#its all so beautifully Jewish in a way i cannot describe

[lem0nademouth]

yall if eden golan wins eurovision i will cry it will be such a fucking triumph and victory for the Jewish community worldwide like there is no better embodiment of the Jewish spirit than “my existence made people angry and they called for my failure and suffering and death and then I won”

[angrybell]

An Israeli author was supposed to appear and give a talk about her books at the Pushkin House, part of the University of London. It was due to occur on . With the date approaching the people at Pushkin House sent the following to Ms. Rubina.

Good afternoon, Dina

The Pushkin House advertised our upcoming discussion on social media and immediately received critical messages regarding your position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They would like to understand your position on this issue before reacting in any way.

Could you formulate your position and send it to me as soon as possible?”

Natalia! “

Ms. Rubina responded with the following open letter.

An OPEN LETTER

from Dina Rubina

“Dear Natalia!

You have written beautifully about my novels; I am very sorry for the time you have wasted. But it seems we’ll have to cancel our meeting. The University of Warsaw and the University of Torun have just cancelled lectures by the remarkable Israeli Russian-speaking writer Yakov Shechter on the life of Jews in Galicia in the 17th and 19th centuries – “to avoid aggravating the situation”. I suspected that this would also happen to me, because now the academic environment is the main nursery of the most disgusting and rabid anti-Semitism, hiding behind the so-called “criticism of Israel”. I was expecting something like this, and even sat down three times to write you a letter on the subject… but I decided to wait, and so I have waited.

That’s what I want to say to all those who expect from me a quick and obsequious account of my position on my beloved country, which now (and always) lives in a circle of ardent enemies who seek its destruction; on my country, which is now waging a just patriotic war against a violent, ruthless, deceitful and sophisticated enemy:

The last time in my life I apologised in the headmaster’s office, in the ninth grade. Since then, I have done what I think is right, listening only to my conscience and expressing only my understanding of the world order and human laws of justice.

And so on.

I’m really sorry, Natalia, for your efforts and the hope that you could “cook something with me” – something that everyone will like.

Therefore, I ask you personally to send my reply to all those who are interested:

On Saturday 7 October, the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the ruthless, well-trained, carefully prepared and perfectly equipped with Iranian weapons Hamas terrorist regime ruling the Gaza enclave (which Israel left some 20 years ago) attacked dozens of peaceful kibbutzim and simultaneously pelted the territory of my country with tens of thousands of rockets. Atrocities that even the Bible cannot describe, atrocities and horrors that make the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah pale in comparison (captured, by the way, by the frontal and chest cameras of the murderers themselves and boastfully sent by them in real time to the Internet), can shock any normal person. For several hours, thousands of gleeful, blood-drunk animals raped women, children and men, shot their victims in the crotch and in the head, cut off women’s breasts and played football with them, cut babies out of the bellies of pregnant women and immediately beheaded them, tied up small children and burned them. There were so many charred and completely burnt bodies that for many weeks the pathologists could not cope with the enormous burden of identifying individuals.

My friend, who worked in a New York hospital waiting room for 20 years and then spent another 15 years in Israel identifying remains, was one of the first to arrive in the burned and blood-soaked kibbutzim with a group of rescuers and medics… She still can’t sleep. A medic used to cutting up bodies – she fainted from what she saw and then vomited all the way back to the car. What these people have seen is beyond words.

Together with the Hamas fighters, the “civilian population” rushed into the holes in the fence, joined the pogroms on an unprecedented scale, robbed, killed and dragged whatever they could get their hands on into Gaza. Among these “peaceful Palestinians” were 450 members of the UN’s UNRWA scum. Everyone was there, and judging by the stormy total joy of the population (also captured in these inconvenient times by hundreds of mobile cameras) – there were a lot of people – Hamas supports and approves, at least before the real fighting starts, of almost the entire population of Gaza… The main problem: our residents were dragged into the beast’s lair, more than two hundred of them, including women, children, the elderly and non-essential foreign workers. About a hundred of them are now rotting and dying in the Hamas dungeons. Needless to say, these harassed victims are of little concern to the “academic community”.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I am not writing this to make anyone sympathise with the tragedy of my people.

For all these years, when the world community has literally poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this piece of land (the Gaza Strip) – and the annual budget of the UNRWA organisation alone is a BILLION dollars! – All these years, Hamas has used this money to build an empire of the most complex underground tunnel system, to stockpile weapons, to teach primary school children how to dismantle and reassemble a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to print textbooks in which the hatred of Israel defies description, in which even the maths problems go like this: “There were ten Jews, Shahid killed four, how many are left?” – with every word calling for the murder of Jews.

And now that Israel, shocked at last by the monstrous crime of these bastards, is waging a war to destroy the Hamas terrorists, who have prepared this war so carefully, planting thousands of shells in all the hospitals, schools, kindergartens… – here the academic world of the whole world has risen up, worried about the “genocide of the Palestinian people”, based, of course, on data provided by… who? That’s right, by the same Hamas, by the same UNRWA… The academic community, which was not concerned about the massacres in Syria, the massacre in Somalia, the mockery of the Uighurs or the millions of Kurds persecuted for decades by the Turkish regime – this very concerned public, wearing “Arafat” around their necks, the trademark of the murderers, rallies under the banners “Free Palestine from the river to the sea! – which means the total destruction of Israel (yes, many of these “academics”, as surveys show, have no idea where this river is, what it is called, where some borders are…). – Now this very public asks me to “take a clear position on this issue”.

Are you serious?! Are you serious?!!

You see, I’m a writer by profession. All my life, for more than fifty years, I have been folding words. My novels have been translated into 40 languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Chinese, Esperanto… and many others.

Now, with great pleasure, without using too many expressions, I sincerely and with all the strength of my soul send all the brainless “intellectuals” interested in my position to the ASS. In fact, very soon you will all be there without me”.

Dina Rubina

[otherworldlybooksgoddess]

Five Exceptional Fantasy Books Based in Non-European Myth

Photo by Josh Hild

Don’t misunderstand me: I love reading well-written fantasy with roots in the familiar Celtic and English folklore of my childhood, but with the vast majority of High Fantasy being set in worlds closely akin to Medieval Europe, and a large amount of of Mythic Fiction drawing on legends of similar origin, sometimes the ground begins to feel too well trodden.  There is, after all, an entire world of lore out there to draw from.  That’s why I’m always thrilled to find excellent works of what I call “the Realistic Sub-Genres of Fantasy” based in or inspired by myths from other cultures.  Such books not only support inclusiveness, but also expand readers’ experiences with lore and provide a wide range of new, exciting realities to explore. So, if you are looking for something different in the realm of Fantasy, the following novels will provide a breath of fresh air.

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wrecker

In this beautifully written novel, Wrecker draws on both Middle-Eastern and Jewish mythology to tell the stories of two unwilling immigrants in Edwardian New York and the unlikely friendship that springs up between them.  Chava, an unusually lifelike golem created for peculiar purposes, has only days worth of memories and is practically childlike in her innocence.  Ahmad the Jinni has lived for centuries, but is trying to reclaim his forgotten past. The former is as steady and calm as the earth she’s made from while the latter is as volatile and free-spirited as the fire within him.  Both must learn to live in an unfamiliar new culture and find their places in a city too modern for myths even as they hide their true natures.  It’s a wonderful metaphor for the experiences of immigrants everywhere, who often find themselves feeling like outsiders—isolated and even overwhelmed— as they struggle to adapt to life in an alien society.  

Full of memorable characters, vivid descriptions, and interesting twists, The Golem and the Jinni takes readers on a journey that is driven as much by internal conflict as external action.  The setting of 1900’s Manhattan is well-researched and spectacular in its detail.  Wrecker blends two old-world mythologies into the relatively modern Edwardian world with a deft hand.  The result is not only fascinating, but also serves to illustrate the common early-twentieth-century experience of an immigrant past colliding with an American future.

The Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

One part Detective Mystery and one part Magical Realism, this novel invites readers to experience modern-day Ghana in a way that is both authentic and profound.  When Kayo, a forensic pathologist just beginning his career, is pushed into investigating a suspected murder in the rural village of Sonokrom, the last thing he expects is to have a life-changing experience.  Soon, however, he gets the acute sense that the villagers may know more than they’re letting on. When all of the latest scientific and investigative techniques fail him, even as odd occurrences keep dogging his steps, Kayo is finally forced to accept that there is something stranger than he thought about this case.  Solving the crime will require more than intelligence and deduction; it will require setting his disbelief aside and taking the traditional tales and folklore of an old hunter seriously.  Because whatever is happening in Sonokrom, it isn’t entirely natural.  

This novel is brilliant not only because of its deep understanding of Ghanaian society and realistic setting, but also because of Parkes writing style.  The narrative is gorgeously lyrical and everything within it is described with a keen, insightful eye.  The dialogue is full of local color, and while some may find the pidgin English and native colloquialisms difficult to follow, I found that the context was usually enough to explain any unfamiliar terms. Sometimes the narrative feels a little dreamlike, but that is exactly the way great Magical Realism should be.  The Tail of the Blue Bird insistently tugs readers to a place where reality intertwines with myth and magic, all while providing an authentic taste of Ghanaian culture.

The Deer and the Cauldron by Jin Yong

During the reign of Manchu Emperor Kang Xi, China is in a state of barely-controlled sociopolitical unrest.  Many of the older generation remember the previous dynasty, and there still remain vestiges of a resistance movement hidden among the populace.  As his forces continue to hunt down the malefactors, called the Triad Societies, the boy-emperor turns to his unlikely friend and ally: a young rascal known only as Trinket.  This protagonist is a study in contrasts: lazy yet ambitious, cunning yet humorous, roguish yet likable, foul-mouthed yet persuasive. Born in a brothel, Trinket has made his way by his wits alone.  At age twelve, he accidentally sneaked into the Forbidden City—a bizarre occurrence in itself—afterward befriending Kang Xi.  Now, rising quickly through the ranks, he is on a mission to (ostensibly) find and weed out the Triad Societies, and he uses the opportunity to infiltrate various organizations, playing their leaders against one another for his own gain. With a dangerous conspiracy brewing in the Forbidden City itself, however, he is forced to choose sides and decide what is most important to him: friendship, fortune, or freedom.   Supernatural occurrences, daring escapades, and moments of deep introspection abound as Trinket struggles to navigate the perilous maze his life has become.

This novel is like a gemstone: bright, alluring, and many faceted.  At times it may seem somewhat simple on the surface, but looking closer reveals new depths and multiple layers.  Full of intrigue, action, horror, and even laughs, The Deer and the Cauldron mirrors not only the complexities of its setting, but those of the China the author himself knew during the Communist revolution. By blending together history, fantasy, realism, humor, and subtle political commentary, Yong not only beautifully captures these social intricacies but also creates a narrative that is as thoroughly engaging as it is unapologetically unique.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Magical realism related to food has almost become a movement in itself, with novels like Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, and Sarah Addison Allen’s Garden Spells all finding their places in readers’ hearts.  Originally published in 1992, Like Water for Chocolate helped create this fascinating trend, and it has become something of a modern classic in the fantasy genre.  

The narrative centers around Tita de la Garza, a mid-twentieth century Mexican woman possessing deep sensitivity, a strong will, and a special talent for cooking.  Born prematurely, Tita arrived in her family’s kitchen, tears already in her eyes.  It is in that room where she spends most of her childhood, being nurtured and taught by the elderly cook, Nacha.  The relationship that flourishes between Tita and her caregiver is a special gift, as it provides the girl not only with the compassion and support her own mother denies, but also with a passion and skill for creating incredible, mouth-watering dishes.  At Nacha’s side, Tita learns the secrets of life and cookery, but she also learns one terrible fact: thanks to a family tradition, she is destined never to have love, marriage, or a child of her own.  Her fate, rather, is to care for her tyrannical widowed mother, Mama Elena, until the day the older woman dies.  With a vibrant, independent spirit, sixteen-year-old Tita flouts this rule, falling deeply in love with a man named Pedro who asks for, and is denied, her hand in marriage.  Undaunted, the young man agrees to wed one of Tita’s older sisters, Rosaura, instead, as he believes this to be the only way he can be close to the woman he loves.  Thus begins a life-long struggle between freedom and tradition, love and duty, which is peppered throughout with supernatural events and delicious cuisine.  So great is her skill in cooking that the meals Tita prepares take on magical qualities all their own, reflecting and amplifying her emotions upon everyone who enjoys them.  Controlled and confined for much of her existence, food becomes her outlet for all the things she cannot say or do.  The narrative itself echoes this, by turns as spicy, sweet, and bitter as the flavors Tita combines.  At its heart, this is as much a tale about how important the simple things, like a good meal, can be as it is a story about a woman determined to be her own person and choose her own fate.

Cuisine is fundamental to this novel, with recipes woven throughout the narrative, but that is only a part of its charm.  In the English translation, the language is beautiful in its simplicity.  The characters often reveal hidden depths, especially as Tita grows up and is able to better understand the people around her.  Heartfelt in its joys and sorrows, Like Water for Chocolate glows with cultural flavor and a sense of wonder.  It’s a feast for the spirit, and like an exquisite meal, it never fails to surprise those who enjoy it.

