Should I have resisted juxtaposing these two images, the Janus coin that is one side modern (and good) and the other deeply medieval (and heartbreakingly evil)?
“Shimmer” — a term of art on this blog — has not changed, but one hopes the numbers of those arrested in yesterday have diminished while those who come forward, who have stepped forward into their own next world, have grown.
Where are the political and social scientists on change?
I don’t know where they or their numbers — observable, measurable cultural and political topology — are today.
The Jews could not have done very well against the Romans!
🙂
Revisit Titus and the horrific burning of Jerusalem.
Revisit Masada, for that matter.
The distillation and order I suggest for the uptake of a Judaic monotheism, which we all share (whether we like it or not) starts with the jurist Hillel the Elder (35-BCE to 10-CE), who produced decisions and an outlook that made Judaism less ethnic, more evolving around principle, and more accessible to conversions (uh oh). smile emoticon So: Hillel the Elder –> Jesus and Paul –> General Constantine –> General Muhammad.
We may agree on the unity (and sanctity) of life and of a natural life well lived, but our disagreements on scripture, the composition of extended works and exegesis, devolve to our ethnolinguistic cultures once more separated by geospatial relationships and by time. In retrospect, here at the advent of a new world interlaced with Internet-based communicating, our enmities seem cultivated in fear and dreadfully superficial and malignant narcissism.
At this point, no one need have the last word — not Moses, not Jesus, not Muhammad, nor our overlooked link in the end-of-the-Roman Era family guy Hillel the Elder. What we may need are new words resonant with the more noble aspects of our common humanity.
Artists and assorted creative types needs must submerge themselves with object-projects: book, essay, play, poem, screenplay. That’s what it takes to pioneer thought and fashion ideas and insights into transmissible forms, and that auto-constructed isolation may go hard on the soul — it certainly has on mine, and the desktop has added its own layer of interference with the experience of what is proximate in the way of events and people. Nonetheless, “chatyping” in response to what others spell out online proves always stimulating while the cyber-environment — global, politically across cultures, across political boundaries, across languages and religions — provides a glimpse at what today is possible and perhaps needs to become a new reality in conversation.
The Awesome Conversation itself has been nothing less than miraculous.
What comes next?
This blog has stated its six most irreducible virtues at the top of the sidebar to the left.
Those ennobling characteristics, however, may be brought to bear against a world rife with cruel and despotic leaders and their deeply manipulated and misguided (start with “state-controlled press” and end with “absolute political suppression”) followers and the messes made by related widespread conflict, diminishment, ignorance, and impoverishment.
Rome was neither built nor taken apart in a day, and while Latin has become a “dead language” — useful to the Catholic Church and to science for its stability, Hebrew has been returned to life and with it, so one may hope, interest in the preservation, survival, and evolution of some approximately 7,000 still living languages and the cultures and subcultures each represents in the global tapestry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadiya_Savchenko: “Russia’s Investigative Committee insists she crossed the border voluntarily, without documents and in the guise of a refugee.[20] Russia’s pro-Kremlin TV channel NTV, however, reported on June 20 that Savchenko had been captured by “rebels” and then handed over to the Russian authorities.[21] Ukrainian officials said she had been illegally taken to Russia by Russian intelligence services in collaboration with pro-Russian rebels.”
http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1437143184 – 7/18/2015 – “New attempt to keep Nadiya Savchenko trial secret” — “Russia is insisting on holding the trial of captured ex-pilot Nadiya Savchenko in a Russian city bordering the area of Ukraine under Kremlin-backed militant control. There are no legitimate grounds for this move which will seriously hinder access to the trial, and could, Savchenko believes, put her mother and sister in danger. Her formal appeal* to Russia’s Prosecutor General to move the trial to Moscow where all investigative activities and assessments were carried out has effectively already been rejected. One of her lawyers announced late on Friday afternoon that Savchenko has already been moved from the remand prison in Moscow and is on her way to the Rostov oblast.”
http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1435707020 – 7/2/2015 – “Savchenko material shows how Russia concocted ‘case’ and what it can’t conceal” – ” The key problem in the investigators’ case is Savchenko’s irrefutable alibi however there are also a number of other obvious flaws in their version which do not go away despite being assiduously ignored..”
