Archive for category Culture
The Midpoint of the World
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, History, Philosophy, Politics on March 6, 2013
What would you ask of a time traveler from a hundred years ago? And if you traveled a hundred years into the future, what would you want to tell the people you found there? Perhaps it would sound something like this:
What did you do to handle the overpopulations we predicted? How did you protect the seashores? What did you do to keep the ozone layer intact, the energy supplies, the trees? Have you eliminated ignorance, brutality, greed?
There might be no better way to discover unexamined truths about ourselves then by composing a letter to our grandchildren’s grandchildren. This was certainly on the mind of award-winning essayist Roger Rosenblatt a quarter century ago when he penned his deeply thoughtful Letter to 2086.
Read the whole article here.
Hat tip: David Rich
Leadership is not (yet) dead
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Ethics of Fathers, Politics on February 21, 2013
From Beyond Twelve Gates by Rabbi Ze’ev Smason:
Our persistent need to rank events and people has led to the proliferation of year-end ‘Best of the Year’ lists; Top 10 Sports Moments of the Year, Top 10 News Stories of the Year, Top 10 Gefilte Fish Recipes of the Year (well, maybe things haven’t gone that far …yet). However, an intriguing year-end list, put forth by the Times of Israel, was ‘ Gentiles of the Year 2012.’ One name relatively unknown on this list was Istvan Ujhelyi. Unfamiliar with Mr. Ujhelyi? His name is worth knowing.
After a far-right Hungarian politician called for Jews to be screened as potential security risks, Istvan Ujhelyi, the deputy speaker of Hungary’s parliament, led colleagues in wearing yellow stars as a sign of solidarity with the country’s Jewish community. While presiding over a parliamentary session, Ujhelyi, bedecked in his own yellow star, said, ”One of our fellow deputies stepped over a line that I thought until now could not happen in the halls of the Hungarian national assembly. As far as I know I do not have Jewish ancestry, but should (someone) uncover that I have such roots, I will be proud of them.” Some 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust, including a third of the victims who died at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hungary’s Jewish population is estimated at 100,000 today, and while physical attacks are rare, an elderly rabbi was insulted recently near his home and Jewish and Holocaust memorials have been vandalized.
Istvan Ujhelyi’s action and words brings to mind the teaching of Hillel (Ethics of the Fathers 2:6) “…..and in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” There are times when circumstances in life require that we go against the tide. Even when no one else has the wisdom or courage to do the right thing, even when everyone else has become part of the faceless crowd, we still must rise to the occasion.
A song of hope
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Education and Parenting, Philosophy, Weekly Parsha on January 22, 2013
An elaboration of remarks made this week at the l’chaim for my son Yaakov and his kallah, Amanda:
It’s especially fitting to celebrate an engagement this week, when we will observe Shabbos Shira. It’s difficult for us to imagine what it was like for the Jews of Egypt when, after watching the systematic and miraculous obliteration of the empire that had oppressed them for generations, after witnessing the death of four-fifths of their brethren who refused to trust in the hand of heaven, after setting forth into the forbidding desert with great wealth and fanfare, after finding themselves trapped between Pharaoh’s advancing chariots and the unyielding sea – after all that, to launch themselves forward between towering walls of water may have been the only option available to them but was by no means a simple act of self-preservation.
Panic, desperation, terror, relief, and disbelief – all these emotions caromed back and forth through their collective consciousness as they raced forward into uncertainty. And, as they came out soundly on the other side, the cacophony of thoughts and feelings coalesced into a divinely inspired harmony we call the Shir Shel Yam – the Song of the Sea.
For all that, the commentaries all question the syntax of the opening phrase, Oz yoshir Moshe u’vnei Yisroel – contextually translated as, “Then, Moshe and the Children of Israel sang,” but curiously rendered in the future tense rather than the past. Explains the Sfas Emes: although the people were inspired to sing as they passed through the sea, their preoccupation with the practical business of fleeing for their lives demanded that their lyrical expression of elation would have to wait until their salvation was completed.
