Order Built on (Queer) Sand: A Communist Reading of the Queer Name of God in Exodus

 Casey Aldridge

            The night before she was arrested and executed by right-wing paramilitaries known as the Freikorps for her leadership of the rebellion of Berlin’s proletarian masses in January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg penned her final editorial for the newspaper of Germany’s communist left, Die Rote Fahne (“The Red Flag”).[i] In her final contribution to the labor movement, Luxemburg decried the bourgeois “order” of Western Europe as an illusory order reliant on the exploitation of the working class and “regularly maintained through bloody slaughter.”[ii] Luxemburg concludes with a resounding denunciation of the counter-revolutionaries celebrating the restoration of the status quo throughout the city of Berlin: “‘Order Prevails in Berlin!’ You foolish lackeys! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will ‘rise up again, clashing its weapons,’ and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!”[iii]

            Deciphering the theological significance of Rosa Luxemburg’s last words requires careful attention to her unique social location. Luxemburg was a Polish communist living, teaching, and organizing within the German Empire, where she was among the most outspoken and radical opponents of the German war effort. Luxemburg’s colossal status within leftist movements today is at least partly a result of her martyrdom alongside her comrade Karl Liebknecht on 15 January 1919.[iv] During her life, Luxemburg struggled at times to be taken seriously, usually on account of her gender or her “lifelong visible disability—one leg [was] shorter than the other and she walk[ed] with a pronounced limp.”[v] Luxemburg’s Marxist convictions included a commitment to atheism and philosophical materialism; nevertheless, Luxemburg was formed by her upbringing within a liberal Jewish family in the Jewish community of Zamość.[vi] Her rejection of religion did not protect her from antisemitism, nor did it purge her of her extensive knowledge of the Hebrew Bible. While her final editorial in Die Rote Fahne is rightly understood as a communist polemic, her Jewish background allows us to detect in those final words (“I was, I am, I shall be!”) echoes of Exodus 3 and the revelation of the divine name to Moses at the burning bush.

            Likewise, my own social location informs my reading of Luxemburg and of Exodus 3. I share with Luxemburg her anti-authoritarian commitments and communist convictions, but little else. As an able-bodied white man living comfortably enough in the United States in the twenty-first century, and as a master’s student writing a thesis on Rosa Luxemburg who has nevertheless never had to wonder where my next meal might come from, the violence of the state does not hit me in the same way that it struck Luxemburg. When I talk about my hermeneutic of liberation, I have fewer material investments in liberation theology than do Luxemburg and others. Likewise, my engagement with queer theory in connection with Exodus 3 must be held in tension with my cisgender and heterosexual presentation. Finally, my Christian faith places me in a very different position relative to the Exodus-event than most Jewish readers. I have different expectations of the text that make it possible for me to read the revelation of the divine name at the burning bush alongside the incarnation of Christ within queer theory; such a comparison, however, must be carried out carefully so as not to impose a supersessionistic and anti-Jewish reading of Exodus.

            My personal hermeneutic, as noted above, is rooted in a belief that God is committed to the emancipation of oppressed individuals and communities across human history. My introduction to the academic study of theology came from Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom.[vii] From Bloch I learned to read biblical texts with the critical eye of a Marxist and the eschatological hope of a Christian. From Bloch’s disciple in queer theory, José Esteban Muñoz, I also find that which is for me the most compelling definition of queerness: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain.”[viii] Following Muñoz, in this paper I will argue that God comes out in Exodus 3 as “queer futurity” or queerness itself, capable of destabilizing normative theological claims about God. I will conclude with a return to Luxemburg’s appropriation of the divine name toward Marxist and—I argue—fundamentally queer ends.