Posted to YouTube 7/7/2015
This patriot, made a Hero of Ukraine by President Poroshenko on March 2, this Joan of Arc detained in spite of the diplomatic immunity to which she has been entitled since her election to the Rada and as Ukraine’s representative to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, has become simultaneously the symbol of Putin’s arbitrary exercise of power and of Ukrainian resistance.
As Russia celebrated with great pomp and ceremony the seventieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism, one might have hoped that Putin would make a gesture.
Here in Moscow she has been charged as an accessory to murder, linked to the death of two Russian journalists covering the conflict in eastern Ukraine between the rebels and government troops.
But the BBC has seen mobile phone data from the day they died, that her lawyers argue proves her innocence.
Imprisoning a Ukrainian officer, who disappeared while on duty last month in the battleground region of Luhansk, will make it hard for Russia to maintain its claim that it is not in league with the separatist rebels. According to the Ukrainian government, the rebels captured Savchenko in June and illegally smuggled her across the border into Russia, where authorities not only arrested her but took her hundreds of miles to the city of Voronezh, a provincial capital in the heartland of western Russia. Diplomats and top officials in Ukraine, as well as their U.S. allies, have already cited the case as among the clearest pieces of evidence so far that Russian security services are working in concert with the rebel fighters. That means the case is sure to bolster the Western argument for another round of sanctions against Russia this month.
Russia agreed to immediately free all hostages and illegally held persons. Yet Russia and the separatists it backs continue to hold at least 500 hostages. They include Savchenko, as well as Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, both of whom were captured by separatists on Ukrainian soil and illegally transported against their will to Russia.
We continue our publication of the prison writings delivered to us by Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot who was abducted by pro-Russian separatists on June 18, 2014, and who has been in prison ever since. La Règle du Jeu, in partnership with Kyiv Post, Ukraina Pravda, The Huffington Post/WorldPost, and other magazines and newspapers, is launching a double appeal: Do not forget Nadiya, and do everything you can–everything–to obtain her release.–Bernard-Henri Lévy
When it comes to the perception of brute force in power, the language play in the invention of the term “21st Century Neo-Feudalism” proves more convenient than earnest and popular political science on the matter, so suggests a cursory glance at related Google search results, which frequently lists this blog as the term’s proponent. Nonetheless, as witness through Internet-borne media to Nadiya Savchenko’s abduction and imprisonment in relation to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “hybrid warfare” (by proxy thugs) in Ukraine, the term would seem well applied.
Typing here from the sidelines, the lawlessness of the feudal world — in effect, the caprice of the senior mafia running the show — concentrates power in a titular head, who may actually have it, and a surrounding bulwark of favored and patronized nobility. Against that model, the lawful of the democratic world — also argumentative, bureaucratic, responsible, responsive — tend to distribute power across a magnificent quilt of private and public and local to international interests. Adventurous and bright, the very tough Nadiya Savchenko appears to have managed to become selected for being trapped between the two worlds.
Putin’s message: I have captured and caged the brave Ukrainian bird; come and get her.
That’s absolute power.
I have long suggested here and elsewhere that that kind of power becomes the power to make others suffer with impunity — and Putin, among others, have demonstrably got it.
What power have the democracies against “political absolutism”?
The power of international law as invested in western institutions?
Talk, talk, talk.
The ogre keeps the stolen bird caged.
Old tweet: “Putin, Assad, Khamenei — together they are defending absolute power.”
Posted to YouTube 7/15/2015
Why shouldn’t Bashar al-Assad continue slaughtering or displacing all Syrians who disagree with his ownership — absolute control — of Syria and dominion over the lives and property of all who inhabit his realm?
Nothing has diminished his power where he may still project it, and, in fact, the political theater produced by “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and to which I refer as “Assad vs The Terrorists” has positively contributed to his power. Assad appears to have forked Obama’s policy on Syria (whatever it might have been), for the American has had to have his military fly sorties against Daesh, everyone’s enemy, but also — and mostly so — Assad’s enemy.
Assad didn’t always have “The Terrorists”, but through sufficient selective bombing and fighting, he achieved the incubation of the “Al-Qaeda Typicals”, and now he has them, and he has got Washington bombing them at Washington’s expense!
