Big Barn's Corner Spot

I am now reading The Ethics  by Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza in preparation for my last class on proving the existence of God.  He was before Freud, so rather than having the three influences, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, he has two.  I think he was influenced by his education in rabbinics.  The Rabbis see a conflict within us between our יצר רע, our evil inclination, and our יצר טוב, our good inclination.  For Rabbi Ben Zoma, a hero is someone whose good conquers the bad.  For Spinoza, it was the passions and the intellect.   It would be easy for me to define morality in Ben Zoma terms as the victory of the good, since morality is defined as the distinction between good and bad and right and wrong.  Since I have already discussed the issue of true and false in a previous blog, I will not include that even though I think it is relevant.  Philosophy since its inception has dealt with the struggle to be good.  If we look at it in t...

Two Jewish men are sitting on a bench.  Schmu'el says to Avrum, "Avrum, I've got troubles.  My son vants to converse to Christianity." Schmu'el responds, "You got troubles!  My son vants the same thing.  Vhat do ve do?" Avrum says, "Let's go to the rabbi.  He vill know." Schmu'el says to the rabbi, "Rabbi, ve got troubles.  Our sons they vants to converse to Christianity." The rabbi responds, "You go troubles.  My son vants the same thing.  I know.  Ve pray to God." The rabbi intones, "Dear Lord, ve got troubles.  Our sons they vants to converse to Christianity." After a moment of silence, they hear a booming voice, "YOU GOT TROUBLES!" I hope this is not found offensive, if it is found at all.

Since there has been no resolution of the fighting between Israel and Hamas, the war goes on and the hostages have not been returned.  College campuses have been the scene of many pro-Palestinian protests.  Many students have been arrested.  Penn has set up an contained area for the protests, so they do not disrupt the campus.  I understand the passions that these students are displaying.  We had it in the 60's.   I have a question I would like to ask the protesters, especially those proclaiming "from the river to the sea".  My question is--what solution to the war and the day after do you think would be acceptable to both the Israelis and the Palestinians.  The generation of Israeli soldiers, for the most part, that they are fighting are second or third generation Israeli.  They are not colonizers, they its citizens. Wistfully wishing to the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state is not going to solve anything.  Israel, unless the...

As a student of the Hebrew Bible, I am fascinated by the rituals that are prescribed in it, particularly sacrifice.  Tonight, before sundown, we  are commanded to sacrifice the Passover lamb and must eat it all before sunrise.  We do not have the second day to eat the sacrifice, as it is with the other sacrifices.  It is in memory of the blood that protected the people of Israel from the angel of death.  The blood did not have magical powers.  It was not the blood that kept the angel of death at bay.  It was a sign of their belief and devotion.   I have always wondered why people in the ancient world offered sacrifices to their deities.  But that is for another time.  We do not have a temple, so we do not sacrifice.  We acknowledge the sacrifice through symbols of it.  The symbols are meant to take us through time travel.  We are going back in time.  We think of slavery, and how we are fortunate that we are not s...

Passover begins tomorrow night.  It is usually a joyous holiday.  This year we enter it with heavy hearts.  October 7 and the War in Gaza has aroused passions in the American Jewish community.  The reaction goes from Jews who claim to be anti-Zionist, and call for the creation of a Palestinian state "from the river to the sea", to the supporters of Israel right or wrong.  Since I consider myself a moderate, I am somewhere in the middle. As I pointed out in my previous blog, history must be remembered.  Those on the left who make the Anti-Zionist claims are caught up in the rhetoric of today with little regard to history.  Calling the Jews in Israel colonizers is a misnomer.  They seem to be unaware or forget that half the Jewish population are Jewish refugees from Arab lands.  The other half are refugees from destruction in Europe.  They did not build Israel as a European colony.   To blame Israel for the Palestinians not havin...

