Can anyone explain to me how come a small village in small island in the middle of a huge ocean could generate enough resources to build something like this at the start of the XX-th Century?
Officially… sugar cane, rum and cochinilla beetle… but still… today they are no more than 35 000 people… God knows how many were living in the area at that time…
A remarkable feat!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96491037@N07/albums/72157673443858702
A Treasure of Beautiful Balconies and Strange Roof Top Gardens
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96491037@N07/albums/72157673476600520
“The purpose of Halacha is to disturb. To disturb a world that cannot wake up from its slumber because it thinks that it is right.”
Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo
What is currently known as the ‘North Atlantic Civilization’ is a construction whose blue prints have been initiated in the Middle East, on the Banks of Jordan.
The Jews, those who had started the process and one of the very few peoples/cultures who have survived since that era, have reached a very interesting stage in their development.
Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo discusses, in a series of articles, some very important ‘contemporary issues’.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the context:
– “The word “halakhah” is usually translated as “Jewish Law,” although a more literal (and more appropriate) translation might be “the path that one walks.” The word is derived from the Hebrew root Hei-Lamed-Kaf, meaning to go, to walk or to travel.”
– Yigal Amir had killed Yitzhak Rabin in an attempt to halt the Oslo Peace process and
– Baruch Goldstein had killed 29 and wounded 125 in “the Muslim prayer hall at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron“.
When reading Dr. Cardozo’s considerations please engage yourself in a mental experiment. Try to identify at least one aspect of those mentioned here that doesn’t fit the rest of the North Atlantic cultural space.
I encourage you to use the links and read Dr. Cardozo’s articles in full. I have selected some of his words trying to suggest something, there is a lot more to be learned there.
“One of the greatest tragedies of Judaism in modern times is that certain halachic authorities, as well as people like Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein, forgot to study the first book of the Torah. They have become so dedicated to the letter of the law that they have done the inconceivable and have caused the degradation of Halacha.”
http://www.cardozoacademy.org/thoughts-to-ponder/the-desecration-of-halacha/
“It is for this reason that Halacha has always developed on the basis of case law, and not because of overall well-worked-out ideologies. It is sui generis. Much depends on circumstances, the kind of person we are dealing with, local customs, human feelings, and sometimes trivialities. God, as Abraham Joshua Heschel explains, is concerned with everydayness. It is the common deed—with all of its often trivial and contradictory dimensions— that claims His attention. People do not come before God as actors in a play that has been planned down to the minutest detail. If they did, they would be robots and life would be a farce.”
http://www.cardozoacademy.org/thoughts-to-ponder/chaos-theory-halacha-part-1-3/
“Not only do we see a considerable amount of chaotic halachic literature, published by numerous authorities, which seems to lack consistency and order, but we may even find contradictions in the various writings of one halachist. This doesn’t mean that the writer lacks a particular line of thought and some basic principles; it just means that within these norms almost everything is an open market.
I believe this is the reason why the Conservative movement, with all its good intentions and great scholarship, was unable to grasp the imagination of many halachic authorities. It is not the lack of knowledge, but rather the over-systematization that is responsible for this. Once there is too much of a unified weltanschauung and agenda, Halacha loses its vitality. The multitude of attitudes, worldviews, chaotic thinking and sometime wild ideas, through which the greatest halachic authorities freely expressed their opinions, is what kept the Orthodox halachic world alive. In some sense, and even almost paradoxically, Orthodox Halacha is less fundamentalist than Halacha in other movements within Judaism.
