Category Archives: Religion

FTAC: An American of Jewish Descent

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Religion, United States of America

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

Around the world, resurgent nationalism in defense of indigenous culture has refocused too many on the authenticity of their character: “The Real Americans”, “The Real Jews”, “The Real ____________”. 

Whatever the McCoy sought, one might discover a few overlaps.

What answer may there be to so shallow a perception– more than that: a defense! — of legacy in identity?

I spent forty years in the American Wildness before venturing into the synagogue where I live and joining it.

I recall one afternoon lazing on the mall of the Maryland campus when a “Succoth Mobile” stopped not far from where I was enjoying my hour in the sun and a representative came up to me and asked, “Are you Jewish?”

“No.”

I wasn’t middle eastern.

My American eastern woodlands were nothing like, what, the hills of Judea?

Here for harvest, we celebrate Thanksgiving.

However, I also recall spending hours one afternoon in some lonely part of an upper floor of McKeldin Library (UMCP) looking over the photography of the Holocaust.

I don’t recall the motive, only the moment.

I took my Bar Mitzvah in 1968 reading off a plastic card. The morning may have been a ceremony for two, and, on my side, certainly for the adults. I really hadn’t much to do with it at all.

Forty years later, after walking out of that mill, I walked into a real synagogue where American children spoke Hebrew with fluency at their ceremonies. The “Conservative-to-Reform” Friday night greeting of the Sabbath took place in both English and Hebrew, and the building remains regal and old. There were other European and Hebrew and Israeli features as well as the unmistakable imprint of generations going back 125 years.

In hyperactive America, that’s an old synagogue.

So, one might say, I got to reconnect with family, my spiritual family (although I have spent time with the Unitarians and the Ethical Society as well over the years). I have been also ten years with my synagogue.  I am one of those who, perhaps, visit for a time, but I am Jewish, and that knowledge is as fundamental to my sense of identity as my name, Schmuel. You may call me “an American of Jewish descent” but that in no way would make me less Jewish than thou.

–33–

FTAC: “An Unbounded Narcissism . . . .” A Comment on Absolute Power

23 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

It’s a bit preachy keen, but someone “Liked” it, and so I’ve elected to share it.

In the faith communities referencing Moses, competition for power and wealth through subscription and the many demonstrations of devotion and loyalty have produced some bloody “competitions” across time and space. The pious have long fought among themselves — schisms will do that — as well as taken aim at external enemies.

Has as much not been the way of the world?

This day is a little different: we may see one another through what we have to say, and hearing and seeing more, we may think a little more as well.

Moses challenged politically absolute power and with the guidance and power of God removed from it the Jews and the “mixed multitude” that would join them. Not much has changed. No one likes to be tyrannized.

The Jewish liberation story and much else about Judaism proved potently attractive enough to inspire uptake — give Hillel the Elder some credit — by the “restive of Rome”, i.e., those tiring of the brutality and excesses of the powerful. Even with eased conversions, the tribal ethnolinguistic culture (perhaps) could not begin to absorb the numbers, and the Romans looking for a new answer may have had other cultural needs better addressed by Jesus / Paul.

With Christianity in place, General Constantine finds his mission, and about 300 years later, General Muhammad develops his.

The Jews: they appear to worry much less about subscription, power, and wealth, and it’s pretty clear where and how the Hebrews have settled.

Aside: in 12th Century Hungary, laws designed by a Christian government to discriminate against Jews were upon activation applied equally to Muslims (ref. Raphael Patai’s _The Jews of Hungary).

This may be the best time to get off the medieval merry-go-round by looking forward while leaving some attitudes and beliefs plus archaic doctrines and methods far in the past where they belong.

–33–

FTAC: A Comment on Memory, The Holocaust, and Passover

12 Saturday May 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Memory — personal, cultural, national, international (that about covers it ) — plays a huge role in conflicts at every level. We bear grudges; we want justice for something that happened last week or hundreds of years ago; we want revenge; we want sympathy; we want acknowledgment; etc. In the end, however, we want to be free of the past as well. Carry the lessons forward through time; leave the story alone; leave it also ineffable — beyond comprehension, explanation, and words.

I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that one memory in Jewish life may be much, much more important than The Holocaust.

Passover.

