Happy Purim - better late than never

"But when the plot came to the king's attention, he issued written orders that the evil scheme Haman had devised against the Jews should come back onto his own head, and that he and his sons should be hanged on the gallows." Esther 9:25

That’s what happens to bad Amalekites….
The Jews speak of a situation being described as A Purim Story It means a mad, disconnected series of events that do not seem to make sense, but in the end, all seems to work out just fine.
Purim is an ancient story of court intrigue, deception, miscommunication, drunken parties, assassination plots, a foolish king, a delinquent queen, villains, a strong hero and one beautiful heroine. A bit like a Middle Eastern Macbeth. Except for the happy ending.
For one little holiday, Purim’s 24 – hour carnival – like shenanigans certainly has it all. Given that the story involves the selection of a new queen after Vashti’s petulant non-appearance, we might suppose it to be the forerunner of the beauty contest. Purim is an occasion on which a bit of bad behaviour is permitted even within the walls of the synagogue itself. For example, during the public service in many congregations, when the reader of the Megillah mentions Haman , there is hissing, stamping, and rattling, a hangover from the 13^th century. Purim is also a time for other unusual goings-on. For example, many congregations will read the prayers in ways that would be considered sacrilegious on any other occasion during the year - for example, singing some prayers to the tune of widely-known songs, like singing the Lord's Prayer to the tune of "Colonel Bogey". Outside the synagogue, Purim pranks dating from the Talmudic period seem commonplace. As early as the fifth century it was a custom to burn Haman in effigy on Purim, rather like on November 5^th, when Guy Fawkes gets burned every year for having the temerity to attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

It seems it might even be a mitzvah to consume alcohol on Purim...Oh, dear......

Apocalypse whenever....

It's really going to be interesting. The American Christians deciding who they want this time. GWB, for all his faults and, God knows, they are on sufficiently public display to be quite noticeable, has by and large, soothed the lions of the Christian Right, who have turned to tougher meat. Pat Robertson, whom I have been looking at recently, is on record as suggesting that assassination of that Amalekite President of Argentina might be quite an idea, and, much as George Fox denounced the citizenry of Lichfield, has suggested Divine retribution will surely fall on a small town called Dover for allowing the teaching of intelligent design in its schools. He and his '700 Club' TV show seem universally popular. H'm. But, what price next time? The Democrats must surely win the prayer battle. Hillary C is a Methodist, nice girl from Park Ridge, Illinois, sensibly flat-shod and balanced, so the idea of her leading the meeting isn't quite as remote a possibility as Rudy Giuliani inviting an altar call. Catholic guilt and freedom of worship are uneasy bedfellows. It remains to be seen whether the Bible belt will get behind the girl, or not. My guess is, they just might.

Celestial teapots

In The New Republic last October, Thomas Nagel, a philosopher who calls himself “as much an outsider to religion” as Mr. Dawkins, extracts a quite cogent little nugget from the two-fingers-up-at-religion school of baloney, pointing out that what was meant by God was not, as Mr. Dawkins’s argument seemed to assume, “a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world.” instead, a la RD, “as some kind of chap, however supersized.”

Nor was belief in God analogous to belief in a Celestial Teapot, an example Mr. Dawkins borrowed from Bertrand Russell. If this insistence on theology beyond the level of Pat Robertson and biblical literalism was not enough, several reviewers banged on enthusiastically about double standards. One compared Mr. Dawkins’s volubility about religion’s vast wrongs with his silence “on the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity” and the good that religion has produced. He writes:

“In a book of almost 400 pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history — and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.” H'm. More good than harm, perhaps?

Another wrote: “No decent person can fail to be appalled by the sins committed in the name of religion,” but atheism has to be held to the same standard: “Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual fact that (1) the 20th century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.” Communism as a social disease, Nazi extermination camps, inter alia. Dawkins is not an amiable agnostic. It almost seems as if he is desperate to believe, perhaps standing, like Dostoyevsky, on the ladder just one rung below belief.

We might ask a more linear question: does 'rational' mean ' scientific'? “The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism." writes another. In other words, tediously grey thinking.

It's surely becoming clearer that emotional intelligence is as valuable if not more so in the survival struggle than academic attainments. We have more than one formula for understanding, a distinction made in Scripture by the separate use of both 'wisdom' and 'knowledge'. The great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal. We still don't know if a horse can sympathise with a rat, for example. Surely we have no reason to dismiss moral reasoning, introspection or conceptual analysis as ways of uncovering the truth just because they aren't 'physics'.

