A.H. Schectman 18601 NE 14th Avenue Apartment 312 North Miami Beach, FL 33179 (305) 949 2701
December 16, 2005
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on Issues, Ideas and Reflections on the Times. Please click on www.aaron.schectman.com for a wide selection
of essays. Your responses are valued.
THE THINGS WE VENERATE
I am most familiar with the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, in Hebrew and Aramaic and mostly in English for I cannot translate either the Hebrew or Aramaic yet until after I begin studying for my second Bar Mitzvah. I made a mistake and am sorry for it: I said it was the fiftieth anniversary of my first Bar Mitzvah at age 13. However, planning for my 83rd birthday is an occasion of 70 years since that first event. I think I know a little more this time than the first for I have had the benefit of experience and a great deal of thinking allowed.
I do not venerate the Torah. I study it. I do not kiss it or sing with joy carrying it around the Temple as some do. I do venerate learning and disputation as well as intellectual nit-picking from others who are equally enthralled with trying to extract meaning from words thousands of years old.
My Catholic friends are equally involved with symbols of their religion. I think that the confessional booth is a great idea but would suggest more air, more light and more people involved. My beloved mother-in-law who lived her last years in Villa Maria was in a private room which had on the wall a cross which she tried to have removed and a Mogen David put up in its place. We compromised and added a Star of David as a symbol of her Jewish ness.
The sliver of a moon and a star is a symbol of Islam as well as the Black Stone in Mecca, called the Kaaba. This is believed to be a meteorite that landed in the sand and alerted all the folk around – including Abraham – to come and venerate a message from Heaven. People still visit this relic as the most holy of holies in the Muslim world. Muhammad studied the precursor religions and decided he would have the last word. He declared that the Jews were the People of THE Book and of Jesus on the Cross was a good prophet – but Muhammad the Messenger of Allah was the Last Prophet. There are these major differences. Nowadays there is a struggle for the soul of Jerusalem and the remnants of the wall of the Temple that Herod built. Two Moslem Mosques sit on top of that Temple Mount. We worship differently and venerate vastly different things.
Now, Buddhists and other religionists think that a sharply pointed high hill in the midst of a very cold and high Tibetan wasteland is an object of veneration. People who visit and pray there take a three day journey hiking around it and then attempt the climb up it. It is supposed to be a very spiritual journey much like people visiting the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple; crawling and then walking around the Kaaba or being baptized where Jesus was in the Jordan River and visiting places where holy people lived. This is all very interesting and I love studying it. PLEASE CONTINUE READING p. 2
At this point I am going to break a long standing tradition of restricting my remarks to a single page. The subject of today, THE THINGS WE VENERATE, needs some additional items, without which, all the points I made are anemic and could use a great deal more attention.
Let me begin by saying that I was startled to learn that there was a phallic object that exists in the middle of a Tibetan landscape that for thousands of years has been the object of veneration by the peoples living in and around Mount Kailas. . I found an article in National Geographic’s Adventure magazine in my Audiologist’s office, read about it and confess that I knew nothing about it. Yet, it inspires hikers from western countries to come and be near it and try to emulate the Buddhists and other religionists who adhere to it in order to benefit by a spirituality that seems to emanate from that high pointed natural occurrence in the middle of a remote land controlled by the Chinese.
We venerate a great many things. I will just point out those favorite icons, like the rabbits’ foot kind of thing that fill drawers all over the world. In some parts of the world, a relic of a saint is set up in a niche and that is worshiped, talked to and requests for intervention are made. We hope for luck and that Lady fills the minds of those who wager a lot.
But we also worship success. This comes in the form of wealth. That is a mark of success in this world. We also worship power and those who wield it. There ARE leaders and, of course, followers. There are those who believe they were not born under a lucky star but KNOW a brooding cloud rains over them perpetually.
I know a great many people who think they are owed more than they have because they are who they are. They have not worked for what they want but want it anyway. There are those who thieve, connive and wreak havoc to get what they want but do not have any conscience or morality to tell them that among the living they are like wolverines and other rapacious animals, only human in form.
What do such inhuman creatures believe in? I suspect they believe that what is good for them is the rule they live by. This, in miniature, is the same kind of belief that what is good for General Motors is good for the United States. Particularly odious is the desecration of the shrines, churches, synagogues and other places of worship by those who place themselves as arbiters of what Allah, God, Jesus or whomever they believe is the chief mover of life in this world. There are among us those who believe that filth is better than cleanliness (adolescents usually outgrow this) and that foul and filthy language is better than the universe of discourse in which learned speech and actual knowledge of what is spoken about is considered to be the better way of expression.
There are too many people who venerate themselves and think their opinion, because it is their opinion is as good as any fact you or I express. This is the way the world works. We often venerate unworthy things.