Blessed are the flatbread makers...

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Econoline
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Econoline »

Big RR wrote:
Thu Apr 08, 2021 1:20 pm
Sue--one christian "lens" (not necessarily the only one) recognizes the deliverance celebrated in the Passover, recognizing that god chose to spare his followers who showed their faith by placing the blood of the lam outside their house; it was an exercise of faith, and the faithful were redeemed and saved both from death and ultimately slavery. One christian perspective is that the crucifixion and resurrection of jesus is similar; god will save believers from death and damnation based on their faith;
Exactly wrong: the slaughter of a lamb and the use of the blood to mark their doorways was not an "act of faith" on the part of the Hebrew slaves; it was an actual visible, physical *ACTION*. Similarly, the Passover seder is not an "act of faith"; it too requires actual physical actions, words, rituals, which can be seen (and eaten and drunk) by everyone. At a seder it matters not a whit what you believe. No one can read your mind, but everyone can see your actions, and that's what counts.
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Econoline wrote:
Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:17 pm
Big RR wrote:
Thu Apr 08, 2021 1:20 pm
Sue--one christian "lens" (not necessarily the only one) recognizes the deliverance celebrated in the Passover, recognizing that god chose to spare his followers who showed their faith by placing the blood of the lam outside their house; it was an exercise of faith, and the faithful were redeemed and saved both from death and ultimately slavery. One christian perspective is that the crucifixion and resurrection of jesus is similar; god will save believers from death and damnation based on their faith;
Exactly wrong: the slaughter of a lamb and the use of the blood to mark their doorways was not an "act of faith" on the part of the Hebrew slaves; it was an actual visible, physical *ACTION*. Similarly, the Passover seder is not an "act of faith"; it too requires actual physical actions, words, rituals, which can be seen (and eaten and drunk) by everyone. At a seder it matters not a whit what you believe. No one can read your mind, but everyone can see your actions, and that's what counts.
So what you're saying is, to quote Shakespeare, "the play's the thing" and it's all about the show.  I guess that goes a long way to explaining the concept of the eruv wire encircling areas of New York as well as the peiyot, the tallit, and the davening among ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Just the opposite of the teachings of Jesus, who gave us the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, and who told us to not make a huge display when practicing your righteousness, giving of charity, fasting, and praying (Matthew 6).
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

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No, I'm saying that actions matter more than "thoughts and prayers"—and that sometimes the community created by collective action can even provide a plus above and beyond individual action.
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Sue U »

Ohferchrissakes ... :lol: :roll: :shrug
The Israelite slaves' slaughter of lambs and dabbing the blood on the doorposts is the subject of numerous midrashim (commentaries/interpretations/exegeses) going back millennia. Why a lamb? Why choose the lamb four days in advance? Did the blood go on the inside or the outside of the doorposts? Why? Who was meant to see it and what was it supposed to signify?

Concepts of "faith" in ancient Egypt were nothing like the concepts of faith today. Suffice it to say for now that the whole affair was meant to both instill fear and horror in the Egyptians and to ready the Israelites psychologically for separating themselves from the past and becoming a nation among nations.
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

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And sane people still debate these nonsenses, apparently.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Sue U »

Gob wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:28 am
And sane people still debate these nonsenses, apparently.
Do you read literature? Do you read history? Do you read philosophy? Do you go to the theater? Do any of these things contain 'ideas," or insights into the human condition? Do any of these things give rise to "thoughts" in your head? Nah, just all a lot of nonsense.
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Big RR »

I agree Sue. :ok People have watched the play Oedipus for centuries and debated the ideas and rituals presented; ditto for reading the Canterbury Tales or Beowulf or read/watched and discussed the works of Shakespeare. Ideas can be presented in a number of ways.

As for the concept of faith in ancient Egypt being different, what besides faith could inspire the slaves to rise up and leave and walk into the desert with little food and water (and what but an absence or lapse of that faith could have resulted in the making of the golden calf)? The story of the Exodus, whether you think it is totally (or partially) factual or not, reveals much about the human condition.

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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Sue U »

A couple of brief commentaries from the Reform movement on some meanings to be derived from the parsha (portion) of the Torah containing this story:
D'Var Torah By: Peter S. Knobel

In this portion the plagues come to a devastating end. The final plague is the death of the first males born of humans and animals: only the Israelites are spared.