None of this should surprise anyone. When looking into the Talmud, which is the very source of Halacha, we find a range of opinions so wide, and often radical, that it is almost impossible to find any sense of order. There’s a reason why the Talmud is compared to a sea in which storms create unpredictable waves and turbulence. The revealed beauty of this natural phenomenon is what attracts people to gaze at the sea for hours on end. It reflects their inner world, which thrives only in the presence of tension, paradox and chaos.”
http://www.cardozoacademy.org/thoughts-to-ponder/chaos-theory-halacha-part-2-3/
“In my opinion, Halacha is in need of more “chaos.” It must allow for many ways to live a halachic life unbound by too many restrictions of conformity and codification. It must make room for autonomy on the part of individuals, to choose their own way once they have undertaken to observe the foundations of Halacha. Acceptance of minority opinions will have to become a real option, and some rabbinical laws must be relaxed so that a more living Judaism will emerge. While some people need more structure than others, in this day and age we must create halachic options that the codes such as the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch of Rabbi Yosef Karo do not provide.
Surely those who prefer to live by the strict rules of the codes should continue to do so. For some, these rules are actually a necessity – even a religious obligation – since this may be the only way they can experience God. But they should never become an obstacle to those who are unable to adhere to them. Labeling these new approaches “non-Orthodox,” or “heresy,” is entirely missing the point.
I wish to be clear: I am not advocating Reform or Conservative Judaism which, as I stated earlier, have paradoxically become overly structured and agenda-driven. They lack sufficient “chaos” to make them vigorous.
While there is great beauty in attending synagogue three times a day to pray, we clearly see that much of it has become mechanic – going through the motions, but no religious experience. Yes, it’s better than not being involved in any prayer at all, but the price we pay is increasing by leaps and bounds. It is pushing many away. Codification is the best way to strangle Judaism. By now, Orthodox Judaism has been over-codified and is on its way to becoming more and more irrelevant.
…
I believe that one of Halacha’s main functions is to protest against a world that is becoming ever more complacent, self-indulgent, insensitive, and egocentric. Many people are unhappy and apathetic. They no longer live a really inspiring life, even though they are surrounded by luxuries, which no one would have even dreamed of only one generation ago.
The purpose of Halacha is to disturb. To disturb a world that cannot wake up from its slumber because it thinks that it is right. The great tragedy is that the halachic community itself has been overcome by exactly those obstacles against which the Halacha has protested and for which it was created. Halachic living has become the victim of Halacha. The religious community has succumbed to the daily grind of halachic living while being disconnected from the spirit of Halacha, which often clashes with halachic conformity for the sake of conformity. Many religious people convince themselves that they are religious because they are “frum.” They are conformists, not because they are religious but because they are often self-pleasers, or are pleasing the communities in which they live.
Large numbers of religious Jews live in self-assurance and ease. The same is true of the secular community. Both live in contentment. But as Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs notes: “Who wants a life of contentment? Religion throughout the ages has been used to comfort the troubled. We should now use it to trouble the comfortable…” ”
http://www.cardozoacademy.org/thoughts-to-ponder/chaos-theory-halacha-part-3-3/
Plant and fungi simply exist.
Animals ‘perform’.
Basically the main difference between plants and animals is that while plants – and fungi, ‘digest’ parts of their environment, the animals actively search for food and perform other activities which help them survive or result in the individual performer experiencing ‘pleasure’.
Most animals, number-wise, behave as if they were pre-programed. They act ‘instinctively’. Almost plant-like, only enjoying a lot more physical freedom. A bed bug will move a lot more than the plant on your night-stand but that doesn’t mean the bed-bug is considerably more intelligent than the lavender which guards your sleep.
At least some of the animals can learn. Meaning that individuals can alter their behavior, consistently, to suit changes in their environment. As if the ‘programs’ that have been ‘hard wired’ in them allow the individual members some leeway. As if parts of those programs can be re-written, at will, by the individual members themselves. And they don’t even need a brain to do that. These kinds of animals seem to enjoy a different sort of liberty than the simple liberty of movement
As we climb higher and higher up the evolutionary tree we encounter ‘trainable’ animals.
Which can be ‘convinced’ to perform a certain skill. For instance Norman, a dog, who has been bribed/trained to ride a bike.
Animals who can be trained usually can also learn by themselves. Wolves, and dogs, learn how to hunt by watching their brethren while a simple slime, as we learned earlier, can learn how to deal with certain chemicals.
Men have taken this to the next level.