The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty

When I first read this novel, I found the early chapters enjoyable and engaging, but felt the story was no more than a typical, if especially well-written, work of mythic fiction.  The deeper I got into the narrative, however, the more wrong I was proven.  The City of Brass is anything but ordinary. While basing her work in Middle-Eastern lore and history, Chakraborty nonetheless manages to create a setting and story that are both wonderfully unique. Lush, detailed, and bursting with magic and intrigue, this book spans the lines between several sub-genres of fantasy without ever losing its balance.  

Beginning in eighteenth-century Egypt, the narrative follows a quick-witted antiheroine. Nahri doesn’t live by the rules of her society.  She doesn’t believe in magic or fate or even religion.  Orphaned for most of her life, survival has required her to become a con artist and a thief.  As a result, she is practical and pragmatic, a realist who has never even considered donning rose-colored glasses, and the last person who would ever expect anything supernatural to occur. Which, of course, means that it does, but the way in which it is handled is intricate and interesting enough not to feel trite. When Nahri’s latest con—a ceremony she is pretending to perform and doesn’t believe in even slightly—goes awry, and the cynical young woman finds herself face to face with a Daeva.  Magical beings, it transpires, are real after all, and this one is furious.  To both of their dismay, he’s also bound to Nahri, who soon realizes that he has an agenda of his own.  In return for rescuing her (and refraining from killing her himself) Dara, the Daeva warrior Nahri accidentally summoned, wants her to pull of the biggest con of her life: pretending to be the half-human heir to the throne of his people.  Worse still, she soon realizes that Dara, whose mentality sometimes seems a little less-than-stable, actually believes she may be exactly who he claims.  He has something planned, and his intentions may not be in her best interest.  Dragged unwillingly into a strange world of court intrigue, danger, social upheaval, and magic, Nahri quickly discovers that some things remain familiar.  People are ruled by prejudices, the strong prey on the weak, and she can’t fully trust anyone.  The stakes, however, are higher than ever, and Nahri will need all of her wits, cunning, and audacity if she wants to survive.

This novel was thoroughly enjoyable, and in fact prompted me to buy the following books in the trilogy as they became available. Chakraborty’s style is lyrical, her world building is superb, her plot is intricate, and her characters are well-developed.  She not only frames unfamiliar words and ideas is easily-comprehensible contexts, but weaves those explanations smoothly into the narrative. The culture, mythology, and history surrounding her tale are all carefully researched, but the tale itself is nonetheless unique. What begins feeling like a fairly ordinary mythic fiction novel will pleasantly exceed readers’ expectations.

So, while we, as fantasy readers, love the works of authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Charles de Lint, there is also a plethora of other enchanting books to enjoy.  Exploring magical realism and mythic fiction based in cultures and folklore from all around the globe ensures that our to-read lists will always hold something unexpected and exciting to surprise us.  So, if you’re starting to feel like you’re in a bit of a reading rut, or if you’re simply looking to expand your horizons, open up new realms of imagination by opening up one of the novels above.  Who knows see where it will lead you?  You may just discover a new favorite to add to your bookshelf.  Happy reading!

[sowingseedsandshootinghoops]

Rumi: Lover of God

Note on the text: I used Reynold A Nicholson’s 3 volume translation of The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi as published by EJW Trust. All citations are given in the following manner with book number in roman numerals and the lines in Arabic numerals. So a quotation of book 5 line 100 would look like V. 100.

“Choose the love of the living one who is ever lasting, who [gives the wine of everlasting life]. Choose the love of Him from whose love all the prophets gained power and glory. Do not say ‘We have no admission to that King’. Dealings with the generous are not difficult” (I. 220). 

There is a lot to write about here. Even as one tries to write about one thing, a million others seem to pop out at the seams. So in many ways, after much toil, it became obvious that the only theme one could write about without producing a book that is as long as the Mathnawi itself was the theme that stretches throughout the whole book: being one with God.

There is a lot to unpack here. In the third book of this six book epic Rumi writes that “although the final object of man is knowledge of God. . . .Yet every man hath a particular place of worship” (III. 2992). Some could argue this is one of the central themes of the whole work. Rumi believes that the purpose of every man (or woman) is to know God and that everyone has the ability to reach God in his or her own way. Every one can reach God according to the principles of his or her own creed. One does not have to be Muslim or Christian or anything else to reach God because God is bigger than all religions and calls to everyone in different ways.

The reason that Rumi speaks this way about God is because he believes that God is one. Meaning that there is no “Christian God” or “Muslim God” or “Jewish God”. There is just God: “In things spiritual there is no division” (I. 680). That means that God, as the giver life of Life, is the source of everything. It was through God that we were all given life and it is to God that we are all drawn. So although we, as humans, might think that Christians are being drawn to a different God than Muslims are, Rumi argues that this is simply not the case.

Rumi further draws out this point by using the example of the light of a candle: “If ten lamps are present in one place, each differs in form from [the others, but] to distinguish, without doubt, the light of each when you turn your face towards their light is impossible” (I. 680). The important part of a candle, especially in the pre-electric light bulb world, is the light. The entire structure of the candle is there solely for the purpose of creating and maintaining that light. So what Rumi is saying is that important part of the candle, namely the light, you won’t see the individual candles at all. Instead you’ll just see the one big light that all the candles are generating. It’s just the same as when you see a wave in the ocean. You don’t see every drop of water, you just see the wave. And if for some reason you can see every drop of water in that wave then not only are you standing way too close, but you actually are not seeing the wave for what it actually is. It is the same with God. One light, which results in millions of different candles; one wave which results in millions of drops of water. The problem is that humans are so focused on the particulars, on this water molecule versus that one, that they cannot see the bigger picture. They cannot see how the wave connects all those molecules together, or how all of us are connected together in God. In another part of the book, he tells another story that illustrates this point:

A certain man gave a dirham  to four persons. One of them, a Persian, said: ‘I will spend this on angur’. The second one was an Arab who said: ‘No, I want inab, not angur you rascal!’ The third was a Turk and he said: ‘I don’t want inab I want uzum’. The fourth, a Greek, said ‘Stop this [foolish] talk, I want istaful.’ These people began fighting [and were] in contention with each other because they were unaware of the hidden meanings of the names. In their folly they smote each other with their fists. They were full of ignorance and empty of knowledge” (II. 3680-3685).  

The joke here is that they all actually want the same thing: grapes. They think that each of them wants something different, and is trying to get something different, but in reality they are all trying to get the same thing. It’s the same with God. We all have different names for Him and think therefore that those who don’t call Him by the same name that we do are pursuing something or someone else but that isn’t true. For Rumi there is only one God even though there are different religions.

No one person, or even a group of people, can say that they alone truly understand God. Rather each person can only understand a part of God. At this point Rumi tells a rather famous story about a group of people who go into a dark room to see an elephant for the first time. But the room is so dark that they have to resort to using their hands to feel the elephant and thus they all have different, and seemingly contradictory, ways of describing this one animal:

The hand of one fell upon its trunk [and] he said: ‘This creature [must be] like a water pipe!’. The hand of another touched its ear [and] to him it appeared as a fan. Since another’s landed on its leg [that person] said, ‘I have found the elephant’s shape to be like that of a pillar. [The fourth person] laid his hand on its back and said ‘Truly this elephant is like a throne’” (II. 1260-1265).

It’s worth noting that not only that each person could only see the elephant from his own perspective, but that everything they each said was technically true even when it appeared to contradict the testimony of one of the others. The same is true of God. Our minds are like the men in the dark room, unable to fully realize what is in front of them. So we reach out, grope, and investigate as best we can and form our idea of who God from our experiences of Him. It’s not that anyone is “more wrong” than anyone else, it’s that we aren’t able to step back and see God fully for what he is. And we aren’t meant to. We are not built for that. So whatever it is that God want us to do, however it is that God wants us to unite with Him, it cannot be through knowing Him intellectually because that is impossible. As was said before, we cannot really know Him. The answer, as it turns out, is love. God wants us to unite to Him not through intellectual knowledge of Him, but through love of Him.

No where does Rumi make this case more explicitly, or more beautifully, then in the second book through a conversation between Moses and God. In this conversation God is rebuking Moses for chastising a shepherd who was praying to God in a way that Moses thought was improper:

I have bestowed on everyone a particular way of acting. I have given to everyone a particular form of expression.In regards to [the shepherd his method of praying] is worthy of praise [but if you prayed in that way it would be] worthy of blame. [There are no right or wrong ways of worshiping me]. In the [land of the Hindus] the idiom of Hinduism is appropriate. In [the land of the Sindians] the idiom of Sind is praiseworthy. . . I look not at the tongue [or words of a man] but at the inward spirit and state of feeling. I gaze into the heart to see if it be lowly though the words may not be. Because the heart is the substance [and the words are only an] accident. The accident is subservient, the substance is the real object [of importance] (II. 1750-760).  

Rumi then ends this discussion by emphasizing for the reader how much more important it is for the reader to communicate their love for God in whatever way they can than it is for them to worry about whether they are doing it in “the right way” as dictated by others, including society at large because “to lovers there is a burning which consumes them at every turn. . . If he, the lover, speaks faultily, do not call him faulty. . . . The religion of Love is apart from all other religions: for lovers the only true religion and creed is God [who is the Beloved]”  (II. 1765-1770).

So the way to unite with God is to allow yourself to fall in love with Him. To become a true lover of God. How does one do that? By going out and trying with every fiber of your being to become one with his love by going out and trying to be united with him in love. Just like how “he that searches after wisdom becomes a fountain of wisdom” he who searches after God and his love becomes a manifestation of that love (I. 1065). And if you don’t know how to love God properly that is ok; just start with what you know: “Do service to God, that perchance then you might become a lover” (V. 2730). As Thomas Merton once famously said: “Lord, I don’t know if what I am doing actually pleases you, but I do know that my desire to please you does indeed please you”. If all you know how to love God is by going to Mass then do that; if the only way you know how to love God is by being a good mother or father than do that! It doesn’t matter where you start. God calls us all to become one with Him in different ways. We all have different paths to follow, but the important thing is that the more we strive to be one with God in love, the more successful we will be in that endeavor.

So it turns out becoming one with God does not mean knowing him in the intellectual sense, but becoming one with Him in love. It means letting yourself fall in love with God and be held by that love. Because, as has been said many times, in many different languages, through many different philosophies and theologies all the way back to time immemorial, all you need is love. That is what really makes the world go round

[docholligay]

Exodus

SO HERE’S MY PASSOVER FIC.  I feel strange about it, it’s a little more close to the ribs than I usually do, which is why I’m publishing it in the middle of the night. I do want to hear if you like it. A lot of me went into it.

ANYWAY 3,500 ish words on Angela and Passover! And the past! and how it defines our future! And the confusing constant internal debate of every aspect of being Jewish! Fun times! Chag Samech Motherfuckers!

The Hebrews doubted that Moses could lead them to the promised land, and Mercy understood.

Wandering, wandering. So much of Mercy’s life, she felt, had been spent wandering. And wandering in pursuit of what? Not only was she unsure she was wandering to the promised land, she was unsure, anymore, that she would ever knew what that looked like. How to explain, to people who did not know, the long march of a people surviving where they weren’t meant to.

It had been years since she had a proper Seder.

She looked down the table at her expectant team, her team that had become family, that loved her so that they insisted upon helping her hold a Seder.

She had tried to offer up excuses.

“I am out of practice, it has been so long, I will be having the hardest time explaining it.”

“We will help you. I only want to learn what is important to you, and I know this is,” Pharah had comforted, “And you will teach us. It will be wonderful.”

“Besides,” Dva had quipped, “we’re not gonna know if it’s wrong anyway.”

“I like ‘earing about your ‘olidays, Ang. Always ‘ave, much more personal that way, and everyone’s always on about ‘ow we need to ‘ave a wide cultural knowledge, aren’t they?” Tracer had grinned happily, leaning on the table.

Winston had simply smiled and nodded reassuringly.

And so it had come to pass. Tracer and Winston had been all day in the kitchen, pouring over recipes, trying to create something of Mercy’s scattered childhood memories. Dva had gone out to get the wine, although, of course, she said with a smirk, just because she wasn’t sure what anyone else would buy. 76 had, well, agreed to be social.

And Pharah, oh Pharah, she had created an entire low table for the living room, despite the short notice. It had not escaped Mercy’s eye that it was beautifully crafted, stained dark and sealed, the wood she had chosen peeking through with its intricate whorls and striations. It was a gorgeous and practical thing, like Pharah herself, and Mercy welled with love for her, and for that table she had never thought she wanted.

She was nervous, the night of the Seder. It is one thing, to be something, and to always be different from the rest of the world, no matter where you go. When you grow up with that feeling, it becomes intimate and known, and your difference slips in and out of meaning like a shadow. It is quite another to share that difference with others, to show them what you are, and to hope they understand.

It was not that her team was not kind to her, and was not understanding--this new Overwatch was the truest family Mercy had known since that fateful night in Zurich, years ago.

