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To the Jew, the Nazi is a problem, a large one, but the Nazi’s problem is not the Jew’s problem.
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25 Tuesday Feb 2014
Posted in A Little Wisdom
Category Archives: A Little Wisdom
FTAC – “We’ll Wind Up Helping One Another.”
20 Thursday Feb 2014
While we figure out how language sustains conflict in the head (and perhaps catch up or re-read — in my case — Benny Morris or Efraim Karsh), perhaps it’s time to transform the Hamas and Fatah sense of civilizational mission in a way that serves rather than ravages their respective communities. 1948, 1967, 1973, the First Intifada, the Second Intifada — these were not about justice but the elimination of Jewry.
The middle east conflict is not the only conflict in the world; X vs Muslim (Burma, Congo) is not the only cultivated paradigm for conflict — nor is ambitious monotheist succession such a great cause for humanity overall, although I like this “one God” thing.
Let’s stop this fighting here.
Five virtues might help with our nurturing our developing global society: compassion, empathy, humility, inclusion, integrity. Dictators and wealthy narcissists use the image of identification with those values to manipulate their followers (track Assad on that, or Robert Mugabe), but they don’t really embrace them. We, however, might and we’ll wind up helping one another.
The wisdom is probably old, but the act of writing includes the writer’s rediscovery of old standbys and themes.
The same words may be incanted by way of the top of the column to the left of this article.
They’re their to help create a world in which a common soul may know what is going on around him with some reliability born of the dignity of being spoken to honestly.
The inspiration for the note was a thread sidetracked toward the middle east conflict, and on Facebook there are plenty of hate-peace peace groups, and some collegial peace groups, and some anti-Semitic peace groups: a place for everyone at the git-go! One hopes, however, for fewer of the hateful — and of the hateful to anyone — over time.
As suggested by this blog, what we call bigotry or prejudice may be a function of earliest language uptake and, for each language culture, the manner of listening (programming) conveyed from one generation to another — some ears obey all; some question all — and then norms and ambitions supplied (scripting) to those ears.
One does not “win” in the world by leaving himself exclusive and isolated in it.
There is in that the tragedy of the “malignant narcissist”.
Some cultures having derived cultural self-concept along similar patterns may lead themselves to similar suffering. By person, place, state, and region, may we turn that inclination away from ourselves, collectively, worldwide.
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FTAC – The Idea of Justice – Not On A Whim
10 Tuesday Dec 2013
That contemptuous phrase “the whims of man” applies well to autocratic societies in which, indeed, the whims of one man control a great swath of humanity, but with those, one knows the methods: to those who humiliate themselves before their regimes: bribery, nepotism, and patronage: i.e., those get fed like dogs; to those who threaten such regimes: blackmail, intimidation, murder.
In contemporary realpolitik, the path ends with the suffocation of the constituent humanity or the overthrow of the regime.
Syria’s a good case in point today: I cannot figure out on whose side God has appeared. From the survey of that unfolding tragedy, He would seem altogether absent.
One more thing: the struggle for truly just systems of law beneficial, invested in, and trusted by all has not come about through whim.
The struggle for decency in human relationships by way of ethical and moral argument that finds expression through the law has a millennial existence, one that would seem to have its roots in the depths of tragedies, small and large, attending the human experience across oceanic time.
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Rest in Peace, Nelson Mandela
05 Thursday Dec 2013
Posted in A Little Wisdom
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▶ Remembering activist and peacemaker Nelson Mandela – YouTube – PBS, 18:24 – 12/5/2013.
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Nelson Mandela Dead: South African Former President Dies – Business Insider 12/5/2013.
But wait!
Of course this would break around 5 p.m., Eastern Time.
Is Nelson Mandela Dead? Twitter Rumors Abound | HEAVY – 12/5/2013.
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We know the old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
Death watch?
Confirmed?
I think with this, I’m ready for that “first row seat to history” (as opposed to this one on the second row).
Either that, or I’m going to write fiction.
