It has made me wonder about what one could write about such a man, his ways and motivations; or on the many different consequences stemming from his acts. He was a modern day version of the Old Man of the Mountain, wasn't he? Something could be made from all this twisted wreckage -- his name wouldn't even have to be invoked, for that matter.

Ed


You Who Wronged

You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,
Striking gold medals in your honor,
Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

xxxx- Czeslaw Milosz

That's wonderful, Ed. Thank you. Milosz hits the spot magnificently.
Yes, what a challenge for poetry.

I don't think it's in the Torah, but I believe it's in the Talmud, that the story is told that God chastised the Jews for celebrating the death of the Egyptians. At any rate, this story and the lesson of it is part of the standard Passover seder that Jews throughout the world conduct each year, and it's been part of countless rabbinical sermons as well.

I was curious about this, so I looked in my Haggada (I have two versions; both with original text and translation). Anyway, nothing to that effect, that I could find, in the Haggada, so I looked about a bit online.

The passage in question, it turns out, is from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 39b, as follows: The text, being a kind of synopsis of debates between various rabbinical scholars, is rather choppy in places, and hard to follow, perhaps, without the footnotes. But the choice nugget in question, highlighted above in blue, is clear enough. An obscure verse in Exodus 14, right before the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea ("And one approached not the other . . . " footnote 11), is interpreted as meaning that the angels did not rejoice at the (impending--it actually hasn't happened yet!) massacre: i.e., they did not get together ("approach one another") to sing, having presumably been told not to by God (footnote 13). But of course, footnote 13 doesn't lead to any scriptural authority: it's just Rabbi Nahman's say-so. And interestingly, the quote from Nahman is followed by a rejoinder from one Rabbi Hanina: "He Himself does not rejoice, yet He causes others to rejoice," and he does have a quote from scripture (Deut. 28:63) as authority--though it seems a little tenuous, hanging as it does on debatable differences of nuance between causative and active forms ([ya]sis, yasus) of the Hebrew verb for "rejoice." (That said, it certainly is no more torturous than Nahman's attempt to link Exodus 14:20 with angels in heaven.)

At any rate, I wouldn't note these quibbles, except for the fact that googling around to find the text itself, I discovered that it's actually something of a contentious issue for some Jews. Meir Kahane, of course, shouldn't be confused with anything in the mainstream of modern diaspora Judaism, being the founder of an organization (the JDL) described by the FBI as a "right-wing terrorist group," but his Pesach -- Holiday of Vengeance still makes a fair case, I think, that Rabbi Nahman's "My handiwork is drowning in the sea" story has a lot of scriptural obstacles to clear before it be taken as authoritative.

More telling for me, however, was just this point, made in an online debate (about Jerusalem's Pride Parade of all things), by a certain Dowid: Which is a good point. In case anyone's not sure what it means, just turn the page in your Bible to Exodus 15 . . . which is where you will, in fact, find "Moses and the children of Israel" singing their song of praise (the famous Song of the Sea), giving thanks to God for his destruction of the Egyptians. So whatever He may have told the angels that day . . . the message clearly didn't get passed on. The Israelites did in fact sing in praise of God's "handiwork" in destroying the Egyptians, and for all one can tell from the Exodus text, the Old Guy didn't mind it one bit.

Needless to say, it's all to the good that later generations of Jews have sought to distance themselves from some of the nastier parts of their religious heritage--just as Christians and others (Muslims included) have done with theirs. I'm all for it. I just think that the first step in that process is making sure we see that heritage squarely to start with. Only from that foundation can we do the all-important work of building better gods for ourselves . . . or (my preference) levelling the lot, and living with none at all.

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There's also the Seder tradition of spilling a drop of wine for each plague, which I've always been told is to remember to feel bad about the victims of the plagues.

Since I was a toddler, and many times in Seders and Hebrew school in the years that followed, I was instructed apropos the Red Sea story that we are not to celebrate the death of our enemies, but only our own escape and liberation.

In Judaism, the Talmud enjoys an exalted status nearly as great as the Bible itself, and certainly has defined the conversation, concerns and attitudes of Jews for many centuries. It doesn't matter if you or I find it in the Bible. The Bible is what it is expounded to be by the commentaries and discussions of the rabbis who wrote the Talmud, according to Jewish teaching and tradition, and the idea of not celebrating the death of one's enemies is solidly entrenched in the core teachings of Judaism.

Spoken as a fellow atheist.

The Jewish take on the matter is perhaps summarized well in this article on the Chabad website.

Among other things, the author quotes Solomon in Proverbs, who said two arguably inconsistent things:

1. “When the wicked perish from the world, good comes to the world, as the verse states, ‘When the wicked perish, there is joyful song.’

2. “When your enemy falls, do not rejoice, and when he stumbles, let your heart not exult, lest the L‑rd see and be displeased, and turn His wrath away from him.”

The author's peroration isn't bad for this sort of thing:

I don't think it is violence or hatred, it is a grim satisfaction that justice has been done. Here is a link to my Facebook note on the whole matter: https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/...50168429966444.

dwl

David, it looks like you pretty much agree with the Chabad article that I referenced in my last post. And so do I.

I have to back up Bob and Bill on this. A friend's daughter had her Bat Mitzvah a few years ago and her reading was on this very issue. In fact she asked my daughter to draw a picture of the Red Sea collapsing around the Egyptians for the cover of the Siddur.

This is what is in the Bible: Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth (Proverbs 24:17).

The Red Sea bit is a common Talmudic teaching. Essentially, the question is how to square the Proverbs quote above with Moses' "Song of the Sea" (Exodus 15). The supposed answer is that Moses' song is not an example of rejoicing in the enemy's defeat, but of acknowledging God's awesome power and showing gratitude for his protection and salvation.

David R.

The Fisk article:
 

Fisk loses me at this point in his article:

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. And then the world went mad.


....Who cares if Bin Laden is no long politically relevant or interesting to Fisk? That kid broke a lot of fucking windows!

This whole thing is such a headache. COULD YOU IMAGINE if he were put on trial? It's ugly, ugly shit, I hate the whole thing. But there it is. Selah.

Regarding facts--they are by definition obvious. It's the truth that is a bitch to get at. As Rilke says, and I still can't find where: The truth is buried under a pile of facts.

Planes flew into buildings, killing more than 3,000 people: Fact
etc.

Truth--keeps us up at night.

No joy in Mudville,
Rick