And yet, her mind wandered, like the rest of her, never finding rest.

She looked across the table at the collected family in front of her.

“The Torah teaches us there are four children who ask questions about the Exodus. These verses represent four types of children. We are all, sometimes, these children,” She smiled, thinking of the way her mother used to describe them, so eloquent with her words, “And they are all important.” She looked over at Pharah, who gazed at her with love. “The wise child asks,”

Pharah responded, not even looking at the piece fo paper Mercy had supplied. “What are the laws that God has commanded us?”

First, do no harm. It was not a Jewish rule at all, but she felt it entwined with justice, justice shall you pursue, twin ideas circling around her like the snakes of her caduceus.

It haunted her, wondering if she had made the wrong choice in the moment. Should she have refused Genji, and let him die, knowing how they had forced his hand? Should she have stayed with Tracer, and tried to help her, though they were using Mercy to hound her about the location of the Slipstream?

She lay awake, wondering if she had made the moral choice. Justice, justice, shall you pursue. Her father had told her it was the holiest obligation in Judaism. She had not been able to turn away Genji. She had not been able to help hurt Tracer.

It had led her to where she was now, the choices she had made. The rules of Overwatch were made to appear virtuous. She could not follow Jack there. Jack couldn’t follow Jack there, she would think later, but he had been so stern, in those days, trying to convince himself that what he was was not at odds with the organization he had helped build.  She could not follow Gabriel, so close to Jack but so far, as they drifted closer in their mistakes in their attempt to be different from one another. And then Gabriel had died, and there was no chance for reconciliation.

Mercy had simply left, like she left Tracer in the lab, she had simply refused to help any longer. Justice was not here. She would have to go find it. She had been seeking it across the desert of this world since she was 13.

She ran her hand over her father’s siddur sometimes, wondering what God really meant when he asked these things of her. The lines seemed so blurred in the moment, and so frighteningly clear in the past.

When she thought of saving a life, she thought of her mother.

“Every Jew, my little Angela,” Her mother hugged her tightly as she sat on her lap, her fingers following the the letters she was only beginning to learn, picking out alephs and lameds in the text, “is like a letter in this Torah. Do you know what I mean?”

Angela thought for a moment, always a pensive child, and turned the question over in her mind. “I...I don’t know, Mama. They...they’re together in the book? Under the Torah?”

“No, “ she shook her head and smiled, “But what a clever answer from a clever little girl.” She traced her finger alongside her daughter’s. “Every letter, Angela, is different. Some hard, some are soft, some are silent. But all of them are needed. To lose one letter is to compromise the holiness, the completeness, of the whole Torah.”

She looked back up at them, her eyes filled with tears.

I do not always know the way, but I know I cannot lose even one of you. That is the law my heart has now commanded.

She cleared her throat. “You must teach this child the laws of Passover, starting with the beginning, and ending with the laws of the Afikomen.” She looked over to Dva. “The wicked child asks,”

Dva looked down at the piece of paper. “What does this ritual mean to you?”

“What does it mean, if we are becoming our enemies?” Mercy looked across the table at the redhead sipping whiskey in front of her. “We are Jewish. We’re merciful.” She shook her head. “That, I think is beautiful.”

“What’s it mean if we’re dead?” She set down the glass, and though it was not intentionally slammed, the sound still reverberated through the half-empty bar.

Yael was an American, hard and mercenary and wild, raised in the dust and the tall grass of the high plains, and she stretched her name out long like they do in those places. She ran with the Deadlock Gang, and she ran in Mercy’s temple, and neither of these seemed to be a contradiction to her. She protected Jewish lives with her work, and that, to her, was pursuing justice.

Mercy did not agree with her, but she envied deeply how Yael seemed to know what justice was, and where to follow it.

She stirred her oversweet cocktail slowly. “Do you ever think, Yael, about doing something different?” She looked back up, hopefully. “You do not have to be doing this, if you wan--”

She leaned over the table, putting a hand up to quiet Mercy. “Let me tell you something, Angie. You get to be the right hand of God, because some of us are willing to be the left. After the crisis, they blamed us, because they always do when the shit hits the goddamn fan.”

“My parents--”

“Your parents were idealist Jews and they’re dead now, right? That ain’t me. They ain’t making Jews like Jesus, where I’m from, and I don’t turn the other cheek.” She shrugged. “You don’t have to be me, Angie, but I’ll hear no talk about how I’m meant to be you.”

Mercy wanted to balk that her parents had not been killed because they were Jews, but because of an accident of fate and war, but she remembered, like a sliver of light through the darkness, the way people never mentioned their Judaism in the many speeches given to their humanitarian work, as if that was an accident, but how happy people were to remind others that Jews had been a major part of the science that created omnics, and so, it’s not that they DESERVED it, per se, but, you could hardly blame the omnics…

And she demurred to say anything at all.

Yael leaned back and took another sip, giving a sideways grin to Mercy. “I don’t wanna fight about it. Next round’s on me, kay?”

But maybe that was dying, she thought later, and often, over the years. To be what you are not. To become something twisted from itself. She had seen that, with too many people and too many times, and she could not imagine squeezing herself into something she scarcely recognized.

To be a Jew was to be good, and she held this at her heart.

But maybe Yael was right. Maybe Yael had sacrificed her life to save others, in a way Mercy could barely understand. Perhaps this was the strongest way to give one’s life, worse than any physical death. To do what others will not, and cannot.

Maybe justice had many faces, and none of them felt like a mirror.

“It is…” Mercy nervously took a sip of her wine, “it is because of what God did for me, when I came out of Egypt. For me. God...sacrificed...much..for me.” Pharah touched her hand, and she nodded, smiling, “And then, the simple child says,”

“Not entirely sure why I ‘ave to be the simple child.” Tracer half-scowled.

“Popular vote.” Pharah quipped across the table.

Mercy touched Tracer’s elbow. “It is more like the...you know, naive child, who does not know things, not in the sense of that you are stupid--”

“This is not getting any more flattering, love.” She laughed and looked down at her paper  “It’s fine, s’ fine, the simple child asks, what is this Seder?”

She lit a yahrzeit candle and sat by the window, shuffling through pages of medical textbooks, leaning against the windowframe, half-mumbling prayers to herself. It was like this every year, and every year the wind seemed to blow with the same high and lonesome sound, whipping around the bricks of the medical school and into her heart.

She touched her father’s siddur sitting near her leg, like some long-ago memory, and she felt afraid to open it. The same day, every year, when her world changed, the wind whipping the same as it did that night, that Kaddish cry she would come to know by heart.

There was a knock at the door, and she sprang to answer it, swinging it open slowly, wondering if the thousand crashing memories of that night might be behind it.

“Doctor Kaplan?” It was no such memory, but only one of her professors, a bottle in her hand, coat slung warm around her shoulders.

“Oh, Angela, I’m here on unofficial business, call me Tzofiya.” She did not ask to be let in, simply breezed into the living room, looking over at the candles at the window. “Your test went well, I see.”

She nodded. They usually did. She was a star, people often said, and Mercy had often thought that, yes, she was. Brilliant and alone in the dark.

Tzofiya looked over at her, and gave a sage nod. “I am here,” she popped open the bottle, “because I know what this night is.”

Mercy drew the knitted shawl more tightly around her body. “Why are we drinking champagne?”

Tzofiya turned around and smiled. “Because you are alive, and you you are thriving, and for that we are thankful.” She poured a glass. “That is the Jewish story, yes, don’t you think? They try to destroy us, but they can’t, not all of us, and we prosper despite all of it. You,” she poured a second glass for Mercy. “Prosper despite all of it, and you can celebrate that and mourn them. Life is not all joy and it is not all pain, even on the same day, Angela.”

Mercy looked off out the window, holding her glass non-committally.

Tzofiya reached over to her father’s siddur. “To look at all you have lost and see a light in the darkness, that is the most Jewish thing of all. We do not ignore the darkness, or say it is sunny, but we make shadow puppets by the light we have. That,” she poked Mercy’s leg, “Is what I hope you learn from this.”

“You are making it sound so easy.” She shook her head, her eyes so much older than her sixteen years.

“It isn’t. Nothing in life is. But we are here to struggle, and to struggle together, and that is life.” She raised her glass. “L’chaim. That we still have it, and we still know how to laugh, thank God for that, if nothing else.”

“L’chaim.” Mercy whispered into the bubbles.

“God brought us out of Egypt. Out of the rubble.” She looked over at her small team, that was her small family, and thought of the rubble they had been brought from. Alone in the world, unlike anyone else. Disconnected from time. A child at war. Struggling to make a legacy of her own. Struggling with the legacy he left. “And because we survived,” she nodded, “ because we thrive, and we are going forward. Because they cannot break us. We celebrate. We commemorate.”

Pharah took her hand. “Because you are strong. I admire that about you.”

People said many things of Mercy. She was kind. She was intelligent. She was exceptional. But people did not call her strong, for she lacked the hardness that had been so valued in early Overwatch, and the cleverness so valued by Blackwatch, and she cried when those she loved were hurt, and losing a patient had never become easy. But Pharah saw her, in a way she could not even see herself, and she felt strong for it.

“There is a last child,” she cupped Pharah’s cheek with her hand, but her eyes were far away, “A child who does not know how to ask.”

Overwatch was shut down for a reason, and Mercy believed in that. But that belief, that knowledge, made her no less rudderless in its absence. She had thought that Overwatch would be her calling, that she would find her promised land in the promise of worldwide peace.

And now, here she was, sitting alone in a finely appointed office at a very prestigious university, teaching about cutting-edge technologies, passing on things that made the world unquestionably better, collaborating with the finest minds of her time. Being one of the finest minds of her time.

And she felt completely empty.

The worst of it was that she could not have even known what to ask for. Her work was fine and regular, and helped the world, and that justice she had chased should have been within her grasp. She went to temple every Shabbat, and she sang to God not knowing what she was singing for, and while it brought her peace, it brought her no fullness.

I have chased you, oh Lord. I have chased you, and still I feel thirst. I have chased justice, but I cannot run fast enough. 

Was it shallow to wish for fulfillment? When that night had struck, her father throwing her into the closet under the stairs, the terrible tremor and shake, the loud boom of the life she had known ending, of her violent rebirth, she had stepped out of the closet, her home shattered around her, and seen a spray of blood above the door where she had hidden. She had been spared. But spared for what?

She would fast, and she would pray, if she knew what to ask for.

Her lecture had gone well, and the day was bright, and Harvard was an excellent institution, and she should be thankful for all of that. Perhaps she would be. Perhaps she would take a walk, and try not to think of another Passover, spent alone, wandering, waiting for Elijah. She walked to the edge of campus, contemplating what sort of takeout she would get for dinner, when something caught her eye across the street.

There was no mistaking Tracer for anyone else, even allowing for the blue glow of the chronal accelerator on her chest. Her particular bouncy walk carried her across the patio, smiling at nothing at all, her cowlicks soaring like sails, as she set her lunch down at a table. Mercy was halfway across the street before she realized she was moving at all, pulled toward Tracer, a bright smile on her own face.

“Lena!”

Tracer looked up, and then, in a single motion, jumped the small fence of the patio and landed a few feet in front of Mercy, wrapping her arms around her.

“Ang! God, it’s been too long!”

Mercy looked down at her, hands still on her shoulders. “What are you even doing here? I thought you were back in London.” She sighed happily. “It’s so nice to see you.”

“Aw, yeah,” she waved her hand, “Win’s over at MIT, now—“

“I had no idea he was so close.” She felt a bit embarrassed for the oversight. “Teaching?”

“Naw, you know how shy ‘e is. Research, mostly.” She gestured toward the table. “Come sit with us, I’ll share me chips, even.” She opened the gate to let Mercy inside. “That’s what I’m ‘ere for, really, is to get ‘is all clear. Or rather,” she sat down and looked over at Mercy, half-annoyed by what she was about to say, “to get the bloody RAF to accept ‘is all clear, I can’t be bothered with an all clear.”

She sat delicately beside Tracer on the bench. “You’re not instructing?”

“Oh, I’m instructing, all right, Red Air can’t ‘ardly turn me down, really, but it’s all theoretical, they won’t let me in the air, not without Win solemnly swearing that I won’t disappear mid-flight.” She winked. “As luck would ‘ave it, the Americans are completely mad, so I did a gig at Top Gun for a time, but,” she shrugged, “if it takes me 8 hours to fly to Win either way, I’d rather be ‘ome. You miss Switzerland?”

She folded her hands in her lap and shook her head. “Switzerland was a place I lived, but it was never like London was for you.”

Tracer looked over at the door. “Oi, Fareeha!” She waved, and then looked back at Mercy. “This is the other reason I’m ‘ere, brought one of the ‘elix kids to Winston’s lab.”

Mercy looked up at the door, and her lip unconsciously slipped under her front tooth. She was tall and broad-shouldered, her jet black hair glittering under the filtered light of the day, her features strong and proud,  a tattoo marking her cheekbone. She walked as if she expected the room to salute, and set her tray down at the table.

“Fareeha, this is Angela Ziegler. Ang, this is Fareeha Amari.”

