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| Daughters of Zelophehad, courtesy Wikiimages.com |
I have come to look forward not only to the old favorite
Scripture readings in church, but often even more to the more esoteric ones I
would otherwise be inclined to skip or gloss over. Rev. Joetta
Schlabach of Faith Mennonite in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, delivered one such offering in her examination of the
text Numbers 27: 1-11, Those Audacious
Daughters of Zelophehad.
In summary, as the nation of
Israel was preparing to enter the Promised Land, a census had been taken in
order to divide up the land amongst the male-headed households. The daughters of the deceased Zelophehad were
to find themselves disinherited from
an equal portion of the land due to their father’s death and appealed to Moses
that despite being female, they should in fact be allocated the proper portion
due to their deceased father who had died faithful to the Lord.
For
our purposes, Schlabach’s sermon also contains three major observations
pertinent to traditional Mennonite cultural organization and self-governance
(though not necessarily unique only to the Anabaptists).
This story … teaches an important and
enduring lesson about law: it is not
permanently fixed but grows and changes along with the growth of God’s people
and in response to the call for justice.
This doesn’t mean that anyone can change the law as they wish. There was a clear process here: the daughters of Z raised a concern within
their community. The leaders (in this
case Moses) consulted God and received a preliminary ruling. Later additional concerns were raised,
calling for additional discernment.
Together the community shaped the new law that they would live by (Schlabach,
17 June 2012).
Schlabach is indicating an
important Pietist understanding of communal consensus government. The daughters of Z had a request / complaint
/ petition for the community to address.
They brought their concern before Moses and the elders. Moses did not handle the situation like a
“king,” “pope,” or “Spirit-anointed Evangelist.” Nor did Moses hear the petition alone – but
rather the women brought their case before Moses and the elders and
the clergy (priests) – it was a matter for the people, the community, to hear
and resolve:
So
the five sisters stood up publicly in front of Moses, the priest, the leaders,
and all the people to state their cause.
They presented their case, not simply as a matter of justice for them,
but also as a matter of the legacy for their father’s name [… and of import to
the well-being of their tribe…].
…
Moses found their case compelling and agreed to consult God. And God’s response was positive: yes, give these women an inheritance! (Schlabach).
While there is nothing odd or
different regarding the traditional forms and norms of consensual, “tribal” or traditional
gemeinde governance as presented in
the first part of this process, what is somewhat different is the fact that
Moses reached beyond the consensual governance of the elders and his own understanding
of the Law to inquire directly of God – both a Pietist impulse and a Pietist
understanding of the source of truth.
Moses reached beyond the elders to appeal directly to the highest
authority. At the same time, Moses
communicated back to, within and in the context of the consensus-building body
of the priests and elders. He did not
speak as one with a unique access to God or as the possessor of a uniquely
ordained gift, inscrutable to the reason and judgment of others. He did not speak ex cathedra or from the Papal
throne, but rather within the context of tradition, the established
governing mechanisms and as part of an open process. This is an important characteristic of
traditional Anabaptist ethnic and church governance.
Schlabach’s second
observation regards the dual nature of a community’s rules and laws – that they
exist for the good or sake of both the individual and the community:
None
of these accounts … suggest that laws aren’t needed. Instead they affirm that laws serve both the
good of individuals and the community.
The two must always be held together in a positive tension, whether we
are talking about the distribution of goods in our society (such as the land,
as in the story from Numbers) or about questions of personal morality including
sexuality (as in Luke’s [14] account of the case of adultery).
We
must confess that we don’t do very well as a society or a church, in holding
the individual and communal in balance.
Our society is highly individualistic and tends to place individual
rights above all else… (Schlabach).
In this, Schlabach indicates
that she is speaking of the qualifier to the women’s inheritance. The women’s case was heard and addressed by
God and therefore the community but in granting an inheritance to the women,
their clan or tribe faced the potential loss of that land to the tribes of
their eventual husbands. In order to
protect against this, the Lord balanced out their individual needs and those of
the tribe – the women could have their inheritance but they would be required
to marry within their hereditary tribe to preserve the community’s interests as
well. In other words, the rights and
needs of the individual were met yet mitigated by the need to preserve the
common good or the community’s best self-interest. In humility, the women seem to have
acquiesced.
So Schlabach’s sermon
identifies two challenges – the first being to be “vigilant for people or groups within our society [i.e. individuals] who
are not served by our current laws or traditional practices.” Schlabach’s second challenge is community
focused – “to stay engaged in processes
of discernment with all levels of our church as we seek to build more just
communities.”
