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Aim for Yom Kippur, ‘if Not Higher’ A treatment of an old Jewish tale offers a model of faith during the Days of Awe. By Ruth R. Wisse

By on September 22nd, 2023

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.

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Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) Guide for the Perplexed, 2023-Yoram Ettinger

By on September 20th, 2023

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.

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What is “The Right Way To Lead Life”? When a philosopher goes wrong, he can go really wrong By Roger Kimball

By on September 18th, 2023

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.

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He Became the Nation’s Ninth Vice President. She Was His Enslaved Wife.Ronald G. Shafer

By on September 13th, 2023

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/he-became-the-nation-s-ninth-vice-president-she-was-his-enslaved-wife?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

Her name was Julia Chinn, and her role in Richard Mentor Johnson’s life caused a furor when the Kentucky Democrat was chosen as Martin Van Buren’s running mate in 1836.

She was born enslaved and remained that way her entire life, even after she became Richard Mentor Johnson’s “bride.”

Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who eventually became the nation’s ninth vice president in 1837, couldn’t legally marry Julia Chinn. Instead the couple exchanged vows at a local church with a wedding celebration organized by the enslaved people at his family’s plantation in Great Crossing, according to Miriam Biskin, who wrote about Chinn decades ago.

Chinn died nearly four years before Johnson took office. But because of controversy over her, Johnson is the only vice president in American history who failed to receive enough electoral votes to be elected. The Senate voted him into office.

The couple’s story is complicated and fraught, historians say. As an enslaved woman, Chinn could not consent to a relationship, and there’s no record of how she regarded him. Though she wrote to Johnson during his lengthy absences from Kentucky, the letters didn’t survive.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who is working on a book about Chinn, wrote about the hurdles in a blog post for the Association of Black Women Historians.

“While doing my research, I was struck by how Julia had been erased from the history books,” wrote Myers, a history professor at Indiana University. “Nobody knew who she was. The truth is that Julia (and Richard) are both victims of legacies of enslavement, interracial sex, and silence around black women’s histories.”

Johnson’s life is far better documented.

He was elected as a Democrat to the state legislature in 1802 and to Congress in 1806. The folksy, handsome Kentuckian gained a reputation as a champion of the common man.

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THE GREAT CRISIS OF OUR TIME: JOHN WATERS

By on August 27th, 2023

https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2023/08/26/great_crisis_of_our_time_975593.html

Nearly 100 years ago, Winston Churchill wrote an essay called the “Mass Effects in Modern Life.” In it he wondered whether the best of human potential had been handed over to assembly lines and machine processes, what he referred to as the “magic” of mass production. “Science in all its forms surpasses itself every year,” Churchill observed. The year was 1925. Churchill had seen a great deal of change in his life. He had lived through the mass sacrifice and suffering of the Great War, the rise of a collectivist ideology in Soviet Russia, and a second wave of industrialization that stretched from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. Though science had delivered “material blessings” in “measureless abundance,” the face of society was changing.

Gone were the master craftsmen and creators. Gone were the pioneers and adventurers, whose bold choices spurred the enterprise that followed their discoveries. In the place of “eminent men” was industrial repetitiveness, powerful and productive but lacking in whatever elusive qualities that once imbued the lonely individual with a sense of honor, and an ambition to leave his mark on the world. Modern civilization proved “hostile to the development of outstanding personalities and to their influence upon events.” More artist than politician, Churchill saw through the mysteries of the times and concluded that as man becomes more dominant over science and technology, “the individual [himself] becomes a function.” This tiny speck that is a person no longer thinks of “himself as an immortal spirit, clothed in the flesh, but sovereign, unique, indestructible.” He loses his faith; he loses himself.

Modern life seems depleted of meaning and purpose, writes political philosopher Glenn Ellmers. In his new book The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy (Encounter, 2023), Ellmers explores what went wrong in the American political community over the last 100-plus years, tracing a line from Machiavelli to Nietzsche on to Hegel and then Foucault in search of that rogue strain of thought that produced this modern condition. At less than 100 pages, the book offers no solutions. Instead, like Churchill, Ellmers illuminates the problem: how the individual became part of an aggregate; why “our dignity has no quantitative value.” I spoke with Ellmers about his book and ideas. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

What is the “great crisis” of our time?

