We live in what writer Michael Ventura describes as \”the age of interruption.\” There is a mismatch between \”inner time\” — our personal sense of the rhythms of time — and \”outer time\” — the regimented time society imposes upon us.
Have we the tools to meet the impending crises of environmental degradation, population explosion, nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, ethnic and racial slaughter?
Is it any wonder that in education, andparticularly in Jewish education, there is an astonishingly highprofessional mortality rate?
Enter a cathedral, and what do you feel? Thesoaring vaulted ceiling, the giant columns, the colossal statues ofsaints and martyrs, the luminous stained-glass images of scripturalheroes — the architecture articulates a spirituality of contrast. Weare small, insignificant, ephemeral creatures, no better than insectson the floor. We are impure, corrupt, stained with sin. Who are we toapproach God? God is magnificent, distant and fearsome in judgment.In the cathedral, it is only the figure of Christ that mediatesbetween my miserable condition as human being and God\’s majesty.Holiness, argued the scholar Rudolf Otto, lies in the contrastbetween our \”utter creatureliness\” and God\’s frightening \”tremendum.\”Holiness is the shiver of vulnerability in the face of theinfinite.
The Nazis took my uncle Henry at the beginning ofthe war. He survived more than five years as a slave. Young andstrong, he was a carpenter, and they needed carpenters. At first,they moved him from camp to camp, including a stay at Pleshow, whereSchindler\’s people were kept. And, finally, Auschwitz. A slavelaborer, he built parts of the camp. When the Allies advanced, he wastaken on the infamous Death March from Poland into Germany. He wasliberated from Buchenwald by the U.S. Army in 1945.
Pity Esau. One moment of weakness, one moment ofimpulse, and his birthright is gone. He goes out to fulfill hisfather\’s dying wish for a savory meal of game, and while he\’s outhunting, his mother and brother conspire and rob him of his blessing.Returning to his father with the feast, expecting at last to gain hisdue position as head of the clan, he is met with his father\’s emptyexcuses. And so Esau cries: \”Have you but one blessing, Father? Blessme too, Father!\” And Esau wept aloud (Genesis 27:38). Tears ofbetrayal, of pain, of rage, of broken dreams.
He is our first forefather, the progenitor of the Covenant, and, yet, we do not call ourselves B\’nai Avraham, the children of Abraham.
In 1620, our Pilgrim ancestors escapedthe tyranny and religious persecution of the Old World and braved atreacherous journey to find freedom on this continent.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.