This past week, a dear friend of mine who is Muslim reminded me that this Shabbat coincides with the Islamic holiday of Ashura. For Sunni Muslims, Ashura commemorates the day that Musa (Moses) parted the Red Sea for the Israelites, using a staff that Allah (God) provided him, allowing the Israelites to escape their bondage to Pharaoh. Many Jews are probably unaware of when and how narratives from the Torah appear in the Koran, yet there are many such instances.
The Talmud has a phrase, “anshei imrei…: People say.” It is one of the ways our Sages brought then-contemporary wisdom or folk sayings into their higher-level discussions. Borrowing from their approach, there’s something fascinating about juxtaposing our culture’s paradoxical statements. For example, in our milieu, the older statement, “God is in the details,” morphed more recently into, “the devil is in the details.”
Two days ago, the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, died at the age of 94. I was in college when some of his most important books were going to print, not least of which was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The work made a deep impression on me at the time, and I probably reread it three times in the following few years. At a certain point, however, I made a vow not to read it again, in the same manner that I have made commitments not to revisit certain television shows that meant the world to me when I was a boy, such as Underdog.
I recently stumbled across a story about how we sometimes do things we don’t mean to do, written by Anne Peterson, a prolific Christian author. She recounts an autobiographical incident in a piece called “I Didn’t Mean to Hurt Her,” about the struggles she had with her mom when she was a teenager. They got in a fight and the next day, her forty-three-year-old mother was wheeled out of the house on a gurney. Game over.
The first time I watched the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in A New Hope, the original Star Wars film, it made a lasting impression. The motley collection of aliens was exotic and decidedly otherworldly. We had never before seen anything like that on the big screen, but it doesn’t require a science fiction film to induce that sort of experience. We all have those moments when the weirdness of life takes away our breath.
This past week, a number of “spoof” emails went out, impersonating me and asking for help from you. In one of these, the purported email noted that I was busy in meetings and requested that you text me rather than call. Meanwhile, a number of internal phishing attempts were sent to our professional staff pretending to come from our IT department.
A few years ago, some researchers at three Israeli universities (Bar Ilan, Tel Aviv, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem) turned their attention to the last dregs of some very stale beer. Specifically, they found living yeast in 5000-year-old clay vessels from Tel Es Gafi—the ancient site of Gat, where Goliath was born—the same giant that young David would defeat with his slingshot. The shape of the vessel was one commonly used to store beer or wine.
