I find this heartening, I must admit: a survey in Israel by the Guttman-Avi Chai foundation says that a record number of Israeli Jews currently believe in God. That number is 80%, and by “record number,” reference is made to other surveys dating back to 1991. [Read more →]
A holy and merry Christmas to all who will be celebrating, and a very happy Chanukah to those observing that festival.
The small group of close relatives, friends and world leaders on my snail-mail-Christmas-card list received a custom made card this year featuring the photograph of our dog Billie below, and the Bible verses beneath it.
“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the LORD has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind.”
Job, Chapter 12, verses 7 through 10 (English Standard Version).
It’s one of the most moving for me of what I like to think of as the sacred songs from the hills. It tugs at something deep within. It was written by Charles E. Moody in the 1920s. Famous versions exist by Hank Williams and Emmylou Harris. No less than Bob Dylan has credited his hearing of a version of this song while a child with altering him on some indefinable but vital level. [Read more →]
From a performance in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1981, the YouTube clip below features Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins performing “I’ll Fly Away.”
Carl Perkins died in 1998. Johnny Cash in 2003. Elvis Presley, the fourth member of the famed “million dollar quartet,” passed away back in 1977. That’s the genesis of the title of a recent Jerry Lee Lewis album, namely Last Man Standing.
I’ve written several times previously on the poetry of Samuel Menashe. He passed away last month. The magazine First Things published many of his poems in recent years, and it’s in fact there that I first encountered his work. Today a tribute to Samuel Menashe by Yours Truly is published on that magazine’s website.
…
By the way, I do highly recommend his book, New and Selected Poems, either in the Library of America edition
Below are two very recent headlines I grabbed:
“School shut down by Board of Ed for teaching secular Bible course.”
“Court says teacher must take down patriotic banners mentioning God.”
You see these kinds of stories all the time, with schools or teachers running afoul of what is characterized as “the separation of church and state” (which is a phrase some people mistakenly believe resides in the U.S. Constitution, but no matter that now). God doesn’t belong in a public school classroom, we are told, and that goes double for the Bible, which is a manifestation of that specific Judeo-Christian God.
Although I’m not personally an advocate of this idea of actively expunging religious concepts from the natural life and thought that would take place in schools, I do understand the concept. It’s why, when passing a public school in my New York City neighborhood, I’ve raised my eyebrow at a sign that has long hung over the main entrance. It says: “Robert F. Kennedy Students Have KARMA.” That’s PS 169, of the New York City Public School system. [Read more →]
|
(Click for explanation of picture if needed.) |
The article by Nicholas Schmidle in the New Yorker—“Getting Bin Laden”—seems to be the most detailed account yet published on the mission to kill the al-Qaeda leader. Although it provides background and a postscript, it focuses largely on the SEAL mission itself. Of-course any piece like this is only as good as its sources, and we don’t really know who Schmidle’s sources are, but the story comes across very credibly, to this reader at least, and I definitely recommend reading it in full. It should fill any American’s heart with awe at the caliber of those wearing the uniform and putting themselves on the line every day. As the article makes clear, the mission that night was in some ways not unusual at all; these kinds of dangerous and daring attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets are executed on a regular basis. The unusual things in this case were (1) venturing so far within Pakistan and (2) the name of the primary target. In some ways, as scary and nerve-wracking as it is even to read the account months later, this mission was significantly easier than the average one, in that Osama bin Laden’s compound was not well-defended. Of-course it’s easy to know that after the fact, aware as we are now that there were no booby-traps or suicide vests awaiting the SEALs. They couldn’t know those things that night. [Read more →]
In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Death and Budgets,” columnist David Brooks points to the example of a writer named Dudley Clendinen to illustrate what Brooks apparently feels is the correct way to face death, especially from that which we call terminal illness. Dudley Clendinen is sixty-six years-old, and has a diagnosis of A.L.S. (Lou Gehrig’s disease). He wrote a piece himself for the Times called “The Good Short Life” in which he explains his decision to forgo a variety of treatments that could keep him alive for some additional years, albeit in a progressively more disabled state. Essentially he says that he is plumping to let the disease take its course, and he thinks it likely that he will die from aspirational pneumonia some time in the next several months (although he is not opposed to giving himself a shove into death by some other means if he deems it necessary).
David Brooks moves quickly to presenting Clendinen’s story as a valuable “backdrop to the current budget mess.” Health care costs being such a big part of it, he argues, wouldn’t it be great if everyone had the same attitude to death as Dudley Clendinen? Our society would save so much money by not having to provide great quantities of medical care to the elderly and terminally ill, when all it does is provide them with a few more years of living—and diminished living at that. His argument is really just that simple. [Read more →]
From his book God in Search of Man : A Philosophy of Judaism
Man had to be expelled from the Garden of Eden; he had to witness the murder of half of the human species by Cain out of envy; experience the catastrophe of the Flood; the confusion of the languages; slavery in Egypt and the wonder of the Exodus, to be ready to accept the law.
I was reading an essay by Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Insecurity of Freedom
Into his studies of the Bible the modern scholar brings his total personality, his increased knowledge of the ancient Near East, his power of analysis, his historic sense, his honest commitment to truth—as well as inherent skepticism of biblical claims and tradition. In consequence, we have so much to say about the Bible that we are not prepared to hear what the Bible has to say about us. We are not in love with the Bible; we are in love with our own power of critical acumen, with our theories about the Bible. Intellectual narcissism is a disease to which some of us are not always immune. The sense of the mystery and transcendence of what is at stake in the Bible is lost in the process of analysis. As a result, we have brought about the desanctification of the Bible.
Similar things have no doubt been said in many different ways, but I think that is extraordinarily well put. Those words were written in 1963. They struck me when I read them more on a personal level than as a societal or institutional criticism, although the “desanctification” of the Bible surely has had plenty to do with the rotting away of the mainline Protestant churches in America. [Read more →]
