Friday, 29 November 2013

Back to the Green Chapel, Part 9

Hannuakah at the Green Chapel


What is a Green Girdle?  In the most immediate sense of the poem, it is the belt that Lady Bertilak wears around her middle as a sash.  Such a garment—or if it does not show outwardly, such an undergarment—is associated with the centre of the female body, and hence it is a ceinture, metonymically, it is a the woman’s middle, her belly, her womb, her gender-defining being; and the garment protects that area of her body and expresses its powers of procreation.  Hence, in many medieval churches, women who wished to become pregnant or were having difficulty during their pregnancy—that is, who are enceinte—came to pray to a relic that was or reproduced symbolically the girdle that the Virgin Mary wore while she was bearing the infant Jesus.

To wear a girdle in such a symbolic universe is to see in it embodying an apotropaic, a power of warding off evils, such as curses, illnesses, and violence.  When Lady Bertilak convinces Sir Gawain to accept this gift from her and to keep it without offering it in the exchange game he is playing with the Host, Bertilak de Hautdesert, the object is described as having apotropaic powers: it will keep away the lethal, destructive and negative potencies of the Green Knight’s axe blows.  Rather than trusting in his own prowess and bravery, having faith in the Virgin Mary and Christ, whose images he bears on the inside and outside of his shield—and symbolized by the interlocking pentangular star of Solomon shown to the world—Gawain lapses into superstition and puts his hopes for survival in a material object.  He trusts in the magical efficacy of the girdle that the Lady takes from her own middle and gives to him to wear secretly under his own armor.  The  magic that he purportedly would gain through this transference from her female body to his masculine self, with the displacement also from her womb and genitals to his masculine neck, veers away from the traditional Christian sense of protection and intercession by Mary on behalf of her worshipers in two ways: on the one hand, the whole function of the girdle now is supposed to work in a military situation to keep Gawain alive after receiving mortal blows in combat with his monstrous adversary; and on the other, much more radical in its symbolic transformations, the magic becomes part of the Jewish ritual of circumcision, not just the medical operation of removing the head of the penis for the sake of hygiene, but the elaborate ceremony of making the removal of that part of his body a sign of belonging to the People of Israel, being placed under the protection and obligations of the Law, and establishing the physical, moral, spiritual and social basis for a marriage that will produce more children of Israel within the covenant of the brit

Without Gawain being at first consciously aware of what happens to him, this acceptance of the girdle puts him in the position of having to depend on a mortal woman, to place his trust in an idolatrous, pagan object, and to break two fundamental social (feudal and chivalric) vows he had taken, one to meet the Green Knight at the Green Chapel to fulfil the bargain of the beheading game without any other protection than his own faith and courage and the other to exchange all gifts received during the three days between the end of Christmas and the New Year while the Host goes hunting and Gawain rests in bed: when he realizes what he has done after the game is over, he understands the girdle to be a badge of shame, a token of the ignominy he has brought upon himself by this weakness, anxiety and lack of faith.  The other shift in meanings through the creation of an alternative symbolic universe in which his actions and appearances are to be measured, however, lies outside of his intellectual awareness and moral compass: he is a secret Jew, a status secret to himself. 

What is this like? How do we come to an understanding through midrashic analysis, recontextualization, comparisons and unpacking of the figures and words that constitute the textual object?

Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth, spoke the profound meanings of Hannukah in a sermon published for the holiday in 2013.[i]  Rabbi Sacks looked at the Talmudic rulings on whether or not, should a person have only one candle to light on a Friday evening for the first night of Hannukah whether he or she should use the candle for the Sabbath ritual or of the annual holiday since it is not permitted to use the same candle for both occasions.  Maimonides had also ruled that if a person did not have sufficient funds to purchase even one candle, he or she is required to sell something in the house in order to fulfil the mitzvah; but still that leaves open the question of which purpose the light will serve, that of the Sabbath or of the Hannukah celebration.  How did Maimonides rule?  On the one hand, there is the memorial celebration of the greatest military victory in Jewish history, the defeat by the poor, outnumbered, poorly armed Hasmonean army of the Seleucid Greeks, part of the greatest military force in the world at that time. Hannukah celebrates the rededication of the Temple after it had been desecrated by the placement of an idol of Zeus in the Holy of Holies and the entire structure had been ransacked and destroyed during the fighting.  Under Judas Maccabeus and his sons, the nation of Israel was reborn and regained its independence and autonomy.  Though the Temple would be destroyed again in 19 CE and the independence and autonomy of the state extinguished, leading to exile and dispersion for the next two thousand years, the candles of Hannukah are reminders of the hope in Israel that there will be a restoration and the memory itself is the new spiritual core of Jewish national identity.  On the other hand, the lighting of the Sabbath candles stand for shalom bayit, domestic peace, marriage, the harmonious and reproductive powers of family life, respect and nurturance of parenthood, children, and all the virtues of the home as a site for love and education.  Maimonides’ decision was that the Sabbath takes precedence over Hannukah.  Rabbi Sacks cites the Rambam and then explains:

“The Sabbath light takes priority because it symbolizes shalom bayit, domestic peace.  And great is peace because the entire Torah was given in order to make peace in the world.”

