Two Different Worlds
A
recent column by New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman made the point that “the world is being divided into regions of
‘order’ and ‘disorder,’ and for the first time in a long time, we don’t have an
answer for all of the people flocking to get out of the world of disorder and
into the world of order.” Whether they
are driven by hunger, fear or economics, people want to move to that world of
order, regardless of the cost or danger involved in getting there.
The
forces of “nature” such as population growth and crop failures, the “globalization”
of what once were local economies and finally, the improvements in technology
and its ready availability worldwide are driving this movement of people from
disorderly places to orderly ones.
A Syrian fearing the next military attack in his family’s neighborhood, an African existing on a near-starvation diet in the Sudan, anyone anywhere who fears that their religious or ethnic identity may put them on the wrong side of whoever is in power in the country where they live … all of them now have seen the European and North American world of order on television, have smart phones and access social media and know for certain that their world of disorder is not the way it is everywhere. And changing their particular world of disorder to one of order is something they just do not have the time nor the resources to risk undertaking.
And this is the real basis for illegal immigration throughout the world. It is a problem Friedman sees as just starting, and for which “we have some hard new thinking and hard choices ahead.”
If
you and your family were in that “world of disorder,” and you knew about the “world
of order” elsewhere, and possibly already had friends and relatives who had
gotten there, what would you do?
JL
Read
Friedman’s column in its entirety by clicking on http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/opinion/thomas-friedman-walls-borders-a-dome-and-refugees.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthomas-l-friedman&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection
My Presidential Bumper Sticker
Hillary
Clinton will end up getting the Democratic Presidential nomination, for which
she has worked so hard for the past eight years. But will she deserve it? I do not put very much weight on the
Republican attacks on Ms. Clinton in regard to her role as Secretary of State
at the time of the Benghazi consulate attack, in her handling of government
business on her personal Email account and her relationship to the Clinton’s
foundation which receives money from foreign as well as domestic donors. In the big picture, these are things which
the G.O.P. has blown far, far out of proportion in order to attack her and her integrity. But, beyond this, what has she done to
qualify her to be President?
She has served
the country as a United States Senator from New York and as Secretary of State,
but in those roles, has she done anything out of the ordinary (as her successor
at State, John Kerry, has accomplished in negotiating the nuclear deal with
Iran) or shown herself to be a strong leader?
The 2016
Presidential election will witness a battle of ideology. It is unclear from what position the Republicans
will campaign since their many potential candidates all are against the way
things are now, but offer no realistic alternatives. Voters, particularly women and minorities,
will find it hard to vote for a Republican candidate whose party is beholden to
so many fringe ideologies most Americans find to be reprehensible.
Hillary and Bernie
In an
effort to hold together the traditional Democratic combination of minorities,
women, union members and so-called “liberals,” Ms. Clinton has come out with a politely
enunciated version of traditional Democratic positions. The true positions of the Democratic Party
are being more properly voiced by Bernie Sanders who is unabashedly pro-union, for increased
government regulation of business, free college education, and a greatly
increased government safety net, including a single payer universal health
insurance program (Medicare for everybody).
He represents traditional Democratic ideology far better than Hillary
Clinton does.
That’s
why, although I don’t expect him to get the nomination, I have a “Bernie”
sticker on my car.
Jack Lippman
Police Blotter
Each
Thursday the Palm Beach Post carries
excerpts from the “Police Blotters” of local communities (but not of the much
larger county police force). Sometimes
they are amusing and sometimes they are sad.
Recently reported from Boca Raton were thefts of $65.63 worth of
groceries from a supermarket and a rotisserie chicken from another business. Both thieves were arrested. Sadly, it seems to me that the motivation to
steal was “hunger” on the part of the thieves for themselves and/or their
families. This is a sad commentary on
the condition of many local families existing below the poverty line, and the
actions taken, possibly as a last resort, by what might be unemployed “breadwinners,”
who choose to become “bread-stealers.” Shades of Jean Valjean!
Two other
arrests reported involved the theft of a bottle of scotch from a liquor store and the
shoplifting of a pair of $40 men's underwear.
This is testimony to the exquisite taste found in Boca Raton, even among
thieves.
JL
With the Jewish High Holidays approaching, I am including a piece I wrote some years ago about Herman Melville's great novel, Moby Dick. In retrospect, it barely touches the surface of what the book is all about, but it still is worthwhile reading at this time of the year.
Moby Dick, a Jewish Novel?
Moby Dick, a Jewish Novel?
