From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 23:09:11 MDT
At 09:00 PM 4/8/03 -0700, Hal wrote:
>Gelernter concludes by
>giving a vote of confidence to the Bible as a guide to the difficult
>technological choices ahead.
That's the clue. Gelernter is an observant Orthodox Jew, I understand. See.
e.g. in Commentary, 2002:
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1061/5_113/85106569/p1/article.jhtml?ter
m=judaism
What is Judaism? The main topics are familiar: God and man; the people
Israel; Torah and mitzvot, or
divine commands; prayer, the Sabbath, and the yearly cycle of sacred
ritual. The great themes of Jewish
history are likewise familiar: exodus and liberation, chosenness and
revelation, exile and redemption,
community and peoplehood. But some of Judaism's most important themes are
unfamiliar, because, like
musical phrases or fragrances, they can only be described imperfectly in
words.
What is Judaism? It is one continuous sacred text, founded on the written
Torah (or Bible) and the
spoken Torah (or Talmud), continuing through several millennia's worth of
discussion and commentary
laid in translucent leaves over the foundation. One generation's work of
study and understanding never
obscures, only colors, the previous generation's. Israel developed its
religion by successive glazes. You
are always catching glimpses--as if you were a scuba diver gazing downward
at submerged ancient
cities--of older worlds beneath the surface. But you swim not in water but
in voices: the Lord's voice
upon the waters of Psalm 29; the voice of the shofar, in which mankind
addresses its most urgent
messages to God; the still, small voice that the prophet Elijah hears on
Mt. Horeb; the dark voice of
Jewish history, the "voice of your brother's blood" crying out from the
earth; and the intertwined voices
of unbridled joy, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the
bride--the sound of God's presence
in the universe.
Evidently that sound tells us not to meddle in things Man was not meant to
know or do.
Sigh.
Damien Broderick
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