Animals, as opposed to plants, have a certain liberty. They can move. It’s exactly this liberty which sets the stage for their ability to be trained. By the environment – the wolf who doesn’t learn to hunt ends up hungry, or by a trainer – the dog who rides a bike gets tasty treats.
People, the human beings, enjoy an even wider liberty than the rest of the animals. Those who grow up surrounded by other human beings, of course.
The handful of individuals who had the misfortune to grow up lacking adequate attention from members of their own species had failed to develop a certain part of their mind, hence they remained prisoners, even after being ‘found’, in the ‘animal kingdom’.
It’s as if a certain ‘opportunity window’ has to be used before it inexorably closes, sometime between the 5-th and the 10-th anniversary.
If all goes well, human individuals are conditioned – first by training and later by learning – by those around them into something which is deemed to be the ‘acceptable behavior’, as per the social standards valid at that moment in time.
During this conditioning process most individuals also learn – mainly by trial and error, as opposed to ‘being trained into it’, how much individual freedom is included in those social standards.
At some point during this conditioning process, which actually never stops, the individual is considered ‘mature’ enough to be held fully responsible for his fate/actions.
This ‘moment’ has varied significantly during our history and it depended on many variables besides the obvious one – individual proficiency. Well… usually even that was measured indirectly, by considering the age of the individual.
And, for most of the time, Lady Luck has been the most important factor in determining how much freedom was going to be enjoyed by a certain individual. One could have been born a slave, a slave owner, a free person, a man, a woman, a serf, a landowner, in Europe, in sub-Saharan Africa during the TransAtlantic slave trade, in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in North Korea…
In each of these situations he had to learn, fast, a skill. In order to make himself useful enough to the rest of ‘his gang’ so that they would ‘make some room’ for him. So that he would be able to trade the results of his skillful work for the ‘resources’ he needed in order to survive or even to prosper.
In order to be efficient, one must also become ‘meta-skilled’. Being skilled, at anything, is almost never really useful if one doesn’t know when/how to use his skills.
And, on top of all this, one should also learn to what end to use his skills.
Choosing properly one’s goals – and being able to evaluate correctly what others do or promise to do, is important not only for each individual but also for those who had helped into his conditioning – if they are still around, for his other contemporaries and also for their children.
Let me give you an example.
Driving a car is a skill. A rather basic one. So basic that a monkey could do it.
Learning to refrain from driving when you are too tired, or in a blizzard if the vehicle is not suitable, is a meta-skill. Sometimes a lot more important than the mere ability to start a car and to drive it from A to B.
Volunteering to drive an unsuited vehicle trough a blizzard to save somebody’s life or refusing, despite being offered a huge bribe, to drive a lorry full of hazardous waste to an illegal dumping site is what gives the real measure of your true self.
And, also, how free was the society that helped in your ‘conditioning’.
Quite a lot of things are currently going on on our Earth.
Many of them have a planetary importance and some of them make it into the news bulletins.
The manner in which they are selected by the editors speaks volumes about our, collective, mind set.
So let’s see what BBC, one of the most important news outlets, deemed as being important enough to make the cut this early morning – September 8, 2016.
US elections, Technology, A peek into how the Chinese Government manages its country, A little ‘human touch’ – an Australian family caving in to mental illness, A short but heated discussion about ‘ugly buildings’…
An so on…
The Middle East Crises is buried somewhere in “More World News” but still only two clicks away from the main page while if you want to find out more about the “Worst SE Asia Haze for 20 Years” you have to specifically search for it despite BBC itself wondering, only three short days ago: “Could air pollution cause brain damage?”
OK, but what about those ‘damned phones’?
So don’t you find it rather strange that ‘Apple’s new IPhone ditches headphone socket‘ makes it to the ‘first page’?
Rio 2016: The Syrian Refugee who swam for her life – all the way to the Olympics. BBC.Com
At some point in time 12 tribes of nomadic herders had settled down on the banks of Jordan.
Conditions were good so they had enough time to think about things further than meeting their immediate needs.
