An interview with Fred Stella, host of WGVU’s “Common Threads,” about my book, Reflections on the Psalms. The book is available on Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFCYR1NP.
Theology – The Thought that Drives our Practice
Reflections on the Psalms
An interview with Samuel Zinner about my book. The book is available on Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFCYR1NP. If you are in Grand Rapids, I have a few copies that I can sell for about 20% off. It makes a great Hanukkah (or Christmas) present!
Samuel Zinner, Ph.D. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2002. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Zinner concentrated in modern and ancient languages and literatures, history, and Museum Studies. He contributed to German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing 1920- 1945 (Berghahn Books 2004), which was awarded the American Library Association’s prestigious “Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year Award” for 2005. He has contributed articles to Religions/Adyan (Doha International Centre for Interfaith Dialogue), and other academic journals. He has served as a peer-review referee for the journals Old Testament Essays, Paedagogia Christiana, etc. His work has been published internationally in a variety of languages by Oxford University Press, De Gruyter, etc. Zinner’s work has been praised by Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Philip R. Davies, Hebraist John F. A. Sawyer (Durham University), Targums scholar Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge), and others. Zinner is currently an editor of the forthcoming volume Origins and Applications of Language and Number (Rowman and Littlefield), which includes contributions by Noam Chomsky, Gregory Chaitin, and other eminent scholars. Zinner’s recent conference participations include presentations for the Oregon Jewish Cultural Project “Bob Dylan: Jewish Perspectives on his Repertoire” and “The Bible and the Qur’an: Comparative Studies” at the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran.
Divre Harav – April, 2018
When [Hillel] saw a skull floating on the water, he said to it, “Because you drowned others, they drowned you. In the end, they who drowned you shall be drowned.” Pirke Avot 2:7
I’m sitting next to Hillel on the bank of the Jordan river back in the day when it was more than a trickle. We see a skull float by. I’m thinking, “Gross! Yuck! Poor guy.” And Hillel, great sage that he is, comes up with the perfect formulation of Jewish Karma. All right, so next to Hillel, I’m kind of s schlepper. But my skills shine when it comes to knowing how to Google!
Hillel is enamored with Exodus 21:23-25, “the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.” Let’s see where that might lead (thanks to Reb Google):
In 1914, a member of the Canadian House of Parliament named Mr. Graham argued against the death penalty. He said, “We can argue all we like, but if capital punishment is being inflicted on some man, we are inclined to say: ‘It serves him right.’ That is not the spirit, I believe, in which legislation is enacted. If in this present age we were to go back to the old time of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ there would be very few honorable gentlemen in this House who would not, metaphorically speaking, be blind and toothless.”
Or more concisely, in Fiddler on the Roof, a man says, “We should defend ourselves. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” And Tevye responds, “Very good. And that way, the whole world will be blind and toothless.
Now as it happens, I’m not dead set again the death penalty, but I do believe that the evidentiary requirements for carrying it our should be extra-high. Not just guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but “beyond any shadow of doubt.” Hillel’s observation, however, is not limited to the arena of punishment by human courts. The Karma he describes means that when we put out destructive energy, at some point in the future we will find ourselves facing the backlash from our negative behavior. All behavior, positive and negative, has inescapable consequences. Every action produces waves of energy which bounce around, affecting the world around us. Eventually, the waves will inevitably come back towards us, whether by human or divine agency.
The idea that our behavior affects our fate is a cornerstone of Judaism, hammered into our heads in the month and a half leading up to Yom Kippur. I tip my hat to our sage Hillel, whose immersion in the waters of Torah was so deep that he viewed everything that passed before through the lens of Jewish theology.
Hebrew Words of the Month (body parts connected to letters of the Hebrew alphabet):
- Ayin – eye
- Shen – tooth
- Peh – mouth
- Yad – hand
- Rosh – head
- Kaf – palm
Psalm 97
“Light is sown for the righteous.” (97:11)
Goodness is its own reward – sometimes yes, sometimes no. We do get recognized, thanked, and sometimes rewarded for good behavior. But the ideal is to behave with pure, altruistic, goodness for its own sake. Because we are human beings with egos, the Psalmist plants a suggestion that a reward is sown for the righteous. We may not get the spotlight today, but someday, perhaps in the World to Come, we will reap the harvest and be rewarded for the things we have done for others.
Psalm 95
“Come, let us bow down and kneel.” (95:6)
Judaism incorporates some bowing into daily liturgy and a little bit of symbolic not-quite-kneeling. A few times a year, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, traditional Jews take kneeling one step further into full prostration. Excessive bowing has the appearance of false, obsequious, groveling, but careful, judicious, but serious, bowing, is useful to one’s character to remind oneself that no matter how powerful we might feel, that our power is limited. We bow to show our humility before God, and we bow to remind ourselves to behave with humility before others
Embodied Torah 