Oh, the glory.
Posted to YouTube 7/18/2015
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei too has gathered power unto himself without limit, and he too appears to have going “hybrid warfare” and “war-by-proxy” in several districts, from Yemen today to the Gaza Strip, and these too continue with just enough impedance to hold them in place. If Tehran keeps its part of the “nuclear deal”, it will find itself with tens of billions of new or recovered dollars to earmark for throwing its weight around the region.
Why not?
Khamenei has met no lasting opposition within Iran — the world knows how that works — and within the region, whether manipulating the Al-Qaeda Typicals or the Hezbollah Virulence, sending Revolutionary Guard to battle Daesh with Iraq’s Shiite militia or cheering the Houthis as they bring wreckage and ruin to Yemen, none have yet curtailed his influence or meddling.
No “off button”; no “reset”; no brakes: that’s theocratic dictatorship — and that’s been Khamenei’s thing for a while now, and it’s working.
It would appear that “absolute power” needs no ethical, humanist, moral, or religion defense, for whether practiced by Putin, Assad, or Khamenei — different talks: same walk — all that is needed is unyielding relentless assertion.
What does Putin say?
I have got your most ambitious, darling, and high flying bird in my cage.
What does Assad say:
I have committed crimes beyond imagination and destroyed children’s educations, their homes, and their parents’ lives by the millions — but I am still here, President of Syria.
What does Khamenei say:
Khamenei doesn’t say anything, for Khamenei laughs.
The world is the world as found, X., and we’re a wild species in it. The AQ-Typicals and the Hezbollahvirus may be part of a larger mix of lawless souls represented by Russia’s Emperor De Facto and his “New Nobility” and assorted New Nationalists and National Socialists, and that is what has the UN going after Israel and the inheritors in whole and part of the legacy of Moses the Lawgiver.
The more familiar the message, the more distilled and telegraphed it becomes.
In political shorthand, the “West” becomes “Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian”; the arrangement of the most significant and virulent forces opposed: “Syndicate Red Brown Green“.
Elaboration seems no longer needed.
Additional concepts and data may be helpful as regards challenges inherent in the governance of states opposed to the western democracies and their true allies worldwide: Egypt failed in its first foray as a democracy, proving itself unprepared for the aggressive fascism of the Muslim Botherhood — and it chose to advance to the rule of a military pursuing business for itself and the state while promoting for all Egyptians a moderating classical liberalism. For sheer expanse and numbers, China too would seem imprudent were it to rapidly transfer the powers of the ruling elite now invested in the west — and proud to own some mansions in Melbourne and elsewhere — across a democratized but perhaps also disorganized sea of humanity.
For the greater part, possibly, our international competitions may be also naturally adjusting, but there are bloodied fringes too: Russian hybrid warfare in Ukraine has made a dismal space of Crimea, and one that on the Russo-nationalist track has no durable, ennobled, or happy future, so mired has Putin’s revanche neo-feudal Russia become in political crime (a visit to “The Russian Section” may help clarify that assertion).
Today’s “Brown” (for “Brown Shirts”, Nazis, National Socialists, Nationalists of the want of a stripe of ethnic, racial, or religious purity — in that last aspect, everyone, Jews included, may have someone among the “the pure” bearing in common affection for the fascist’s favored color in work shirts) wears camouflage:
In a recent interview with Reuters, Mr Vona claimed: “With time, the [extremist] elements of Jobbik you may see as prevalent will fade because they no longer find their calling here.”
This attempt at detoxification, à la National Front in France, has convinced few observers, however. Political analyst Peter Kreko says: “The hardcore antisemitism, the hardcore anti-Roma sentiments, are still present in Jobbik, they simply display it less prominently.”
“Brown” also shimmers, but since the defeat of nationalist fascism in Europe and even with the development and morphing of similar movements in Russia like Pamyat and Russian National Unity, it has a deeply fragmented and riven aspect to it. There is no unifying “internationalist nationalist” framework for belligerence. Perhaps ironically, BackChannels encouragement of “ethnolinguistic cultural integrity” and responsive geospatial arrangements in troubled regions addresses exactly the kernel that anchors the idea of “The Jewish State” — or that of those who dream of an independent Balochistan or a unified Kurdistan. Nonetheless, when Hungary’s Jobbik Party has associated itself with the regime in Iran, the “Brown-Green” portion of “Red Brown Green” would seem apt.