            It is good exegetical practice to explicitly establish one’s social location before diving into a text. It is doubly important for a close reading of the divine name in Exodus 3. Before the inquiry into God’s identity can be launched, Moses poses a question of himself: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt” (Ex. 3:11, NRSV)?[ix] Moses’ question “who am I?” does not indicate any lack of self-awareness. It is Moses’ sense of his own Hebrew identity and his intolerance of injustice that causes him to retaliate on behalf of the Hebrew slave being beaten by the Egyptian taskmaster in Ex. 2:11-12. It is this same intolerance of injustice that prompts Moses to intervene against the shepherds at the well on behalf of the daughters of the priest of Midian (2:15-17). Moses’ righteous indignation is mirrored in the character of God, who “heard [the] groaning” (2:24) and “took notice” (2:25) of the Hebrew slaves crying out in Egypt. Moses’ self-awareness allows him to respond to God’s initial call with the words “here I am” (3:4). Such a response is impossible without an articulated sense of self that Moses can refer to as “I.” His self-searching question then (“who am I that I should go to Pharaoh”; 3:11) is consequently a question of his qualifications and also of resistance to God’s call. God’s response is, according to Terence Fretheim, “both clear and enigmatic. What is clear is that God will be with Moses in all that he undertakes… His ‘I’ will be accompanied by the divine ‘I’.”[x] Moses’ second question, according to Brevard Childs, continues the motif of “the prophet’s resistance”[xi]: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them” (3:13)?

            Moses asks for God’s name, Fretheim suggests, because “the name of the God for whom he speaks will establish his credentials” when he returns to the Israelites in Egypt.[xii] Yet Childs observes that the name is “not actually raised in the subsequent discussion with the people.”[xiii] Though Moses justifies his question to God as for the sake of the Israelites (“what shall I say to them?”), he does not actually relay to them what he learns. Childs offers another explanation for Moses’ question: within his Near Eastern context there existed an assumed correlation between “name and reality.”[xiv] The fact that God has a particular name—revealed in verse 14 as “I am who I am” (אֶֽהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶֽהְיֶה)—implies that “this God is not a general God,” but the “God of this exodus, this people: the slave people delivered from slavery.”[xv] By itself, the term God “is a title, an office, a function… as such, ‘God’ signifies nothing—except that his power knows no boundaries.”[xvi] But a God with a name is a God who corresponds to some reality; God’s power is leveraged to some end. According to Dick Boer, we can conclude from God’s name that God’s “nature [is] to lead this people from the house of servitude.”[xvii]

            Just as Moses’ commitment to the oppressed is reflected in this deity, so too is Moses’ “openness met by divine openness.”[xviii] Moses’ character (“here I am,” הִנֵּֽנִי; 3:4) is mirrored by the revelation of the divine name in Exodus 3 to such an extent that Zora Neale Hurston has called YHWH a “construction” of Moses and the Israelites.[xix] Bloch’s interpretation is more provocative still. Bloch contends that Moses invokes or invents YHWH as a “Sign-post out of Bondage… the flag of liberation… the horizon of his people’s expectations.”[xx] Moses, according to Bloch, saw the “awe-inspiring Tremendum of thunder and smoke” of “the volcano of Sinai” (referred to here as “Mount Horeb”; 3:1) on the horizon and fashioned this “idol of thunder and oppression into a source of leadership through time” capable of guiding the Israelites out of Egypt, out of slavery, and into the “Promised Land.”[xxi] Like Luxemburg, Bloch was a Jew by birth, atheist by choice, and Marxist by political conviction. And like Luxemburg, Bloch’s appropriation of the name of God places the fullness of God’s self-revelation in the as-yet-undisclosed future, on the horizon, “the unfixed Futurum.”[xxii] This is not the “general God” that one encounters in Greek mythology, but “a God who is coming; a God who is a sea of righteousness, as Isaiah says in his highly un-Present, Utopian way.”[xxiii]

            Bloch is known on the left as the Marxist philosopher of hope, and utopia is a recurring theme of his work. José Esteban Muñoz’s queer theory draws heavily from Bloch’s work and his “critical distinction between abstract utopias and concrete utopias.”[xxiv] Muñoz argues that whereas “abstract utopias… are untethered from any historical consciousness[,] concrete utopias are relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential.”[xxv] The utopia contained within the divine name—within the conception of God as a constructed “sign-post out of bondage”—is specifically related to the “historically situated struggle” of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. The divine “name” revealed in Exodus 3 passes through several stages, first in verse 14 as “I am who I am” (אֶֽהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶֽהְיֶה), next as simply the abridged “I am” (אֶֽהְיֶה; 3:14), and finally as the proper name יְהוָה, replaced in the NRSV by “Lord” (3:15). This final form, also known as the tetragrammaton and rendered simply as YHWH, imitates its allegedly human architects in a more intimate sense in that it is “could not be spoken at all—only breathed.”[xxvi] The name is quite literally a sigh that reflects and mimics the sigh of the Israelites in bondage.

