More Thoughts on the Ninth of Av: The Jean Valjean Paradox
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, as many people know who haven't even read it, centers around a man, Jean Valjean, who spends nineteen years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving nephew. He never sees any of his family again; by the time he's released from prison they've vanished in the winds of poverty and depravation. In a combination of justified and unjustified anger at a society that won't give him a break, he violates his parole and spends the rest of his life on the run. He never has a real home or a real name again.
This is outrageous, of course. Unfair. Ridiculous. Cruel and unjustified. A tragedy.
Jean Valjean is a good guy, exceptionally intelligent and possessed of inhuman physical strength. He lives to support his sister and her seven children, with only passing success. He has no time for any life or family of his own, or for anything besides subsistence. His world is narrow and day-to-day, nasty, brutish and short. He is a faceless illiterate peasant.
In a fit of justified but not particularly thought-out desperation (he never tries, for example, asking the baker whether he would give him the bread), he breaks the law and spends the rest of his life paying for it. His destiny is thrown to the wind; he wanders far and wide and finds no rest or comfort and is given no chance or benefit of the doubt; horrible assumptions are made about him, and fear and rumors precede him. He meets a saintly bishop whose life has been devoted to annoying the Church by adhering to the principles dictated in the Gospels, and, unable to appreciate genuine charity anymore, he steals from him. The police bring him back, and the bishop absolves him of guilt, gives him additional silver, and challenges him to merit the gift. After a period of shocked denial -- during which he robs a young boy of badly-needed money, a wrong he never succeeds in righting -- he spends the rest of his life trying to live up to the astonishing example of love and charity set by the bishop, whom he never meets again. He fails, and he succeeds. He abandons his old identity, rescues children from a burning house, makes a technological and economic breakthrough that revolutionalizes an industry and revitalizes a region. He can barely turn down the honors fast enough. In spite of his efforts, he is appointed mayor. He stands up in defense of the downtrodden, he provides dignified jobs for multitudes, he endows hospital beds. The socially motivated paragons of righteousness scramble over each other to equal his example, and the poor benefit. He becomes educated.
Fate turns on him again, and he is forced by his own conscience to reveal his identity and stare down his past in the form of a sullen loner plausibly arrested as Jean Valjean. He admits he can see how someone might mistake this man for his former self. He has to actively convince people of his true identity, and then he's on the run again. An attempt to rectify his own mistake, in having trusted too casually in the appearance of piety, lands him an adopted daughter who becomes his entire life. He rescues her from a horrible existence, raises her lovingly and well, endows her with the vast earnings of his previous life and sees her married into comfortable respectability and toasted by all. He saves lives, even when it is against his immediate interest. He works tirelessly and anonymously -- aided by his immense natural gifts and internal resources -- for real justice. He wrestles with complicated moral decisions. He forces others to wrestle with complicated moral decisions.
Life is not kind to him, but it's not clear that he comes out the worse for it. He grows to fulfill his potential, to the immense benefit of all around him. He has a family of his own. He learns to read. He inspires and changes those he meets. He leaves his mark on the world.
Growth -- spiritual, moral, interpersonal or intellectual -- is rarely fun or easy, and it rarely takes place in circumstances of balance and tranquility. To be forced to wander is to see and be seen by much more of the world than one might otherwise. Would Jean Valjean, or his world, have been better off had the baker just given him the bread?
I remember seeing a book once, entitled, But Were They Good for the Jews? It's basically a point-by-point analysis of major historical figures, with major conventional-wisdom legacies, in terms of the direct effect they had on the Jewish people. And there were the usual shockers -- so-and-so gets good press but he was antisemitic, so-and-so left the Jews alone, so what if he was a fascist? Needless to say, I find it a somewhat skewed and nepotistic way of looking at history.
But I can't help but wonder -- do we or anybody else even know what in the end is really good for us? For anyone? There is plenty to mourn in the past two thousand years of Jewish history, but is is really safe to say that they were, from the distance of history, a bad thing? To the extent that we can ever know at all, it seems to me at the least an open question.
This is outrageous, of course. Unfair. Ridiculous. Cruel and unjustified. A tragedy.
Jean Valjean is a good guy, exceptionally intelligent and possessed of inhuman physical strength. He lives to support his sister and her seven children, with only passing success. He has no time for any life or family of his own, or for anything besides subsistence. His world is narrow and day-to-day, nasty, brutish and short. He is a faceless illiterate peasant.
In a fit of justified but not particularly thought-out desperation (he never tries, for example, asking the baker whether he would give him the bread), he breaks the law and spends the rest of his life paying for it. His destiny is thrown to the wind; he wanders far and wide and finds no rest or comfort and is given no chance or benefit of the doubt; horrible assumptions are made about him, and fear and rumors precede him. He meets a saintly bishop whose life has been devoted to annoying the Church by adhering to the principles dictated in the Gospels, and, unable to appreciate genuine charity anymore, he steals from him. The police bring him back, and the bishop absolves him of guilt, gives him additional silver, and challenges him to merit the gift. After a period of shocked denial -- during which he robs a young boy of badly-needed money, a wrong he never succeeds in righting -- he spends the rest of his life trying to live up to the astonishing example of love and charity set by the bishop, whom he never meets again. He fails, and he succeeds. He abandons his old identity, rescues children from a burning house, makes a technological and economic breakthrough that revolutionalizes an industry and revitalizes a region. He can barely turn down the honors fast enough. In spite of his efforts, he is appointed mayor. He stands up in defense of the downtrodden, he provides dignified jobs for multitudes, he endows hospital beds. The socially motivated paragons of righteousness scramble over each other to equal his example, and the poor benefit. He becomes educated.
Fate turns on him again, and he is forced by his own conscience to reveal his identity and stare down his past in the form of a sullen loner plausibly arrested as Jean Valjean. He admits he can see how someone might mistake this man for his former self. He has to actively convince people of his true identity, and then he's on the run again. An attempt to rectify his own mistake, in having trusted too casually in the appearance of piety, lands him an adopted daughter who becomes his entire life. He rescues her from a horrible existence, raises her lovingly and well, endows her with the vast earnings of his previous life and sees her married into comfortable respectability and toasted by all. He saves lives, even when it is against his immediate interest. He works tirelessly and anonymously -- aided by his immense natural gifts and internal resources -- for real justice. He wrestles with complicated moral decisions. He forces others to wrestle with complicated moral decisions.
Life is not kind to him, but it's not clear that he comes out the worse for it. He grows to fulfill his potential, to the immense benefit of all around him. He has a family of his own. He learns to read. He inspires and changes those he meets. He leaves his mark on the world.
Growth -- spiritual, moral, interpersonal or intellectual -- is rarely fun or easy, and it rarely takes place in circumstances of balance and tranquility. To be forced to wander is to see and be seen by much more of the world than one might otherwise. Would Jean Valjean, or his world, have been better off had the baker just given him the bread?
I remember seeing a book once, entitled, But Were They Good for the Jews? It's basically a point-by-point analysis of major historical figures, with major conventional-wisdom legacies, in terms of the direct effect they had on the Jewish people. And there were the usual shockers -- so-and-so gets good press but he was antisemitic, so-and-so left the Jews alone, so what if he was a fascist? Needless to say, I find it a somewhat skewed and nepotistic way of looking at history.
But I can't help but wonder -- do we or anybody else even know what in the end is really good for us? For anyone? There is plenty to mourn in the past two thousand years of Jewish history, but is is really safe to say that they were, from the distance of history, a bad thing? To the extent that we can ever know at all, it seems to me at the least an open question.
posted by fleurdelis28 | 4:33 PM
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