Written up: Historian Simon Schama packed the Adelaide Town Hall for the big event in Writers Week, – a new experience for Obadiah. Despite being lobbied not to come, he defied fellow Zionists to come and addressed the topic of Anti-Semitism to a packed meeting.
Unlike Sydney or Melbourne, Adelaide has only a tiny Jewish community. This was an address to an ABC watching, left of centre crowd. But Sir Simon Michael Schama CBE, BBC presenter, author and Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University was a big name and hence a big draw. Schama gave a powerful speech that argued Anti Semitism is a deep-seated, historically persistent phenomenon.
During his address, Schama uncovered for Obadiah a great piece of Christian advocacy for the Jewish Cause. He quoted Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, who urged action to save Jews during WW2. He was quoting from a famous speech to the House of Lords which detailed exactly what was happening across Europe. The holocaust was in full swing, and Temple knew some of his suggestions – that the British Empire should take in Europe’s jews would be refused by Germany. “We know that what we can do is small compared with the magnitude of the problem, but we cannot rest so long as there is any sense among us that we are not doing all that might be done. We have discussed the matter on the footing that we are not responsible for this great evil, that the burden lies on others, but it is always true that the obligations of decent men are decided for them by contingencies which they did not themselves create and very largely by the action of wicked men. The priest and the Levite in the parable were not in the least responsible for the traveller’s wounds as he lay there by the roadside and no doubt they had many other pressing things to attend to, but they stand as the picture of those who are condemned for neglecting the opportunity of showing mercy. We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.”
Shama also specified a long list of anti-Semitic Christian writers from John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa onwards without the need to provide quotes, while quoting Temple for even longer than Obadiah has done here.
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It was Writers Week director, Louise Adler, who revealed at the end of the night that Shama had been told not to come to the Writers Week – while she left it to the audience to guess who lobbied him, she said it was to avoid him “white washing” the festival. Obadiah concluded it must have been some more conservative Zionists, who wanted Shama to stay away. They would have been happy for Writers Week to be seen as anti-Israel – a gathering of what the Brits call “luvvies”. After all, Walid Ali and Susan Carling led another session on Islamophobia.
But why not explore both ideas at what is essentially a festival of ideas?
Premier Peter Malinauskas had opened the session with a rousing defense of free speech, as the foundation of democracy. Obadiah thought it was a great speech – but why did Sharma need a first course? Then after Adler spoke, Obadiah understood. We need Zionist speech and pro palestinian speech to be free.
The glorious thing is that over 200 sessions of Writers Week are free*. You just turn up in one of the lively shaded spots behind Adelaide’s government House. Back when Obadiah was an Adelaide Uni student, it was a bleak leftover space … but now full of life. For a week.
(*Not Sharma though, that was ticketed in the town hall.)
Bob Carr shared the Writers Week East Stage (there’s three stages) for a moving discussion of grief with Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks – both have lost spouses in the last few years and talked movingly about processing their loss. Carr cited the literature of grief, which he had turned to after his sudden loss of Helena. Although a professed atheist, he found C. S Lewis’ A Grief Observed as the most insightful of the stack of books he had read working through his grief.
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Resentment: Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff is interviewed at length by Peter Wehner in the New York Times. It dwells on the grief of losing a son, Eric. Wehner writes “I learned of him when I read his deeply affecting, searingly honest book, “Lament for a Son,” an expression of his profound grief in the aftermath of the death of his 25-year-old son, Eric, in a mountain-climbing accident. ‘To the most agonizing question I have ever been asked,’ Mr. Wolterstorff wrote, ‘I do not know the answer. I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess. My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.’
Having traversed Job, and the centrality of the resurrection the conversation drifts as so many at Writers Week did to the perplexities of US politics. Wolterdorf had this insight. “Deep in the evangelical ethos, it seems to me, is: Get government off our back. Individual liberty is what the government should be doing, insofar as it does anything at all. And second, over the past 20 years, a deep nostalgia and resentment has entered into North American white evangelicals, a nostalgia for what supposedly once upon a time existed, when women stayed at home and didn’t preach in church and there were no homosexuals that we knew about and men had good jobs and so forth. Nostalgia for that and resentment against those who they understand as having destroyed that way of life, like immigrants and college professors and the Chinese and things like that.
“The origins of that populism are simply not biblical. So I would say that white North American evangelicals — let’s be specific — have strayed from the fundamental biblical conviction that government is understood to be a gift of God and its primary business is to secure justice in society. And then this haunting theme of the quartet of the vulnerable. [Wolterstorff describes the Biblical yearning for justice as summed up as care for the the widows, the orphans, the aliens and the impoverished.] When we’re thinking about justice, yeah, wealthy people can get clubbed over the head while riding a horse through Central Park, I know that. But that’s not the first thing for us to worry about.”
Standing in the league of prayer:
At the end of their NRL opening round game in Las Vegas (Obadiah is still puzzled about that bit), the Penrith team formed a prayer circle at Allegiant Stadium. Obadiah is almost tempted to follow Mrs Slope and become a fan.
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