Christianity, Judaism & Jews, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist
…Christian forgiveness is… contingent on the sinner’s repentance, and can be granted only by the one sinned against, and not by the various proxies of popularity. Instant expiation flows more from the values of the 1960s than from any doctrinal Christian values…
The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, No-fault Forgiveness is Fatal. Feel free to comment.
I’m getting sick of the determinists who whittle down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages, or something. This article in the New York Magazine puts paid to such reductionism:
“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”
At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really. The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.
Jay Homnick writes insightfully about the topic:
“In fact this analysis is not only demonstrably incorrect, its blind-man-and-the-elephant methodology doomed it from the start. Let’s ask this: is it logical to say that the people who produced the world’s greatest literary work in the 24 books of Scripture, the most powerful (and unprecedented) poetry in history in the Psalms and Song of Songs, and the most ingenious legal compilation, the Talmud, did not have these smarts? That by the merest coincidence their offspring fell into an ironic social anomaly two millennia later and only then achieved a belated smartening?”
He follows up with equal bite in an e-mail exchange:
“As for that rubbish about Jews suddenly getting smart because they had to suddenly figure out that 8 percent of a hundred dollars was 8 dollars, while in the old days they could just farm without having to figure out their overhead and the necessary profit margin to make it profitable, how crass is that?!”
True, “Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world’s population and a mere 3 percent of the United States’, [yet] they account… for 27 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent of the globe’s chess champions.” But if this Jewish menace upsets you, take comfort in the knowledge that there are plenty of stupid Jews to go around.
Critique, English, Hebrew Testament, Ilana Mercer, Judaism & Jews, Literature
Here’s a Letter-to-the-Editor of the British Times Literary Supplement. They wanted to publish it; I knew they would; Britons like a pedant. But they want private information about me, which I’m unwilling to disclose. What is it about so many private organizations these days that they act like government? On making a purchase, salesclerks will routinely ask for one’s address. Are they nuts? And most people comply. My husband takes cover whenever a salesperson dares to so pry.
Dear Editor,
In his review of Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses (TLS, June 24, 2005), John Barton praises the author’s translation of the Torah for “brilliantly imitating the Hebrew without sacrificing intelligibility.”
As someone who greatly admires the biblical narrator, I certainly agree that “welter and waste” does justice to “tohu vavohu” (Genesis 1:1), which Barton or the author transliterated to read “tohu wabohu.” Whence does that bowdlerization come? There’s no “wabohu” in Genesis 1:1—there’s no “wabohu” in the Hebrew language!
The first letter in vavohu is a “vav,” which is never a “w,” and here it’s pronounced “va.” The next Barton or Alter-bungled letter is an unpunctuated “Bet” (B), pronounced “v” too. Its enunciation here is “vo.” Hence, “vavohu.” I’m not sure how better to denote an unpunctuated “Bet” in English, but it’s certainly not a “b.”
So many scholarly writers, who profess to know Hebrew, habitually muck up the English transliteration of Hebrew words. Why?
With reference to Unlearned Rabbi Rages at Ratzinger, here’s a thought: Judaism is the Mother Faith —it gave birth to Christianity (Jesus was Jewish). The proper metaphor for the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is that of parent and progeny. Self-anointed Jewish leadership, however, has managed to cast Jews as a mere faction among a multicultural mob, a position Jews (being liberals) love.
After reading Paul Sperry’s Infiltration, I am more convinced than ever that if Christians and Jews fail to form a united front, our children’s children will be destined for infidel’s dhimitude under the most unforgiving of faiths: Islam.