Imagine the Quaker
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archives | newquaker.comThursday, November 20, 2003
Let it be ... so human. The Beatles' last album Let It Be, which came out in 1970 as the band was breaking apart, was re-released this week in a 2-CD set called Let It Be ... Naked, stripped of the first album's background orchestra and overdubbing that overshadowed the raw freshness of their in-the-studio musical sets, such as "Get Back," "The Long and Winding Road," "I've Got a Feeling," and of course "Let it Be." I've owned most of the Beatles albums (either as LP, cassette, or CD), but I never did buy Let It Be, and I don't think I'll be buying the remix now. It isn't that I've lost any interest in my favorite band—I just can't handle buying CDs anymore. The problem is that I tend to devour them—all of them—playing the best of the songs over and over and over, until I can't stand to hear them, ending up with a stack of CDs that I can no longer listen to.
I think this is so incredibly human. It isn't fickleness, caprice, or lack of resolve that drives this trait in us: it is, I think, our inability to withstand the surfeit of pleasure. In everything, we reach a crescendo and then the want (or the need or desire) is satisfied and we are ready to move to the next satisfaction ... and again, and again. If we are really driven to something, whether it's music, food, anything sensually pleasant, we can only sustain interest if it's always new. And we really are never satisfied, as we know from the rise and decline of cultures, from the history of me and the history of you. We may be satisfied in our individual wants, but we can't get past the cyle—for the wanting is still there, like the unstoppable layered rows of teeth in the jaws of a shark.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:23 PM
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
There is freedom in being out of touch—in Belgium. This afternoon at the College, I went to the men's room and while washing my hands I ended up leaving my cell phone behind. It was found, but it's locked up until tomorrow morning, and for about an hour I was embittered at being out of touch with anyone and everyone on my call list. But the feeling subsided and I am at peace this evening and I can report that there is indeed life after the cellular phone. Don't believe me? Then consider the startled Belgian family at the closed-casket funeral for their son who was killed and his body badly mutilated when his motorcycle crashed into a tractor: During the ceremony the dead man's cell phone, which was still in his pocket, rang inside the coffin. Read the story at Ananova. While you're at it, you can also read about another Belgian—an artist who wants to film a human body decomposing. Declared the artist, Gerard Godal: "I want to seek proof for the existence of the soul. Probably there is indeed a life after death. But anyway I will give these people eternity since they will be part of a piece of art, an artistic mausoleum on the internet." [Read the news story.] Maybe I should get these Belgians together. I'll call them tomorrow, on my cell phone.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:42 PM
Monday, November 17, 2003
In December, Palm Beach County, FL, will be the site of a Jews for Jesus evangelical outreach to the 250,000-member Jewish community there. Called "Operation Behold Your God," the crusade's plans already have met with organized resistance from groups such as Jews for Judaism and the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County. Part of the resistance includes a curious charge: that Messianic Jews are not in fact Jews at all. What's up with that?
Michelle Cohn, chair of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Palm Beach County, said: "It's very simple. You cannot be a Jew and believe Jesus is the Messiah and the son of God." [Palm Beach Post, November 1, 2003] Similarly, William Gralnick, Southeast Regional Director of the American Jewish Committee, said: "They are Evangelical Christians masquerading as Jews. They have the audacity to call their leaders rabbis and cantors when those people are often graduates of Christian seminaries and never graduates of Jewish ones. Any ceremony preformed by such people is therefore on its face invalid, a ruse, a lie, a fraud." [Boca Raton News, November 5, 2003]
Our mutual history confutes this. The apostles, the church at Jerusalem, the Jewish Christian community in the first century of the Church—these were the original "Messianic Jews," convinced that in his life and ministry Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy. It is odd that they would hold such a view in light of the standard adopted by the The National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) 2000-01, "a representative survey of the Jewish population in the United States sponsored by United Jewish Communities and the Jewish federation system." Using a standard the group adopted for their 1990 survey, the report defines a Jew as a person:
Whose religion is Jewish, or
Whose religion is Jewish and something else, or
Who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, or
Who has a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing
By this standard, the Messianic Jew clearly has inclusion within the Jewish community, but the counter-Christian organization, Jews for Judaism, seeks a much more restrictive standard, denying that "one can remain Jewish while practicing Christianity":
"A Jew who follows another religion is Jewish only to the point that he retains a spiritual obligation to repent and to return to Judaism. However, as long as his beliefs are idolatrous and foreign to Judaism, he cannot call himself a Jew. (It is important to note that a non-practicing Jew is different from a Jew who has chosen to follow a foreign path.)" [See The Jewish Response to Missionaries Counter-Missionary Handbook]
By this standard, Christianity is a Jewish cult, another religion altogether, which was one of the earliest Jewish charges against "the Way" in the first century of the Church's existence [See Acts 9:2, 19:9,23, 22:4, 24:14,25]. Those who oppose the Jews for Jesus crusades would do well to remember Gamaliel's warning to the Sanhedrin, after Peter and the apostles were brought there for questioning and were about to be killed:
"Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God." [Acts 5:38-39]
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:48 AM
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Three Georges, Dick, and Dean—looking at Gephardt with incredulity. This morning I watched Dick Gephardt getting grilled by George Stephanopoulos and George Will on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and the topic that lingered was not so much US campaign reform as what on earth he thinks he's going to do to overcome the overflowing war chests of George W. Bush and Howard Dean. It's not clear that anything can be done about it within the confines of the US Constitution, as a free-speech issue. The McCain-Feingold initiative notwithstanding, candidates can simply choose not to play the game of campaign finance restrictions by refusing to take federal funds and the limits that taking these funds would impose. And that's just what Bush, Dean, and Kerry have done. Gephardt said he would like to see strict limits on campaign funding, if that could be achieved within the scope of the Constitution, but it isn't clear at all how it can be done. In the meantime, Gephardt said that he "will win this campaign" because he has the "biggest, best, most realistic ideas" of this presidential race. It was like watching a man say that he's going to take a short running start and jump over a mile-wide gorge. It isn't going to happen. So Bush and Dean will go on to fight the campaign-coffer battle and get closer to what real presidential elections are in the US: who has the most money. But then I've said that before. It must be déjà vu.
Until we overhaul the entire electoral process, at the same time requiring candidates to be on the same financial levels, it will never be a forum for ideas and prospects, but instead a war of financial interests that must end in a noisy weigh-in on a banker's scale. The campaign contribution is not simply a matter of collecting funds to finance ads, literature, travel, and other promotional activities. The campaign contribution is an investment not unlike a stock purchase—and the stockholders expect a return on their investment. The elector's stakeholders become "special interests" who are usually rewarded (i.e., get a return on their investment), as we well know from history. All others are disenfranchised and effectively underrepresented.
We need to stop seeing the American way as "the way we've done it" and instead see it as "the way it should be done," and then do it that way. Isn't that the American way, really?
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 1:22 PM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