For me it doesn’t matter much whether their religious teachings were a gift from their God or just a product of their own minds. The fact that they are choke full of useful advice for all of us and that the sharpness of that advice has not been dulled by the passage of time should be enough. We’d better continue to pay attention.
How come, then, that we are still killing each other in an organized manner?
OK, some go bonkers and kill themselves.
Some go so bonkers as to blame others for their unhappiness. They decide to go out with a bang and to kill as many of the ‘others’ as possible in the process.
The number of people going bonkers is naturally swelled by the present economic and social crises. Emile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, had written an entire book on the subject, more than a century ago.
I can dig all this. It’s unacceptable but sort of explainable – aberrant behavior is not un-natural. That’s what evolution is for, to weed out aberrations that are too unfit to survive.
What completely baffles me is how come two and a half millennia after some simple herdsmen have demonstrated such acute but also noble thinking, some of us, most of whom pretend to be sophisticated intellectuals, continue to fashion religious teachings and ethnic/cultural values into wedges.
And use them to drive us into warring factions.
Why are they still doing this?
Why are we still heeding to their prodding?
Not only that we allow ‘them’ to ‘organize’ civil wars that kill hundreds of thousands of us and drive millions of the rest in exile but then we also allow some of ‘them’ to rule over some of the media that, supposedly, keep us informed.
“Unfortunately, some of the celebration was overshadowed by a completely unnecessary “omission” or outright censorship by Hungary’s public broadcaster. Refugee athletes are participating in the Rio Summer Games. Yusra Mardini, originally from Syria, is one of them and she has garnered a great deal of media attention, including in the Toronto Star.
“In the water, Yusra Mardini feels alive. In the water, Yusra Mardini swam for her life. In the water, Yusra Mardini helped to save the lives of many others”–writes Rosie Dimanno in The Star. The 18 year old ended up winning in the one hundred metre butterfly heat on Saturday. Not too long ago, Ms. Mardini had to swim to safety, fleeing her war-torn homeland, through Turkey and then across the waters in Greece. She and her sister swam for over three hours straight and, incredibly, made it to Europe safely. (They also helped save the 20 people that were in the boat they had been towing during those three hours) She trained for the Olympics in Germany.
Disappointingly, during the Hungarian public broadcaster M4′s coverage of the one hundred metre butterfly, they completely and seemingly deliberately neglected to mention Ms. Mardini. Jenő Knézy Jr., who is reporting live from Rio on behalf of the public broadcaster, mentioned four out of the five females competing–the only one he did not utter at all was the name of the Syrian refugee. It was as though she did not even exist– even though viewers could see her on their television screens. Mr. Knézy managed to avoid mentioning her, even after she won.
The hvg.hu news site wondered aloud after the incident: “Is it forbidden to even utter the name of a refugee on Hungarian public television?”
Mr. Knézy claims to have made an innocent mistake, when he forgot to mention the name of the winner of the competition.” (Christopher Adam, Hungary wins gold, breaks record on Olympics Day 1, but why did public television censor the coverage? August 7, 2016, hungarianfreepress.com)
“The Brexit vote may or may not have been a tragedy, but Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary appears determined to follow with a farce. On Monday, he scheduled a referendum on keeping out refugees for Oct. 2, further threatening to undermine the weakened European Union. The referendum question — “Do you want the European Union to be able to order the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without parliament’s consent?” — is a textbook example of voter manipulation.
This isn’t really designed to address the EU’s plan to settle 1,294 refugees in Hungary — the country’s share of the 160,000 people that European authorities have proposed resettling from the Middle East. Hungary and Slovakia are already suing the EU over the refugee quotas, and, in theory, Orban could veto any such plan. The referendum will help him prop up his domestic popularity and give him a “democratic” bargaining chip with other EU leaders — even though his strategy will be glaringly obvious because the question is framed in a way that produces only one answer.
Direct democracy’s biggest vulnerability may be that it can be subverted by political players who ask the people loaded, incomprehensible or otherwise rigged questions.”