Consider: Channukah commemorates one of the greatest military victories in Jewish history.  Yet Jewish law rules that if he can light one candle—the Shabbat light takes precedence, because to Judaism the greatest military victory takes second place to peace in the home.

It would be best to match the two events and their significance: the military victory shows that Israel does more than wish for peace and freedom, it is willing to fight for them against all odds and whatever the costs.  Peace is not in itself an absolute except in the cosmic sense of world-harmony that is part of the ever-recreating process of the divine light shining forth from the darkness: shalom includes and is defined by justice.  And how is this relevant for Gawain and the Green Girdle?

Jews were the people who valued marriage, the home, and peace between husband and wife, above the highest glory on the battlefield.  In Judaism, the light of peace takes precedence over the light of war.

Gawain, while he sought to shield himself, his body and soul, from the seductions of Lady Bertilak, because he compromised with his ideals, came to be the knight of seductions and erotic adventure in Arthurian tradition; he failed himself and the court at Camelot.  Nevertheless, by internalizing his shame, brooding on his guilt, and allowing the green girdle to stand for the soon to be invisible nick on the neck, he carries on his body the sign of the covenant—affirmed even as they are broken; what he lacks enhances his status as an adherent of the secret covenant.  Unlike the other knights and ladies within the romantic tales of high adventure and courtly love, Gawain knows how self-blinded they are, how deluded by their own egotistical desires, and how foolish are the games they play amongst themselves.  In Judaism, shalom, peace, means reciprocal and fair distribution, exchange, of values, not a perfect geometrical balance—a golden mean between extremes—but a humane and fluid adjustment of circumstance, intention and consequence.  Because he is unaware of these principles, Gawain comes to stand for what he cannot in himself achieve.  Between the strict interlocking virtues of the pentangle on the outside of his shield and the emotional and sentimental love emblematized on the inside by the image of the Virgin Mary and her infant son, there is this other medium—a middle position, in a sense, but much more a peaceful reconciliation and reciprocation between what is possible in the world and what is envisioned only in heavenly perfection.  There are just wars to be fought—not only battles undertaken out of pride, greed and duty; but those conflicts fought to repel evil, to rescue the weak and the poor, and to ensure national independence in which the Law may be applied without external interference...and if these wars are lost, the victory of tyrants is only temporary, for a limited time, while hope remains and the losing party carries on as best it can, even in exile, even in dispersion, even under the cover of conformity. 

And why is the girdle green? For the same reason as the Host assumes the shape of the Green Giant who challenges King Arthur and his court at Christmastime; for the same reason as the ancillary, supplemental, and seemingly disassociated cave or tumulus near the Castle of Hautdesert is a Green Chapel.  Green is the color of youth, both the yep, the wild, unruly, spontaneous children who are the knights of Camelot; and the innocent and naïve children who perform in the Festival of Fools of New Year’s Day, when as the old year turns into or is replaced by the new year, the world is turned upside down; and of vigorous new growth and the evergreen of life that lies dormant through the cold dark winter as well as the green of rot, decay and dissolution, as in the unrisen corpse left hanging on the cross or moulding in the cave where it was buried until its rot melts away, leaving only a green slime.  Green stands for envy and jealousy, the green-eyed monster; and for faith, the glow of expectation through the shadows of doubt and despair. 

Thus green (g-r-n)  is the grain (g-r-n) of renewed life lying fallow in the ground, the seed of words on the tongue to be spoken as speech and uttered into textual life, the small Eucharistic wafer, the crumb of anticipation, as in Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale about the young boy supposedly murdered by the evil Jews and yet reborn to holiness when the g-r-n is removed from his mouth. Yet Gawain, though he tried to recount to the courtiers what really happened at the Green Chapel, finds his language misunderstood, his words shattered and broken, so that he must keep his silence, hold within himself the truth he cannot speak. 

On the other hand, the green of the shining armor worn by the Knight of the Green Chapel when he comes to Camelot is the green of gold, a form of bright yellow, harmonious with the blood red adornments in his crest and shield.  This is gold not perfectly refined when the fires of the forge do not attain sufficient intensity of heat. 

Isn’t hard to move away from the ingrained habit of reading the poem as though it had to be unquestionably a Christian text? Any other interpretation must be ipso facto a forgery.                                     



[i] Jonathan Sacks, « 8 Short Thoughts for 8 Chanukah Nights,” The Algemeiner (29 November 2013) online at http//:www.algemeiner.com/2-13/11/29/9-short-thoughts-for-8-chanukah-lights

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