Moses said: "Thus says the Eternal: Toward midnight I will go forth among the Egyptians, and every [male] first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle." (Exodus 11:4-5)

The plague of the death of the firstborn is deeply disturbing. The loss of human and animal life appears to be extremely cruel. At the time, it seems to have been the necessary condition for the liberation of our ancestors from Egyptian slavery. The stark irony is that the liberation of human beings from slavery almost never comes without the loss of life. Rarely are oppressors willing to relinquish their power peacefully. They seem hell-bent on inflicting death and devastation not only on those they oppress, but also on the whole population under their control. In this portion we can envision God as having warned Pharaoh and his courtiers nine times with increasingly severe consequences. But it is only after God destroys all the firstborn males that Pharaoh gets the message.

Some understand God's action in this story as the equivalent of military action. When faced with an oppressive regime that is slaughtering its own population, do the nations of the world choose to intervene militarily? The question of military intervention is complex. As Jews, we are constantly angered and perplexed by the failure of the world to prevent the Shoah. We often ask, why didn't President Roosevelt bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz? How many times since the Shoah has the world failed to respond to genocide? When are we humans willing to say, as God says at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, "I have marked well the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters; yes I am mindful of their sufferings. I have come down to rescue them . . ." (Exodus 3:7-8)? Let us remember it only took God four hundred years!1

Is there a way to understand the plagues as offering guidance for when and how intervention might occur? In the contemporary world we frequently observe the desire of oppressed peoples for liberation and watch as the revolt against oppression unfolds, sometimes intervening and sometimes restraining ourselves. Weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological, and nuclear – are redlines. At what point do we believe that negotiations and sanctions have failed, and we have no choice but to act? The plague of the death of the firstborn provides us with a fruitful opportunity to explore these complex, difficult, and potentially disastrous options.

I now wish to turn from this moral conundrum to briefly discuss the observance of Pesach. The Israelites were instructed to set aside a year-old lamb without blemish on the tenth of Nisan and to sacrifice it on the fourteenth of Nisan. To protect themselves from the midnight slaughter they were told to paint the doorposts and lintels of their homes with the blood of the lamb, which was to be roasted and consumed before morning with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. "This is how you shall eat it your loins girded, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand you shall eat it hurriedly" (Exodus 12:11). The Israelites were instructed further to re-create the original Pesach annually as a permanent observance of the Exodus from Egypt. The rite was designed to engender questions from children so that the story of Passover could be retold every year.

In his book, Myth: A Very Short Introduction, Robert Segal quotes Mercia Eliade's understanding of the relationship between myth and ritual in this way: "when [ritually] [re-]enacted myth acts as a time machine, carrying one back to the time of the myth and thereby bringing one closer to god." 2 This idea clearly is the basis for the observance of Pesach described above. By reenacting the crucial moment that propelled us out of slavery we recapture the experience and the transcendent meaning of Jewish existence that becomes our master story, and has ethical implications, as we repeat the mantra of our understanding slavery and oppression because "we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt."

We no longer paint our doorposts and lintels with blood, and many do not observe the prohibition against eating roast lamb on Pesach.3 But we continue to try to re-create the experience verbally by substituting text (the Passover Haggadah) and ritual foods, such as matzah (unleavened bread), maror (bitter herbs), and charoset (apples, wine, and nuts, or figs and honey) for the paschal sacrifice. While we no longer don our traveling clothes to prepare for the upcoming redemption, we are obligated to explore the joy of our liberation and we bemoan its failure to have led to universal liberation. Then the question of intervention looms large, as we no longer expect that God will directly intervene. We hope for a Moses who will proclaim the message of God's displeasure and we debate whether it is time for the governments of liberated people to liberate the oppressed.

1 Exodus 12:40 mentions four hundred and thirty years; Genesis 15:13 says four hundred years, see The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised Ed. ( New York: URJ Press, 2005), p. 414
2 Robert A. Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 73
3 "With the destruction of the [Second] Temple, the offering of the paschal lamb came to an end," (see Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 13 [Jerusalem, Keter Publishing, 1996], p. 163)

Rabbi Peter S. Knobel serves as interim rabbi at Temple Judea in Coral Gables Florida. He is rabbi emeritus at Beth Emet the Free Synagogue Evanston Illinois and past president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.


The Dangerous Tool of Destruction
Daver Acher By: Neal Schuster

"Once the destroyer is given permission to harm, he does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked"1

According to our commentaries, this is why the Children of Israel were admonished on the eve of the devastating and disturbing final plague that "none of you shall go outside the door of your house until morning" (Exodus 12:22). Inside of their blood-smeared doorposts they were safe; if they stepped outside in the hour of destruction they stepped into peril.