            Childs rejects interpretations such as those of Ernst Bloch and Zora Neale Hurston, who in different ways “subsume the divine element within the category of the psychological,” making Moses’ call narrative “the internal brooding of a man over the problems of his people and the mounting religious conviction that God wants him to aid.”[xxvii] But we do not need to unreservedly accept Bloch’s Marxist-materialist hermeneutical reduction of the name of God to a “sign-post” to appreciate the value of what his interpretation provides. The way in which the deity “mirrors” Moses opens up a two-way interaction that can be passed in either direction. It not only allows human desires—the sighs of oppressed and the longing of slaves for liberation—to be located in the name of God, but it also provides a framework for seeing God in ourselves. In Dan Geslin’s sermon on overcoming fear and coming out as gay, the name of God is a call “to become… who I am.”[xxviii] Everyone “created in the image of God” is empowered to share in God’s name and: “I am who I am.”[xxix] And insofar as the name of God incorporates queer identities and is a means by which queer people can embrace their bodies and desires for what they are, the name of God is queer. In Geslin’s “Coming Out Story,” God comes out as well.

            Moreover, YHWH’s name reveal’s YHWH’s political commitment to the poor and the oppressed. It turns out that the translation of אֶֽהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶֽהְיֶה (transliterated by Fretheim as ‘ehyeh ‘aser ‘ehyeh) is not as simple as I have made it seem thus far.[xxx] Fretheim calls Exodus 3:14 “one of the most puzzled over verses in the entire Hebrew Bible.”[xxxi] The first and fullest appellation—אֶֽהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶֽהְיֶה—begins and ends with the same first person singular conjugation of the Hebrew verb הָיָה (“to be”), connected by the relative particle אֲשֶׁר.[xxxii] The NRSV renders this phrase, as we have seen, as “I am who I am,” but Fretheim gestures to the diversity of translations that exist: “I will be what (who) I will be”; “I will cause to be what I will cause to be”; I will be who I am / I am who I will be.”[xxxiii] The communist theologian Dick Boer translates the full name as “I will be there, as he who I will be there… in the impending exodus and in the future that begins with the exodus that is the path to the Promised Land.”[xxxiv] Boer’s translation points to good news for the oppressed and the futurity of God, the not-yet-here that Muñoz identifies as the essence of queer identity. For Muñoz, queerness is “not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”[xxxv]

            Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia has generally been read as a response to Lee Edelman’s queer rejection of the future and his turn towards “anti-relational” queer theory.[xxxvi] In their volume on “Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies,” editors Stephen Moore, Kent Brintnall, and Joseph Marchal suggest that Muñoz and Edelman are not diametrically opposed to one another—at least not in the way they conceptualize queerness.[xxxvii] For Muñoz and Edelman, they argue, queerness “is equally evasive of present pinning down.”[xxxviii] The label “queer” is therefore always inadequate as a term of identity—it always falls short of capturing the depth and complexity of one’s sexual or social identity—and yet it is a fruitful source of identity-disruption. That the queer name of God is notoriously tricky to translate and nigh-impossible to pronounce tells us very little about God, but does point us in the direction of the future—where the oppressed will break free from oppression, where the marginalized will be able to declare “I am who I am” or “I love who I love” without fear of ostracization.

            In the preceding analysis of the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush, I have largely focused on the name provided in Exodus 3:14 rather than the proper name YHWH, which is subsequently given in verse 15. That is partly because “it is pointless,” Boer suggests, “to speculate what the four-letter-word YHWH might mean before and beyond the self-definition in Ex. 3:14.”[xxxix] It is God’s imitation of Moses and God’s decision to hear and imitate the sigh for liberation of the slaves in Egypt that gives us the tools to see God’s self-revelation as a coming-out story and which lets marginalized people see their bodies, their desires, and their hopes for the future reflected “in” God. And it is in the expression אֶֽהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶֽהְיֶה that God’s enigmatic and ultimately queer orientation toward the future coheres with Muñoz’s definition of queerness as “an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”[xl] Nevertheless it is worth noting that the tetragrammaton (יְהוָה) appears to be an incomprehensible and ultimately “inaccessible” conjugation of the same Hebrew verb הָיָה (“to be”).[xli] It is related to being, but neither is it given over entirely to the past, present, or future. Andrew Vogel suggests that the closest thing to a meaning for YHWH might be “is-was-will-be-ness” or “being in becoming.”[xlii]