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A bit of history never goes amiss. Victor Sharpe (2011)

By on August 23rd, 2023

President Obama’s lugubrious policy of denigrating America whenever he visits developing Third World countries includes craven, mournful apologies for perceived past American sins to some of the world’s worst thugocracies. British Prime Minister, David Cameron, alas, appears to be sinking to the same level in apologizing for alleged British sins.

The Prime Minister was recently in Pakistan — that Muslim nation that has just seen U.N. officials beheaded and scores of people murdered by frenzied Muslim mobs upset at the burning of a Koran by an American Christian pastor.

Of course, burning the Jewish Torah (first five books of the Bible), the Bhagavad-Gita, (Hindu Gospels), the Tripitaka (Buddhist holy book) and the entire Bible itself would never engender beheadings or murders: such horrors are left to the followers of Islam.

But David Cameron has some problems with history, it seems. His words imply that Britain is responsible for all the ills between India and Pakistan — stating that Britain’s, “imperial legacy was to blame for the current conflicts in many parts of the world’s trouble spots.” He continued, “As with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”

According to Nile Gardiner, Mr. Cameron, while on a trip to Washington last July, 2010, also described Britain as the “junior partner” to America in fighting the Germans in 1940. Are we to understand that Prime Minister Cameron does not know that Britain fought alone once war was declared on September 3, 1939 and that the US did not enter the war until December 7, 1941, and then only because the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor?

Again, according to Nile Gardiner, writing in the London Daily Telegraph on April 5, 2011, Cameron’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, had responded to an earlier attack on Britain by Thabo Mbeki, then South Africa’s president, by declaring that, “… the days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over,” and that, “we should celebrate much of our past, rather than apologize for it.”

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Robert Taft: A Senator for All Seasons Paul F. Petrick

By on July 31st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/31/robert-taft-a-senator-for-all-seasons/

Contrary to popular belief, the biggest fraud in American politics is not Rep. George Santos.  Nor is it the not-so-Native American Sen. Elizabeth Warren.  Nor is it the “Stolen Valor” Sen. Richard Blumenthal.  It is not even Joe Biden, whose fabulism stretches so far back that Johnny Carson joked about it. 

The biggest frauds in American politics are the 27 “Republican” members of Congress who voted for the obscene $1.66 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill last December, 16 of whom still “serve.”

In stark contrast to their example is the memory of Ohio Republican Sen. Robert A. Taft, who died 70 years ago today — July 31, 1953. 

Among the few outstanding American statesmen and the fewer whose greatness was contemporaneously acknowledged, Taft’s destiny seemed preordained.  First in his class in high school, college (Yale), and law school (Harvard), Taft was the scion of a great American political dynasty and the son of the only man to hold the offices of U.S. president and Supreme Court chief justice. Leaving no branch of government unmastered by his family, Taft scaled the legislative ladder. In the Ohio legislature, he led efforts to reform the state’s antiquated tax code, opposed prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan, and rose to become speaker of the lower house before graduating to the State Senate.  But it was as a U.S. senator that Taft became one for the ages.

Elected in 1938, Taft immediately became renowned for his intelligence, parliamentary skill, and principled opposition to government intervention at home and abroad. Impervious to interest groups, Taft never broke an agreement, especially with his constituents. He was always the man they voted for. Taft eschewed political deception and courageously adhered to his principles, garnering universal respect. 

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The Discovery of Insulin: A Story of Monstrous Egos and Toxic Rivalries Meet the feuding scientists who battled for credit over the discovery of insulin.

By on July 20th, 2023

ttps://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-discovery-of-insulin-a-story-of-monstrous-egos-and-toxic-rivalries?utm_source=pocket-newtab

When Frederick Banting’s phone rang one morning in October 1923, it was the call that every scientist must dream of receiving. On the other end of the line, an excited friend asked Banting if he had seen the morning newspapers. When Banting said no, his friend broke the news himself. Banting had just been awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery of insulin.