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Nelson Mandela dies at 95 – The Globe and Mail – 12/5/2013.
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(CNN) — Nelson Mandela, the revered statesman who emerged from prison after 27 years to lead South Africa out of decades of apartheid, has died, South African President Jacob Zuma announced late Thursday.
Nelson Mandela dies – CNN.com – 12/5/2013.
The bold and italics are mine, and the CNN reporting works for me.
Addendum 12/6/2013
An Ideal For which I am Prepared to Die – Nelson Mandela – YouTube – Posted 9/26/2011.
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Addendum 12/8/2013
Still, Mandela was no orthodox leftist. In his autobiography, he discusses how he was strongly influenced by the Atlantic Charter of 1941, a mission statement shaped by the visions of Churchill and FDR for a post-war order in which freedom would reign, fear and want would be banished, and self-government would emerge as a core principle. Elsewhere in the book, he takes care to distinguish the African nationalism he subscribed to from the communist beliefs that prevailed among those he worked with—and his understanding of nationalism bears a close resemblance to the national movements that surfaced in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, including Zionism.
Nelson Mandela and Zionism | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com – 12/8/2013.
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From The Awesome Conversation:
The good guy isn’t always good, and the bad guy isn’t always bad. Had Mandela embraced Saddam Hussein too, it would not have made Hussein any less criminal in his dictatorship and kleptocracy. Fortunately, while we cheer any number of enlightened and humanist sentiments and ourselves pick up the battle against barbarism and the despots who promote it, we’re also independent as thinkers in our own right and know not to make idols of our heroes.
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FTAC – God, Moses, Pharaoh, and Time
22 Friday Nov 2013
Moses merely facilitates God’s design in that story — and keep in mind we read these stories very carefully and a little differently — and what we notice is that God, being God, knows what’s going to happen to Pharaoh.
Moses, of course, has no idea what’s going to happen to Pharaoh.
And the reader, reading for the first time or the hundredth, may note that Pharaoh, all said and done after the tenth plague, the slaughtering of the first born, is not conquered so much as abandoned, then isolated, then left to see his pursuing army drowned.
Quite a story.
The Jews don’t get Egypt — and they don’t get off easy either: for their suffering, they get 40 years wandering in the wilderness; and Moses never makes it across the Jordan to the Promised Land. In exchange, I guess, the Jews and the “mixed multitude that left with them — get to own themselves in their next generation.
Today we ask, “what was Pharaoh?”
Whatever the answer to that, we leave it behind us, locked in history, gone forever.
For many Pakistanis, I may be the first conservative Jew with whom they have chatyped or met face to face via Skype.
I had not intended to engage in “Torah study” or to spew homilies; yet these conversations about civility — which today having to do with polite speech helped launch the above observation (my correspondent noted, “It often reminds me [of] the blessed words of the Holy Prophet Moses ( Peace and blessings be upon him ), while addressing the Pharaoh in delivering the divine Message of the All-Mighty to him” — and ethics, faith, and morality come up and I engage with abbreviated knowledge, talent, and tools I have at hand.
Judaism’s emphasis on compelling ethical argument, each line and passage urging us to examine and fight — with words — over the meaning intended produces its analogs in law and social behavior and comportment. Hillel the Elder’s update, which is how I think about his work in the interpretation of law, has sealed a great philosophy into the Greco-Roman architecture of the western character and its humanity.
For a blog frequently referencing “malignant narcissism” the trace back to Pharaoh stands first in the line of channel markers denoting the worst inhumanity imaginable — and then some — experienced by the Jews and others. If today for the Jews we should stop at Hitler while mulling over resurgent and similar nationalism in Hungary, I would ask why not afford and expand these ideas to Syrians deeply suffering between a ruthless dictator losing his state and an equally ruthless and ugly religious juggernaut murdering its way into taking it over? The part of Arab public relations that demonizes the Jews only does so to keep the promise and reality of freedom and political equality and significance — equal voice, individual, family, and community in the operations of place and state — from displacing its captive souls.