“And you shall tell your child on this day,” she murmured, still cupping Pharah’s cheek, “you shall tell them, ‘We commemorate Passover tonight because of what God did for us when we went out of Egypt.’”

Moses never saw the promised land but from afar. Moses found his promised land in Tzipporah, in his people, and Mercy understood.

She looked at the room, filled with people she loved, and filled her cup of wine until it nearly overflowed.

[advancedstudioproductionkwc]

This is an intermediate stage of the “background” to the piece I presented today in class. This is what I listened to (with a single ear effectively) whilst improvising the tentative and somewhat random sounding piano parts I added to this “background”. I’ve decided that each of the pieces I present this semester in this course will be modelled on the rather beautiful proportions of the prelude from Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde” and be of that length as well.

I intend to make a full high-fidelity 4-channel recording of the failing, interrupted and “broken” file of the piece as heard after midnight outside the Coles at the end of Elizabeth Street (which is a different orchestral performance and recording to the one I have used here). I will compose a broken, fully notated and yet fragmented and tentative piece for piano to be accompanied by the fully spatialised recording of the way this “broken prelude” sounds in real space. I may then apply some of these same filtering, stretching and resonating techniques to the “realistic” recording so that gradually it acquires some of that same “oceanic” quality.

The placing of such a piece outside Coles in what I would describe as a pretty degraded and sometimes highly dangerous part of the city fascinates me. I’m not surprised (nor dismayed) to have heard Italian opera arias, Dvorak “New World Symphony” and other “warhorses” (interesting term that isn’t it?) used as sonic warfare against the drunks and "Blue Lotus” addicts that horizontally line the streets in this part of “the most livable city in the world”. I have walked many times past this supermarket and one night I noticed that this piece, the prelude to the opera I have seen the most times on stage, which I quote constantly and which is a clear point of origin for one important strand of early modernism (”expressionism”) was being played but the file was corrupted, gappy, coming in and out in a kind of microcosmic relation to the ebbs and flows of the original piece. That is, the rapid ebbing and flowing of the real sound was almost like a horrible parody of the vast ebbs and flows written into the score but which take place over long stretches of time. Even though the climaxes of each Act are positively volcanic in live performance a great deal of the music is delicate and quiet for very long stretches of time (another innovation of Wagner’s). Very little music before this piece has such a strong connection to water, the oceanic, the immersive. The 1st Act is set on a ship, the 2nd features a fountain (beautifully evoked in the music) and the 3rd act is set in a castle overlooking a calm and empty sea as a dying Tristan awaits the boat carrying his adulterous lover Isolde to him (there’s a beautiful essay by Susan Sontag about water in this opera). The words of the final “aria” where Isolde sings of the bliss of sinking into unconsciousness, singing of the breathing of the universe are an incredibly vivid image of the crashing of waves over a drowning person and re-appear repeatedly in pieces like “La Mer” by Debussy and the soundtracks of many Hollywood films dealing with the sea.

So outside Coles, after a terrible night of dealing with men wanting illicit sex, drunks wanting a place to rest, addicts begging for change, in a workplace full of all the dangers of the contemporary world I hear the achingly beautiful music of this prelude and instantly a whole world of associations opens up. My mind filled in the “gaps” of the broken file but somehow incorrectly. My piece is all about those gaps in the real that give rise to desire, by definition insatiable.

This opera is not just the world’s most pretentious “love triangle”, it is about the conflict between the world of the “day” (law, culture, property, the ego etc) and the “night” (symbolising the unconscious, the flow of desire, the impossible union of people in a community of two we call romantic love). In the story of the opera the Irish princess Isolde is carried across the sea to be married to a King by a knight Tristan (his name literally means sadness) who is the King’s nephew but they fall in love, a love which is consummated only in death and singing.

It is breathtakingly beautiful in a rare great performance. The chord in the third bar of the prelude has kept musicologists busy for more than a century and has been quoted by countless subsequent composers in a variety of ways: other than the beautiful quotation of it in Berg’s “Lyric Suite” (itself a coded love letter to his mistress) I find particularly interesting the change from Debussy’s entirely sincere usage of it to set the word “triste” in his early opera “Pelleas and Melisande” to the entirely sarcastic use of it in the “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” in the “Children’s Suite” for piano near the end of his life after his turn against Wagner in favour of a kind of French nationalism (need I point out the corrosive presence of a performative irony in the racial colouring of such a title?). It also celebrates (much like the incestuous relationship of Siegmund and Sieglinde in the Ring cycle) a revolt of desire against the merely “socially correct”.

This is a piece that attempts to avoid resolution by every means possible. It is ostensibly in A minor but look how many accidentals there are, how many times dissonances are held in suspension. The dissonant chord in the 3rd bar is really only resolved properly in the very last bars of the whole opera, some 3 hours later. Accordingly (pun intended) I had the comb filters constantly slide towards that resolution the harmonies seemingly desperately desire only to slide back again and again to the 3rd bar. At one point as well I engineered the tackiest possible resolution of the dissonance in the piano parts, poisoned by the difference in tuning between the “cultural” (and hence entirely “normalised”) tuning of 12 tone equal temperament and the second piano part which is tuned in accordance with the “natural” overtones of A (which sounds “out of tune”).

So this piece is in effect a kind of distorted memory of the original, a fantasy on its themes of intoxication and social control and an attempt to make the piece strange again now that it is safely ensconced in the “canon”.

I’m also considering making some new comb filters in Audiomulch tuned to the sometimes shockingly ugly sounds of the “Tristan chord” (B F D# G#) in other overtone tunings and making a piece out of those.

PS: this opera is also HILARIOUSLY vulgarised by Franz Waxman in the dreadful Joan Crawford film “Humoresque” from 1946. Waxman moves quickly from bits of the prelude, to the long love scene that takes up most of the second act, to the final act. He arranged these bits almost without regard to their actual harmonic and musical implications for violin and piano solos with full orchestra. It’s such a terrible piece of work that without fail makes me laugh because I recognise the harmonies enough to expect a particular consequence of a phrase then the music will jump at random to some other harmony when Wagner could probably spend 20 minutes getting from one to the other. When I first discovered this opera as a teenager (because I read that my then hero Schoenberg’s piece “Transfigured Night” was criticised as sounding like someone had smeared the score of Tristan while still wet and amusing you can hear my piece linked here as attempting exactly that) my mother who loved soppy Hollywood movies immediately recognised the music but hated the singing. Of course Wagner and this piece in particular is the source of more than 100 years of musical tropes illustrating “passion” or “pain” in music. It is of course incredibly beautiful in an overwhelming way and often reduces me to tears. Wagner is the Steven Spielberg of music but with the ���machinery” as carefully hidden as the joins in phrases. He is also a masterclass in long range harmonic thinking and listening (I highly recommend diving deep into Wagner at an early age as it ameliorates your tendency to boredom and tunes your ears to resonate to harmonic moves stretched over the span of an hour or more). Of course, what makes this malignantly seductive music fascist to the core isn’t its occasional forays into a “military” soundworld but rather its dedication to aesthetic illusion above all, its beauty and its desire to flood the listener with sensation that you cannot take a critical distance from. Wagner is, as Adorno pointed out, fascist to the core not because of his terrible words about Jews but because of its commitment to art as a kind of magical spell that dissolves the individual and their borders. I also think that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was entirely correct to think of National Socialism as National Aestheticism: only in German does “ugly” also mean “hateful”. It amuses me therefore that Wagner’s music ended up in a ridiculous Hollywood melodrama, mutilated and stitched back together like Frankenstein’s creation by a Jewish emigre composer in Hollywood. To use one of Hitler’s favorite operas (Hitler is of course the locus classicus of the toxic opera queen) after the “victory over fascism” for a Joan Crawford movie about the redemptive power of art is camp as fuck (precisely because it is done with an entirely straight face). The fact that I have seen with my very own eyes people swoon with delight over this shoddy piece of work makes it even funnier: possibly the worst idea of Western civilisation is the neo-Platonist identification of the beautiful with the true and the good. One of the reasons for my intense interest in the fate of “culture” during the Third Reich is the manner in which the highest ideals of western civilisation are finally revealed there (by the very “people” that invented some of them) as a cheap veneer over barbarism: Adorno was correct to say that after Auschwitz both culture and its urgently necessary critique (ie. his own life’s work) are garbage.

There’s an awfully vulgar video of the Waxman “Tristan Fantasia” on Youtube that illustrates almost everything terrible about “Western classical music” and how it now functions as an ideological apparatus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOrRAvmUV2c

[nancywait]

Women may buy bags for all sorts of reasons, but their main purpose is a container for things we want to carry around with us when we’re out. This carpet bag made in Prague, from a real carpet woven in Prague by old ladies who lived on the outskirts of the city that I bought online fifteen years ago, was not only a container of personal possessions, it was a bag of hope. And now it was in Brooklyn, over 4,000 miles away as the crow flies, but it looked and felt Old World. And it was something physical and tangible, an actual material I could wear slung over my shoulder or clenched in my hand. Whenever I looked at its warm reds and felt its softness, I remembered my dream of one day going to Prague. Of seeing the city in person, instead of just reading about it or viewing it on you tube.

The cards in the bag I took to Prague last month were the handy plastic kind that make a dream come true, in that they got me on the plane and into the hotel. But for fifteen years, as well as the carpet bag, there had been another set of cards that were not plastic—78 of them altogether—and these were the cards that fed the dream and kept it alive. Tarot cards. The Tarot of Prague. They helped nurture the dream. In the poem, Harlem, Langston Hughes asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” He wonders, “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” He suggests other, less appetizing fates. Meanwhile, I bided my time. I waited until my carpet bag so bulged with hope that it had to become a reality.

Each of the tarot cards was beautifully illustrated with different aspects of Prague’s gothic and baroque past, as well as the more recent art nouveau. Churches and statuary, bas-reliefs and carvings, bridges, archways, stairways and buildings, placed in such a way as to perfectly address the meaning of the cards. Fortune telling cards I would learn to interpret as I pored over the imagery until it was engraved on my brain. Cards that told me as much about myself as about the city’s medieval past that unaccountably had been left standing when so many others had been whisked away by bulldozers or bombs.

For fifteen years this bit of carpet and collection of cards bought online from the same shop in Prague, were my replacements for an actual visit. While I waited I found other bags that suited my more immediate needs. I found other tarot decks to engage with, and I forgot why I wanted to go to Prague in the first place. I had never thought about Prague at all until I watched the Velvet Revolution unfolding on TV at the end of 1989. It was mesmerizing. The Berlin Wall had fallen a few weeks before, and now crowds were gathering in Wenceslas Square every night, holding lighted candles, jingling their house keys, standing in solidarity. A few years later I read that Americans had started flocking to Prague, and I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could go too.

But the fifteen-year saga didn’t really start until some years after that when I read Patricia Hampl’s, A Romantic Education, a glorious, poetic memoir of her visit to Prague in the 1970s when it was still under Communist rule. Hampl, from Minnesota with a Czech grandmother, writes,

  Perhaps, if you go to the old country seeking, as third or fourth generation Americans often do, a strictly personal history based on bloodlines, then, the less intimate history of the nation cannot impose itself upon you very strongly. History is reduced to genealogy, which is supposed to satisfy a hunger that is clearly much larger.

  But if you go on a journey like this not to find somebody, but just to look around—then, in a country like Czechoslovakia (or perhaps only there, only in Prague), the country’s history is infused with the urgency of the classic search for personal identity. The country itself becomes the lost ancestry and, one finds, the country is eloquent. Its long story, its history, satisfy the instinct for kinship in a way that the discovery of a distant cousin could not. For it is really the longing for a lost culture that sends Americans on these pilgrimages.

Hampl describes how she “…stumbled through the ancient streets, stopped in the smoke-grimed coffeehouses,” and says, “I was simply in the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and it was grimy and sad and broken.”

  The weight of its history and the beauty of its architecture came to me first as an awareness of dirt, a sort of ancient grime I had never seen before. It bewitched me, that dirt, caught in the corners f baroque moldings and decorative cornices, and especially I loved the dusty filth of the long, grave windows at sunset when the light flared against the tall oblongs and caused them to look gilded.

That was the 70s. When Hampl returned to post-revolution Prague in the mid-90s, “Not only the color of the buildings has changed, but the entrepreneurial rush, especially in the center, has created a new kind of Kafkaesque unreality.” And, “It is as if, for the new earnest visitors from the West, Prague is a stage set—the improbable dream of the baroque city where Kafka and Rilke walked in exultation and anguish—but the purpose of the stage set eludes them. They worry that they have arrived “too late,” and have expatriated themselves to a theme park. They sense that the life of the place is something quite other than the charms purveyed by the rouged-up tourist center, beguiling though they are.”

I roamed around Prague in January, avoiding the hordes of tourists, and though the streets were far from empty, I didn’t once think I had arrived too late. For me, an off-season bargain through Hotels.com was the right time. But neither Hampl or the pile of guidebooks I read, (or the fifteen years I waited) had prepared me for the unexpected tears momentarily blurring my vision. At first glance, Wenceslas Square, my first view of the city, was a garish commercial strip with giant screens advertising sportswear. But I was on a journey back through time to feel the energy of ancient stone and brick, of auras that might still linger in churches and synagogues, or medieval streets forming a labyrinth around the Old Town Square. I could see past the video screens and souvenir shops.