No Moses?
No Muhammad.
However, with Moses and Muhammad and Jesus between — and so many other personalities of historic note, including the the BC to CE-bridging Hillel the Elder — the world may boast of including about seven billion “Abrahamic” monotheists, however fractious. Faced with the onslaughts of the Islamists and the plain thieving promoted by the Feudalists, most might prefer the “rule of law” to the bloody enslavement and exploitation of the lawless.
With the introduction of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” and Eve’s predictable transgression, the Torah introduces three aspects of humanity that are to accompany its journey through time: human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience.
Ah, to be burdened by conscience!
Says Hillel the Elder to an as yet unconvinced prospective convert: “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Awareness of others . . . conscience . . . some justice inherent in the phrase that anchors a good portion of the law and empirical legal methods: “Because it could happen to you” — whatever it is.
Rule of law.
As opposed to the rule of men who have made themselves into unbridled, unconscionable, unredeemable monsters.
Anti-Semitic expression involves lying, sometimes grossly so as with the medieval “blood libel“, but often also with subtlety by way of obfuscations and omissions easily overlooked by lazy minds short on curiosity or time and long, perhaps, on culturally transmitted and enforced bad feeling (about someone — could be anyone — outside their own known group).
As hatreds go, one might find the signals of anti-Semitic thought inherently criminal for being plainly disingenuous.
There’s nothing more to it.
What makes anti-Semitic cant more interesting is who embraces it and exploits the same in the interest of developing or furthering their own powers of abuse.
. . . . its very interesting to note that Judism and Islam are very similar. you have two systems biblical Judaism and rabbinical Judaism. we muslims have alhe sunat and ahl hadees. two sect one follows the Quran and the hadees while the other follows the Quran only. grin emoticon grin emoticon
Torah is the word of GOD. and Talmud is the commentry by the Rabbis. true?
Poor man — he could not have seen the loooooong answer coming, and neither could I who wrote it:
The books left to me by my synagogue’s former rabbi are The Torah — the Five Books of Moses — and the Nevi’im or “The Prophets”, which Wikipedia refers to as “the second main division of the Hebrew Bible”. It begins, “After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ attendant: / “My servant Moses is dead. Prepare to cross the Jordan, together with all this people, into the land which I am giving to the Israelites. Every spot on which your foot treats I give to you, as I promised Moses . . . .”
It looks like a sequel to me 🙂 , but for a language culture embedding and transmitting its codes and history in next generations, it’s powerful stuff.
It informs belief, and that’s enough, apparently, to provide culture its interior sense of mission.
With language art created and supplied, perhaps mysteriously so — there’s a subject for long discussion (first question: from whence comes the breath of inspiration? — artifact in text becomes available to interpretation: now the critics, the moral entrepreneurs, and the wise get to do their thing in the spirit of the work obtained.
This model of communications I think inescapable. We want meaning. We want to be more certain about something about which there can be no human certainty. And there you have it: volumes upon volumes of addendums, commentaries, and associated inspirational works — at least out of enthused or exuberant language cultures.
The Talmud has two components. The first part is the Mishnah (Hebrew: משנה, c. 200 CE), the written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism’s Oral Torah (Torah meaning “Instruction”, “Teaching” in Hebrew). The second part is the Gemara (c. 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible. The term Talmud can be used to mean either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah and Gemara as printed together.
The whole Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. It is written in Tannaitic Hebrew and Aramaic. The Talmud contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis on a variety of subjects, including Halakha (law), Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law and is much quoted in rabbinic literature.
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When it comes to being Jewish, I’m not that Jewish: I have to look up everything, and I’m still ambivalent about re-reading The Torah, reading the Nevi’im; for scholarship, add: re-reading the Qur’an, and reading the Hadith (“Riyad-us-Saliheen” says the cover of my two-volume set).
