NOTES for

Beginning his story about Susanna, the sacred writer very accurately and briefly describes the reasons for what will soon happen, the unjust trial on which the judges will resolve. He says of the elders that they "perverted (literally, 'turned inside out') their mind and turned away their eyes so as not to look toward heaven and not to remember righteous judgments (literally, 'judicial determinations, decrees')." This is where every sin, and sometimes every crime, begins.

After all, the mind is completely obedient to our heart, to our will, and if the will is directed toward evil, then the mind begins to act accordingly. It is as if it turns itself inside out. Indeed, it is not our reason that decides why one thing is good and another bad. It can only suggest to us what should be considered bad and what good according to the orientation given to it by our will, guided by the system of values we ourselves have established. And if the will orders reason to consider black white and bad good, reason will carry everything out and begin functioning in an inverted mode, as if turned inside out.

But the elders were, after all, people who undoubtedly believed and knew well the Law and commandments given by God. They can hardly have been hypocrites their whole lives: in the relatively small Jewish community of Babylon, everyone knew one another well enough. People known for duplicity and moral unscrupulousness would never have been chosen as elders, still less as judges. Here there is an obvious and serious spiritual collapse.

And the sacred writer speaks quite clearly about the causes of this collapse: the elders mentioned in the book "turned away their eyes," turned their inner gaze away from what it should have been fixed on constantly: on God (the word "heaven" in the language of that era was sometimes used as a synonym for the word "God") and on His Law, by which they should have been guided. The experience of what was called in those days the inner Law (the inner Torah) amounted precisely to this: the commandments and the Law given by God were experienced as an inner imperative that determined a person's whole life. But here a clear failure occurred: in the place of this inner imperative came something else, connected with desire for feminine beauty.

Instead of being directed toward God, the will was directed toward passion, which it sought to satisfy at any cost. And reason, completely subject to the will, found ways to realize this. And this is no surprise: only the One who gave life to a person can make that person's life normal. And any attempts to find this norm somewhere else can lead only to spiritual catastrophe. To sin, and sometimes to crime. And, most important, to the loss of God. And of one's own salvation.