Praha in Czech means threshold. A place of transition between the visible world and the invisible one. That was the place I was looking for. That line, that place of transition. That threshold. The closest I came to it was in the Kafka Museum where the windows were boarded up, the walls were painted black, and a video scored with Smetana’s Má Vlast, (My Country) constantly played. It was old footage of Prague in Kafka’s day, edited with special effects revealing distorted views of tilting houses and streets closing in upon each other to suggest an altered perception, a dimensional shift. The effect I enjoyed the most was when the screen rippled as if it was under water. Scenes washed over by the waters of time. As if those of us who’d crossed the Vltava over the 15th century Charles Bridge to Malá Strana, using our smart phones to guide us to the museum tucked away on a side street called Cihelná, hadn’t had our perception altered enough.

I left the carpet bag at home, and though I took the tarot cards with me, I didn’t look at them once, or even open my guidebook until the fifth day. I didn’t want to look anything up. I wanted to be in the moment, witnessing the present without comparing it to anything I’d seen before. I looked at the cards when I returned home, and realized that unknowingly I’d come upon the sights represented on the cards that were most meaningful to me. The Hermit and Temperance.

Temperance stands for moderation, balance, and inner peace. She had recently come up as my ‘Navigator.’ I came across the image that represents her in the tarot when I chanced to walk by the art deco façade in Široká Street in Josefov, the Jewish Quarter. Though I stopped to photograph her, I didn’t recall her image in the cards.

Nor did I remember the Hermit was standing in Golden Lane, one of the places at the top of my list to visit. The Hermit, as card number 9, represents my Destiny Number, therefore who I am in the tarot. In most decks, the Hermit was an old man with a beard holding a lantern to represent introspection, meditation, a deliberate withdrawal, and often foretells a quest of some kind.

In the Tarot of Prague, he stood in Golden Lane, known as the “Street of the Alchemists.” I knew Kafka had once lived at number 22, and the tarot reader, Mme. de Thebes, executed by the Nazis because she predicted Germany would lose the war, lived at number 14. None of the houses were known to be home to alchemists, but I’d felt an affinity to the place.

Before my trip I did a couple of watercolors of the tiny medieval houses.

I went to Prague for a week, and now it’s also a week since I’ve been home. The journey that began with a bag and a bunch of cards has shifted to an inner journey. Maybe it was always meant to be an inner journey. But how would I have known that if I hadn’t gone there first? This inner journey is about digesting the experience, integrating what I’ve seen and felt, perhaps coming up with new realizations. As I write about it, I’m already starting to see past the beauty of the sights to something deeper within. While I was there in the old city on the Vltava, I was too startled, too overcome by the views and vistas every which way I looked. But now, back on familiar ground, my inner eye has begun weaving together past and present.

A Bag and a Bunch of Cards Women may buy bags for all sorts of reasons, but their main purpose is a container for things we want to carry around with us when we’re out.

[honorsphilosophyitalytrip-blog]

January 8th, 2018 - Roma

Today, we visited the Jewish Ghetto in Roma. When I first heard the phrase “Jewish Ghetto”, I didn’t really know what that phrase meant. As an American, the only time I had ever used the phrase “ghetto”, was as a pejorative descriptor for African-American neighborhoods, activities, cultures, and people. Therefore, the concept of a Jewish Ghetto didn’t quite click in my head immediately. After some research, however, I have a better understanding of the word’s origin and its meaning – the word “ghetto” originated in Italy, in fact, with the Jewish ghetto of Venice. Since its coining, it has come to mean any area, most likely one within a large city, where a minority group is forced to live.

When we arrived at the Museo Ebraico di Roma (Jewish Museum of Rome), our excellent tour guide told us all about the history of Roma’s Jewish Ghetto – which has existed since 1555 BC. It was originally instated by the Pope at the time, Paul IV, along with an order that required all Jewish people in Roma to live within the ghetto. Living in the ghetto, the gates of which were only open while the sun was in the sky, demoted Jewish Romans to second class citizens. This treatment was purposefully horrible – the Pope, and the Catholic church, wished to convert Roma’s Jewish population to Christianity, and priests would come into the ghetto to preach to them, with the promise of better living conditions as a result of conversion.

One of the forms of oppression Roma’s Jewish population faced was economic – Jewish people in Roma were forbidden from doing any job other than lending money, which would later become untenable due to the Papal Bank, and selling used clothing. This was to ensure that Jewish workers would never be able to meet anyone of higher status, and make connections, as only lower classes would purchase used clothing from them. As a result of the working men all taking jobs in the used clothing business, the women of the Jewish Ghetto became some of the best seamstresses in Roma. One example of their handiwork was pointed out to us by our tour guide – the beautifully intricate mantels, which are coverings specifically designed to protect the scrolls of the Torah, the holy text of Judaism. These mantels, which were also displayed in the museum with keters, which are metal caps to ‘crown’ the Torah scrolls, were just one piece of the beauty that could be found in the museum.

The Museo Ebraico di Roma, located in the basement of the Great Synagogue of Rome, is a home to a plethora of artifacts from Roman Jewish culture. Everything in the museum, from the remnants of the arks used in previous Roman synagogues, to pieces of stone from the Jewish catacombs, inscribed with Jewish symbols and information on the dead in Greek and Latin, told a story about Jewish life in Roma. While the Jewish people have always suffered, and Roma was no exception to this narrative, every single piece that was on display told a story – even if one could not understand it, they were touched. I remember the first thing that I noticed when I walked into the museum was an intricate menorah (a Jewish symbol that symbolizes the seven days of creation, among other things) shaped like a flower, delicately crafted with the utmost care and detail.

I constantly found myself simultaneously in awe and humbled by our trip to the Jewish Ghetto. When we were led by our tour guide into the Great Synagogue of Rome, my heart nearly stopped beating the instant I laid eyes upon its interior. We have seen so many amazing, wondrous, stunning buildings in Rome over the past six days – but, for me, this one will always be the most beautiful. Simultaneously simple and ornate, the interior of the Great Synagogue of Rome is decorated with a plethora of Jewish symbols, all of which celebrate G-d in some way or another. The roof of the synagogue, which is the only square dome in all of Roma, makes the structure stand out as distinctly unique. I honestly cannot describe what made it so beautiful to me. Maybe one has to see it to understand.

After our tour was over, we had the opportunity to explore the museum and the surrounding area of the ghetto. The first thing I did, after I had looked through the museum, was go into the gift shop and get something for myself: a pendant in the shape of a hand, with two thumbs – the Hamsa, a symbol of protection in the Middle East and North Africa region, which is also featured prominently in Jewish culture. I remember the first time I saw the Hamsa was the first time I went to a Shabbat service, at UD Hillel – my friend Finn was showing me around the building, and explaining various symbols and terms that we were coming across, including the Hamsa. I really look forward to keeping it on my person, as both a memento of my visit, and as a protective measure. After leaving the museum, some of us students went into another museum right across the street, one that focused on the history of the Shoah (Holocaust), in Italia and Roma. Walking through that museum was difficult, imagining the pain and the chaos of the time period, pain that still affects people to this day, something that will never be erased from human history. It’s hard, but it’s something we must never forget – especially in this day and age, as fascist politics are seeing a definite rise, both in Europe and at home. Leaving the heaviness of the museums behind, our group got lunch, and, after lunch, visited a traditional Jewish bakery – I decided to get myself a cookie, and, kindly, I was given it for free by the owner of the bakery. Even in the shadow of pain and suffering, it is so, so important to be kind.

Religion is a major theme of our trip to Italia this Winter – we’re discussing religious pluralism, and the different religions of the Roman Empire, the Italian City-states, and the Italian Republic. Judaism, of all the religions present in this country, is one of the ones that I find myself drawn to the most, and I never tire of learning more about its practice, and finding what my own beliefs do and do not resonate with. While the traditions of the Jewish people may be unfamiliar to us as a group, it is important not to alienate or belittle any individual tradition – just because one finds the sounds of Hebrew words to be humorous, does not mean they can joke about ‘wearing ukuleles’ in the synagogue, or because we have been raised in a world of anti-Semitism, does not mean that we can ignorantly spread those attitudes. All religions deserve respect, and, in my opinion, love – that is the true spirit of religious pluralism, the crafting of a new, better world, by understanding and working side by side those of all kinds of faiths.

[tortuga-aak]

These candles smell like home, and they're the perfect gift this holiday season

The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

The holiday season is all about families and friends coming together to celebrate, eat good food, and open presents. But sometimes, you can't make it home for the holidays and you end up feeling a bit homesick. There's one sure-fire way to erase the holiday blues and that's with an awesome candle that will conjure memories of your home city, state, or favorite experience.

Homesick makes classic white candles with customized scents for each of the 50 states, several cities, and experiences like being in grandma's kitchen, smelling books, or heading off to summer camp. 

It may sound crazy, but scent is very closely tied to memory. That's why when you smell cookies baking in the oven, you feel like you're back in your kitchen helping grandma decorate cookies with icing and sprinkles. 

To come up with the customized scents for each city and state, Homesick polled people from those areas to find out what home smelled like to them. The results range from the hilarious — like Jewish Christmas, which smells like, "Buttered popcorn and a movie at the local theatre followed by an overindulgence of Chinese food with friends and family," — to the classics, like Grandma's Kitchen, which smells like "The scents of rich butter mixed with touches of apple, cinnamon, clove and a hint of sugar cookie. Tonka bean and sugar finish out this homey aroma."

Each candle is made from all-natural soy wax, which is hand-poured into a classy glass container. The simple black and white labels look cool and let you know what candle you're smelling. The candles come in cute, colorful boxes, making them perfect gifts for anyone who wants a whiff of nostalgia in their home away from home. Homesick's candles are also really reasonably priced at $29.95 and you get free one-day shipping on Amazon.

We tried two Homesick candles: New York City and Holiday. Keep scrolling to see what we thought of them.

Having trouble buying gifts for everyone on your list? Check out all of our 2017 gift guides on Insider Picks.

Homesick's New York City candle smells like Macy's in Herald Square

Homesick Candles

As denizens of New York City, the Insider Picks team typically remembers the malodorous smells we catch a whiff on the street rather than the candle's idealistic "scents of spring days in Central Park, Fine department stores, and concrete."

Insider Picks reporter Mara Leighton said it best when she described the candle as "what New York smells like in your dreams before you actually move here." Still, we cannot deny that the candle smells a lot like Macy's in Herald Square, of that the scent is infinitely preferable to the iffy smell of the city streets and the subway.

When I burned the NYC candle in my apartment, it smelled amazing. The gentle scent made my entire apartment smell great, and it burned evenly without whittling down the wick at all even after several hours.

Buy the Homesick New York City candle on Amazon for $29.95 (Currently out of stock, but other cities are available)

Homesick's Holiday candle smells like Grandma's house in the woods

Homesick Candle

The Holiday candle hit all the right notes with its scents of "freshly cut Pine trees and pomander balls; Mom's sugar cookies and Grandma's pies, warm from the oven." The whole Insider Picks team agreed that it smelled wonderful.

I brought it home to test in my apartment, and it was wonderful. Just like the NYC candle, it burned evenly and beautifully all evening long. The scent of this Holiday candle is even more aromatic and lovely — especially for this time of year. 

When I closed, my eyes, the gentle pine scent reminded me of Christmastime at my Grandma's house, which was surrounded by pine trees. The hint of cinnamon in there brought me right back to baking Swedish cinnamon buns with her, too. It's my favorite of the two I tried.

There's nothing better than a beautiful candle to bring holiday cheer and coziness to your home. 

Buy the Homesick Holiday candle on Amazon for $29.95

Homesick candles make a great gift

Homesick Candles

At $29.95, Homesick candles are so reasonably priced that you can get a different one for each person on your list. College students and new-ish grown-ups who are just getting started in a new city or state will love the nostalgia factor, and anyone who likes candles will appreciate how well made they are.

Shop Homesick Candles by State on Amazon for $29.95

Shop Homesick Candles by City on Amazon for $29.95

Shop Homesick Candles by Experience on Amazon for $29.95

from Feedburner http://ift.tt/2BByRup

[how2to18]

IN A 1972 LETTER, Hannah Arendt speculates that a thinker has only one real thought in her life, everything else being nothing but variations on this single theme. First published in French in 2014, A Long Saturday is a short book of conversations between George Steiner and the journalist Laure Adler. The volume provides an overview of the main themes that have occupied Steiner’s mind throughout his life, but it also gives us reason to doubt Arendt’s conjecture. For while those of us familiar with Steiner’s oeuvre will hear in these conversations variations on familiar themes, we are left with no doubt as to the plurality of those themes. A Long Saturday shows Steiner to be a man of more than one book.