            When Luxemburg says that “the revolution will ‘rise up again, clashing its weapons,’ and… proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be,” she uses what she as a biblically-literate Jewish woman knows as the “is-was-will-be-ness” of the divine name to make sense of her defeated proletarian revolution.[xliii] The attempted revolution of January 1919 is, like queerness for Muñoz, “an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”[xliv] Like the name of God in Exodus 3:14-15, it implies a concrete utopia connected to a “historically situated struggle”—for Luxemburg, the struggle against class oppression; for the ancient Israelites, the struggle against bondage in Egypt; for Muñoz and queer individuals and communities today, the struggle against violent oppression and marginalization on account of sexual preference or gender identity.[xlv] Just as the queer name of God “shapes Israel’s story, and the story gives greater texture to the name,” so too do struggles against cisheteronormativity and capitalism today give us a greater glimpse into the character and self-identification of YHWH.[xlvi]

            The concrete utopias of queerness or revolution or God, each of which functions in the sense of that which theology calls the “already-and-not-yet,” are eschatological idealities that haunt and disturb the present order as it exists. Although I read Exodus 3, Rosa Luxemburg, and queer theory as a convinced Marxist and as a practicing Christian, the very social location and ideological commitments that allow me to witness God at work in certain struggles across time and history may limit me from witnessing the work of God in other contexts. The struggles and movements enumerated above should therefore not be seen as exhaustive. God’s presence, as queerness itself and bearing a queer name that resists categorization or translation, is not limited to struggles against capitalism or cisheteronormativity. God is the creator of all, which is to say with Teresa Hornsby and Ken Stone that “it is from queerness that all creation comes.”[xlvii] Just as “heterosexuality… is [a] fleeting” and impermanent historical “wave,” so too is capitalism, and anti-capitalism, and political resistance to heteronormativity.[xlviii]  Every interpretation of Exodus 3—including this communist reading of the queer name of God—is contextual, which is to say that every interpretation seeks to uphold or bring down the social structures of its day. But every social order (as well as righteous resistance to every social order) is made up of fleeting, impermanent waves in a queer ocean and constructed on top of queer sand.[xlix]

Works Cited:

Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Translated by J.T. Swann. London: Verso Books, 2009.

Boer, Dick. Deliverance from Slavery: Attempting a Biblical Theology in the Service of Liberation. Translated by Rebecca Pohl. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017.

Brintnall, Kent L., Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore. “Introduction—Queer Disorientations: Four Turns and a Twist.” In Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies. Edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore, pp. 1-45. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017.

Childs, Brevard S. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1974.

Citrin, Paul, editor. Lights in the Forest: Rabbis Respond to Twelve Essential Jewish Questions. New York, NY: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2014. Accessed 19 December 2019. https://books.google.com/books?id=GUolBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT55&lpg=PT55&dq=iswaswillbeness&source=bl&ots=6edxQQW73D&sig=ACfU3U3RZ3Txiu92qdrKEDxUAqtle1Ngig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjA-KnPo8LmAhUESK0KHWgpCt0Q6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=iswaswillbeness&f=false.

Evans, Kate. “Drawing Out Rosa Luxemburg’s Gender Identity.” E-International Relations. 1 December 2015. Accessed 17 December 2019. https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/01/drawing-out-rosa-luxemburgs-gender-identity.

Fretheim, Terence E. Exodus. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991.

Frölich, Paul. Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action. Translated by Johanna Hoornweg. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010 [1939].

Geslin, Dan. “A Coming Out Story.” In Olive Elaine Hinnant, God Comes Out: A Queer Homiletic. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2007.

Hornsby, Teresa J. and Ken Stone. “Already Queer: A Preface.” In Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship. Edited by Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone, pp. ix-xiv. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011.