But there are many kinds of peril. There is the obvious danger of being struck down by the indiscriminate hand of "the destroyer." But there also is a darker danger that we might join the destroyer in his slaughter; that we might use an enemy's evil as license to slake our thirst for justice from a cup of vengeance and indignation. There is the danger that we ourselves may become the wanton destroyers who fail to distinguish between the righteous and the wicked. Perhaps the Children of Israel were warned to stay inside not only for their physical protection, but also for their spiritual protection.

Exodus stands as a profound proof for us that redemption is possible. It can be seen as God providing an archetype of redemption in order to teach us that we must set ourselves to the same task in the world. But we would do well to recognize that even when God redeems, that redemption is fraught with deep and disturbing moral complexity; how much more so when we seek to engage in the task.

Redemption and repair are our tasks in this world, and there are times when the destroyer must be let loose to defeat evil. But "once the destroyer is given permission to harm," there are always righteous who suffer along with the wicked. As the Talmud warns, a fire set against thorns quickly consumes wheat as well (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kama 60a).

In the Torah, God unleashes the power of destruction in the rarest of circumstances. That seems like a valuable lesson if we want to make progress toward a bit of redemption in this world.

1 M'chilta (Pischa, Ch. 11) and Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kama 60a, both of which are cited by Rashi and Nachmanides

Rabbi Neal Schuster is the senior Jewish educator at University of Kansas Hillel.

Reference Materials

Bo, Exodus 10:1-13:16
The Torah: A Modern Commentary, pp. 448-471; Revised Edition, pp. 405–426;
The Torah: A Women's Commentary, pp. 355–378
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

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Sue U wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:35 am
Do you read literature? Do you read history? Do you read philosophy? Do you go to the theater? Do any of these things contain 'ideas," or insights into the human condition? Do any of these things give rise to "thoughts" in your head? Nah, just all a lot of nonsense.

Of course I do. But none of them try to convince me to believe in a big man in the sky who does strange, and rather stupid, things. None of them expect me to ignore actual history. None of them stoop down to the level of fairy tales.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Big RR »

Gob--you can take what you want from them, but most, from the oracles of Oedipus, to the witches of Macbeth, to many others disclose similar supernatural "things" which are central to the disclosure of their their ideas.

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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Gob »

Sure, and I treat those texts as what they are, made up stories.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Sue U »

Gob wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 3:43 pm
Sure, and I treat those texts as what they are, made up stories.
That's fine. I don't " believe in a big man in the sky who does strange, and rather stupid, things" and I don't take the Pentateuch or the Prophets as literal historical records either, even to the extent they incorporate historical events and people into their texts. If that's what you're looking for, you're missing the point entirely. You can think of it as a sub-genre of magical realism, if that makes it any easier for you. Not everyone's cuppa, but no one's forcing you to do anything.
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

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Gob, 'just made up stories' I am puzzled by this description. The only book I have that might not fit in that category is the copy of the phone book which my local landline phone service distributes free periodically to everyone. Most go directly to the paper re-cycle bin immediately. I can't imagine a book that would be more boring and challenging to read from cover to cover.

You might give some thought to the commentaries of Hunter S Thompson and Truman Capote. They each produced very different arguments that real truths can sometimes only be communicated as fiction.

Your descriptions of how you composed and recorded landscape pictures 'are 'just made up stories.'

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Gob
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Gob »

Sue U wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 4:22 pm
You can think of it as a sub-genre of magical realism, if that makes it any easier for you. Not everyone's cuppa, but no one's forcing you to do anything.
Fair comment, but "magical realism"? Meh...
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Gob
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Gob »

Burning Petard wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 6:45 pm
Your descriptions of how you composed and recorded landscape pictures 'are 'just made up stories.'

snailgate
But they require no additional belief.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

Gob wrote:
Sat Apr 10, 2021 9:17 am
But they require no additional belief.
Nor does (say) the book of Exodus. One is not required to believe the ideas put forward by the author(s) in order to learn what their society believed, acted upon or used in their relationships to each other and to their God. One does not need to believe and espouse the ideas in "The Republic" to study it as social philosophy, history and material for discussion. One does not have to (and should not) believe that Arrian's version of the life of Alexander the Great is absolutely truthful in order to gain knowledge from studying it.

I think you are afraid of some kinds of study for fear that you just might believe something you have predetermined to reject. It does explain your continuing and wilful mischaracterization of Christian beliefs. :nana
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Sue U »

Gob wrote:
Sat Apr 10, 2021 9:16 am
Fair comment, but "magical realism"? Meh...
Why do you hate Salman Rushdie, ayatollah?
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Re: Blessed are the flatbread makers...

Post by Gob »

Because he's a verbose prat. ;-)
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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