Valuing What we Make
As I’ve mentioned a few times over the years, this is my favourite text from the Bible:
‘The Lord says:
Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.
Where is the house you will build for me?
Where will my resting place be?
Isaiah 66:1-2
I’ve written about it in terms of housing the sacred. I like the idea of building, of course. It’s a radical old text, is Isaiah, especially the bit about their being neither harm nor destruction ‘on all my holy mountain’:
‘They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the works of their hands.’ (Isaiah 65: 17-25).
Anyhow – building, labouring, the supply of social labour, the enjoyment of the work of our own hands, as against alienation and exploitation.
Jonathan Sacks is well worth reading on this: “Why We Value What We Make” [and why we rest those things that alienate that value from us …] Sacks talks about ‘added value.’ In the posts below, I write in terms of ‘surplus value’ and its extraction through the commodity value form.
Alienation as a dehumanisation:
“With an extraordinary act of tzimtzum, self-limitation, God gave the Israelites the chance to make something with their own hands, something they would value because, collectively, they had made it. Everyone who was willing could contribute, from whatever they had: “gold, silver or bronze, blue, purple or crimson yarns, fine linen, goat hair, red-dyed ram skins, fine leather, acacia wood, oil for the lamp, balsam oils for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense,” jewels for the breastplate and so on. Some gave their labour and skills. Everyone had the opportunity to take part: women as well as men, the people as a whole, not just an elite.”
“For the first time God was asking them not just to follow His pillar of cloud and fire through the wilderness, or obey His laws, but to be active: to become builders and creators. And because it involved their work, energy and time, they invested something of themselves, individually and collectively, in it. We value what we create. The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us.”
“The Creator of the universe was giving His people the chance to become creators also – not just of something physical and secular, but of something profoundly spiritual and sacred.”
Rabbi Sacks nails it in the final passage:
“Hence the life-changing lesson: if you want people to value something, get them to participate in creating it. Give them a challenge and give them responsibility. The effort we put into something does not just change the object: it changes us. The greater the labour, the greater the love for what we have made.”
In the article Sacks writes of co-creation, of human beings and Gods as partners:
“The builders of the sanctuary lifted up their gift to God, and in the process of lifting, discovered that they themselves were lifted. God was giving them the chance to become “His partners in the work of creation,” the highest characterisation ever given of the human condition.”
“This is a life-changing idea. The greatest gift we can give people is to give them the chance to create. This is the one gift that turns the recipient into a giver. It gives them dignity. It shows that we trust them, have faith in them, and believe they are capable of great things.”
Sacks’ book The Great Partnership describes this idea of co-responsibility in the creation at length. It was the book that influenced me most in revealing what it was I was searching for, and not finding, in philosophy.
“There is a difference between a contradiction and a cry.
You can solve a contradiction by sitting quietly in a room, thinking, using conceptual ingenuity, reframing. Philosophy, said Wittgenstein, leaves the world unchanged. But faith does not leave the world unchanged. You cannot solve a cry by thinking. Moses, weeping for his people, is not consoled by Leibniz's admittedly brilliant proof that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Theodicy, the attempt to vindicate God's justice in a world of evil, is compelling evidence that in the translation of Abrahamic spirituality into the language of Plato and Aristotle, something is lost. What is lost is the cry.”
(Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership, 2011: 141)
Or
“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” (Reinhold Niebuhr).
Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?