 I grew up on Jewish comedy.  My all time favorites are the Marx Brothers.  I have seen all their movies multiple times and I still laugh,  I think Duck Soup  was their best movie, and possibly the funniest movie ever made.  That is my subjective view.  For the same reason, that humor is subjective, I could not choose humor in the Hebrew Bible for my dissertation.  I could not be objective.  We can argue who is the funniest Jewish comedian and the best picture made by the best Jewish director at the best Jewish movie studio.  We cannot argue the impact that Jewish humor was eventful on the entertain industry in America. One of the usual anti-Semitic slander is that the Jews owned movie studios, newspapers, and radio stations.  The Jews could exercise an intellectual influence over the masses through control of all these.  The Jews, or to be more precise, particular Jews owning these in and of itself was not slander.  It wa...

I am reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion .  He defines illusions as "Illusions need not necessarily be false--that is to say unrealizable or in contradiction to reality" (page 49).  They are not false, because they cannot be proven so.  An illusion is that I am going to win the lottery and become rich.  It is possible, but highly improbable.  To him, religious beliefs are illusions.  As in the case of God, the illusions of belief cannot either be proven or refuted.   Believing in religious traditions to Freud are based on three things: 1.  We should believe them because our ancestors believed them. 2. These proofs have been handed down from ancient times. 3.  It is forbidden to question their authenticity. I have heard numbers one and two being used as evidence for the historicity of the Exodus and the Revelation at Mt. Sinai.  It was witnessed and passed down from generation to generation.  Number three is seen in the ra...

As a teacher of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies, and as a member of a synagogue who attends services regularly, I would have to say that religion is very important to me.  I am writing a book that deals with how religious ideas have helped cultivate a sense of morality and justice in my life.  I still think there is strength in Kant's argument that a divine imperative is needed for objective morality.  As a result, I need to distinguish between the teachings and the practices of religions. I once heard religion described as mysticism turned political.  It is the politics of religion that to me have caused problems.  The wars that have been fought in the name of religion have bloodied people's conceptions of religion.  I have read many articles about Islam and whether it is a religion that professes peace and brotherhood.  When I look at Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, the Islamic State, and other fanatical Islamic groups, I...

How do we prove something is true?  This has been a question of philosophy since the time of Aristotle.  The simple answer is that if something is true, it must be factual.  In other words, it must be able to be proven.  Since we accept values in mathematics, it is easy to prove that mathematical statements are true.  We all agree that 2+2=4, so that statement is true.  If I put water in a freezer that is less than 32 degrees, it will free, so we all accept that water freezes at 32 degrees F.   Copernicus established the truth that the earth rotates around the sun, even though it took almost a hundred years for his theory to be accepted.  For science, truth must be empirical.  Einstein's theories of relativity have been proven to be true.  Truth for many is hard to accept, especially when it goes against firmly established beliefs, as Copernicus and Galileo discovered.  If truths that can be empirically proven are hard to accep...

 I am now in Maryland visiting my daughter, son-in-law, and two of my grandchildren.  The drive, mostly on turnpikes, takes a little over two hours.  So I have time to think about turnpikes.  I could easily turn this into a rant about drivers who don't know how to drive.  But that would not be worthwhile.  So, I decided to write about something more important:  "Turnpike Dogfight". A little background.  I am fascinated by aviation.  I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy until I realized that they would reject me because I am color blind.  I never had the money to acquire a private license to fly.  But I did a lot of reading, particularly about World War I fighter pilots and their planes.  I am amazed in the rapid development of airplanes from the Wright brothers, whose plane stayed in the air for minutes, to aerial combat ten years later. I have spend a great deal of time driving on turnpikes.  For the most part, they ar...

 There is an editorial in the New York Times today by Jessica Grose entitled "Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It's Too Late".  As a classroom teacher, I totally agree with her.  She paints an even worse picture than I imagined.  As I pointed out in a previous blog, the addiction to screens seems to be getting worse.  I am not free of this addiction.  I spend a great deal of time on a computer.  I could not be writing this blog if I was not.   I have a suspicion, but I cannot confirm it because I do not have the data, that there has been a serious reduction in attention span.  I do not know if it is cause or effect.  I will start with Sesame Street.  Each segment is short because the attention span of younger children is short.  If a child lost focus on one scene, it did not matter, because the next scene did not build on it.  My concern is that the inability to focus for longer periods did not develop as strongly...

