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[ by Charles Cameron — is empathy really so very strange these days? ]
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When I saw this in one of my feeds this morning ..

I was strongly reminded of a remark I’ve mentioned before, found in the Talmud, Megillah 10b.

R. Johanan is responding to the question “does the Holy One, blessed be He, rejoice in the downfall of the wicked” and his response references the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea — “For the horses of Pharaoh went with his chariots and his horsemen into the sea, and the LORD brought back the waters of the sea upon them” (Exodus 15.19) — as they pursued the people of Israel escaping on their way to the promised land:

The angels of heaven wanted to sing the usual song, and the Holy One, blessed be He, said to them: My creatures are drowning in the sea, and you want to sing songs!

I have, of course, cherry-picked this particular comment from 6,200 complex pages of Talmud, and while I’m not competent (British understatement) to offer you a rich context for this remark, I can at least offer you R. Elazar’s response:

He Himself does not rejoice, but He makes others rejoice.

[ by Charles Cameron — thinking of human, animal and symbolic sacrifice — also of “the lamb that was slain” ]
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In Nepal:

Nepal temple bans mass animal slaughter at festival

In a victory for activists, Nepalese temple authorities have announced they will end a centuries-old Hindu tradition of mass animal slaughter that attracts hundreds of thousands of worshippers.

The festival, held once every five years, sees hordes of devotees from Nepal and India flock to a temple in the Himalayan nation’s southern plains to sacrifice thousands of animals in the hope of appeasing the Hindu goddess of power, Gadhimai.

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From Brooklyn to Tel Aviv:

Jewish chicken-slaughter ritual gets OK from judge

All’s fair when it comes to slaughtering fowl on the streets of Brooklyn, a judge ruled Monday, clearing the way for thousands of chickens to be killed next week in a 2,000-year-old ritual.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra James ruled that the Orthodox practice of Kaporos, during which chickens are slaughtered before the high holy day of Yom Kippur to atone for sins, can proceed, knocking down a challenge by a Brooklyn animal-rights group.

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Sacrifice may be one of the most profound values that we are losing in our rush to reductionism — and by this I wish to imply also that we are not sacrificing it, but simply forgetting it, permitting it to fade..

And yet I would be hard-pressed to define it.

[ by Charles Cameron — I am reminded also of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s great and simple book, The Sabbath ]
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Two very different styles of thinking came to my attention today. The first style (upper panel, below) is that now commonly found within the effective altruism movement:

The second (lower panel, above) comes from Oliver Sacks, physician.

Between them lies the difference between quantitative and qualitative modes of thinking — which is to say between quantity and quality as the two great vectors aloing which we align our lives and futures.

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Sources:

Dylan Matthews, I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity..

Oliver Sacks, Sabbath

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Rabbi Heschel‘s book, The Sabbath, opens with the words:

He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil.

[ by Charles Cameron — from Tractate Sanhedrin and Grotius to Gershon Scholem and the power of names ]
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I ran across Yonatan Mendel‘s post, Kill Him First, in the Jewish Quarterly today while searching for the Habrew of the phrase get up early to kill him first, which I wanted to pair with the quote from Hugo Grotius which is pretty obviously derived from it:

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I arrived at that page, in other words, looking for the phrase Ha-Ba le-Horgekha Hashkem le-Horgo, and was glad to find it there, along with a fascinating narrative of some of the times it has been quoted in recent Israeli political circles:

Following the Second Lebanon War, Ehud Yatom, a Likud MK, explained the asymmetrical death toll of 44 Israeli civilians and 1,191 Lebanese civilians with the same trump card: ‘and if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’ It has been used by Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon when addressing university students about their military reserve service and by Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter when lecturing about IDF strategy. It was also the explanation provided by Minister of Minorities Avishai Braverman for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. Even Ayoub Kara, a Druze MK from Likud, has used it. When asked about the Iranian nuclear plan Kara showed little originality: ‘I think an attack on Iran will be justifi ed’, he said, ‘since if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’

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But, but.

That’s not the real treasure. For me, the real treasure is in the quote that heads Mendel’s article, from the great schoilar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem in his 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig, On Our Language: A Confession. Here’s Mendel’s quote:

The people here are not aware of the significance of their acts. They only think they have turned Hebrew into a secular language. That they have released the apocalyptic sting out of it… but God will not remain silent in the language in which he was invoked again and again, thousands of times, to return into our lives.

Scholem’s whole letter is a powerful poetic testament:

Language is name. The power of language is enclosed in the name; the abyss of language is sealed within it..