Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today – loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul – then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshipping them, for then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly from the good land that the Lord is giving you.

You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.

The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord your God.

Jones concludes,

It can be said that these verses, this prayer, compose the very heart of Judaism, and what became Christianity. While the orders to add fringes to clothing as a reminder seem odd to those of us who aren’t Jewish, we surely recognize the statements about God’s oneness, about the love and honor that is due to God, and about God’s steadfast love to Israel in bringing them out of bondage. (57)

For whatever reason, I was struck by the part Jones seems to do away with. Before reading his immediate remarks that follow the prayer, I underlined this sentence:

You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes.

There’s something really profound here that I’m not sure I can pinpoint or explain. It takes into account both righteousness and the reality of our fallenness. I’m thinking of Peter Rollins’ assertion (following Caputo) that the Kingdom is rather materialistic endeavor; that the “working out” of Christian faith provides food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, welcoming for the stranger, clothing for the naked, care for the sick and time visiting the prisoner [see Matthew 25.31-46]. David Bazan seems to be saying something similar in his song “Bearing Witness”, though he may dislike my saying so.

The use of fringes as a reminder to be holy seems to be for the same reason but pointing in the opposite direction. A material thing pointing back to a spiritual dimension. Are not God’s commandments so often forgotten because of the desires of our hearts?

Anyway, I’m off to the sewing machine.

The second part of the comment sent me to Pete Rollins’ latest book, Insurrection: To Believe is Human, To Doubt, Divine. While I quite like the book (and most everything Pete writes), I can’t quite give it a full endorsement. It’s essentially a meditation on Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, where the Slovenian philosopher argues (a la Chesterton) that Jesus’ cry on the cross reveals a sort of atheism, or, in Lacanian terms, that there is no big Other “out there” to save us. It’s an interesting interpretation, which, frankly, I don’t find particularly fair to the text, but that’s another blog post for another day.

Anyway, after the comment on this morning’s post, I flipped to Rollins’ section on (The) Facebook, entitled “I Wear A Mask That Looks Like Me”, which I find rather insightful:

The question then is whether the story we tell ourselves about ourselves functions in much the same way. In order to answer that, let us consider the growing phenomenon of online social networking sites.

These sites can be described as offering the world an idealized reflection of ourselves. They express an image of ourselves that we would like other people to believe reflects who we are. Indeed, more fundamentally, they enable us to construct an image of ourselves we would like to believe that we are. On our profiles we list all the films that we want people to think that we like while failing to mention some of the more embarrassing ones, or we post the books that help solidify a certain image while avoiding our guilty pleasures. More than this we will often only post pictures that make us look good and remove tags from photos that put us in a bad light. For instance, I remember being at MoMA in New York City and overhearing a young girl asking someone to take a picture of her looking at a particular piece of art for her Facebook profile. It was quite obvious that the girl had little interest in the art as such (moving on as soon as the picture had been taken), but she was interested in creating an image of herself as the type of person who would be interested in that particular painting. One could say that she desired to be the type of person who would like that piece of art or, what amounts to almost the same thing, that she would like other people to think that she was the type of person who would like that piece of art.

It would be a mistake, however, to limit our reflections to the rather mundane claim that Facebook tends to reflect an idealized version of our conscious self. We must go deeper and approach Facebook as itself derivative of a more basic psychic structure – the reality that our conscious self is an idealized expression of who we are. Our conscious self is the idealized version of ourselves that we present to the world, and our Facebook profile simply reflects that. The significant gap does not then lie between our Facebook profile and our conscious self; rather it rests in the difference between our conscious self (reflected in social networking sites like Facebook) and the truth of who we are.

We hide every day behind a mask that is a Photoshopped version of ourselves. (93-94)

The Daily Mail’s Tom Leonard writes,

After allowing for gender, religiosity and whether people were single or attached, the study found that ‘the more hours people spent on Facebook, the stronger was their agreement that others were happier’… Those who had used Facebook for longer were also ‘significantly’ likely to agree with the statement that ‘life is unfair’.

Chou sees this as a “common psychological process” known as correspondence bias, where false conclusions about others are based on limited knowledge. Conversely,

people who spent more time actually socialising with friends in the flesh were less likely to feel they had been handed life’s short straw.

This reminds me of Pete Rollins’ poignant reminder that Facebook (and other web 2.0 type things) give us the opportunity to create socially constructed selves which are, ultimately, merely projections of how we want to be seen by others:

…it is obvious that my twitter, facebook, and website, are mere propaganda machines that pretend to offer you an insight into me while ensuring I remain hidden behind an idealized image. I hide myself in my public profile…

Chou and Edge are merely revealing the destruction regarding how such idealized profiles negatively affect others.

[Hat Tip: John Drane for posting this article on - get this - Facebook! He's much better connected than me.]