Jamais Vu (Part 1)

(Jamais vu is, essentially, the opposite of deja vu--it is seeing something familiar as if experiencing it for the first time.  There is a wonderful example of it in The Sun Also Rises when Jake describes  walking down the mainstreet of his town after a concussion in a high school football game and everything looks foreign...  Okay, I'm getting off-topic.  The point is, we all occassinally come across passages of scripture that we may have read dozens of times and they suddenly stand out to us with new significance.  I hope to share some of my own jamais vu expereinces on this blog.)

As the city wall of Jerusalem was being rebuilt following in the Babylonian Captivity, Nehemiah, verse 3:12 notes: “Shallum son of Hallohesh, ruler of a half-district of Jerusalem, repaired the next section with the help of his daughters.”  I stumbled across this verse about a year ago and was surprised that I’d never really thought about it before.  It’s just a simple mention, obviously, but it was significant enough to the author that he note the participation of these women.

What is, perhaps, equally as significant, is that the writer makes no further comment—that is, the women seem to have completed the job put before them without any of the drama and jealousies that so often seem to accompany stories about sisters, be they biblical (Leah and Rachel) or literary (King Lear) or artistic (Olivia DeHavilland and Joan Fontaine) or in popular culture (Downton Abbey, season one – before the war made everyone nice) or in wildly-over-exposed-media-outlets (the Kardashians).

The point is, it’s exciting to me when I notice something in scripture that points to the lives of people about whom we otherwise know very little.  Of course, the sight of women harmoniously and manually contributing to the reconstruction of military fortifications would have been somewhat unusual for the time, so it is an interesting glimpse into the sense of ownership and individual responsibility these woman felt towards the work going on around them.

My prayer for the week is that we will all feel a sense of personal investment in reaching out to do whatever needs doing in our community, rather than passing the job off to other citizens or “the government” (as if that is not simply other citizens, as well), and that we can do so in a peaceful and edifying manner that gets the job done effectively.