And so we learn that Hashem is closest to us not during those times when we have already connected with Him, but rather when we are seeking Him with the sense that revelation is nearly within reach. Naturally, we express our deepest gratitude after we have been saved. But our most intimate connection with the Almighty comes during those moments when salvation is imminent but not yet complete. Only then can we experience the spiritual intensity of absolute dependence upon divine intervention even as we see our redemption unfolding before our eyes.
Indeed, the Zohar tells us that Moshe Rabbeinu felt humbled when he beheld prophetically the generation before the coming of Moshiach. For Moshe, who lived in an era of open miracles and divine revelation, it seemed a simple matter to trust in Hashem and His providence. But to live in a generation of such spiritual darkness that even the faintest glimmer of divine light seemed to have vanished, and to retain nevertheless even the smallest shred of faithfulness to Hashem and His Torah – that was something the Moshe himself could not fathom; that was the source of his profound humility.
We find ourselves in such a generation, so much so that it’s easy for us to reckon ourselves like King Louis XV of France who said, “Things may last my time, but after me – le deluge.”
It’s terrifying to contemplate the world in which our grandchildren will grow up and the storms our children will have to navigate. But on the occasion of this l’chaim, I’m filled with hope.
After two decades of trying, by constant teaching and imperfect modeling, to instill in my children the primacy of middos tovos, after laboring to impress upon them by any means that qualities such as honesty, integrity, loyalty, modesty, and respect are the foundations of Torah life and Torah society, I thank the Ribono Shel Olam that my son has chosen a young woman whose impeccably fine character testifies to the quality of her parents and her upbringing. I look with nachas at my own son, whose maturation into a ben Torah and a ba’al middos testifies to the inscrutable power of tefillah.
And looking at them, I feel as the Jews must have felt when they were passing through the Yam Suf – I want to sing shira. For as frightened as I am for them and all the challenges they will have to face, they give me hope for the future and inspire me with confidence that very soon we will all merit the final redemption and the coming of Moshiach.
Originally posted at Beyondbt.com.
Words, words, words
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture on November 21, 2012
The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are some of the winners:
Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease.
Karmageddon : It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer……like
Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.
The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. Among the winners are:
Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
Frisbeetarianism, n.. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
Hat tip: Steve Glassman
It’s (not) my fault!
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture on November 11, 2012
By Joe Holleman • jholleman@post-dispatch.com
The big election is just days away and I’ll be glad when the question of who is more evil, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, can finally be laid to rest — at least until the next time the griping electorate needs to demonize yet another opponent.
Sorry if this seems cynical, but do you blame me? For we have become something worse than a Nation of Greed or a Nation of Hate.
We have become a Nation of Whiners.
Welcome to the land of griping and moaning fault-finders who can identify a hundred reasons why they’ve failed, and not one that begins with them.
I mean it really can’t be our fault that we’re fat, or unhappy, or got a divorce, or can’t hold a job, or drink or smoke too much, or do too many drugs? We’re not to blame for these weaknesses, are we?
Advertising makes us eat too much, our bosses make us drink to excess and our spouses make us cheat. What’s a poor boy to do?
(Note: To those who have pointed out that I have been fat most of my life, let me explain how that unfortunate condition came about: I eat too damn much. You know whose fault that is? Mine.)
And if you sit still and try hard enough, you can feel that vast conspiracy of right-wing wackos, left-wing crazies, racist whites, lazy blacks, communists, capitalists, religious kooks and marrying gays all coming together to pull the invisible strings that yank your lives off track.
And don’t even get me started on those border-violating Mexicans who come up here to work jobs that we’re simply too good or too lazy to accept. The nerve of them.
For if it’s not one of these many reasons for our failures, if we still can’t blame a Kennedy or a George W., then we just might be forced to sit upright in our easy-way-out chairs and at least give a passing nod to the notion that our lives are in the present condition because of what we have done with them.
Oh, relax, I was just kidding. Who needs an honest self-appraisal when we have cadres of counseling shills straight from the excuse factories ready to let us off the hook for all of our faults? Why should we embrace personal responsibility when the messes our lives have become can be laid off on a harping mother, an absent father, a mean nun, godless Democrats and soulless Republicans.