(or “Moby Dick, an Incomplete Anagram”)
Jack Lippman
I
have always felt that there was a special relationship between Herman
Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick, and the Jewish High Holidays. Many of the biblical allusions in the book
relate specifically to Jewish scriptural occurrences which are part of the
Jewish High Holiday liturgy. This is so
striking that I have often wondered, even though it is clear that Herman
Melville had an extremely thorough knowledge of Jewish scriptural writings, whether
he might also have had a Jewish friend who took him to synagogue during the
High Holidays.
Herman Melville
Herman Melville
For
people who like to play with words, the very title of Moby Dick is enticing and
perhaps exciting. If you look at the
letters spelling out the whale's name, and try to construct an anagram from them, you fail to produce “Yom
Kippur,” but you do come fairly close. The
first five letters of the holiday’s name, “Yom Ki” easily fall into place, but
then the anagram fails. But this failure
to complete the anagram may not be accidental.
In the book, the white whale called Moby Dick never appears in his
entirety, only that portion of him which is not submerged in the water being
visible. Might it not be logical that
Melville, in entitling his book, would create only a partial anagram since his
view of the whale was never more than a partial one? He actually says “… there is no earthly way
of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.” (Chapter
55)
In
another quote, Melville apparently associates the sperm whale, whose face he
considers to be an inscrutable blank wall, with the Deity. (Chapter 79) He paraphrases Exodus 33:23 (“Thou shall see
my back parts … but my face shall not be seen.
But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will
about his face, I say again he has no face”) (Chapter 86) causing us to wonder whether
Melville is talking about God or about a whale.
To those familiar enough with the novel to subscribe to the idea that
the White Whale might be a manifestation of God, or actually represent a Deity
which mankind has never actually fully seen, the incomplete anagram may make some
sense.
Herman
Melville came from a socially prominent Manhattan family which had lost most of
its money, precluding his pursuing higher education. Instead, at age eighteen, he went to sea on a
merchant vessel. This was followed by
whaling voyages, capture by cannibals, teaching, lecturing, and ultimately a
government job at the Custom House in New York.
Early on, Melville turned to writing about his experiences at sea and
from Moby Dick, it is clear that he was very familiar with Jewish scripture. I am unaware of Melville having any close
relationship with Jews of his period, although undoubtedly, there certainly were
Jews in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps, as I have thought, he had a Jewish
friend. But let us get on with the book, and of
course, its uncanny relationship to the Jewish High Holidays
The
“Etymology” which begins the book includes the word for “whale” in many
languages. It is noteworthy that first
of all of them, however, Melville lists (in Hebrew letters, no less) the Hebrew
word for whale. Immediately following
that is a section labeled “Extracts,” where quotations involving whales are
cited from various historic sources. The
first five of the many extracts quoted, notably, are from Jewish scripture,
specifically from the Books of Genesis, Job, Jonah, Isaiah and Psalms, texts
with which Melville obviously was very familiar.
The
novel itself starts with three words, “Call me Ishmael.” And Ishmael is the narrator as we read “Moby
Dick.” In the Bible, Ishmael is Abraham’s
son, born of Hagar, his wife Sarah’s maidservant. Genesis 21 tells us that when, after years of
barrenness Sarah gives birth to Isaac, she no longer wants Hagar and Ishmael to
remain in the household. The Lord
instructs Abraham to accede to his wife’s wishes and to send Hagar and Ishmael
off, assuring Abraham of Ishmael’s future wellbeing. Apparently, Ishmael did survive his
wanderings, because years later, we find his namesake about to set off on a
whaling voyage out of Nantucket, which as his telling the story evidences, he
also survived. Coincidentally, Genesis 21 often is the morning Torah reading for the
First Day of Rosh Hashanah during the Jewish High Holidays.
On
his way to Nantucket, Ishmael stops in the whaling port of New Bedford, waiting
for a boat to take him to the island, where he will seek employment on a whaling
vessel. He visits the Whaler’s Chapel in
that city where he listens to a sermon about the punishment which awaits those
who defy and disobey the Lord, but how the Lord also forgives those who repent. This, of course, is the story of Jonah, which
in the salty language of the seagoing preacher, is told in its entirety in that
Chapel in New Bedford. That same Book of Jonah also is read, again
coincidentally, as part of the afternoon service on the Day of Atonement, Yom
Kippur.
