DVORIM MIN HALEIV

Note: This posting wil meander a bit, as it weaves several related themes, and is explanatory rather than having a clear set of conclusions. Please feel free to skip it, and go directly to the naked monkey evolution pictures. If you're that way inclined. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Good words that go out from the heart, enter the heart - Dvorim hayotzim min haleiv, nichnasim haleiv

ALSO when they are written words.

The history of a bookish people proves that. Abundantly.


My grammar school years were at a tiny non-denominational public school right next door to an immense Catholic school where good little Katolikim learned from the monks that everyone else was going to hell.
Protestantim, in their schools, learned the same, from severe and unyielding blinkerbrains.
Our school was not thus.
Many of the students at our school came from less privileged families. The others came from a heretical and unaffiliated milieu, or from the three or four Jewish families in town.
In our school, heaven and hell were NOT mentioned as part of the curriculum. If our classmates learned about those two destinations, it was either from their home and religious environment outside of school hours, or, remarkably, from their classmates.


Judging by how many kids told us (the Heretical, Unaffiliated or Jewish - hereafter referred to as HUJ) that we were going to hell, heaven must be jam-packed with self-satisfied little shits.[Note: Since returning to the US, the only time I am told that I'm going to hell is when I turn on the telly. Perhaps that has something to do with living in San Francisco, where we're all going to hell. Well, the six out of every seven here who are HUJ. The rest voted for Bush.]


When our pious classmates weren't informing us of the hellish fate that awaited all the HUJ, they often told us that our salvation and future material welfare would be based entirely on begging Jayziz for mercy.

I think they wanted us to start doing that while they watched. We must've disappointed them, and I don't think they have ever forgiven us.


Which makes it strange that subsequently, in high school, while everybody else was getting failing grades in the religion course (a required subject, nota bene!), I and the other HUJ breezed through with top marks. A subject with much reading, and many recommended texts.

[What was high school religion class? Mostly Torah, less Nach, nearly no Christian Subsequentia - plus a very superficial overview of related traditions, somewhat in-depth on the history of the Holy Land and the social / cultural environment. Background on the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman periods, and the intellectual environment of the time. Some of us even ended up with the Pentateuch memorized, in the old-fashioned Dutch of the Staten Bijbel translation. Unfortunately, no Rashi. I do not think that Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki has been translated into Dutch yet.]


Reading may be better than having the received interpretation drummed in after all

Dvorim hayotzim min hasefer, nichnasim hasechel.


My parents instilled in me that scripture is a major part of one's education and cultural foundation. Treat it as literature, treat it as one of the major building blocks of civilization, treat it as a guide for the perplexed, treat it as part of the web and woof of the Western subconscious. Do not treat it as cast in bronze, set in stone, or revealed certainty. If you do, the text can no longer be argued, and an interactive personal understanding of the material is well nigh impossible.

This approach can be perhaps best be thought of as less a family minhag than a response to environment.

My family represents several generations of recovering Dutch Calvinists, Scottish Presbyterians, and a few rogue Anglicans - mostly with a pathological dislike for preachers, priests, and organized religion.
And, fittingly, several fine Tanachic names - Abraham Isaacsen, Isaac Abrahamsen, Isaac Isaacsen, Jacob Isaacsen, Selah Abrahamsen, Nathan, Ezekiel, Zacharias, and others.
[Note: Selah was my great-great grandfather, the various Isaacs and Abrahams and others lived in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It could be said that most of them at the very least veered into HUJ territory, when they weren't energetically disobeying other societally imposed rules.]


I believe my mother may have had the same distaste for spontaneous freeform prayers (which are much favoured by fundies) that she had for amateurish free-verse. I have inherited that distaste, and added to it - public prayer strikes me as too much like group sex, especially when it is evident that some participants adhere to that odd tripartite conception of the divine (one does not willingly take part in idolatrous rituals, even if only as an unwilling witness).

There are appropriate times and places for ritual, and if one is not 'there and then', such things should be kept to oneself.