Pathological mourning

Jewish date:  18 Tammuz 5772 (Parashath Pineḥas).

Today’s holidays:  Fast of Tammuz (Judaism), Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Zorak/National Camel Toad Hunting Day (secular) (Church of the SubGenius).


Greetings.

Since today is the Fast of Tammuz, I thought I would take a little time and talk about the meaning of this holiday in the interest of not missing its point.  The Fast of Tammuz is the start of the Three Weeks, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the concurrent damage to the Jewish communities.  Naturally, this is a season of mourning, with fasts both today and at the end of the Three Weeks.  What I want to discuss in particular what goes wrong with these fasts.

The first thing which goes wrong is that some people take the fasting as the whole point of the holiday and go off and do whatever they like otherwise, such as play tourist.  This is clearly not mourning and thus missing the point entirely.

The other thing which goes wrong is more subtle.  We do the same rituals, year after year, mourning the destruction of the Temples, the latter of which happened in 70 CE.  In 1948 (1,878 years later), the State of Israel was founded, and 19 years later, the Old City of Yerushalayim was back in Jewish hands.  In all this time the Jewish people have become increasingly concentrated in Israel, definite progress on the Ingathering of the Exiles, and Judaism has undergone a revival.  Yet the Temple Mount, the place where YHWH told us to build His Temple, is largely ignored.  Rather than push to rebuild the Temple, we let the Muslim Waqf treat the Temple Mount as if it were its own property and constantly desecrate it.  Our yearly mourning has become an end in itself, rather than a means.  We are afraid to change the status quo—despite it being obvious that our situation has changed radically—and would rather pretend that nothing has changed for us in 1,940 years.  This is missing the point of mourning.  The point of mourning is to help us deal with a tragedy and move forward with our lives.  What we need to be doing is to move on to the Third Temple.  We need to start paying attention to the Temple Mount again and reclaim it for Judaism.  We need to demand Jewish religious freedom on the Temple Mount.  We need to visit the Temple Mount and pray up there, whether or not the Muslims or the police approve.  We need to start bringing the Pesaḥ sacrifice again, even if we have to do it under an armed guard.  And we need to knock down everything Muslim on the Temple Mount and build the next Temple.  We need to move forward and keep the entire Torah that YHWH gave us.  Because if we do not, our mourning is simply a pathology, and a large part of lives will never change for the better.


Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

It is no surprise why the Cyclons tried to kill all the humans

Greetings.

Jewish date:  16 ’Adhar 5770 (Parashath Ki Thissa’).

Today’s holidays:  Bahá’í Month of Fasting and Ayyam-i-ha (Bahá’í Faith), Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Take Action: Help stop expanded logging in the Tongass”.

Topic 1:  The latest episode of Caprica, “There Is Another Sky”.  The first of two major religious themes of this episode is the treatment of artificial people.  Daniel Graystone, arguing before the board of his company, claims that artificial intelligences do not have rights and do not need to be treated with the same consideration as humans and can be exploited and bossed around at will.  To illustrate, he orders Zoe II to rip her own arm off.  He still has no idea that Zoe II is still alive and possesses a Cylon body, and she complies, apparently to avoid blowing her cover.  (Why she keeps up the pretense of being just another robot, I have no idea.  I hope she will eventually explain her reasons.)  Meanwhile, the virtual reconstruction of Tamara Adama falls into the hands of a gang who realize that she is pure avatar and not a normal human; she cannot be injured—though she can feel pain—and she cannot be knocked out of the virtual world.  The gang feels no qualms about forcing her to participate in New Cap City, a crime-based game in which normal rules of morality are ignored.  Eventually she turns on them and shoots them all, knocking them out of the virtual world, except for one; the reason for this will be explained shortly.  But suffice it to say that many of the humans have little or no moral regard for artificial people.  This explains a lot about why 58 years in the future the Cylons rebel and try to kill all the humans.

The other major religious theme is mourning.  Joseph and Willie Adama spend this episode trying to come to terms with the deaths of Shannon and Tamara.  Joseph finds out that Willie has been skipping school and tries to bond with his son.  Eventually the two of them participate in a Tauron mourning ceremony involving giving coins for the dead—shades of the ancient Greek practice of placing a coin under the tongue of the dead so as to pay Charon to take him/her across the river Styx to Hades—and officiated by a bald, darkly-clad priest.  At this point Joseph seems well on his way to recovery (that is the point of mourning ceremonies, after all), when all of a sudden a visitor shows up.  It is the one gang member which Tamara II did not shoot, and he tells Joseph that Tamara II sent him.  The gang member runs away in fear before delivering any more information, and Joseph is left clearly disturbed.  Clearly Joseph’s search for Tamara II is meant to be a long-term arc.

Topic 2:  Despite a prediction to the contrary, Utah was not destroyed by a comet yesterday.  Reason:  1, Bible codes:  0.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor:  “Even Basement Cat”:


Peace.

Aaron