We leave. We move on. We are joined by the mixed multitude that shares — down deep enough to gamble on moving with us — our political perceptions — our ethical and moral dimensions — and with God’s help, we leave behind the horrors and are strengthened in meeting the next challenges.

May we all look forward more than we do backward.

Someone had been upset over the overuse of the term “holocaust” — it seems everyone of late has come from some cultural background that has suffered one.

Not quite.

My other attempt at peacemaking over the matter:

While “THE Holocaust” may be regarded as a singular event in history, displacements and genocides have been a fair part of the history of warfare, the other part being conquest accompanied by longer-term plundering by way of subjection. The Jewish cultural and tribal history may be unique to the Hebrews but the same has developed an empathetic universalism accessible far beyond its own boundaries. So be it — and expect language to evolve accordingly.

May God (Nature, and the Universe) help us save ourselves from the “MaligNarcs” — “Malignant Narcissists” — that would subordinate our lives to theirs, have the chaos of the universe whipped up around themselves while embarking on the most heartbreaking and inhuman — and ungodly — of methods and practices known or imaginable in the course of their political arcs and inevitable failures.

–33–

FTAC: Jewish: The Tribe and The Idea

03 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Presented with choice between Christianity and Islam early in the 20th Century, the Abayudaya adopted Judaism. The Abayudaya are Jewish.

The Native American community is not a “nation” — it is an assembly and cohort made up of many nations with many formerly at war with one another.

While you are looking for bedrock authenticity, we Jews may enjoy both adoption and lineage in the construction of our identity.

In the feudal and medieval modes, lineage may be made to count for a great deal in the inheritance of power and privilege related to “purity” of some kind (as most kingdoms learn, genetic “purity” turns out badly pursued too well), but in the modern world, identity has much to do with what is in the heart and shared from it.
///
Now the sons of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, aside from children. 38 A mixed multitude also went up with them, along with flocks and herds, a very large number of livestock. 39 They baked the dough which they had brought out of Egypt into cakes of unleavened bread. For it had not become leavened, since they were driven out of Egypt and could not delay, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves.…
/// (Exodus 12:38).

Who in that “mixed multitude” that shared the experience undertaken by the sons of Israel would not come to be themselves considered Hebrew and Jewish?

Related Reference

Wikipedia: “Judaism”.

BBC: Religion: Judaism

–33–

FTAC: The Wisdom of Holocaust Remembrance

12 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

We remember Pharaoh. We remember Haman. We should remember what Hitler did and with the greater wisdom that should come of traumatic experience. We have something today that earlier generations could not have imagined grasping and incorporating in their survival: we have ventured into the psychology attending evil; we have made ourselves deeply cognizant of the nuts and bolts associated with dictatorships and anti-Semitism (and we know how those two travel together — and are traveling together now). We are aware of dangers and done with denial. We should have greater foresight. If that’s not a blessing, I don’t what is.

–33–

FTAC – A Note on Ethno-Cultural Philosophy and Islam

09 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Are the Abayudaya Jewish?

Are the Pashtun, who are Pashtun while referring to themselves as “B’ni Israel” both a little bit Jewish and Muslim?

There are ethnic elements in the invention, uptake, and adaptation of Islam that may not be separated from “Muslim” — not “Islamic” — self-concept and volunteered description. When for tribal business, independence, security, or survival one civilization accepts the overlay of another, it becomes difficult in time to pry apart that melding. At the same time, an ethos that drives against the grain of humanity, i.e., as that possessed by the “Islamists”, needs must be ejected at least in part.

There is an argument to be had about the character of Muhammad and that of Islam with some who would put all Muslims in the al-Qaeda (or similar) box even though Muslims appears the first victims (and warriors against) that efflorescent fascism that has no place among good people.

We are born with our identities: culture and its customs and laws, our parents, and our families, our names.  God (Nature and the Universe) provide us with no choice in those earliest matters.  However, as we are not fixed as characters in books and much less in place and time, we as adults may confirm our cultural self-concept or change it.  Over time, change is what we do because “back there” in time includes ideas and practices that become for each “new world” — a generational concept — maladapted.

–33–

FTAC: Political, Racial, Religious Singularity and Purity / Distribution x Equilibrium

04 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Asides, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Perhaps by way of the editor’s accidental tourism in poli-sci and poli-psy, BackChannels has from the start been about the distillation of basic concepts and values.  That’s evident down the column of the left sidebar (which hasn’t been updated in some time): there are the universals  —

Compassion

Empathy

Justice

Humility

Inclusion

Integrity

The six are what matter within ourselves if we are to support goodness and grace against the evil of a behavioral and moral vacuum.