“Orban has no one to correct him. Earlier this year, Hungary’s Supreme Court approved the referendum question. So now a Hungarian voter has a choice between agreeing with Orban or effectively recognizing that the EU can do whatever it pleases in Hungary without any national authorities having any say. The only other option is not to show up, thus refusing to be manipulated. If enough voters do that, Orban will be made to look a fool. But given the combined popularity of Orban’s party, Fidesz, and the hard-right Jobbik, whose thunder Orban is trying to steal with the vote, there’s a good chance the turnout will be sufficient.” (Leonid Bershidsky, Hungary’s Manipulative Referendum, July 5, 2016, Bloomberg.com.
Going back to Durkheim’ Suicide, there is something there that I find of enormous importance. After studying how suicide rates vary, both in time and across borders and religions, Durkheim has noticed that each suicide act was indeed determined by the individual itself who, in his turn, was influenced by prevailing socio-economic conditions but that there could be noted another very important influence.
The members of the Jewish communities were the least likely to commit suicide, the Catholics came next while the Protestants were the most likely to end their lives, of those belonging to any of these three categories.
Durkheim explained this phenomenon by using the concept of ‘social solidarity’ – for a society to survive its members need to stick together.
Then Durkheim went further and elaborated on the matter. ‘While it is good for a society to develop strong bonds among its members – the Jews have survived for so long and against such odds, these ties must not be allowed to become strong enough to stifle the individuals – otherwise that society would loose its ability to innovate, hence to adapt itself to the inevitable change that befalls upon its head, no matter what.’An equilibrium has to be met between social solidarity – which pushes us to think alike and to align ourselves to the values shared by the entire community – and individual freedom – that which allows each of us to depart, somewhat, from the social norms without being punished by the rest of the society.
I’m going to use, again, the Jews as an example. They have survived, as a people, for so long and against such odds that they must have done something right. Well… they do take care of their own and they do cherish individual autonomy.
After all they are the ones who came up with ‘God created Man in His image’. Hence all men are considered equal – because they have been cast in the same mould – and assigned a spark of ‘something special’.
Jews have done well in this world. Given the circumstances and until some of us have completely lost their minds.
Why don’t the rest of us follow their example?
They don’t kill each-other!
Not physically and not even symbolically.
No matter how much two of them might hate their respective guts, when push comes to shove they’ll help each-other out of the mess.
Why have we, the goyim, ignored for so long such a fine example?
Why do we continue to do so even now, after we’ve found out that the only one Planet we can call home is rather small and that no one seems to be coming, anytime soon, to rescue us from ourselves?
And even if there was anybody who could have done this… would any of you lift a finger to help a bunch of quarreling idiots who are continuously threading on each-others toes? Specially when/if each of us would get their due after their death…
Then why would He?
Why would He help us before we start helping each-other?
Funny, isn’t it?
Or yet another reminder that constantly cracking jokes about everything and everybody is not exactly the best thing to do… Let’s compare the relative importance of the British Empire during Shaw’s coming of age – the period when he developed his habit of cracking jokes about everything, no matter how serious the subject, with the fact that Scotland is seriously planning a second independence referendum.
Or let me remind you of another Brit who enjoys cracking annoying jokes:
Not funny anymore?
OK, let me try another tack.
What if
Could it be that the problem resides with us?
That this is basically a matter of what we do with whatever (history) has been passed to us by our forefathers? That what has been passed to us does have its own importance but that we can’t do very much about it?
History can only be rewritten but never changed…
We, on the other hand, can and should learn to deal with the dynamics of this world.
How come ‘those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it’?
Could it be that some of the ‘students of history’ are doing something wrong?
Misunderstand the very lessons they try to impose on the others?
Cracking annoying jokes about the matters at hand instead of honestly helping others to reach intellectual autonomy and then respectfully allowing them to develop their own interpretations of things?
I hear a lot of people discussing about the need to choose ‘the lesser evil’.
Otherwise the ‘greater evil will prevail’ they warn us.
nicichiarasa 