Repeat after me, “It’s not my fault.”
And if you could just indulge self-indulgence a teensy bit longer, we can surely find a support group or psychological study that backs us up.
Better yet, let’s take another ridiculous step further and make heroes out of failures. Give the big headlines to troubled pop singers, actors and athletes than to people who actually do some good. The fact that so many people know so much about Lindsay Lohan should be some sort of crime in itself.
In modern America, it has become the norm to exalt mediocrity and praise good intentions. That way, our self-esteem gets stroked far more when we consistently clear that low bar than it would if we were actually expected to show quality and results.
Clearly, we have sailed past the point of listening to Shakespeare tell us we shouldn’t blame the stars, but ourselves. And maybe the world is now too secular to remind anyone that the L-rd helps those who help themselves.
But let’s hope we’re not too far down that lost highway to ignore Hunter S. Thompson’s note about life. “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
In short, quit whining.
(Published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 4, 2012)
Post Mortem
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Politics on November 7, 2012
Dated April 18, 2011, the following is from the Prager Zeitung, a publication in the Czech Republic:
“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting an inexperienced man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude … such as those who made him their president.”
Thinking about faith
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture on May 25, 2012
What shapes a person’s world view? Where do ideas come from? From whence do our outlooks and attitudes spring forth, and to what can we attribute our biases and perspectives?
British philosopher Henry Sidgwick offered the following observation:
We think so because other people all think so;
or because —
or because, after all, we do think so;
or because we were told so, and think we must think so;
or because we once thought so, and think we still think so;
or because, having thought so, we think we will think so…
A new article asserts that faith and reason are mutually exclusive. Click here to see who’s kidding whom.
Who’s holding all the cards?
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Philosophy on March 12, 2012
Why did Qatar pay $250 million for a second-tier masterpiece?
Editorial Judgment and Responsibility
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Jewish Unity on March 9, 2012
Published this week in the St. Louis Jewish Light.
Dear Editor:
N.P. raises an interesting point in his objection to the all-girls musical productions of Block Yeshiva and Bais Yaakov (Letter to the editor, Feb. 29). He is correct that I will not be able to attend my own daughter’s performance, in accordance with Jewish law. I appreciate his heartfelt concern for my feelings and those of my daughter, but our commitment to 3,300 years of tradition mitigates any pangs of disappointment.
Be that as it may, objection to this kind of “segregation” begs the question of consistency. Why has N. P. not similarly denounced the JCC for segregating men and women into separate locker rooms? Why has he not expressed outrage against the International Olympic Committee for refusing to integrate men and women in athletic competition, against the NAACP for devoting resources solely to the African-American community, and against professional basketball for its underrepresentation of the vertically disadvantaged? Indeed, why has he not filed suit against the Department of Transportation for segregating northbound traffic from southbound traffic with those ubiquitous yellow lines?
Ultimately, it is neither the illogic nor the pettiness of N. P.’s reflexive attacks upon Jewish tradition that matters. Of far greater concern is the pattern of poor judgment shown by the Jewish Light in providing a platform for hatemongering and factionalism.
Responsible spokesmen representing different opinions may argue passionately without abandoning reason or civility, and a local paper should offer a forum for articulate voices expressing divergent views. However, the failure of the Light to demonstrate sound editorial discernment is among the primary reasons why the paper has lost credibility in the eyes of so many while alienating a substantial part of the Jewish community.
3/9/2012
Weighing in on Evolution
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Science and Nature on January 19, 2012
Teaching Jewish history and philosophy, I try to encapsulate for my students what I have heard and read from critics of evolutionary theory. My purpose is not to disprove evolution per se, but to demonstrate that the theory of evolution is not as sacrosanct as the scientific community and conventional wisdom would have us believe. Since I am not a scientist, I have to sift though what evidence is available in layman’s terms and try to evaluate the often strident voices on each side of the argument.
