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Tag Archives: Hatikvah

FTAC – Singing “Hatikva” On the Way to the “Showers”

29 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Psychology, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

conflict, defiance, Hatikvah, soul

This started with a photograph of hundreds of women lined up at Birkenau, the Nazi death camp, and on their way to the gas chambers.  It has been reported that they sang “Hatikvah”, Israel’s national anthem, as they walked to their deaths.

The conversation online has covered many things, including the invitation to argue the existence of God, but as I wanted to wrap up the thread, I wrote this cap —

* * *

Let’s wrap this thread and move into the new week (in which I’m enjoying a so far mild hurricane).

Regarding choices having to do with divinity, there were no ends, and it seems Pharaoh himself believed himself a God. Man as god, plants as gods, rocks as spirits, gods in the skies (those of Greece and Rome were to come), there were many possibilities, including (film recommendation here: Agora), the possibility of reason and science.

The power to intimidate, rob, and murder others by way of political will includes the intent to humiliate, so to go down firm in spirit, to sing in the face of death, is another form of exodus — an act of defiance and liberation beneath the twinned shadows of madness and death. The Nazis lost a lot more than their country, their preferred identity (as Nazis born to rule the world), and their lives, and for them that’s something that might be said of the living as well as the dead: they lost their way when they jettisoned their humanity.

In consideration of the evolution of mind that may be associated with biological “brain power” (x size x abilities), our species would seem to be gregarious with great consciousness, self-consciousness, a highly developed language ability, and with it the advent of a complex of social norms, personal conscience, and values and sentiments of all kinds. Given that life of the mind, life alone is not the highest reward (even though we Jews toast with “La chaim” — “To life!” Dignity and freedom matter. We avoid and rightly fear humiliation and shame.

Survival may be the highest reward, but in human life, “survival” involves a great deal more than animal — copulate, eat, defecate — existence.

On one or two of my blogs, I’ve a quote by Simon Weisenthal, the Nazi hunter, made n the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: “The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing.”

That is living and a living testament to the discernment of right from wrong, which may be essential in both the evolution, including political and social evolution, and survival of our species.

Christopher Hitchens famously and repeatedly asked a simple question: “Do you need God to be good?”

I’ve never argued otherwise, and yet . . . from Moses to Maimonides to the Adlers (pioneers in contemporary psychology and humanism), this quest to learn from all or the Almighty or the universe seems to have been invested in those who thought enough of themselves to walk away from Pharaoh or who chose to end their lives — or begin new ones — singing “Hatikvah”.

* * *

Referenced

Alfred Adler

Felix Adler

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"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."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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