JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Many modern atheists are really pantheists. If you listen carefully, you will often hear, “I go out, look at the lake. That’s all I need. I am filled with awe.” Where the awe came from is an unanswered question…

The philosopher who magnetically attracts many contemporary atheists is Spinoza. Spinoza felt Nature was Immanent. Inhabited by the spiritual.

Wiki says,

Martial Guéroult suggested the term “Panentheism”, rather than “Pantheism” to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, “in” God. Not only do finite things have God as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.

It seems a comfy fit: Spinoza and atheism. But listen to Isaiah Berlin about Spinoza,

Spinoza has no sense of change and evolution. He has no sense of history. Spinoza thinks that correct solutions to all questions could have been thought of at any time, but unfortunately weren’t,.. Spinoza preaches a kind of timeless rationalism in a void. He thinks that any idea could have been born at any time. Who in the world has believed this after Hegel?
Conversations With Isaiah Berlin, “The Birth of Modern Politics”

The moving tale of the Ugandan Jews, called the Abayudaya, is described by photojournalist Richard Sobol:

For four generations the Abayudaya Jewish Community in Eastern Uganda has survived despite numerous hardships. Living in virtual isolation until the early 1990′s these struggling subsistence farmers have observed Jewish customs and celebrated the Sabbath and Festivals of the Jewish calendar together as families. Guided by their faith in the Jewish Laws of the Torah, they pray together in mud huts designated as synagogues and chant Hebrew prayers to an Afro beat. Spread out over many miles, the 600 members of this community have held on to their beliefs through civil wars and periods of religious intolerance. Although their faith has at times added to their economic perils, they affirm the power of religion each day, in a life filled with dignity and grace.

(Image © Richard Sobol and used with permission. All rights reserved.)

Richard’s photos are luminous with the human spirit.

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Richard’s site, with some of his photos.

Richard’s book, Abayudaya: The Jews of Uganda.

This wiki entry tells the remarkable tale.

The centerpiece, and not to be missed: You can hear the Abayudaya’s music here. The music reminds me of Paul Simon’s work with South African musicians. The Abayudaya’s music is sweeter, lighter, and more resonant.

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Tangentially related, but of great interest, is this bhtv online discussion about faith and its relation to science. Nick Wade, NYT science reporter, is enormously informative.

“Excerpts of the first Jewish broadcast that took place in occupied Germany in Aachen in 1944.”

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Iran’s lunatic president said today,

Mr. Ahmadinejad said confrontation with Israel was a “national and religious duty” and that the Holocaust was “a lie” used as a pretext for the country’s creation in 1948.

Quite a piece of work, the Iranian government,

The [Iranian] government had largely halted street protests in July, with a harsh government crackdown that left dozens of marchers dead and thousands in jail. But the authorities have been unable to silence the opposition’s leaders, who have kept up their criticism of the election and the government’s violent response. The opposition leaders raised tensions when they leveled accusations that some protesters were tortured and raped in prison. The rape accusations have been especially embarrassing for the government, which has denied them while acknowledging that some prisoners were tortured.

The thin tea of the Obama administration’s response,

“Obviously, we condemn what he said,” [Obama's press secretary] told reporters.

Obviously.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Michael Wex’s book about the Yiddish language, “Born to Kvetch”. The author reads the book himself, which is a good thing, given the requirements of pronunciation, and the flavor it lends the book. Wex is described in the blurb as a stand-up comic, among other accomplishments, but he is really a scholar of the Yiddish language, and seeks to revive Yiddish. World War II had a lot to do with the decline of Yiddish — another consequence of German toxicity in 20th century world history.

This is not a feel good book with chicken soup and Yiddish curses, although it has some of that. It is a book about language. It reveals the way language weaves itself into, and makes manifest, consciousness itself. The despair, anger, deep irony, cutting humor, deep anxieties expressed in Yiddish words and usage, are revelatory of the experience of a people. Language as living history. Yiddish has influenced English in very deep ways, right down to inflection and word order. Already you’re discouraged?

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Language is an expression of the collective genius of our species. All languages. It has always struck me how poetical many words are, more than single strokes of genius making a distinction, but extensions of our imaginative connection to the world.

The word “gimlet” means drill. The very object described, its very shape, in the form of a “T”, suggests it goes as far back as toolmaking itself. The expression “gimlet eye” means a hard stare — a look that drills.

Not a great surprise, but papers have been found which show how early on the Nazi plan of systematic genocide was in the planning.