 Measured against Greek philosophy, the Hebrew Bible is not philosophical.  The Hebrew Bible is known in Hebrew as the תנ“ך, Tanach, which stands for the three sections of the Hebrew Bible, T for the Torah, N for  Nevi'im , the Prophets, and K for  Ketuvim , the Writings.  This is not to say that the ancient Hebrews did not philosophize.  It is that the texts that were accepted by the Rabbis into the Tanach were not philosophical treatises.   There are two books that might fit into a philosophical category.  They are Ecclesiastes and Job.  Job could be compared to the works of Plato, based on the dialogues that are the major part of the book.  The protagonist of Job, like Socrates, questioned his three friends in an attempt to explain why terrible things happened to him.  Socrates challenged the traditional conception of the gods, and he was executed for this.  The three friends of Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Tzofar, espouse...

 A number of years ago, I gave a lecture I called "And God Said:  'Let There Be a Big Bang'".  During the question and answer period, a woman asked what might happen if the Big Bang was replaced by another theory.  My answer was that I would have to come up with another lecture.  I admit that my ideas are more likely eisegesis, reading ideas into the text, rather than exegesis, trying to determine the intention of the author.  In other words, is the goal of interpretation to be objective, or am I subjectively reading a meaning into the text because that is what I think it means, or what I want it to mean? First, my assumption.  For the text of the Hebrew Bible to be divine, it must be true.  I am basing this on the assumption that first, God exists, second, God communicates, and third, God would not lie to us.  I cannot prove my assumptions.  Even if I can convince you that the account of creation is scientifically true, it does not prov...

 Yehuda HaLevy lived from 1045-1171.  He was a poet and an early Zionist.  Legend states that he ultimately left Spain and came to Jerusalem where he was killed by a Crusader.  The period from about 1000-1200 is known as the Golden Age of Spain.  Southern Spain was under Muslim control.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims studied philosophy together.  The teachings of Aristotle was revised through the commentaries of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198).  Maimonides (1135-1204), the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, and to some, of all time, studied them and attempted to reinterpret Aristotle through a Jewish lens, as Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) did for Christianity. Halevy wrote a book,  The Book of the Khazars , in which he attempted to demonstrate the superiority of Judaism over Christianity and Islam.  The Khazars were a Turkish people who established a commercial empire in the 6th Century between...

 I never particularly enjoyed studying math or science.  I think it was because they have answers.  When tested, answers were either right or wrong.  I was more intrigued by questions without answers.  It was not a question of right or wrong, but how well could I back up my answer.  I used that approach when teaching the Hebrew Bible.  Unlike some who think they know what the Bible means, I took the approach that there were multiple points of view, and all of them were correct.  A typical question was "Did Abraham lie to Pharaoh?".  If someone just answered yes, they may be right, but they still failed because they did not explain why he lied.  Their goal was to convince me that they were right. I think that might be why questions about God may intrigue me so much.  There is no right answer.  All the proofs and arguments we looked at did not prove God.  Each argument tried to convince us that through the logic of the argum...

 Today I donated blood for the 114th time.  After six more donations, I will have donated 15 gallons.  I encourage anyone who is able to donate.  To me, donating blood is one of the ultimate forms of charity.  I do not know exactly how many lives I might have saved through my donations.  I do know that I have helped many people.  Even though I am not a Christian, I value the teachings of Jesus.  "Do unto others as you have them do unto you".  I give blood in the hope that if and when I need it, someone will do the same for me and my loved ones.  The Talmud tells us that the world was created for me, so saving one life is saving an entire world.   As a student of the Hebrew Bible, I find the topic of blood fascinating.  The first mention of blood is in chapter four of Genesis.  Interestingly, the word is in the plural, דמי אחיך, literally "the bloods of your brother.  The use of blood in the plural is common in th...