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FTAC – More Than 7,000 Ways of Addressing the World
12 Tuesday Nov 2013
In the arts, we may refer to a certain state in performance as contained and connected and that with God, nature, and the universe. — put together some observations in psychology — Ecstasy: a Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (1961). I happen to think our Homo sapiens sapiens is as wild a species as any but with a large brain and a phenomenal mouth, and one has proven capable of great creativity and intuition and the other of aiding the invention of languages (of which there are more than 7,000 separable extant as I type in just one) and language culture, each of the thousands embracing and entertaining one form of divinity or another.
Mine (edited lightly).
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In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to writing that was more poetic and expressive. I also wanted a more viable balance between my work with words and my work with wood, especially furniture for worship settings.
William J. Everett’s Blog | Reflections on Writing, Woodworking, and Ethics
Human life (actually for those bedding down on Siberian ledges to watch the sunset, bear life too) entails, whether we or the bears like it or not, an aesthetic and spiritual emotional and emotive experience.
That’s life.
The wonder is how many approaches have been adopted, created, discovered, embraced, invented, and modified in service to those experiences.
Betwixt and between, then and now, but then I turned a first graduate degree toward facets of the experience of leisure time — boredom, ecstasy,flow, motivation, peak experiences, self-concept, self-as-entertainer, etc. — and among the predicates were youth, mountains, and music.
Not much has changed about me, but my views have been broadened, and here in the blogland of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, it may be worth taking a moment while fighting rages in Syria, Iran struggles to obtain The Bomb, and terror drips into everyday life somewhere in Iraq and Pakistan on a daily to weekly basis that our humanity is of just one species and that species, about 7.124 billion in number, communicates by way of more than 7,000 languages, each addressing the aesthetic and spiritual percepts of its speakers.
We should not be fighting.
We should be awed.
Briefest Introductory Reference
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FTAC – On Islam in Conflict
22 Tuesday Oct 2013
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The ideology writ culturally large (Quran + Hadith + Sectarian Emotion) affords license and then the character and chemistry of a certain kind of zealot does the rest. Whether that zealot represents a diseased branch of the whole or an ever latent perverse florescence is a part of “shimmer”, and if it’s always there, the religion will continue to fail as observed and measured by the external conflicts it foments and the internal violence it hosts.
Yesterday’s “Islamist” bombing of a bus in Volgograd becomes unfortunately another defining moment in the fate of Islam in the world even though it represents a comparatively thin “intelligraphic” band of Muslims, i.e., those engaged in murder integrated with a religious program, whether by Quran-based imperative, the inspiration of an Hadith, or culture-wide invention and emulation (shared cultural attitude).
Related: BBC News – Russia bus bomb: Volgograd blast kills six – 10/21/2012.
Beside the thin band of evildoers actively plotting violence — one may imagine the Rings of Saturn here — there seems to be a broader one of affiliates and sponsors bent on imposing Muslim will on non-Muslims or producing shadow governments tuned to Muslim Brotherhood imperatives regardless of surrounding cultural, economic, political, and social states of affairs.
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Back to the Middle Ages: Viktor Orbán at the Christian Democratic International
15 Tuesday Oct 2013
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(I am resting today, so far as I know . . . .)
I have been wondering for some time when it is that the media “experts” in the Prime Minister’s Office decide to publish his speeches in full on his own website and when they are satisfied with only a summary. Lately I’m coming to the conclusion that they opt for a summary when the exact words that were uttered are not really suitable for a wider audience. Or perhaps when the prime minister’s speech was delivered at a conference where others also had a chance to talk and might have voiced opinions that are not in line with those of Hungary’s prime minister.
I suspect the latter may have been the case with the speech delivered by Orbán at the conference (“On the Road to a Stronger Europe”) of the Christian Democratic International held in Budapest on October 11. At the core of the speech was Orbán’s belief that “the denial of…
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