It may be noted here that while Israel supports a Jewish-majority state, the state itself does not follow “Jewish law” but works off of a secular legal system while supporting the prerogatives of Jewish custom, e.g., Saturday as the day of rest (the U.S. does the same with its Christian majority: without the imprimatur of the law itself, Sunday is nonetheless recognized as the nation’s predominant day of rest, but it’s odd too within the folds of capitalism: the church goers go to church; the weekday nine-to-five workers have the day off; the printing presses continue publishing a thick newspaper for the day: however, many basic consumer businesses, starting with the grocery stores, remain open).
I suppose if the Torah, Nevi’im, and Talmud defined my existence in language, I would be quite a different person moving through the atmosphere created and bounded by those works.
The similarities sustained as time moves through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are there because the initial Jewish program — what Moses did not only with Jews but a “mixed multitude” (! — all who wished to leave Pharaoh and take their chances with the Jews) has proven attractive and robust. The Hebrews, being an ethnic cohort demarcated by language, could not share out the “Hebrewness” of the way in a universal manner (it could take in conversions, much as any may learn Arabic or Latin and become today scholarly and mysteriously authentic in identification with Islam or Catholicism). The opportunity to borrow ideas — and with Hillel the Elder modernizing Jewish thought about Judaism and making the same more accessible to converts — simply came along, imho, and here we are.
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I / you / we and billions of others should not wish to (as Daesh may wish as indicated by its example) destroy worlds.
We need our inventory in language for its own sake.
We just don’t unnaturally build human languages. Esperanto did not make it. smile emoticon
However, we appear to need a supra-common ethical and moral platform from which to derive a few rules of universal good conduct.
We have elements in place like the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, but in our souls we cling to that which has been most familiar to us, i.e., our legacy in language as affected by the history and politics of our regions.
You asked a simple question. 🙂
And offered a sensible observation.
Oh what a little bit of stimulus can do!
What are your thoughts on culture and language, cultural updating, and and a religious progressivism?
Advice from a life-long heavy reader, the little boy always with a book: even given a lifetime of time in a library, we may read only so much, but as little as may cover individually, we may choose the breadth of our literary experience and, related to it, the expanse of our spiritual existence.
The West insists on maintaining the illusion that the government in Baghdad is something other than a Shia sectarian-dominated entity in the process of entering a de facto military alliance with the Iranians. This stubbornness is producing the current absurd situation in which Western air power is being used in support of Shia Islamism.
It is important to understand that this is not taking place because there is no other option for stopping the advance of the Islamic State. There is another, more effective option: direct aid to the Kurds, and to the Sunni tribes further south.
In the medieval mode, sectarian religious teleology — who wins the favor of God? How soon do we get to find out? — reaches the boundary of the ineffable: may God decide on the field of battle, and the sooner the better!
In the modern mode, the same narrative may be left to God to decide gently across millennia — or not at all: who needs must get to the end of the story in their lifetime or even want the same to arrive in their great grandchildren’s day?
BackChannels has been surprised by the tenacious hold given, so the blog shall refer to it, the “Great Sunni vs Shiite War” in Shiite circles and doubtless, whatever the proportions, in Sunni ones as well.
How is it for the west that so alien, primitive, and singular an unanswerable dispute may by ripples and waves spread to engulf the modern of two to several middle east states?
Ayatollah Khamenei’s expansion of influence, and this despite the regime’s infamous behavior in its own space, appears to proceed apace through the combined artifice of political theater — how conveniently the ISIS story links to the narrative “Assad vs The Terrorists” — and, in Yemen, just watch those Houthis go — war by proxy.
Agha ma wati jinday wastha naya Goda degay khe b mani wastha.
Agha ma degrani wastha naya goda ma cheyan?
Agha ani na, goda kadi?
In the first century BCE, Babylonian born Hillel (later known as Hillel the Elder) migrated to the Land of Israel to study and worked as a woodcutter, eventually becoming the most influential force in Jewish life. Hillel is said to have lived in such great poverty that he was sometimes unable to pay the admission fee to study Torah, and because of him that fee was abolished. He was known for his kindness, gentleness, concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah), is “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” The Hillel organization, a network of Jewish college student organizations, is named for him. Hillel and his descendants established academies of learning and were the leaders of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel for several centuries. The Hillel dynasty ended with the death of Hillel II in 365 CE.
