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Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called , or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament--the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana--is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.
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reading
writing
christianity
inspiration
religion
ancient-greeks
cana
entheos
judaea
marriage-at-cana
mullahs
omar-khayyam
symposia
iran
hellenism
passover
passover-seder
oxford
new-testament
boredom
brotherhood
plato
miracles
atheism
food
wine
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Christopher Hitchens |
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One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.
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jealousy
war
suffering
christianity
jesus
religion
bible
grandmothers
biblical-covenant
divine-retribution
edith-stein
false-modesty
hellenism
hiwi-al-balkhi
masochism
passover
passover-seder
rabbis
rationalisation
six-day-war
theodicy
western-wall
will-of-god
exile
gentiles
judaism
martyrdom
arrogance
holocaust
punishment
atheism
self-respect
children
jerusalem
secularism
wine
survivors
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Christopher Hitchens |