RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-roman-empire-through-virgils-eyes/

Recently a trend on Tik-Tok had its fifteen minutes of click-fame.  It seems that some women are asking their men how often they think about the Roman Empire. The usual suspect experts were consulted, and of course they conclude that this interest in Rome reflects modern males’ angst over, or nostalgia for a time when patriarchy dominated, and manly deeds defined the male sex––the original “toxic masculinity.”

There’s nothing wrong per se with thinking about ancient Rome. Since Edward Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of Rome has been a cautionary tale of how great empires collapse. Given the abundance of empirical evidence––invasions of unvetted migrants, our geopolitical enemies’ increasing challenges, a looming fiscal apocalypse, and suicidal social and cultural corruption––our country may be experiencing Rome’s fate, making its history deserving of our attention. And one place to start is reading what one brilliant Roman thought about the then new empire.

There’s no greater witness than the poet Virgil, who came of age during the last years of the Roman Republic, a century when social disorder, civic violence, and civil wars between Roman generals and their legions were chronic. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 B.C.) tells the story of Rome’s beginnings in the invasion of Italy by Trojan refugees, and also explores the tragic costs of civilization, and the lofty idealism that some great empires have claimed to represent.

That theme is what makes Rome and its fate so significant for us Americans, who are watching a floundering foreign policy lurching between appeasement and half-hearted interventions abroad.

Virgil has several scenes that make Rome’s imperial idealism explicit. One dimension of Rome’s greatness was its virtue: not just courage, the most important virtue for every civilization, but also pietas, the duty and responsibility one owes to family, the dead, the gods, and Rome itself. Virgil’s hero Aeneas is known for this virtue, hence the honorific pius attached to his name.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aim-for-yom-kippur-if-not-higher-judaism-faith-literature-days-of-awe-peretz-b818bb1?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

In the Hebrew calendar, the 10-day period beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ending with Yom Kippur, the year’s holiest day, are called Yamim Noraim, the “Days of Awe.” During this time—which began this year on Sept. 16—our reckoning before the Supreme Judge is so fearsome that the very fish are said to tremble in the seas.

This intense concentration on one’s regrettable actions can often inspire a resolve for teshuvah, or return, in this case from one’s iniquities. Since modernity seemed to lead Jews inexorably from religious faith to secular humanism, this time presented an opportunity to encourage Jews who had strayed from the path to return to the traditional way of life. The term ba’al teshuvah came to refer to one who had reassumed the historically sanctioned habits of Jewish observance.

But things aren’t always as they seem.

One of the best-known stories about this penitential period, set in a small town in Eastern Europe, features a Hasidic rebbe who is in the strange habit of disappearing every year during these days of judgment when his congregants most require his presence. “Where could the rebbe be?” Where else, they conclude, but in heaven, interceding on their behalf at God’s holy throne.

One year, there arrives in town a skeptic determined to learn the truth. Hiding under the rebbe’s bed, and sensing him rise in the middle of the night, he peeks out. The rebbe dresses in peasant clothing, girds himself with rope and axe, and makes for the forest. There the skeptic watches as the rebbe chops and binds branches for firewood, and then goes to the home of a poor widow at the outskirts of town. Still in disguise, the holy man lights the woman’s fire and assures her that he can wait for payment.

1. Soul searching. Yom Kippur is observed on the 10th day of the Jewish month of Tishrei (September 25, 2023). It is called the Super Sabbath (Shabbat Shabbaton in Hebrew), concluding 10 days of soul-searching and spiritual self-awareness and self-enhancement, which begins on Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish year.

According to Leviticus 23:26-32: “The Lord said to Moses, that the tenth day of the seventh month [Tishrei] is the Day of Atonement…. Do not do any work on that day…. This is a lasting ordinance for generations to come….”

Yom Kippur commemorates the day of divine forgiveness for the sin of worshipping the golden calf idol. It cautions against the temptation to sacrifice spiritual values on the altar of materialism and convenience.

2. Social responsibility. Asking forgiveness of fellow human-beings is a major feature of Yom Kippur, transferring human behavior from acrimony and vindictiveness to forgiveness and peaceful coexistence. It is consistent with the philosophy of Hillel the Elder, a leading 1st century BCE Jewish Sage: “The essence of the Torah is: do not do unto your fellow person that which is hateful to you; the rest [of the Torah] is commentary.” 

3. No ill-speaking. According to Judaism, the tongue can be a lethal weapon, and therefore, ill-speaking of other people (“evil tongue” in Hebrew) may not be forgiven.  Yom Kippur is a reminder that words are controllable while inside one’s mouth, but they become uncontrollable once they are uttered out.

4. Behavioral enhancement. Yom Kippur highlights magnanimity, humility, genuine-repentance, compassion, consideration, forgiveness, responsibility, optimism and faith.  It recognizes one’s fallibilities, emphasizes learning from one’s mistakes, minimizing future missteps, elevating morality and enhancing family and community cohesion.

Criminals and sinners are invited to participate in Yom Kippur services.

5. Fasting is a key feature of Yom Kippur, reducing material pleasure, in order to focus on one’s soul-searching, and enhancing empathy with the needy. The Hebrew spelling of fasting [צומ] is the root of the Hebrew word for reducing/focusing ((צמצומ.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/17/what-is-the-right-way-to-lead-life/

In a famous passage of Plato’s Republic, Socrates admonishes his young friend Glaucon (who, incidentally, was also Plato’s older brother) that what they are talking about “is no ordinary business, but the right way to lead one’s life.”

Talking about “the right way to lead life”—if not, alas, actually doing it—has always been philosophy’s trump card, its highest purpose, the reason, deep down, we put up with the philosopher’s woolliness, his maddening jargon, his intellectual arrogance. We suspect that he might just have something important to tell us about how to live—or how not to live—our lives.

We’re right about that. But it must also be said that when a philosopher goes wrong, he can go really wrong. Some of the loopiest things ever said about life, the universe, and everything have been said by philosophers.

It is not just intellectually that philosophers can go wrong. There is something about the grandness of the philosophical enterprise—laying down the law about what is and what isn’t wisdom—that gives a certain kind of philosopher a sweet tooth for political tyranny.

Plato himself famously flirted with Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse. And in our own time there is the example of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

There are two widely divergent opinions about Heidegger.

One camp holds that Heidegger was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, a philosophical giant whose inquiries into the nature of Being made him a worthy heir of Kant.

The other camp holds that Heidegger was one of the greatest philosophical charlatans of the 20th century, a man hopelessly addicted to mystification and obfuscating polysyllabic word-play.

I know it sounds paradoxical (not to say self-contradictory), but I believe that both camps have a point. I believe that Heidegger really was a deep thinker. I also think he was a deliberately mystifying one.

Someday I may come back to that controversy. But today, I want to concentrate on Heidegger’s performance as a public person, a philosopher in the glare of the public realm. Considered from this point of view, as a political figure, Heidegger does not merit very good grades.