Without prompting, a Facebook friend, a teacher, translated Hillel into Baloch.
At the end of a note to the same, I’ve stated a perhaps uniquely modern stance:
Our world offers an abundance of timeless knowledge and wisdom from myriad sources, a vast reach across cultures through the great libraries and their scholars, and one may be gifted with opportunity and time to do some soul searching about the meaning of life and living in the place that one inhabits. Toward that end, while I do my part 🙂 , I generally promote ethnolinguistic cultural survival and self-determination, not only for the Hebrews but for Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun, and every other unique living language community on the planet.
In fewer words, plainly promoted: geospatial coexistence with ethnic centers, margins, and mixers; global cultural co-evolution with updating toward what is authentic in belief, kind in social manner, and respectful in its humanity; and continuously improving “qualities in living” with economic, psychological, physical, and spiritual dimensions.
“We can proceed from the assumption that Judaism and Islam, while certainly differing in a number of fundamental perspectives and priorities — are, as religious communities, not in conflict.” In the main part, Christians, Jews, and Muslims and others are not naturally in conflict. There’s no cause but what may be amplified — or provoked! – in content of imagination and mind. However, legal, social, and political histories evolving after Hillel the Elder, a jurist who may have laid the foundation for a universalized access to Judaism, belie the assumption. Denial is sweet, but like sugar poured on a wound, may add to injury, and all have been injured on the monotheist merry-go-round that follows from Hillel’s outlook and the adaptation of Judaism to restive populations.
The Jews, not to separate myself too much, are a deeply rooted ethnolinguistic people, indigenous and inherent or joined, brought together beneath the umbrella of a common outlook about humanity. That it works may be born out by what has followed, and now we’re here and perhaps again — all sharing a common basis in faith: God — restive.
I don’t wish to drown in theology — it’s too soon — but may suggest being careful about assumptions that have deeply illiberal — enslaving — political consequences. What is here today is “back there” already. Looking forward may be part of a good assembling.
A conciliatory stance may diminish the want of conflict and contribute to a character in conversation that eventually enables a clarified and frank reappraisal of ideas, instructions, and principles bound in with legacies in faith. That conversation must and will be had, but whether today is its day is another matter.
And then on, I droned —
Setting aside the problems posed by inherently despotic leaders — they have their hidden stories and the concept of “malignant narcissism” may cover their intellectual disposition and layout — the psychologies of followers and readers differ also. Those are large areas for discussion, but Facebook threads challenge us to distill and compress as much as possible . . . .
Hillel’s statement to a man ambivalent about conversion sets out a standard perhaps implicit either in the Torah or the study of it: “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. All of the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Would that would be all there was to it.
Similarly, when Muhammad says, “One scholar is more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers,” he too invokes a universal observation, value, and yearning where language and its treasures have flourished.
We’re all fine with that, or should be.
What happens next becomes history where differences become loud.
In the Jewish way, none of the prophets are close to God or treated as if gods. Moses is shy; he’s dependent on Aaron for advice; and when the waters are parted, it’s not Moses who does it. It’s God. When God sets out to “prove” (test) Abraham, we’re not told whether the test is of obedience or conscience, and we are left to note and argue an awful lot of evidence and subsequent story whether or not Abraham “passes” or “fails” this particular — and many of us believe dumb galunk that would sacrificed his own son without asking God a few questions fails by miles. And so it goes with differences in apprehension, conversational style, and the informing of conscience through language.
On the other side of Jewish liberalism and western “classical liberalism” . . . we miss a lot, which for me starts with the language traditions behind “7,000 living languages” (approximate current estimate) and adding in the ecological and social exigencies of living in large numbers elsewhere on the planet. “Illiberal assumptions” may account for social organization and political peace where imposed even if we don’t much like (and shouldn’t).
Talk and time may work miracles, and as we have that time now, let’s together — Christian, Jewish, and Muslim — set aside complaints and foibles and have a good look around as well as into (my fave) “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” — and see if we cannot produce a better world than that in which we find ourselves.
BackChannels 
