost purely human-controlled system tightly wound by commentaries and a class system, a power-structure; He is the gadfly goading the desperation of an older vision, so minutely examined through the centuries that it could no longer be examined. The Jews at this time were occupied by Rome within their own Promised Land, even to the steps of the Temple itself. They were again on a war-footing, even if frustrated and castrated. They were waiting for a new Joshua, for the Messiah to come and clear their homes, their vineyards, so that they could properly find meaning in acting out the image of God within them. Had they lost the Imaginative Vision, or was it the time, the kairos, for the real Vision to be fulfilled? Were they a generation meant for the greatest of invitations?
God enters in and He speaks; in this particular mirroring of the eve-of-battle exemptions, He articulates the Parable of the Banquet. Luke 14:16-20:
A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’
These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.
