Ilan Stavans is the editor of the new anthology A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands. His many other books include Conversations on Dictionaries. He is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.
Q: What inspired you to edit A Nation Wrestles with God?
A: As a Mexican immigrant who is Jewish, I have been enthralled with the statement, in the United States Declaration of Independence, “Endowed by Their Creator.” What does it mean? The answer is manifold.
For starters, it is proof that this country began with an appeal to the divine. The Mayflower Compact bound a fledgling community into covenant “under God,” and the United States Declaration of Independence boldly proclaimed that human equality rests on rights “endowed by their Creator.”
It is now 250 years after that declaration. What sort of relationship, as a country made of people from all around the globe, do we have with God? Is there only one God Americans wrestle with depending on their religion, or are there many? Can a liberal democracy survive if one of these gods acquires supremacy over the others?
In other words, how did that daring invocation of God shape the American experiment? How have later generations wrestled with the promise and the contradictions at the heart of that founding appeal?
Through the voice of writers, politicians, scientists, poets, theologians, comedians, philosophers, religious leaders, and cartoonists as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Cotton Mather, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Merton, Malcolm X, Albert Einstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Baldwin, Tony Kushner, Anne Lamott, and more, the volume explore the role of the divine in America’s moral language, political ideals, and cultural imagination.
What does it mean for a nation to ground its freedom in a creator? How have ideas of the divine and sacred inspired, challenged, and transformed the United States ever since?
An anthology, as you know, is a portable library in which the authors are in conversation with one another and, mostly, with the reader, who has the final say. The material in this one is organized chronologically by the author’s date of birth.
The lesson, I guess, is that the answer to the question “What does ‘Endowed by the Creator’ mean?” is always in the eyes of the beholder.
Q: How did you choose the excerpts to include in the book?
A: There is a lot I wanted to include. I worked within a limit: 500 pages. In other words, the sum of all pieces needed to fit into a book that would be seen, in its size, as a weapon of self-defense. I excerpted novels, speeches, sermons, poems, and so on. In many ways, the voices included are a statement of the contentious dialogue I carry inside me.
Every editor of an anthology must start by imagining the target audience. Mine is made of curious, perplexed individuals for whom the tension between credo and episteme is a source of inspiration.
Also, every editor of an anthology imagines themselves as the first reader but surely not the last. I hope this book is read across faiths, across geographies, and across generations.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: It is no exaggeration to say that I have been researching this book my entire life, keeping notes on an insightful reading, leaving a comment as marginalia in a library borrowing, and, of course, writing, over the decades, all kinds of explorations of the divine, from my autobiography On Borrowed Words (2001), to my play The Oven: An Anti-Lecture (2017) to the poem The Wall (2018). In November, my forthcoming book Fictional Translations: Poems (LSU) continues this search.
About to reach 65, I simply sat down and told myself: now is the time. Your experience is part of a larger conversation. Death will erase all that you are. The only items that will survive you are messages you leave behind.
What surprised me, you asked? Everything.... Some people are afraid of speaking about faith in public. Others see God as a vengeful being. A few more would prefer for the reals of religion and politics not to intersect.
Yes, since the start, Americans do nothing but talk about—and with—God. The epigraph of A Nation Wrestles with God comes from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He was mesmerized, after talking to hundreds of Americans, at how relevant religion has been in this country, for better or worse.
Q: What impact did it have on you to work on this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: I am more humble, and perhaps more skeptical, than I was at the beginning. Skeptical about everything: truth, God, democracy. And yet, I don’t think we can do without any of these. All need to be restrained, disabused, authentically examined.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: This year I am in New York City, as a fellow at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, finishing a book that is a history of Hispanic antisemitism from 1492 to the present, told through a dozen lives: of victims, of perpetrators, and of bystanders. I hope to complete it in the fall. I am also almost finished with my biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Do I believe in God? Yes, no, and maybe—depending on the day. In short, I wrestle. To me, wrestling with God is what humankind has been doing since the beginning.
Look at Socrates, a concoction of Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Aeschines of Sphettus, Aristippus, and other Greek contemporaries. Look at Abraham, Jacob, Moses, the biblical prophets, and the rabbinical tradition. Look at medieval Muslim thinks like Avicenna and Averroes.
Even non-monotheists, atheists, and agnostics wrestle with the divine. It is a two-way dialogue. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that humans search for God as much as God searches for humans.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Ilan Stavans.
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