Toward Attention

Adam's Rib

The Hebrew word for Man is Ish, and is written so:

איש

The Hebrew word for Wo-man is Isha, and is written so:

אשה

Notice that the difference between the words is only one character -- the middle character in the case of Ish (man) and the final character in the case of Isha (woman -- keep in mind that Hebrew reads from right to left).

Notice the middle character in the word for man: kind of looks like a rib, doesn't it? --a rib on the side of the word, no?

People need to wake up and love this story for its truth and its beauty -- and stop this Creationist nonsense.

The Glory of Moses and the Glory of the New Testament

The Epistle section for today's daily scripture reading is from 2 Corinthians:

2Corinthians 3:4-11

    And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious? For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory. For even that which was made glorious had no glory in this respect, by reason of the glory that excelleth. For if that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious.

I could not help but wonder, as I read this, whether the Apostle is assuming that some of this glory has to do with liturgical functions (and thus whether there is some significant liturgical continuity between the Jerusalem temple liturgy, which is typologicall united with the Sinai account here referenced), or whether the remark on "spirit gives life" (contrasted with "the letter killing") implies that the glory is not outward (and may very well have no outward manifestations), but inward (which might justify a kind of liturgical minimalism, such as is often assumed by biblical scholars to have been the case in the NT era).

I only ask this because "glory" is a technical word for theophany often, and theophany as it has to do with the divine radiance generated within a creature -- such as Moses, or, within the temple/tabernacle, in the "garments of glory," the garments that the high priest would wear.

Jesus Himself often spoke of "glory," especially in the latter chapters of St. John's Gospel.

Sorry for the sloppy thought, all.

Son of Hamas

There is a book that I've been interested in reading called "Son of Hamas." GQ did an interview with the author here.

The Language of Eden

Looking at this post and this post on Moseback, and this post on the genealogy of the language of Paradise, I think there has to be a way to talk about Hebrew as a primordial language legitimately -- the narrative of Eden is linked to the temple (it is, I think, ultimately a (legitimate) mythical backdrop to explain the meaning of the temple and the exile), the temple offers access to primordial reality, and the temple sevice is in Hebrew, which means that all time that flows out of such a primordial experience is, well, an exile of sorts, and the language in which had this primordial experience was in...Hebrew. It is the language of Paradise. But not the only language, as there are other mountains on which the Mountain of God is present, and they do not only speak Hebrew. The only argument I can think of to validate Hebrew as the primordial language immediately becomes more cosmic -- we can say that Hebrew has a kind of primacy among Paradisical languages, for it was on the Temple Mount that Paradise first had a language ("salvation is from the Jews") -- but it cannot claim exclusivity, not along these lines of thought and life.

The Law against Chaos and Entropy

A good article on the nature of Law in Judaism, though it is woefully unaware of how much of this is maintained both in traditional Catholicism and in Orthodoxy. I've been writing about this privately for some time as it pertains to the Christian context.

A Thanksgiving Hymn from Qumran

Hymn 19

I thank Thee, my God,

     for Thou hast dealt wondrously to dust,

     and mightily towards a creature of clay!

I thank Thee, I thank Thee!

What am I, that Thou shouldst [teach] me

     the counsel fo Thy truth,

     and give me understanding

     of Thy marvellous works;

that Thou shouldst lay hymns of thanksgiving

     within my mouth

     and [praise] upon my tongue,

     and that of my circumcised lips

     (Thou shouldst make) a seat of rejoicing?

"That of my circumcised lips, Thou shouldst make a seat of rejoicing." My mouth, circumcised, as a throne for the Glory of God -- what an honor! What purity we must seek to be fit for such a tabernacling, such a glory, such a grace!

 

Interesting Meditation on the Jewish Calendar

"According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5749.
According to the Chinese calendar, the year is 4687.
That means for 1,062 years, the Jews went without Chinese food..."

See here.

Martin Mosebach, Excerpt 7

Building on this here.

