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Tag Archives: universalism

Battered, Jaded, Numbed? Here’s An Old Tonic

01 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journal, Philosophy, Poetry, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

decency, Don Quixote, humanism, idealism, universalism

As have many days for many years, this one started with a glimpse at conflict and crime news, some searched up, some by way of Facebook forum conversations: Mexico’s national addiction to drugs and money (in that order); a look at human trafficking — it appears China receives from Columbia a steady stream of duped women to be forced into prostitution and then takes little action against the trade.

Web surfers visiting here have probably had their own fill of experience or news — or both — vomited up from the evil and ugly world.  For those so offended but in themselves good and noble and perhaps in need of a refreshed idealism and inspiration, I offer an old memory.

Here’s a trailer.

And here — from another company — the greater quotation.


Related On the Web

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/08/20/richard-kiley-at-55-the-once-and-present-man-of-la-mancha/30d559ae-bac1-47f6-b7f4-cffc93304468/ – 8/20/1977

https://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1088321 — 11/21/2015 Message board topic: 50th anniversary of the musical.

–33–

FTAC – Toward “a more kind and principled humanity”

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

despotism, humanism, universalism

The Iranian regime’s interests begin and end here: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 The sowing of chaos and confusion through disinformation and manipulation conforms with the post-Soviet arrangement signaled by the promotion of feudalism endorsed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. The story’s about individual wealth and absolute power, and there’s not much more to it than that.

The modern Jewish credo and ethos may have been set by Hillel the Elder between 70-BCE and 10-CE, a period to be noted in the history of religion and in the formation of the “Abrahamic Faiths” especially. Hillel’s most famous statement and the three questions:

“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” — the whole was addressed to a convert).

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

Jewish humanism and universalism — for which I blame Hillel 🙂 — far exceed, and have always far exceeded personal and parochial interests. They are a part of what binds personalities as diverse as Karl Marx, Woody Allen, Albert Einstein, and Felix Adler (who?). Of course, Jews do not have the lock on the observation of the universe or the universal in living, but what drives the study, the humor, the insight, and the humanism comes very much of the rejection and abandonment of Pharaonic power, i.e., the power of the despot. The Jews and “the mixed multitude” continue pioneering through time in search of a more kind and principled humanity.


” . . . the power of the despot and the shared humanity of humanity” is what should have been said.

Anti-Semitic and bullying — sometimes mild and polite — “Jew baiting” has its upside in the inspiration of some cool thought now and then; however, who is not full-up on words, Words, WORDS!?

# # #

 

 

FTAC – Global Meld – Primary Reconsideration

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by commart in Notes On Reading BackChannels, Philology, Philosophy, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

global society, Islam, Judaism, literary experience, religion, universalism, values

The question:

. . . . 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.

From Wikipedia on the Talmud:

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.

___

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.

___

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.

# # #

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Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
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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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