Arrows of Jihad

This is probably gonna turn out to be quite a gloomy entry. Why is the West targeted, as well as inoffensive honeymoon spots such as Sharm-el-Sheikh? Is it because of our perceived status - 'who we are' in other words? Or, is it 'what we do?'
Who we are is perceived as a decadent, morally flabby, burnt-out ember of postmodern Christian civilisation, having prostituted its values to globalisation, consumerism and intellectual bankruptcy. What we do is create oases of our own flavour of democracy, allegedly impregnable financial bastions, and offer support to those threatened with extinction because of the crusading zeal and phenomenally rapid growth of militant Islam. Who would have believed, for example, that it would take only six decades for a president of a member state of the United Nations to call for the destruction of Israel, label the Holocaust a myth, and host a revisionist conference of Holocaust deniers, without apparently, any consequences apart from small diplomatic finger waggings. This, from a nation prepared to cock a snook at the UN and blithely stampede ahead with uranium enrichment.
No. It's even less subtle. Jihadism promises extravagant, hedonistic reward in the next life, with scant regard as to how its proponents get there. Against such, there is no rational defence. In the short term, we may expect that internecine feuding between major protagonists (witness events in Gaza, Baghdad and elsewhere) might slow the process down, but it seems unlikely that all will be kissy-poo between the People of the Book for a very long time to come.
The image is of the sky over Yad Vashem, just in case we might be tempted to forget....

Ah, the blessed Mary... Mary Black, of course, the queen of Ireland. Once saw her live and all my Celtic blood rose to the surface, since I was surrounded by English men who were unaware of her inner strength and wouldn't know how to spell Uileann much less appreciate their haunting beauty. I really mustn't listen to Liam O'Flynn or Christy Moore too much, I can almost smell the peat and the wild west coast's Atlantic spray....
This was, I think, taken during a tour in 2003. She seems to go down well in Holland, also Japan, which seems unusual. I think I must have first run across her when she did a superb cover of the incomparable MCC's 'Moon and St Christopher'
My night for listening to nostalgia, from Billy Ray Cyrus to William Ackerman. Must be getting old, I'll be spinning Bryan Adams next....

Wiggle room. إن شاء الله

Someone sent me a 30 - second clip of the undermentioned in full and mellifluous flow, which I almost allowed to irritate me. This paragraph is from the book.

"The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason."

Also sprach Zarathustra, aka Richard Dawkins, our very own modern-day Nietzche. I wonder what he might possibly mean? High treason is an act of gross disloyalty, presumably in this context, to one's own intellect, which seems to me to have some quite nastily schizophrenic undertones to it. His wrath overtakes his reason, sometimes, exampled with the delightful 'miraclewreaking'. I'd quite like to wreak a miracle, personally. All of the above has only tangential bearing on the title today. The great all-seeing, most gracious, most merciful God of Islam, might be perceived in either of the above ways, although I have some conceptual difficulty with God as a metaphor. Metaphor for what, one asks? A metaphor for his self, perhaps. Muslims use (up to twenty times a day) the invocation of the presence of Allah in human affairs. Insha'Allah, to be precise, is the beautiful cover-all phrase even Westerners use when they are asked when a particular something might happen. Or not. Or they'd rather it didn't and are too polite to say so. Water is leaking all over the bathroom floor and the plumber when asked when he is coming, replies, 'Tomorrow, inshallah', meaning, of course that tomorrow is very probably quite out of the question and were he to bestir himself to think any further into the future, a week Tuesday might just be on the cards. Or not.

Cutting the grass

For those aware, cutting the grass is a painful business. Especially for the hard-to-reach places on the western reaches of the garden. Our souls are easy to mow when the ground is flat, green-perfect, golf-course fresh. When the moles within burrow and turn the ground into a minefield of unexpectedness, one learns to think on one's feet and twirl pas de deux as gracefully as one might. Rencontres du temps perdus is a misnomer. Every twist of the green and every turn of the putter's handle brings remembrance as fresh as if yesterday had barely been. To sunsets over Topkapi and pearl earrings.... A little Yiddische humor to brighten a day or two.. Three brothers just off the boat at Ellis Island are questioned by an Immigration Officer, who asks the first, "What is your name?" "Berl" he replies. The Officer says, "Beryl? You can't have a name like that in America. From now on your name is 'Buck.'" He turns to the second brother and says, "What is your name?" "Cheyl" he replies."Cheyl? You can't have a name like that in America. From now on your name will be 'Chuck!'" He then asks the third brother, "And what's your name?" "Ferl," he replies, "And I'm going back to Poland..."