Steiner begins by speaking succinctly about his extraordinary biography, narrated more fully in his autobiographical Errata (1997). We hear of the effects of the “deformity” that has been part of his life since his birth in 1929, of his father’s prescience about what would happen in Europe (he had already left Vienna for Paris, where Steiner was born) and of the family’s narrow escape from Paris, in 1940, on the last American cruise ship leaving from Genoa, “just as the Germans were invading.” We are left to infer the relationships that may exist between Steiner’s biography and the themes to which his writing has kept returning over the years. As he says, “there must be some connection between statement and a life.”

Steiner’s reflections on Judaism and the state of Israel are penetrating and provocative. He has previously described Judaism as “this small, sharp-edged pebble in the shoes of mankind,” an image on which he elaborates here with instances where Judaism has held humanity to account. First, in the formation of monotheism, “the least natural thing in the world” (in contrast to the multiplicity of ancient Greek deities), the divine becomes inconceivable, unimaginable, and unreachable, yet continues — unbearably — to dispense exacting moral demands. Secondly, in Christianity, the Jewish Jesus’s commandment to sell everything and give the money to the poor reinterprets altruism not as a virtue but as a duty. (Steiner reminds us that the Sermon on the Mount is made up of quotations from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos.) Finally, the Marxist championing of justice condemns a person in a fine house with empty rooms while there are people without homes. “Three times, Jews have demanded, ‘Become a person. Become Human.’ It’s frightening. And then as a side note, Freud comes and takes away our dreams. He doesn’t even let us dream in peace.”

Freud elicits criticism from Steiner: “I’ve tried, Laure, believe me, with all my strength, to desire my mother sexually and to make an enemy of my father; I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked at all.” Aside from his misgivings about the Freudian idea of the Oedipus complex (on an uncharacteristically literal reading, it has to be said), Steiner defines human dignity as “having the strength to carry your pain yourself. […] To unload on someone else, for payment, appalls me.” He objects that the practice of psychotherapy simply doesn’t exist in life’s “true horrors” — in the death camps, for example. But he is forgetting about Viktor Frankl, the founder of the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, after Freud and Alfred Adler. Frankl not only conducted group psychotherapy sessions for his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, but also drew on his experiences there to write his unique “On the Psychology of the Concentration Camp.” These contributions are surely no less valuable than the “living books” of whom Steiner speaks: prisoners who could be consulted like texts because they “knew thousands of pages — including the Torah, the Talmud — almost entirely by heart.”

On the origins of anti-Semitism, in My Unwritten Books (2008), Steiner ventures to invert received opinion. The charge of deicide, which has been leveled at Jews for centuries, in fact stands for its opposite: “The Jew is hated not because he killed God but because he has invented and created Him.” Steiner reads monotheism as humanity’s self-critique, by means of which we have placed on ourselves an unbearable psychological and moral burden. From the unimaginable, unreachable God, whose name cannot be uttered, still emanate moral commandments beyond the best intentions of most of us. Whether or not Steiner is right about the origins of anti-Semitism, he manages to articulate a vexing philosophical tension that has persisted in almost all forms of religion since Judaism: that between divine ineffability and human answerability to a God who can never be grasped. Many of the anecdotes that Steiner recounts in A Long Saturday will be familiar to his loyal readers, including the one about the man in Kiev, who accosts Steiner in Yiddish, having recognized that he is a Jew. However, he doesn’t repeat the version in My Unwritten Books, where he asks the man how he knew (“But surely it’s obvious. The way you walk.”), and reflects beautifully on his reply: “Like one, I suppose, who has two thousand years of menace at his heels.”

At least since Language and Silence (1967), Steiner has been preoccupied with the power and limitations of language. Even as a child, he was aware that phrases, lines, and passages of great literature have the power to change everything for their readers, and he speaks compellingly to Adler about the “talismanic” phrases that connect us to life. Steiner views language as an essential vehicle for the expression of ideas, and he mourns the “billions” of thoughts that, for all we know, have been lost for ever for want of a means of expression. For him, the amazement is not only that someone “like you and me” could think as Descartes did, but also that such a thinker had the powers to capture his thoughts in writing. “Can we conceive of a person waiting for lunch or going to tea after writing down what God said in the book of Job?” Yet Steiner is as fascinated by language’s limitations as he is by its extraordinary powers. He reflects on forms of communication that go beyond speech, like music and mathematics, and on the ineffable, which transcends language — on what cannot be said or, like “the ultimate experience of the Shoah,” one shouldn’t even try to say. Steiner is drawn to the points at which language is felt to resist, where the poet and the philosopher each feel the continuity of the other’s work with their own.

These themes of ineffability and transcendence remind the reader that, for Steiner, theological questions (but not answers) are essential for an adequate understanding of artistic creation. Although the “God-question” no longer fuels the majority of contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, Steiner writes (in My Unwritten Books) that, in essence “poiesis, creation, has been an imitatio of, a wrestling with, what is taken to be divine making.” It is startling to find Steiner reaching for Christian imagery here, arguing that the nature of artistic creation is best understood Eucharistically, as the bringing into being of a “real presence.”

On this, he is part of an illuminating yet neglected line of European thinking about art. Drawing on Mallarmé via Valéry, Hans-Georg Gadamer used the same analogy to explain that, unlike prosaic, “everyday” language, poetic language doesn’t simply refer to something because that to which it refers is actually there, really present in the poem. Before Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the “transubstantiations” effected by the artist, as she transforms everything that she wants to present into paint or some other media. In A Long Saturday, we find expressed in summary form an idea developed at length and more or less systematically in Real Presences (1989) and Grammars of Creation (2001): that theological questions are prerequisite to a full understanding of the meaning of artistic creation — and indeed of meaning in general.

Steiner is a polyglot who has devoted his life to the study of the humanities. He is the epitome of a contemporary European humanist yet scathing about what Adler introduces as “so-called European humanism.” “Yes,” he replies, “it’s all in the ‘so-called.’ You might have hoped that Goethe’s garden wouldn’t be next to the Buchenwald camp; but you come out of Goethe’s garden and you’re right in a concentration camp.” The thought is not just that the humanities “put up no resistance” to the atrocities in Europe’s not-too-distant past, but also that in general they fail to humanize — perhaps they even make us inhuman. Our cultivated responsiveness to the suffering of fictional characters can perhaps displace and deaden our response to the suffering of real people. The cry of a character in a play or a novel may drown out the cry in the street.

To illustrate his point that the humanities offered “no resistance,” Steiner gives the example of the subject of yet another of his books: Martin Heidegger, who became the first Nazi rector of Freiburg University in 1933. Intellectually, Steiner is enormously indebted to Heidegger’s writings — without, however, feeling able to defend the man who wrote them. It’s here, significantly, that Steiner does permit a metaphorical reading of the Oedipus complex. Adler asks about Heidegger’s troubled relationship with his Jewish mentor, Edmund Husserl, to whom he owed much of his professional success. Steiner rightly dismisses the unfounded, persistent rumor that, as rector of the university, Heidegger personally banned his mentor from the library. But Heidegger did sign the circular letter that forbade Husserl from entering the building used by the philosophy faculty. Steiner comments that,

as in all great relationships, the student will try to destroy the master. Here, if you like, you are welcome to use Freud’s word ‘oedipal,’ with my respects […] The murder of the father from an intellectual point of view, from a theoretical point of view.

Adler encourages Steiner to explain Heidegger’s refusal to apologize for his behavior after the war, despite encouragement from his friend Karl Jaspers. Steiner responds simply: “Vanity.” But Adler’s mention of Jaspers’s name implicitly raises a stronger challenge to Steiner’s “no resistance” charge against the humanities. Jaspers was married to a Jew, and he remained in Germany with his wife during the years of Nazi rule. Banned by the Nazis from teaching and publishing, Jaspers kept writing. After the liberation, he became among the first to reflect publicly on the collective guilt felt in Germany. And although he felt isolated, Jaspers was not alone. In fact, there were many humanist intellectuals — writers, artists, philosophers — who resisted. The problem is that their stories remain largely unheard. As Steiner describes in My Unwritten Books, Jaspers wrestled in his notebooks with incomprehension over Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazis. Steiner observes that, in these notebooks (posthumously published as Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, 1978), “Jaspers comes to intuit that his own acclaimed labours may fade in the light of Heidegger’s outrageous, despotic stature.” Jaspers’s prediction of his own eclipse has to some extent proved correct, but, this brief passage notwithstanding, Steiner could surely do more to rekindle the flame.

In his essay The Idea of Europe (2004), Steiner refreshingly defines Europe not in the hackneyed economic and political terms that have been worn threadbare since Brexit, but as a cultural entity — in the more ancient and less restricted terms of the joint heritage of Athens and Jerusalem. In his conversation with Adler on the subject, he complains that Europe has become the continent of global tourism: “people travel there to see the old Europe. It’s turned into one big museum and living there is now a luxury. But talking about the future, a positive future, is difficult.” He speculates that we are entering “an era of derision,” where the religious questions that once drove civilization forward are now dismissed as “a romantic joke.” Shortly after the liberation of Heidelberg in 1945, Karl Jaspers was more optimistic about the fate of the European museum. Far from making those of us who remain in Europe into the tourist guides of a lifeless museum, he wrote: “To live as an interpreter who lovingly tends what must never be lost to the consciousness of mankind would not be to live badly […] Museum life becomes a life with an historical soul.”

It is perhaps with a similar sense of hope that Steiner sees the human condition mirrored in Europe, the reflection of a tragic vision incorporating hope as well as despair: “the two sides of the coin of the human condition.” Again, he reaches for Christian imagery: we are living in a “long Saturday” between the despair of Christ’s death on Friday, and the hope of his resurrection on Sunday. It is undeniable that the humanities have very often failed to humanize and, like Heidegger in the Third Reich, have even helped to shore up the establishment and unbalanced structures of power. But Steiner’s work shows that, in the hands of those who have been marginalized, the humanities also have the power to hold humankind to account and challenge us to become more human. There are no guarantees for the future, but this does not mean that hope is out of place. In answer to his own question, “Will humankind experience a Sunday?,” he gives a final, ambiguous response: “One wonders.”

We reach the end of A Long Saturday with the sense that not only in Steiner’s work, but for the future of the humanities, asking difficult questions is far more important than answering them.

¤

Guy Bennett-Hunter is a philosopher and writer based in London. He is the author of Ineffability and Religious Experience (2014).

The post Will It Ever Be Sunday? appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2hEz9sK via IFTTT

[topmixtrends]

IN A 1972 LETTER, Hannah Arendt speculates that a thinker has only one real thought in her life, everything else being nothing but variations on this single theme. First published in French in 2014, A Long Saturday is a short book of conversations between George Steiner and the journalist Laure Adler. The volume provides an overview of the main themes that have occupied Steiner’s mind throughout his life, but it also gives us reason to doubt Arendt’s conjecture. For while those of us familiar with Steiner’s oeuvre will hear in these conversations variations on familiar themes, we are left with no doubt as to the plurality of those themes. A Long Saturday shows Steiner to be a man of more than one book.

Steiner begins by speaking succinctly about his extraordinary biography, narrated more fully in his autobiographical Errata (1997). We hear of the effects of the “deformity” that has been part of his life since his birth in 1929, of his father’s prescience about what would happen in Europe (he had already left Vienna for Paris, where Steiner was born) and of the family’s narrow escape from Paris, in 1940, on the last American cruise ship leaving from Genoa, “just as the Germans were invading.” We are left to infer the relationships that may exist between Steiner’s biography and the themes to which his writing has kept returning over the years. As he says, “there must be some connection between statement and a life.”

Steiner’s reflections on Judaism and the state of Israel are penetrating and provocative. He has previously described Judaism as “this small, sharp-edged pebble in the shoes of mankind,” an image on which he elaborates here with instances where Judaism has held humanity to account. First, in the formation of monotheism, “the least natural thing in the world” (in contrast to the multiplicity of ancient Greek deities), the divine becomes inconceivable, unimaginable, and unreachable, yet continues — unbearably — to dispense exacting moral demands. Secondly, in Christianity, the Jewish Jesus’s commandment to sell everything and give the money to the poor reinterprets altruism not as a virtue but as a duty. (Steiner reminds us that the Sermon on the Mount is made up of quotations from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos.) Finally, the Marxist championing of justice condemns a person in a fine house with empty rooms while there are people without homes. “Three times, Jews have demanded, ‘Become a person. Become Human.’ It’s frightening. And then as a side note, Freud comes and takes away our dreams. He doesn’t even let us dream in peace.”

Freud elicits criticism from Steiner: “I’ve tried, Laure, believe me, with all my strength, to desire my mother sexually and to make an enemy of my father; I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked at all.” Aside from his misgivings about the Freudian idea of the Oedipus complex (on an uncharacteristically literal reading, it has to be said), Steiner defines human dignity as “having the strength to carry your pain yourself. […] To unload on someone else, for payment, appalls me.” He objects that the practice of psychotherapy simply doesn’t exist in life’s “true horrors” — in the death camps, for example. But he is forgetting about Viktor Frankl, the founder of the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, after Freud and Alfred Adler. Frankl not only conducted group psychotherapy sessions for his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, but also drew on his experiences there to write his unique “On the Psychology of the Concentration Camp.” These contributions are surely no less valuable than the “living books” of whom Steiner speaks: prisoners who could be consulted like texts because they “knew thousands of pages — including the Torah, the Talmud — almost entirely by heart.”