"If we aim to bring out the religious significance of ceremonies and rituals to enable them  to fulfill their religious function, it is pointless to ask questions about the historical meaning of the individual prescriptions. Often enough, historically speaking, liturgical actions go back to certain practical necessities, to the particular architectural features of some Roman church, to customs of an agrarian society, or to particular local and quite secular usages. This is all very interesting, and indeed it is wonderful how closely liturgy's treasure-house links us to the past, to the vast army of the dead who were Christians before us and without whom we would not have become Christians: but from a religious point of view it has no value."

"Just as noble metals are used to produce the sacred vessels, making something profane into something sacred, so too the contingencies and particular events of history have turned, in the liturgy, into something holy; and holy things must always be regarded and assessed in a different way from profane things. The Hasidic Jews, the exponents of Europe's last mystical movement, said that every word in their holy books was an angel. That is how I want to regard the rubrics of the Missal: for me, every prescription of the Missal is an angel. Once I have recognized that an angel is responsible for every liturgical action, I shall never be in danger of regarding liturgy as something lifeless or formalistic or as a historical relic, the meaningless detritus of time's onward march. It also preserves us from the unspiritual, legalistic, and scholastic way of looking at things that judges the mysteries of the liturgy according to the categories of "validity" and "minimal requirements."

From this book.

Greg Epstein: Harvard Chaplain, Atheist Superstar?

I read this article in the Boston Phoenix yesterday, and thought it worth posting.

I hope to comment on it later (though I may never get to it), but it seems that several of the phrases the columnist uses -- shared by those he writes about and the audiences he writes to/for? -- are suspicious. There is no atheist community (which, interestingly, was one of the very things he notes that Epstein is attempting to remedy), and so speaking about a breach or a "schism" within the "atheist community" sounds a bit false. Atheism is sort of like certain forms of home-grown "terrorism" -- it's spontaneously generated by our social and cultural milieu as an inevitable shadow or remainder, and its essence, determined by those very forces of control and isolation that they reject, is essentially autonomous and anti-community. To speak about the products of (A) this movement and (B) the general swathe of ignorant and culturally amnesiac secularists whose "default" setting is whatever they buy into from the media machinery as separated brethren is both true and false. It is true that the current architecture of mainstream society creates both these types of people. It is false to say that they are both expressions of atheism.

I could go on about other issues, but I think I'll stop there, and attend to cleaning my apartment and making my wife happy.

The Last of Levenson on Evil

As promised, the last excerpt from Levenson:

Apocalyptic eschatology can be fruitfully conceived as a process of purgation: reality sheds its negative aspects. In part, these doomed but still potent negative beings can be seen as hypostatizations of what earlier stages in the tradition had unself-consciously considered the negative side of God himself. Such hypostatization can be seen already within the Hebrew Bible. An instructive example is the Chronicler's handling of David's catastrophic decision to take a census of Israel and Judah. Whereas 2 Samuel 24:1 says that "the anger of the LORD again flared up against Israel; and He incited David against them," 1 Chronicles 21:1 tells us that "Satan arose against Israel and incited David to number Israel." Satan has replaced YHWH in the morally questionable role of instigator of sin and cause of destruction. A more refined and sophisticated sensibility has proven less able to tolerate the idea that God can be a cause of evil. Indeed, the process can be seen in the very liturgy of the rabbis, which changes God's boast that he "makes peace and creates evil" into the evasive affirmation that he "makes peace and creates everything." In both the biblical and the Rabbinic examples, the tendency is toward an exculpation of the deity. The reverse side of the coin should not, however, be overlooked: as God is exculpated, evil is divinized. A ragtag tribe like the Amalekites becomes an enduring principle of evil that interferes with God's very integrity. In Rabbinic thought Amalek is the hypostatization of God's authorship of a world in which Jewry suffers for being themselves and of his willingness to allow genocidal anti-Semites to survive to strike again. God becomes God, the good God realizes his goodness, only when he overcomes his negative pole. Until then, his unity is fragmented, and his name incomplete. This is a theology with absolute faith in God's ultimate goodness, but a rather qualified faith in his proximate goodness. God's goodness will be established. In the meantime, we have only earnests of it.