They are perhaps the argument against the malign narcissism of politically absolute and inevitably sadistic systems of power.

In relation to a conversation about barbarism, cultural relativism, and civilizational superiority, the following moved mind-to-keyboard and out into a closed Facebook space:

Argument here has essentially to do with the civilizational character of cultural ethics, principles, and values and that is a little complicated by the fewer than 7,000 living languages extant that suspend and replicate thought from one generation to the next — or become muddled or die out.

Not to rapid-shift here, but when Mongol power receded from conquest in Russia, the princes, according to Pipes, had ingested and adopted the idea that the ownership of property and persons was natural and alike, and one test of sovereignty involved possession of the freedom to destroy either at will and with impunity. The modern Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian soul might consider that philosophy of absolute power / absolute ownership just a little bit . . . barbaric.

Whatever it is, it’s on display in Syria and Crimea, and as there seems to be a small cultural pride –how pure and pretty we may be! — theme in this forum, I would suggest this about the preservation of separable but not exclusive cultural, ideological, racial, and religious differences in appearances, ideas, and traditions:

Core X –> | Mixed XYZ –> |Fringe WXYZ x Primary Variable of Interest

No “theme” disappears but each has its core, its mixer, and its fringe and all have the freedom to choose what is most important in the character of their own survival.

There’s an old joke for intellectual youngsters: “Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once; space exists so that everything doesn’t happen to you.”

As a political concept, what is important about ideas, including matters associated with self-concept and self-regard, is their distribution in geopolitical space and the equilibrium established or maintained between them.

So the world offers some small space for everyone who cares to assert that which is most important to himself as regards self-concept or identity.

There’s an old saw — and on the web attributed both to Dorothy Parker and Woody Allen without proof at the source! — “”The Jews are like everyone else, only more so.”

🙂

To answer the mother’s question, “Why can’t you be like everyone else!?” — we are all like everyone else, but we do choose some aspects of ourselves for highlighting, packaging, and presenting, and so may we all continue searching for — or finding — our individual space and time with, one may hope, a few others.

It has often been said that the Jews are like everyone else, only more so. And today, that is more true than it has ever been!

The world of our parents and grandparents was one of exclusion from the wider society. Living apart from the Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles was expected in the old country; when our forebears immigrated to this country many of them maintained their distinct dress, language, foods, songs, and of course religious rituals for a generation or so.

But my grandmother, who was 8 years old when she came to Boston in 1921 from the province of Volhynia in the Ukraine, did not want to be a “greenhorn.” She refused to speak Yiddish. She soon learned that she loved to eat lobster and clams, like so many other Bostonians. She wasn’t so interested in Jewish life. And so she, like many other immigrants, began to shed the ethnic attributes of the old world.

Adelson, Seth. “The Simple Child Sees Only the Past: Kol Nidrei 577.” Sermon.  The Modern Rabbi, October 1 2017.

–33–

A Little Wisdom: On the Separation of Man from God

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

The prompt: an account of a conversation in which Deist prophets were characterized as representing human perfection as provided by God Almighty Himself.

Judaism separates God and His powers from man absolutely. The theme is recurring in the Torah, starting, perhaps, with the masking off of the Tree of Life from Adam and Eve and moves on to Pharaoh in his political hubris and Moses with his stuttering but divinely guided diplomacy, as it were, and on to the “Binding of Isaac” where God sets out to “prove Abraham” but whether for blind obedience or the possession of conscience (should not Abraham have spoken “truth to power”) we are left to argue.

The Roman and Arab uptake of Judaic lore bends content toward the evolving cultural behaviors of each and semi-idolatry, however dressed, becomes part of our bloody medieval merry-go-round (perhaps the idea should be labeled “horror-go-round”) in the conflation of religion with political power.

Whether divinely imparted or wisely composed, the First Commandment would seem most well chosen.

There must be differences between being revered or thought holy and being regarded as God’s perfect expression of humanity.

I think God forbid Jews that option at the very start of the instructions, so as to eliminate too great an idolatry for either any one leader and the leader’s followers.

–33–