On the origins of anti-Semitism, in My Unwritten Books (2008), Steiner ventures to invert received opinion. The charge of deicide, which has been leveled at Jews for centuries, in fact stands for its opposite: “The Jew is hated not because he killed God but because he has invented and created Him.” Steiner reads monotheism as humanity’s self-critique, by means of which we have placed on ourselves an unbearable psychological and moral burden. From the unimaginable, unreachable God, whose name cannot be uttered, still emanate moral commandments beyond the best intentions of most of us. Whether or not Steiner is right about the origins of anti-Semitism, he manages to articulate a vexing philosophical tension that has persisted in almost all forms of religion since Judaism: that between divine ineffability and human answerability to a God who can never be grasped. Many of the anecdotes that Steiner recounts in A Long Saturday will be familiar to his loyal readers, including the one about the man in Kiev, who accosts Steiner in Yiddish, having recognized that he is a Jew. However, he doesn’t repeat the version in My Unwritten Books, where he asks the man how he knew (“But surely it’s obvious. The way you walk.”), and reflects beautifully on his reply: “Like one, I suppose, who has two thousand years of menace at his heels.”

At least since Language and Silence (1967), Steiner has been preoccupied with the power and limitations of language. Even as a child, he was aware that phrases, lines, and passages of great literature have the power to change everything for their readers, and he speaks compellingly to Adler about the “talismanic” phrases that connect us to life. Steiner views language as an essential vehicle for the expression of ideas, and he mourns the “billions” of thoughts that, for all we know, have been lost for ever for want of a means of expression. For him, the amazement is not only that someone “like you and me” could think as Descartes did, but also that such a thinker had the powers to capture his thoughts in writing. “Can we conceive of a person waiting for lunch or going to tea after writing down what God said in the book of Job?” Yet Steiner is as fascinated by language’s limitations as he is by its extraordinary powers. He reflects on forms of communication that go beyond speech, like music and mathematics, and on the ineffable, which transcends language — on what cannot be said or, like “the ultimate experience of the Shoah,” one shouldn’t even try to say. Steiner is drawn to the points at which language is felt to resist, where the poet and the philosopher each feel the continuity of the other’s work with their own.

These themes of ineffability and transcendence remind the reader that, for Steiner, theological questions (but not answers) are essential for an adequate understanding of artistic creation. Although the “God-question” no longer fuels the majority of contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, Steiner writes (in My Unwritten Books) that, in essence “poiesis, creation, has been an imitatio of, a wrestling with, what is taken to be divine making.” It is startling to find Steiner reaching for Christian imagery here, arguing that the nature of artistic creation is best understood Eucharistically, as the bringing into being of a “real presence.”

On this, he is part of an illuminating yet neglected line of European thinking about art. Drawing on Mallarmé via Valéry, Hans-Georg Gadamer used the same analogy to explain that, unlike prosaic, “everyday” language, poetic language doesn’t simply refer to something because that to which it refers is actually there, really present in the poem. Before Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the “transubstantiations” effected by the artist, as she transforms everything that she wants to present into paint or some other media. In A Long Saturday, we find expressed in summary form an idea developed at length and more or less systematically in Real Presences (1989) and Grammars of Creation (2001): that theological questions are prerequisite to a full understanding of the meaning of artistic creation — and indeed of meaning in general.

Steiner is a polyglot who has devoted his life to the study of the humanities. He is the epitome of a contemporary European humanist yet scathing about what Adler introduces as “so-called European humanism.” “Yes,” he replies, “it’s all in the ‘so-called.’ You might have hoped that Goethe’s garden wouldn’t be next to the Buchenwald camp; but you come out of Goethe’s garden and you’re right in a concentration camp.” The thought is not just that the humanities “put up no resistance” to the atrocities in Europe’s not-too-distant past, but also that in general they fail to humanize — perhaps they even make us inhuman. Our cultivated responsiveness to the suffering of fictional characters can perhaps displace and deaden our response to the suffering of real people. The cry of a character in a play or a novel may drown out the cry in the street.

To illustrate his point that the humanities offered “no resistance,” Steiner gives the example of the subject of yet another of his books: Martin Heidegger, who became the first Nazi rector of Freiburg University in 1933. Intellectually, Steiner is enormously indebted to Heidegger’s writings — without, however, feeling able to defend the man who wrote them. It’s here, significantly, that Steiner does permit a metaphorical reading of the Oedipus complex. Adler asks about Heidegger’s troubled relationship with his Jewish mentor, Edmund Husserl, to whom he owed much of his professional success. Steiner rightly dismisses the unfounded, persistent rumor that, as rector of the university, Heidegger personally banned his mentor from the library. But Heidegger did sign the circular letter that forbade Husserl from entering the building used by the philosophy faculty. Steiner comments that,

as in all great relationships, the student will try to destroy the master. Here, if you like, you are welcome to use Freud’s word ‘oedipal,’ with my respects […] The murder of the father from an intellectual point of view, from a theoretical point of view.

Adler encourages Steiner to explain Heidegger’s refusal to apologize for his behavior after the war, despite encouragement from his friend Karl Jaspers. Steiner responds simply: “Vanity.” But Adler’s mention of Jaspers’s name implicitly raises a stronger challenge to Steiner’s “no resistance” charge against the humanities. Jaspers was married to a Jew, and he remained in Germany with his wife during the years of Nazi rule. Banned by the Nazis from teaching and publishing, Jaspers kept writing. After the liberation, he became among the first to reflect publicly on the collective guilt felt in Germany. And although he felt isolated, Jaspers was not alone. In fact, there were many humanist intellectuals — writers, artists, philosophers — who resisted. The problem is that their stories remain largely unheard. As Steiner describes in My Unwritten Books, Jaspers wrestled in his notebooks with incomprehension over Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazis. Steiner observes that, in these notebooks (posthumously published as Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, 1978), “Jaspers comes to intuit that his own acclaimed labours may fade in the light of Heidegger’s outrageous, despotic stature.” Jaspers’s prediction of his own eclipse has to some extent proved correct, but, this brief passage notwithstanding, Steiner could surely do more to rekindle the flame.

In his essay The Idea of Europe (2004), Steiner refreshingly defines Europe not in the hackneyed economic and political terms that have been worn threadbare since Brexit, but as a cultural entity — in the more ancient and less restricted terms of the joint heritage of Athens and Jerusalem. In his conversation with Adler on the subject, he complains that Europe has become the continent of global tourism: “people travel there to see the old Europe. It’s turned into one big museum and living there is now a luxury. But talking about the future, a positive future, is difficult.” He speculates that we are entering “an era of derision,” where the religious questions that once drove civilization forward are now dismissed as “a romantic joke.” Shortly after the liberation of Heidelberg in 1945, Karl Jaspers was more optimistic about the fate of the European museum. Far from making those of us who remain in Europe into the tourist guides of a lifeless museum, he wrote: “To live as an interpreter who lovingly tends what must never be lost to the consciousness of mankind would not be to live badly […] Museum life becomes a life with an historical soul.”

It is perhaps with a similar sense of hope that Steiner sees the human condition mirrored in Europe, the reflection of a tragic vision incorporating hope as well as despair: “the two sides of the coin of the human condition.” Again, he reaches for Christian imagery: we are living in a “long Saturday” between the despair of Christ’s death on Friday, and the hope of his resurrection on Sunday. It is undeniable that the humanities have very often failed to humanize and, like Heidegger in the Third Reich, have even helped to shore up the establishment and unbalanced structures of power. But Steiner’s work shows that, in the hands of those who have been marginalized, the humanities also have the power to hold humankind to account and challenge us to become more human. There are no guarantees for the future, but this does not mean that hope is out of place. In answer to his own question, “Will humankind experience a Sunday?,” he gives a final, ambiguous response: “One wonders.”

We reach the end of A Long Saturday with the sense that not only in Steiner’s work, but for the future of the humanities, asking difficult questions is far more important than answering them.

¤

Guy Bennett-Hunter is a philosopher and writer based in London. He is the author of Ineffability and Religious Experience (2014).

The post Will It Ever Be Sunday? appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2hEz9sK

[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

12th Nov >> Fr. Martin's Gospel Reflection on Matthew 25:1-13 for Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A: ‘Stay awake’.

Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

Matthew 25:1-13

Jesus told this parable to his disciples: ‘The kingdom of heaven will be like this: Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were sensible: the foolish ones did take their lamps, but they brought no oil, whereas the sensible ones took flasks of oil as well as their lamps. The bridegroom was late, and they all grew drowsy and fell asleep. But at midnight there was a cry, “The bridegroom is here! Go out and meet him.” At this, all those bridesmaids woke up and trimmed their lamps, and the foolish ones said to the sensible ones, “Give us some of your oil: our lamps are going out.” But they replied, “There may not be enough for us and for you; you had better go to those who sell it and buy some for yourselves.” They had gone off to buy it when the bridegroom arrived. Those who were ready went in with him to the wedding hall and the door was closed. The other bridesmaids arrived later. “Lord, Lord,” they said “open the door for us.” But he replied, “I tell you solemnly, I do not know you.” So stay awake, because you do not know either the day or the hour.’

Gospel (USA)

Matthew 25:1–13

Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!

Jesus told his disciples this parable: “The kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones, when taking their lamps, brought no oil with them, but the wise brought flasks of oil with their lamps. Since the bridegroom was long delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight, there was a cry, ‘Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all those virgins got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.�� But the wise ones replied, ‘No, for there may not be enough for us and you. Go instead to the merchants and buy some for yourselves.’ While they went off to buy it, the bridegroom came and those who were ready went into the wedding feast with him. Then the door was locked. Afterwards the other virgins came and said, ‘Lord, Lord, open the door for us!’ But he said in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, I do not know you.’ Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

Reflections (3)

(i) Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Many would know from experience that wedding ceremonies do not always go according to plan. I remember a priest telling me who works in a parish down the country that at one wedding he was the celebrant no one remembered to bring the civil registry form that is signed after Mass by the couple, the two witnesses and the priest. The journey to get the form was about a thirty-mile round trip. As you can imagine, the wedding Mass started somewhat late. In my experience, most wedding Masses start later than the time for which they are booked. I was invited to no less than two humanist weddings during the Summer, never having been at one before. They both started bang on time. My sense was that a late start would have been seriously frowned upon by the solemniser.

The wedding ceremony described in the parable of today’s gospel reading certainly got off to a late start and it was the groom who was late. We cannot be sure of the precise form that the wedding ceremony took in the time of Jesus. It seems that it was customary for the groom to first come to the house of the bride late in the day and then to take his bride to his own house for a celebratory meal. Young unmarried women stationed outside the bride’s house would go out to meet the groom on his arrival and then accompany the couple to the groom’s house with lighted torches. It was an important role. It had the practical purpose of lighting the way in the darkness but it also provided a real celebratory atmosphere. In the parable, five of the young women had enough oil to keep their torches burning, in spite of the groom’s delay. The other five had enough oil, provided all went according to plan and the groom arrived on time. There was no point in the five who came prepared for the long haul sharing their oil with the other five because, as they said, there wasn’t enough oil for all ten to last the length of the procession. It could have all ended disastrously.

Jesus often looked out upon the day to day lives of people and saw something deeper there than others saw. The story Jesus tells begins, ‘the kingdom of heaven will be like this’. He recognized some dimension of God’s kingdom in the ordinary experiences of people. The day to day happenings of life spoke to Jesus about our relationship with God. The simple message that Jesus draws from the experience of this wedding party is, ‘Stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour’. ‘Stay awake’ in the sense of ‘be attentive’ or ‘be prepared’. In the writings of Israel’s prophets, God was often portrayed as the bridegroom and the people of Israel as the bride. In the gospels, Jesus speaks of himself as the bridegroom. On one occasion when his disciples were criticized by the Pharisees for not fasting, Jesus replied, ‘the wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them’, clearly referring to himself. The first believers would have associated the bridegroom in the parable with God or with Jesus. The parable encourages us to be alert and prepared for the Lord’s coming, and, in particular, to be alert for the long haul. The wisdom of the five of the bridesmaids consisted in their having enough oil to keep their torches burning for the long haul.

There is a reading often read at funeral Masses from Paul’s second letter to Timothy, where he says, ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith’. Coming towards the end of his earthly life, Paul could say that he kept the light of his faith burning for the long haul, until the end. We need a durable faith in these times. Every person’s journey of faith has its ups and downs. Our faith can be strong at one time in our lives and weak at another. What matters is that we finish the race of faith, that we keep the flame of faith burning to the end. We keep the eyes of our faith fixed on the Lord, even when darkness comes over us and we wonder, ‘Where is the Lord? What’s keeping him?’ There is a lovely line in today’s responsorial psalm, ‘On you I muse through the night’. Being attentive to the Lord during the night, including the dark night of the spirit, the night of the Lord’s seeming absence, is a vital part of the journey of faith. Today’s first reading reminds us that this attentiveness to the Lord, day in and day out, night in and night out, for the long haul, is always a response to the Lord’s attentiveness to us. When Jewish writers spoke about Wisdom as a female figure, as in today’s first reading, it was really a way of speaking about God. According to that reading, ‘Wisdom is found by those who look for her’ because ‘she is sitting at your gates’. The Lord is always near to us when we seek him. He remains at the gate, the door, of our lives, attentive to us, even when the night seems long. He asks us to be as faithfully attentiveness to him as he is to us.