Quite usefully, Schlabach
identifies the structure of this communal consensual spiritual governance:
In this process of discernment we need
everyone:
·
we need
the audacious daughters of Z who raise their voices to point out an injustice;
·
we need
leaders who will listen, pray, and create avenues for authentic conversation
and discernment, and
·
we need
diverse members: some to help us recall
our history and others to help us thoughtfully anticipate the ways that the
community will be affected by modifications to current laws and customs. We cannot know all the unintended
consequences of change, some of which might raise the need for further
modifications.
Again, returning to the
Pietist aspect of Mennonite consensual governance, Schlabach continues to
include the highest participation, “… we
trust this is the work of God. This is
the work we are called to do, now and in this place. As we seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
we believe we will be led into truth.”
God is the ultimate source of truth, law and custom and God is part of
the process, responding to our inquiries and prayers for guidance and
direction. God has ordained the
consensus-building process of the Church and yet faithfully responds to all
“appeals.” Traditional ethnic Mennonites
(and evangelical Mennonites) would seem to sincerely and faithfully pursue that
ordained ethnic and church understanding.
That
being said, Schlabach found that “Moses
found their case compelling and agreed to consult God. And God’s response was positive: yes, give these women an inheritance!”
Moses did not turn to the
tablets of law, the old traditions of the Biblical Levant, the new traditions
of the newly formed Hebrew nation or even the studied notions of the elders of
Israel. In humility, he sought further
guidance and understanding from God directly.
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| Pope John XXIII (1958), (c) wiki images |
This reminds me of an
anecdote regarding Pope John XXIII:
[Pope John XXIII] made no secret of the fact that he did not consider himself a theologian but rather a pastor of souls. He assured a Protestant minister received in private audience that, although as head of the Church he was infallible when proclaiming matters of faith and morals, it was another matter when it came to abstruse theological questions. Then, said the pope, he had to consult his official theologian (Rynne, p 4).
The cultural and spiritual lesson
could be that in humility, sometimes we just need to be open to the fact that
despite all our understanding, despite all of our authority, despite all of our
traditions, politics and principles, we need to look beyond ourselves to seek a
higher perspective than our own too often limited, if well-intentioned
understanding. Humility and openness –
those are the keys to melding individual effectiveness with communal
organization. Both humility and openness
are also understood components of the Mennonite and Amish traditional gelessenheit.
Of
additional cultural and sociological interest to Schlabach’s sermon would be a
comparison of inheritance laws between those from Schlabach’s reading in
Numbers 27, those of the Russian colonies in Chortitza and Molotschna,
inheritance law in the early Canadian Mennonite Reserves of southern Manitoba
and possibly contemporary practice amongst the Amish of North America and the
traditional Russian Mennonites of Mexico and Paraguay. Similarities should be noted and attempts
should be made to account for any differences and to identify their ultimate
cultural source. Note that comparisons
between Old Testament precedent, Early Church history and historic Anabaptist
practice are directly pertinent to both the historical experience and historic
self-identity of the Anabaptists.
A further area for study
would be the extent to how the traditional ethnic and religious Mennonite
self-governance was both inspired by Biblical examples such as the Numbers 27
example and whether or not Numbers is determined to be a source or model, how
closely Anabaptist governance corresponds or differs from the Old Testament
models. Note that comparisons and
contrasts with both contemporary Orthodox Jewish practice and traditional norms
from the Eastern European shtetles might also be of interest to the larger
Mennonite diaspora.
Far from being boring, arcane
or easy to gloss over, the story of Zelophehad’s daughters actually opens a
wide range of conversation and points for further research, study and notation
both spiritually and as a practical study of the nature, impact and operation
of proper customary consensual community or gemeinde
governance applicable to the ancient Israeli experience, that of the Mennonite
Anabaptists and likely many other ethnic and cultural groups.
Rynne, Xavier, Vatican Council II,
Farrar, Straus & Giraux, New York, NY, 1968, p. 596.
Schlabach, Rev. Joetta, Those
Audacious Daughters of Zelophehad (Numbers 27: 1-11), sermon, Faith
Mennonite Church, Minneapolis, Minn., 17 June, 2012.
Joetta Schlabach, Law,
Inheritance, Women’s Rights, Consensus, Elders, Bible Study
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