 Yesterday, I listened to an interview with a comedian on the Washington Post's live site. He said something that I've always known, but he gave it a different perspective.  I have always known that to be a good writer, you should write about what you know.  I stated that in the first blog of this series, and then listed the things I think I know something about:  the Bible, Judaism, and so on. The comedian stated that the things we know well enough to write about are not what are external to us, but internal.  I should not write objectively about Judaism, but subjectively, what does being Jewish mean to me.  Rather than just trying to interpret the Bible, I should write why interpreting it is so important to me.  And so, I should try to write more about what I know about me.   I am trying to learn about myself as much as I can.  I may have started too late in this search to have any great impact on myself, but the search is fascinating....

 Yesterday, another act of vandalism occurred at the Jewish Center at Drexel University.  Again, I am perplexed for the reasons.  It is just a prank?  Do some people think it is funny to deface and vandalize?  I realize that Jewish institutions are not the only recipient of these types of behaviors.  Churches and Mosques have also suffered.  What is the point of these actions?  If there is a message, why not reveal it?  Bret Stephens in his editorial in the New York Times today, "The Appalling Tactics of the 'Free Palestine' Movement", states that these protests clearly reveal their intent--the end of Israel as an independent Jewish state.  As the title states, even though their tactics are appalling, their message is clear.  I don't know what message I am to take from removing letters from the sign at Drexel other than the hatred of Jews. I like to think of myself as a logical and rational person.  I have been influenced by my...

  There was a special service last night at my synagogue Temple Beth-Hillel Beth-El in reaction to the swastika.  I was expecting a large turnout, but I was overwhelmed by the number of people who attended.  Our main sanctuary was filled to capacity.  The auditorium that connects to it was so filled that people were sitting up on the stage and standing on the side.  I recognized many members of our congregation.  The majority of the people I did not know.  They came from other synagogues, churches and mosques.   The Rev. Dr. Adam Hearlson of the Overbrook Presbyterian Church was one of the speakers.  The church was damaged by a fire in January and our synagogue was one of the many that offered space for the church to use.  Rev. Hearlson began by telling us that he and a number of Christian clergy and academics went to Israel to meet with Israeli clergy and academics.  He was surprised that the first topic was kashrut, how to ke...

How do I define myself. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, “definitions have interested philosophers since ancient times” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/definitions/). In my favorite dialogue of Plato,  Euthyphro , Plato attempts to define piety. In his most famous work, The Republic, he attempts to define justice. St. Anselm attempted to prove the existence of God, but to me, he only defined God, telling us basically “that for God to be God, God must be God”. As a teacher, it was essential for me to define my terms so that my students and I were on the same page, so to speak. But how do I define myself? Do I define myself by what I was paid to do, be a teacher? I am also a son, a brother, a cousin, an uncle, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I was not paid to be them, but are they still a part of my definition? I was captain of my high school basketball team my senior year.  Can I define myself as an athlete? I am in the process of writing this, so a...

  Yesterday afternoon, I received an email from my rabbi that our synagogue had a swastika painted over a sign that displayed the synagogue's commitment to the State of Israel.  It was the second time that the sign had been defaced.  For those who have been reading this blog, you know that I am confused by hatred.  I cannot comprehend what the perpetrator hoped to accomplish.  I have a similar reaction to a protest that blocked traffic in Philadelphia calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. I understand the power of protest.  I see it in the Book of Esther where Mordechai refused to bow to Haman as a protest.  Mordechai went through the streets of Shushan, crying out about the injustice of the policies of Haman calling for the genocide of the Jewish subjects of Persia.  I myself participated in protests against the War in Viet Nam.  I joined the Women's March protesting against the election of Donald Trump.   Protesting seems to be one of...

 Good morning. After looking at the various attempts to prove the existence of God, I am left with the conclusion that they all point to the philosophical necessity of a god, not God.  For example, David Hume gave a refutation of the teleological argument.  He wrote that even if we accept the logic of it, that the complexity of the universe and its order shows an intelligence behind it, this does not prove that this intelligence is also the creator of the materials of the universe.   The French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, knew that there is no proof for the existence of God.  At the same time, there is no proof for the non-existence of God, something that Spinoza tried to explain.  For Pascal, believing in God is like playing cards.  No one knows what cards are in the hands of your opponent.  Based on your own hand, you weight the pros and cons of wagering.  Unlike a card game, though, God never reveals the cards that are in God's hand...