Luxemburg, Rosa. “Order Prevails in Berlin.” First published in Die Rote Fahne. 14 January 1919. Accessed 27 February 2019. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm.

Marbury, Herbert Robinson. Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2015.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009.

Rohr, Richard. “Breathing Yahweh.” Center for Action and Contemplation. 6 October 2014. Accessed 19 December 2019. https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--Breathing-Yahweh.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=W6_U3gyEM9g

Notes

[i] Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Berlin,” first published in Die Rote Fahne, 14 January 1919, accessed 27 February 2019 at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm.

[ii] Ibid.                             

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action, trans. Johanna Hoornweg (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010 [1939]), 299.

[v] Kate Evans, “Drawing Out Rosa Luxemburg’s Gender Identity,” E-International Relations, 1 December 2015, accessed 17 December 2019 at https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/01/drawing-out-rosa-luxemburgs-gender-identity/.

[vi] Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, 2, 4.

[vii] Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J.T. Swann (London: Verso Books, 2009).

[viii] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), 1.

[ix] Terence Fretheim, Exodus (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 62. Emphasis added is my own.

[x] Fretheim, Exodus, 61.

[xi] Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1974), 75.

[xii] Fretheim, Exodus, 63.

[xiii] Childs, Book of Exodus, 74.

[xiv] Ibid., 75.

[xv] Dick Boer, Deliverance from Slavery: Attempting a Biblical Theology in the Service of Liberation, trans. Rebecca Pohl (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), 27, 45.

[xvi] Ibid., 45.

[xvii] Ibid., 45.

[xviii] Fretheim, Exodus, 62.

[xix] Herbert Robinson Marbury, Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2015), 126.

[xx] Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 81.

[xxi] Ibid., 80-1.

[xxii] Ibid., 80.

[xxiii] Boer, Deliverance from Slavery, 27; Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 81.

[xxiv] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 3.

[xxv] Ibid., 3.

[xxvi] Richard Rohr, “Breathing Yahweh,” Center for Action and Contemplation, 6 October 2014, accessed 19 December 2019 at https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--Breathing-Yahweh.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=W6_U3gyEM9g.

[xxvii] Childs, Book of Exodus, 73.                 

[xxviii] Dan Geslin, “A Coming Out Story,” in Olive Elaine Hinnant, God Comes Out: A Queer Homiletic (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2007), 35.

[xxix] Ibid., 38.

[xxx] Fretheim, Exodus, 63.

[xxxi] Ibid., 63.

[xxxii] Ibid., 63.

[xxxiii] Ibid., 63.

[xxxiv] Boer, Deliverance from Slavery, 27-8.

[xxxv] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

[xxxvi] This is in no small part due to Muñoz’s own description of his book as “to some extent… a polemic against anti-relationality by insisting on the essential need for an understanding or queerness as collectivity. I respond to Edelman’s assertion that the future is the province of the child and therefore not for the queers by arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity and hope. That is to say that queerness is always on the horizon” (Cruising Utopia, 11).

[xxxvii] Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore, “Introduction—Queer Disorientations: Four Turns and a Twist,” in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, ed.  Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017), 11.

[xxxviii] Ibid., 11.                                    

[xxxix] Boer, Deliverance from Slavery, 27.           

[xl] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

[xli] Coogan, 66.

[xlii] Andrew Vogel in Paul Citrin, ed., Lights in the Forest: Rabbis Respond to Twelve Essential Jewish Questions, (New York, NY: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2014). Accessed 19 December 2019 at https://books.google.com/books?id=GUolBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT55&lpg=PT55&dq=iswaswillbeness&source=bl&ots=6edxQQW73D&sig=ACfU3U3RZ3Txiu92qdrKEDxUAqtle1Ngig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjA-KnPo8LmAhUESK0KHWgpCt0Q6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=iswaswillbeness&f=false.

[xliii] Luxemburg, “Order Prevails.”                                                    

[xliv] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

[xlv] Ibid., 3.

[xlvi] Fretheim, Exodus, 63-4.

[xlvii] Hornsby, Teresa J. and Ken Stone. “Already Queer: A Preface.” In Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship. Edited by Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone, pp. ix-xiv. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011, xi.

[xlviii] Ibid., xii.

[xlix] Luxemburg, “Order Prevails.”