In the Jewish tradition,M., questioning is more than admired: it is required and it had better be tough. My rabbi and I got into it yesterday over the origins of a liberal Judaism, he arguing for 19th Century thought and forward, I for Hillel’s response to Shammai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_and_Shammai) — but just having that argument may be more within the soul of the civilizational way. Approaching your position: Felix Adler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Adler_(professor). Whether with the idea of God or a unifying natural universe or a mysterious “humanity of humanity” (a Rumiesque notion, that last), the drift toward a better world may be part of the faith and at the core of that is the consideration of others as well as ourselves.

The fact of the matter is the world is a dangerous and wild place full of invention and never more so than where people are isolated from one another by either natural features or social processes. I’m coming to think that the ideas planted in a mind by either an oral or written tradition may serve as barbed wire fencing too.

That “language has a power” is given.

That it’s power is to dream us, if you will, into cultural and personal self-concepts suspended in space and time with others may be less remarked.

Those noises we make and on which we agree in the world’s separable “mouth –> ear –> mind –> heart systems” become also the essential music of the cultural mind.

We love our litanies — those stories we tell ourselves about ourselves each morning; those legends and poems we believe to be ourselves — although some may not have been devised to love us back.

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