Having recently revisited the issue, I remain confidant in my conclusion that evolution may have guided the formation of life, but that it could not have done so without divine guidance. Despite the vehemence of those who reject Creationism or Intelligent Design, it seems to require a massive leap of faith to conclude that life could have developed into its present form without help from outside the world of nature. Below I provide relevant quotes and links, which I hope interested and thoughtful readers will give the attention they deserve. Civil rebuttals from articulate spokesmen are welcome.
“Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin’s oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory…
“The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, “Did Darwin get it all right?” And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed.”
Gerald Schroeder — Read the whole essay here.
“As I began to write this novel, I found myself returning unexpectedly to the concerns of my undergraduate studies thirty years ago. Back then, evolution was so controversial that one quickly learned to write cautiously, justifying even the mildest statement with scholarly footnotes. If anything, evolution is more controversial today. And in its modern formulations, evolutionary theory is forbiddingly difficult, and frequently counter-intuitive…
“I remain convinced that the world we are born into is a world of controversy, and that it behooves us to respect our adversaries, and to honor them as expressing another aspect of God’s will.
“Because in the end, evolution is a profound mystery. Life is a profound mystery. And we are fools if we forget that and think, even for a moment, that we know it all…
“Take bats, which have echolocation — they navigate by sound. To do that, many things must evolve. Bats need a specialized apparatus to make sounds, they need specialized ears to hear echoes, they need specialized brains to interpret the sounds, and they need specialized bodies to dive and swoop to catch insects. If all these things don’t evolve simultaneously, there’s no advantage. And to imagine that all these things happened purely by chance [is] very hard to believe.”
Michael Crichton
“Life as we know it is, among other things, dependent on at least 2000 different enzymes. How could the blind forces of the primal sea manage to put together the correct chemical elements to build enzymes? The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein… I am at a loss to understand biologists’ widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.”
Sir Fred Hoyle (who estimated the odds of spontaneous generation as equivalent to rolling 50,000 consecutive sixes with a single die)
“Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can’t see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn’t have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But…is any of this established?”
Fred Reed (linked by Rabbi Dovid Gottleib, former professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins) — Read the whole article here.
I have some doubts about including the following article, having no indication of the credibility of the author. Nevertheless, he cites many compelling sources which, independent of his own expertise or lack thereof, are worth considering:
“Harmful mutations happen constantly. Without repair mechanisms, life would be very short indeed and might not even get started because mutations often lead to disease, deformity, or death. So even the earliest, “simple” creatures in the evolutionist’s primeval soup or tree of life would have needed a sophisticated repair system. But the mechanisms not only remove harmful mutations from DNA, they would also remove mutations that evolutionists believe build new parts. The evolutionist is stuck with imagining the evolution of mechanisms that prevent evolution, all the way back to the very origin of life.”
John Michael Fischer — Read the whole article here.
“However, on both theoretical and experimental grounds, the broad sweep of evolution cannot be based on random mutations. On theoretical grounds, the probability is just too small for random mutations, even with the filtering of natural selections, to lead to a new species.
“On experimental grounds, there are no known random mutations that have added any genetic information to the organism. This may seem surprising at first, but a list of the best examples of mutations offered by evolutionists shows that each of them loses genetic information rather than gains it.
“One of the examples where information is lost is the one often trotted out by evolutionists nowadays in an attempt to convince the public of the truth of evolution. That is the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
“Clearly, if random mutations could account for the evolution of life, then those mutations must have added a vast amount of information to the genetic code. From the time of the first simple organism until the present profusion of life, billions of genetic changes would have to be built up by a long series of accumulated mutations and natural selection. It follows that each of these many billions of mutations must have added information. Yet in spite of all the molecular studies that have been done on mutations, not a single one has been found that adds any genetic information! They all lose information!”
Adapted from Dr. Lee Spetner’s Not By Chance — Read a more thorough synopsis here.
One of my favorite natural anomalies is the orb spider, which spins a web solely for the benefit of the wasp larvae that have been injected into it. This must have taken a good few million years to happen by accident.
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