 Frederick Banting on the cover of TIME magazine on August 27, 1923. Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo 

Banting told his friend to “go to hell” and slammed the receiver down. Then he went out and bought the morning paper. Sure enough, there in the headlines he saw in black and white that his worst fears had come true: he had indeed been awarded the Nobel – but so too had his boss, John Macleod, professor of physiology at the University of Toronto.

This is a tale of monstrous egos, toxic career rivalries and injustices. But of course, there is another character in this drama: diabetes itself.

According to a 2021 World Health Organization report, about 9 million people with type 1 diabetes are alive today thanks to insulin. I’m one of them, and it was my own shock diagnosis with this condition, just over ten years ago, that first led me to investigate the discovery of insulin – the drug that I would be injecting several times a day for the rest of my life.

‘The Pissing Evil’

Diabetes derives its name from the ancient Greek word for “to flow” – a reference to one of its most common symptoms and for which the 17th-century English doctor Thomas Willis (1625-75) gave it the far more memorable name of “the pissing evil”. But frequent trips to the toilet were the least of a patient’s worries.

Before the discovery of insulin, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes meant certain death. Unable to metabolise sugar from carbohydrates in their diet, patients became weak and emaciated until, due to the production of toxic compounds known as ketones, they slipped into a coma and died. Even at the start of the 20th century, there was little that could be done for patients with this condition, other than to put them on a starvation diet that might at best delay the inevitable.

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How Jews Fared in 19th Century ‘Palestine’ Before Zionism and Balfour. July 14, 2023 by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-jews-fared-in-19th-century-palestine/

In recent years, Palestinian and other Arab propagandists have claimed that before the Zionists appeared, supposedly intent on taking over by force land “belonging to the Arabs,” the local Arabs in “Palestine” (a toponym not used by the Arabs until the late 20th century, for until 1948 they thought of the area as part of “southern Syria”) had gotten along quite well with the Jews who had been living in the area long before the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers from Europe.

In this version of history, it was only when Jews, having become Zionists, suddenly became land-grabbers, “stealing Arab land,” that the Arabs, quite justifiably, turned on them in self-defense.

This claim is as false as the one that so many peoples in the West accept about Islamic Spain being a splendid example of interfaith tolerance and cultural syncretism. Elder of Ziyon several months ago compiled news reports from the period before the Balfour Declaration, even before the first stirrings of Zionism, to show what had been the real relations of Muslims to Jews in “Palestine.” More on the evidence showing the treatment that Jews had to endure at the hands of Muslims in “Palestine” in the period “before Balfour and before Herzl” can be found here: “A short catalogue of Arab intolerance of Jews in Palestine before both Zionism and the Balfour Declaration,” Elder of Ziyon, April 10, 2023:

There is no doubt that there were some friendships between some Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem and throughout the Arab world, but to use them as evidence of widespread acceptance of Jews as equals or near-equals is not only flawed reasoning but utterly false.

The evidence that Jews were treated horribly is irrefutable.

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America’s Strength for Freedom by Lawrence Kadish

By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19801/america-strength-for-freedom

Earlier this month, a Gatestone Institute reader, Goh Heung Yong, submitted a comment in which he noted:

“No one should forget that it was America’s strength for freedom, that freed just about all of Asia from Japanese occupation. Her power for peace liberated half of Europe and kept Stalin’s predatory advance at bay. America still is that shining beacon for freedom and civilized existence.”

His astute observation reveals a number of important insights regarding the historic role of the United States during World War II. While much of our attention is often drawn to the European theater of operations, America fought a two-front war. The Pacific theater was a literal fight-to-the-finish as our Marines, Army, Navy and Army Air Corps created a ring of steel around the Japanese Empire intent on fighting for every square inch of land. America won in the Pacific at enormous cost, and only the use of two atomic weapons finally brought the conflict to an end.

What few Americans appreciate was the path of destruction and litany of war crimes committed by the Japanese Empire throughout their zone of occupation, which included huge swaths of China.

Historians have documented their crimes; these included repeated massacres of civilians and prisoners of war, sexual slavery, human experimentation, forced labor and starvation. While those crimes occurred wherever the Emperor’s soldiers occupied Asia, China bore the brunt of Japan’s assault on humanity. Historians estimate that from 1937 to 1945, nearly 4 million Chinese, mostly civilians, were killed as a direct result of Japanese violence.

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