And/Or

(ii) Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

It is lovely to be met by someone when we arrive home from a journey. To be greeted by a familiar face and then to be escorted from the airport or the railway station or the port to our final destination makes all the difference. To be met by a friendly and familiar face is all the more gratifying if our arrival has been delayed. As the minutes tick by, we wonder if the friend who promised to meet us will still be there when we arrive. Doubting their presence, we might find ourselves thinking about other, less convenient, ways of negotiating the last, short stage of the journey. Recognizing the hoped-for presence in the crowd, despite our very late arrival, makes us all the more appreciative of their coming. Our delay has changed nothing. They have been true to their word, in spite of the inconvenience of the unexpected delay.

Perhaps the bridegroom, in today’s gospel reading, was equally pleased to find that at least some of the bridesmaids were there to meet and escort him to the wedding banquet, in spite of his very late arrival. The festive procession would happen regardless! Thank God for those wise enough to have had enough oil in reserve in the event of a long delay. The darkness would be lit up with bright lights after all. The faithfulness of at least some of the bridesmaids was all the more appreciated, because it required foresight, planning and attentiveness.

We value faithfulness in others, especially when we know that it has cost them something and has made demands on them. We appreciate it when people do what is asked of them, when not to have done so would be understandable. Those who remain focused on the task and alert to their calling, in spite of an unexpected turn of events, are great treasures. It is one thing to be faithful when all goes according to plan. It is another thing to remain faithful when the plan unravels and we find ourselves facing into something we had not bargained for.

When the Lord calls us to be his followers, it is always for the long haul. When he addresses us as ‘the light of the world’ (Mt 5:14), he looks to us to keep our light burning to the end. The words addressed to parents in the Baptismal Rite, immediately after the baptism of their children, express this beautifully, ‘May they (your children) keep the flame of faith alive in their hearts. When the Lord comes, may they go out to meet him with all the saints in the heavenly kingdom’. Baptism calls on us to keep the flame of faith alive in our hearts, until the Lord’s coming. The Lord looks to us to keep that flame burning, so that its light is there to greet him, regardless of the lateness or strangeness of his coming to us.

In the times in which we live, it can be a struggle to keep the flame of faith alive in our hearts. Some may feel that the harsh winds of recent weeks in our own Diocese are threatening to extinguish the flame of their faith. Like those in the gospel reading today, they may be tempted to cry out, ‘Our lamps are going out’. Yet, the Lord does not leave us without oil in these difficult times. We have the assurance of the first reading that ‘Wisdom is bright, and does not grow dim’. If we understand Christ as Wisdom, the wisdom of God, we are being assured that the light of Christ’s presence does not grow dim. We are heartened to hear in that same reading that Wisdom, Christ, walks around looking for those worthy of him, and graciously shows himself to them. The Lord comes to us in our hour of need. The oil of his faithful presence to us ensures that our own lamps, the flame of our faith, need not go out. What is asked of us is that, in the words of the responsorial psalm, we gaze on him in the sanctuary. As we turn in prayer to the Lord in our need, he will keep us faithful, and the fire of his love will keep the flame of our faith burning brightly.

Followers of Christ are called to be long-haul people. Like the wise bridesmaids, we are to be there with our lamps lit, even if the bridegroom arrives at a ridiculously late hour. We are to keep the flame of faith burning through the long hours of darkness when the Lord seems to be absent. We are called to have a faith that endures, the only kind of faith worth having. If we are to have a faith that endures the scandalous frailty of the church and the hostility of its critics, we need, in the words of the letter to the Hebrews, to look to Jesus, ‘the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross’. It is in looking to him, whose face always shines upon us, that the light of own faith will continue to shine.

And/Or

(iii) Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

We all know from experience that things do not always work out the way we expect them to. We can plan for something, but then we can discover that it does not happen or it happens in a different way to how we had expected it to happen. In the words of the poet Robert Burns, ‘the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley’ –often go awry, as we might say. The unexpected can come along and knock our plans for six. The parable Jesus speaks in today’s gospel reading reflects that human experience of the disconcerting impact of the unexpected coming along. The ten bridesmaids had a reasonable expectation that the bridegroom would arrive at a certain time for them to escort him to the wedding banquet with his bride. However, as is often the case at weddings, everything happened much later than was expected, only on this occasion it was not the bride that was late but the bridegroom. Five of the bridesmaids, in their wisdom, had planned for this possible scenario and five had not. Those who had anticipated the unexpected had brought enough oil to ensure that their lamps kept burning through the long hours of waiting. The five who had not anticipated the unexpected ran out of oil and had to go and buy some, and as a result they could not provide the escort for the happy couple and found themselves locked out of the wedding banquet. I’m sure many of us would have some sympathy for the poor foolish bridesmaids as they are called. There but for the grace of God go many of us. I tend to work on the basis that things are going to work out in a certain way, and when they don’t I can be easily thrown; I’m not always great at dealing with the unexpected or managing the unplanned.

Yet, it is a great gift to have the wisdom that enables one to adjust to the unexpected. The wisdom of the five wise bridesmaids consisted in doing what was expected of them, in spite of the unexpected turn of events. I read recently something recently about Herbert Hoover who served as President of the United States from 1929 to 1933; he was in office during the Great Depression and at the time of the Wall Street crash. Reflecting back on that time, many years later, he said, ‘Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as in knowing what to do next’. The wisdom of the five bridesmaids wasn’t anything extraordinary; it was very practical. It consisted not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as in knowing what to do next. They had the resources of oil that enabled them to do what had to be done next, even though the circumstances were not ideal and things had not worked out quite as they had expected. We all need resources that enable us to do what has to be done in the day to day circumstances of life, including those unexpected circumstances that are part of life.

The wise bridesmaids had resources of oil that enabled their lamps to remain lighting during the long and dark hours of unexpected waiting. We all need those inner resources that keep our faith, hope and charity burning brightly in those moments when we find ourselves having to deal with the unexpected. For us as Christians the inner resources that keep our own lamp of faith, hope and love burning are the Lord and the Holy Spirit. It is those resources that give us the wisdom we need to do what we have to do, regardless of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said that ‘Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it’. It is our relationship with the Lord that opens us up to that kind of wisdom because the Lord himself is rich in that kind of wisdom. He certainly had that wisdom that consists in doing the next thing he had to do, doing it with his whole heart, and finding delight in doing it. This kind of wisdom is not something esoteric; it is not for the select few. It is the Lord’s gift to all of us; it is offered and available to all of us. That is the message of the first reading today, which speaks of Wisdom as easily found by those who look for her, as making herself known to them; she is described there as sitting at our gates, as walking about looking for those who are worthy of her and graciously showing herself to us as we go. This is the wisdom of God, the wisdom of the Lord, which is freely given to all who seek for her.

This kind of wisdom which consists in doing the next thing we have to do, doing it with all our heart and finding delight in doing it is well captured in a simple well-known story. A holy old monk was sweeping up the fallen leaves in the monastery garden when a visitor asked him: ‘What would you do, brother, if you knew you were to die in ten minutes’. The old monk replied, ‘I’d carry on sweeping’.

Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or  frmartinhogan@gmail.com

Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ie  Please join us via our webcam.

Twitter: @SJtBClontarfRC.

Facebook: St John the Baptist RC Parish, Clontarf.

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[thebeautyoftorah]

Vayakhel-Pekude

bs'd

Shalom, I hope you are well.

My second book "Healing Anger" is about to be published. If you want a dedication for a relative or sponsor the book please send me a message.

I am also offering all of you the opportunity to share in the mitzvah to honor a loved one by sponsoring my weekly parsha review, or for refua shelema (healing), or for shiduch, Atzlacha (success), etc. My weekly review goes out to over 5000 people in English and Spanish around the world. Contact me for more details.

Feel free to forward these words of Torah to any other fellow Jew.

Enjoy it and Shabbat Shalom.

Vayakhel-Pekude

The Best Team Ever Assembled-The Jewish People

On this week’s double Parsha, the Torah recounts how Moshe and Betzalel made all the garments for the Kohen Gadol, how the Jewish people brought the Mishkan {Tabernacle} Tent and its utensils in front of Moshe for his approval, and how he finally erected the Tabernacle and initiated its Service.

There is a wonderful lesson from Rabbi Chaim ben Attar (1696 – 1743) in his commentary Ohr HaChayim on the following verse:

“All the work of the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting, was completed, and the Children of Israel had done everything that G-d commanded Moshe, so did they do” (1).

This verse is difficult to understand. For it was not the Children of Israel as a whole who did all the work in designing, crafting, weaving, and constructing the Tabernacle and all its parts. It was primarily Moshe, Betzalel and the skilled craftsman who did it. The Jewish people collectively donated the gold, silver, bronze and the rest of the materials that were needed for the construction of the Tabernacle, but they were not involved in the actual building. So how can the Torah state that “the Children of Israel had done everything that G-d commanded Moshe, so did they do”?

The Ohr HaChayim answers beautifully:

“It seems that the Torah here is teaching us a general rule about the way Torah can be observed successfully, by showing how the Israelites are like a team where each one works for the other and needs the other. The Torah (in its entirety) is only capable of fulfillment by means of the entire Jewish nation. Every individual Jew is charged with the duty to perform those commandments which he is able to fulfill. The rest of the commandments which he cannot fulfill [an Israelite cannot perform service in the Temple, for instance], can be done by others and are considered as if he had fulfilled them. This idea is hinted to in the well-known verse in Vayikra 19:18: “You shall love your fellow as yourself”, which can also be read “as he is part of yourself”. Without one’s fellow Jew, no individual Jew would be able to function as a ‘total’ Jew. Each Jew has a task to help another Jew to become a whole Jew by means of his fulfilling commandments which the second Jew is unable to fulfill either at that moment or ever. As a result, one’s fellow Jew is not “someone else” but is part of “oneself”. This is the only way in which we can reconcile ourselves to G-d’s commanding us to fulfill 613 commandments – each one of which is meant to rectify a different part of our body and soul – yet it is impossible for one individual to fulfill all of them! Clearly, Torah and its observance then is not only a project for the individual but for the community. The Torah drove home this point by legislating laws which can be performed only by women, only by Levites, only by priests, etc. Our verse describing the whole nation as performing what G-d had commanded Moshe that they do – even though most Jews only donated gold and were not involved in the Tabernacle’s construction at all - teaches this powerful lesson.” The Malbim explains that the purpose of the Mishkan was to create a Koma Shelema (all-encompassing entity) of the Jewish people by combining all the different maalot (attributes), kochot (talents),and levels of kedusha of the various members of the nation. Each would contribute his or her own wealth and skills, and they wouls all be unified with the common goal of creating a worthy home for the Shechinah (Divine Presence).

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, in his commentary to Vayikra 19:18, echoes this idea when he expounds upon the Hebrew word for fellow, re-echa, in the verse “You shall love your fellow [raya] as yourself”. He writes that re-echa shares the same etymological root as mireh, which means “pasture”. This teaches us that everyone is to find and recognize in his fellow Jew his mireh, “the pasturage of his life”, the furthering of his own well-being, the conditions for his own (simchah) happiness[2] in life. Nobody may look on the progress of another as an obstacle to his own progress.

This is such a powerful idea. An idea that can literally change the way we look at our fellow Jews. Are we going to see them as competitors whose very success threatens us? Or will we view them as members of our team - Team Jewish People – in the “relay race of life”, where if they win, we win.

The Torah here is reminding us that we cannot do it all alone and that we were not meant to do it all alone. Each one of us has to do his part and together - as members of the same team - we can accomplish our goals. May Hashem help us to become a real united team (Together Everyone Accomplishes More). _______________________________ [1] Shemot 39:32. [2] The word “simchah” (happiness) in Hebrew has its root in the word “machah” (erase). If a person really wants to rejoice in life, he must forsake his cravings to satisfy his personal needs, and, in a certain sense, he must forget about himself as if he “erases” his own being.

Le Iluy nishmat Eliahu ben Simcha, Mordechai ben Shlomo, Perla bat Simcha, Abraham Meir ben Leah,Moshe ben Gila,Yaakov ben Gila, Sara bat Gila, Yitzchak ben Perla, Leah bat Chavah, Abraham Meir ben Leah.

Refua Shelema of Yaacov ben Miriam, Gila bat Tzipora, Tzipora bat Gila, Dvir ben Leah, Elimelech Dovid ben Chaya Baila, Noa bat Batsheva Devorah and  Dovid Yehoshua ben Leba Malka.

Atzlacha to Shmuel ben Mazal tov and Zivug agun to Marielle Gabriela bat Gila.