The documents’ discovery was announced on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht – the nights of November 9 and 10 1938, when Nazi thugs rampaged through towns destroying Jewish homes, shops and synagogues, in what came to be seen as the prelude to the Holocaust. Yesterday (09/09/08) across Germany the event was marked with ceremonies.

The diary of the Anne Frank of France. Hélène Berr was 21 when she began her diary in 1942.

“To think that every person arrested yesterday, today, this very minute, is probably destined to suffer this terrible fate. To think that it is not over yet, that it continues with diabolical regularity.

To think that if I am arrested this evening (which I have been expecting for ages now), in a week’s time I’ll be in Upper Silesia, maybe dead, and my whole life, with the infinity I sense within me, will be snuffed out…”

“Hélène survived the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. Sick with typhus, she was beaten to death because she was too weak to get up from her bunk for reveille.”

Anne and Hélène died a month apart at Bergen-Belsen. ‘It is raining Death on earth,” she wrote.

This slideshow with commentary says all you need to know about the birth of Israel. There is an associated article as well.

Ruth Gruber, working for the Department of the Interior, was a witness to history and the birth of a nation. Many of the displaced from the Holocaust were refused re-entry to their home country. The State Department, George Marshall, the English — none of them got it.

A young man approached us, his eyes bloodshot. In Romania, they killed 30,000 Jews in two hours, he said, his voice sounding as if it came straight from his guts. They took Jews to the slaughterhouse and hung them alive the way they hang cows, and they put knives to their throats and split them. Underneath them, they put a sign: Kosher Beef.

Gruber asked one of the children why he wanted to go to Palestine:

A 16-year-old orphan ‚Äî actually, we never used the word orphan because the term couldn’t convey the horrors these children had been through ‚Äî gave the most poignant answer. Everybody has a home, he said. The Americans. The British. The French. The Russians. Only we don’t have a home. Don’t ask us. Ask the world.

As usual Charles Krauthammer nails it:

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is “disproportionate,” as in the universally decried “disproportionate Israeli response.”

A postage stamp issued for Hiram Bingham IV , a man Israel designates a Righteous Diplomat.

From the website that campaigned to honor Bingham’s “courageous dissent” :

Hiram Bingham IV, of Salem, Connecticut (who is the son of Hiram Bingham III, the explorer who discovered Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911) died in 1988 at age 84. When he was the US vice consul in Marseilles, France from 1939 to 1941, he boldly defied State Department policy by writing visas for those fleeing the Holocaust, by hiding refugees in his diplomatic residence who were most wanted by Hitler, and by coordinating daring escapes to other countries from Southern France. Harry helped rescue renowned painter Marc Chagall, …anti-Nazi author Leon Feuchtwanger, Nobel Prize physicist Otto Meyerhoff, and ordinary refugees.

Virtues often cluster — he was a modest man:

One time, he became ashen-faced with deep frowns when he painfully recalled long lines of refugees outside his Marseilles consulate window anxiously seeking visas. He said they were being “treated like cattle” —and he quickly changed the subject. His eleven children did not know the extent of his rescue efforts until recent years, when old documents of that era were found in his Salem farmhouse and at various museums.

Palestinians voted out corrupt criminals and voted in sociopathic terrorists. Their society was poisoned by years of Arafat’s incoherent grandiosity and criminality, confining Palestinian options long ago, leaving them with a choice that is no choice, in an election that was no election; a mix of Palestinian despair, the degradations of their warmly embraced death cult mentality, the clown alley of the UN, and the confused detritus of a once admirable progressive Left, has enabled this bizarre outcome — an election from hell. I wonder if Jimmy Carter when he next bares his teeth, in what appears an attempt to provide a smile, will catch on, after his jabbering that it was “good” that Hamas was involved in the election process; what needs to be done, of course, is to pressure the Palestinians — a novel idea — towards, not an election, not democracy, but common decency.

The heartbreaking scene of Israeli settlers being removed by, what amounts to their brothers and sisters in the army, provides a living example of the nobility of a democratic society doing what is so difficult, with restraint and intelligence.

Sharon understands the demographic imperative of removing the settlers — he is doing the only thing he can do. The settlers, in angry despair, see their homes and their ancient heritage taken from them, given to people who harassed and killed them. Palestinian society is often sentimentalized by media outlets, even though murder is the option of choice in that society; despite the rage of the settlers, the whole process of removal is being done with deep feeling, and decent human consideration; the one act of terror by an Israeli was immediately labeled as such by the leader of a free society, and condemned — a model that should be emulated and celebrated, and whose absence in Palestinian society should be universally deplored. Take a look at the press given this signal event, initiated and implemented by a society of institutions and laws — is this Israeli act being presented with the affirmation it deserves?