An
interesting footnote to the chapter in which Ishmael visits the Whaler’s Chapel
is Melville’s passing reference to “antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago.” If the author was using a Hebrew calendar,
and rounding off to the nearest century as he says he is doing, he is fairly
close to the mark, because I place the story of Moby Dick as taking place
approximately in the year 1850 or 5610 on the Hebrew calendar, only 390 years
off from Melvilles’s “sixty round centuries ago.” Melville,
again coincidentally, was obviously conversant with that calendar, which moves
on to another year at each Rosh Hashanah.
The
novel deals with the whaling ship’s captain, Ahab, who drives his crew mercilessly
in his mad quest to find Moby Dick, the White Whale who, on an earlier voyage,
had taken Ahab’s leg and left him seeking revenge. In the Jewish scriptures, Ahab was a Hebrew
king, and influenced by his evil wife Jezebel, became an idolatrous worshipper
of Baal. Melville’s Ahab apparently was
one who in the past, like his biblical namesake, also had disobeyed and defied
the Lord. The novel does not go into the
specifics of Ahab’s transgressions but it is clear that unlike Jonah, neither
the biblical King Ahab nor Melville’s Captain Ahab had any intention of
repenting. In fact, many view Captain
Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick as his way of battling the Lord’s efforts to punish
him, represented by the whale. This, in
effect, is the novel’s story. Ahab, in
hunting the whale to avenge his mutilation, is fighting the God who has
punished him for his sins, and continues to do so, through Moby Dick.
Early
on in the novel, before the Pequod (for that is the name of the boat Ishmael
sailed on) left on its voyage, a mystical character named Elijah appears on the
dock to warn Ishmael that something is wrong with Captain Ahab, that he has a
history of something terrible that had happened in the past. Elijah tries to discourage Ishmael from
signing onto Captain Ahab’s boat. In the
Bible, the Prophet Elijah is precisely the one who attacked the idolatry of King
Ahab and his wife Jezebel, urging the Hebrew people to recognize only the one true
God, and not the false god worshiped by King Ahab. And just as the Prophet urged ancient Jews to
keep their faith pure, so Melville’s Elijah is there to warn Ishmael against
Captain Ahab as he signed onto the crew of the
Pequod on that dock in Nantucket.
The parallel is striking.
But
what might you ask does this have to do with the Jewish High Holidays? The story of King Ahab and Jezebel is not
part of the High Holiday liturgy. The Prophet
Elijah is more associated with Passover, when a door is left open for him at
the seder. Nevertheless, you will find those same words Elijah used
to the Hebrews, uttered in the face of King Ahab’s apostasy, still resonating to
Jews of today, as Yom Kippur draws to a close just prior to the final sounding
of the shofar. “The Lord, He is God”
(Adonoy Hu Ha-Elohim) is repeatedly intoned as Jewish worshippers complete
their period of “tshuva” (repentance) on the Day of Atonement. Was this the same message that Melville’s
Elijah was trying to communicate to Ishmael?
Indeed, it is a Jewish message.
The
novel goes on to tell the story of Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick, and how the
Pequod ultimately finds him, battles him and is destroyed by him, with Ishmael
being the only survivor. As the novel
approaches this climax, the vessel encounters another whaling ship, which is
sadly crisscrossing the sea, looking for missing crewmen, lost in an earlier
attempt to challenge Moby Dick. These lost
crewmen included the vessel’s captain’s children, and the name of the ship, the
Rachel, obviously relates to the biblical Rachel who laments her lost children
in Jerimiah 31. That reading commonly serves as the Haftorah reading for the second day
of Rosh Hashanah, another indication of the relationship of Moby Dick to the
Jewish High Holidays. It is the
Rachel, still searching for its lost children, which rescues Ishmael from the
disaster which befell Ahab, his ship and the rest of its crew.
(Twenty-five
years after writing Moby Dick, Melville published a 30,000 word poem entitled
“Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.” Melville scholars have suggested that this is
really a study in comparative religion, a field which became popular in the
late 19th century, when industrial and scientific advances were
causing many to question long standing fixed beliefs. Melville’s knowledge of Judaism, as
indicated in Moby Dick, would logically lead him in this direction a quarter of
a century later.)
No,
Herman Melville was not Jewish, nor do I really believe he had a Jewish friend
who took him to High Holiday services.
What is clear is that he was extremely familiar with Jewish scriptural
writings, and included many references to them in Moby Dick. In re-reading the novel, and relating it to
the Jewish High Holidays, this reader has had frequent occasion to put the
novel down and refer to the Torah and the Prophets in order to deepen his
understanding of what Melville is saying.
To my way of thinking, a novel which prompts its readers to study Torah
has to be considered a Jewish novel, and Moby Dick certainly meets this standard.
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