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671f660
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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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ancient-greeks
atheism
boredom
brotherhood
cana
christianity
entheos
food
hellenism
inspiration
iran
judaea
marriage-at-cana
miracles
mullahs
new-testament
omar-khayyam
oxford
passover
passover-seder
plato
reading
religion
symposia
wine
writing
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Christopher Hitchens |
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41980cb
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Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink--help the alcoholic who can't.' (' '?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.
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alcohol
alcoholism
andrei-gromyko
antisemitism
astrology
astronomy
beijing
birth
birthdays
breastfeeding
britain
censorship
china
communism
communist-party-of-china
corfu
corfu-channel-incident
czechoslovakia
damascus
diplomacy
ernst-von-weizsacker
flushing-meadows
flushing-queens
gods
history
hitler
horoscopes
hosni-zayim
international-court-of-justice
israel
jews
mao
mars
nato
nazis
newspapers
nuremberg
passover-seder
prohibition
the-hague
united-nations
united-states
ussr
vatican
war
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f486b09
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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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arrogance
atheism
bible
biblical-covenant
children
christianity
divine-retribution
edith-stein
exile
false-modesty
gentiles
grandmothers
hellenism
hiwi-al-balkhi
holocaust
jealousy
jerusalem
jesus
judaism
martyrdom
masochism
passover
passover-seder
punishment
rabbis
rationalisation
religion
secularism
self-respect
six-day-war
suffering
survivors
theodicy
war
western-wall
will-of-god
wine
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Christopher Hitchens |
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1afc44c
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Our failures in charity are chained to a narrowed vision of the world that makes too much of the differences between us, and this is our enslavement.
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passover-seder
this-year-we-are-slaves
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Rebecca Goldstein |