Search Results

< Back Beatitudes David Cowles “The eight beatitudes are a 'manifesto' for change, a change in the way we understand the world…behave in that world… (and) act toward one another. Hearing Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is a bit like going down a rabbit hole…or passing through a looking glass. Nothing is as it should be, everything is turned around…or upside down…or inside out. The heart of Jesus’ sermon is the so-called Beatitudes . Next to the Lord’s Prayer, these eight aphorisms are probably the best known verses in the entire New Testament. Found in the Gospel of Matthew (5: 3-10), they are short enough to be reproduced here in their entirety: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Like I said, everything is turned upside down. The poor and the persecuted take possession of a kingdom while the meek inherit the land. Those who mourn are the ones comforted. The merciful are they who receive mercy. In our experience, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and those who work for peace are invariably frustrated. Not so, according to Jesus! Their efforts are rewarded. In fact, they will be called children of God. Those with clean hearts (like Job?) will even see God. In another essay in this issue, we spoke about a linguistic phenomenon called the “ Middle Voice ”. The middle voice is the voice of reciprocity. It replaces, at least in some contexts, the tyranny of the active and passive verb voices. So let’s return to our eight aphorisms and see if they can fairly be described as examples of middle voice consciousness. The eight may be grouped into three families, each family illustrating a certain aspect of the middle voice: First , “the kingdom of heaven” belongs to the “poor in spirit” and those “who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness”. Whether you understand “poor in spirit” as economic poverty or personal humility, this is not a trait often associated with the possession of a kingdom. Rather, wealth, or at least arrogance, is thought to be the gateway to political power. How about the victims of persecution? By definition, these are folks who lack political power. Then there are the meek. They will inherit the land. Not the ambitious, not the workaholic, not the greedy, not the ruthless, but the meek! Power relationships have been reversed. Every few millennia, the earth’s polarity reverses (south becomes north and north, south). Just this year, scientists in China claim to have detected a reversal in the rotation of the earth’s core. Likewise, the Beatitudes! From our perspective, the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a sort of ‘anti-kingdom’. One is reminded of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass, where walking towards something puts you further away from it, while walking away from something brings you closer to it. Second , mercy is shown to those who are merciful. This beatitude builds on the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our trespasses.” Today, in the language of the streets, we’d say, “What goes around comes around!” In Eastern spirituality, it’s called ‘karma’. According to middle voice consciousness, whatever you do to or for another is automatically and simultaneously done to or for you. This is not a matter of reward and punishment. It is an unshakable characteristic of middle voice ontology: any activity (e.g. being merciful) is always and immediately bidirectional. “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” All action radiates outward toward another and inward toward the self. Those who mourn experience a variation of this. Mourning acknowledges loss and opens us up to experience that loss. It is through being open to the experience of loss that comforting takes place. Another staple of middle voice consciousness: need is the mother of satisfaction. “Give us this day our daily (necessary) bread.” Third , the remaining beatitudes concern our relation to God. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied. God hungers and thirsts for righteousness. Our own hunger and thirst conform our minds to the mind of God. God is also the fullness of all things. So to the extent that we conform our minds to God’s, we are hungry, but we are also satisfied. That is why we pray the Psalms: to conform our minds to God’s, to internalize his values. In doing so, we own our hunger and recognize its satisfaction in God. The human ‘heart’ (not the organ) is the seat of love and a window onto God. It is through our love that we connect with God who is Love. A clean heart allows us a clear view of the Divinity. In middle-voice ontology, the relationship between subject and object is no longer mediated by action. Instead, the relationship is primary; actions flow from that relationship – they do not constitute the relationship. To surrender power and status is to purify the heart…and so to see God. Finally, the peacemakers! In relation to the world, God has two primary functions. First, he is the source of the values that stimulate creativity and motivate events. Second, he is Peacemaker-in-Chief; he is the harmony (peace) that guarantees the eternal preservation (salvation/redemption) of those events. To the extent that any of us makes peace in our world, we do the work of God ( opus dei ). But who does the work of God? His children, of course! We carry on his work: “God & Daughters Construction Co., Inc.” As peacemakers, as God’s children, we are extensions of God into the historical world. We build on a foundation of Incarnation, Eucharist, and Pentecost. The ‘mind of God’ is the ultimate example of middle voice consciousness. To the extent that we adopt a middle voiced view of the world we conform our minds to God’s; and to the extent that we conform our minds to God’s, we both see and act in terms of reciprocity. So Jesus’ ministry and the New Testament record of that ministry can be seen as an effort to change the way people view the world…or at least to give folks an alternative. The eight beatitudes are a manifesto for change, a change in the way we understand the world, a change in the way we behave in that world, a change in the way we act toward one another. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Loaves & Fishes II David Cowles Jul 3, 2025 “So was the feeding of the 5,000 a miracle? Yes…and no!” In an earlier post on this site, we ‘decoded’ the New Testament ‘miracle’ known as the Multiplication of Loaves & Fishes . We discovered that the New Testament (NT) accounts of two separate ‘multiplication events’ form a pattern which allows us to understand their deeper meaning. So what’s the ‘answer’ to the riddle posed by the ‘multiplication’? Why, it’s the number 3 of course! What else could it be? (Discover that for yourself; just click on the link above.) But these accounts raise a deeper question: “How’d he do it?” Of course, a simple answer is, “By the power of God who is omnipotent.” Now, if this answer fully satisfies you, you may not need to read on. But if you’re looking for a more heuristic explanation, please continue. What is a miracle? Is it a suspension of the laws of physics? The intervention of a transcendent and omnipotent power? That’s the standard ‘explanation’…such as it is. Or is it just a perfectly natural, but unusual, event? Folks who explain the Exodus as a rare confluence of unlikely meteorological conditions fall into this camp. Or do ‘miracles’ provide us with a glimpse of an entirely physical reality that exists below the surface of conventional spacetime? (Like quantum mechanics, e.g.) In other words, can we retain the concept of the miraculous but reconcile it with materialism? Folks like me who fall into this later camp do not intend to denigrate in any way the power of God. Rather, we defend it! We simply seek to preserve the ontological independence of the world as God created it. What if the scrubbed and manicured world we call ‘home’ is just a surface, a region, an approximation or an idealization of a much more variegated universe in which many alternative states of affairs may apply? What if there is something about our cognitive apparatus that prompts us to see the phenomenal world as we do, even though it’s an over-simplified version of what’s real? Or what if the substructure of the universe itself is ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’? ( The Lego Movie ) Sidebar : Wikipedia says that someone who lives in Cloud Cuckoo Land, “thinks that completely impossible things might happen…” Yup, that’s us…modified to read: “thinks that infinitesimally probable things actually happen.” Etymologically, this concept derives from the medieval Cockaigne , a ‘land of plenty’. Philosophically, the term first appears in Aristophanes’ play, The Birds (414 BCE), but it has appeared more recently in the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche . The ‘multiplication of loaves and fishes’ is a miracle because you are not supposed to be able to satisfy the appetites of 5,000 hungry pilgrims with just 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish. If a loaf of bread weighs a kilogram, then each pilgrim would receive one gram of bread. (A gram is roughly 1/25 th of an ounce.) If this works, it’s even better than Atkins . But of course it doesn’t work, at least not in the world we’re accustomed to. It doesn’t work because the volume of the ‘parts’ (5,000 crumbs = 5 kilograms) cannot exceed the volume of the ‘whole’ (5 loaves = 5 kilograms) and 1/25 th of an ounce will not satisfy a hungry boy (or girl). This is obviously true in the world as we know it (and in any world characterized by the Archimedean Property ). But who died and made Archimedes boss of the universe? According to Nietzsche, God did! RIP Suppose our everyday Archimedean world is just a special case of a much more flexible, non-Archimedean universe, where the quantitative relationship between a whole and its parts is no longer hardwired by the laws of arithmetic. (What’s the big deal? Zeno disproved those laws 2500 years ago!) Breaking the bread (loaves) into individual portions, we create 5,000 disjoint morsels. In a non-Archimedean universe, the volume of the parts (morsels) can exceed the volume of the whole! In fact, even a single morsel can exceed the volume of the whole. The morsels, considered together or apart, can contain more bread, potentially much more bread, than the 5 loaves from which they were crumbled. That was the case on a certain day on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee 2,000 years ago. Not only did 5 loaves fill the bellies of 5,000 day trippers but the apostles were able to gather up 12 baskets of scraps at the end. 5,000 were fed and there was more left over than there was at the beginning. If only my household budget worked like that! (Perhaps it would if I followed NT economic principles.) So was ‘the feeding of the 5,000’ a ‘miracle’? Yes…and no! It was certainly a manifestation of God’s power in the person of Jesus ( you don’t routinely dip into the non-Archimedean substructure to solve your problems); but it did not violate any of the laws of (non-Archimedean) physics nor did it compromise the independence of the created world (Genesis 1). *** "The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes" (1624–25), oil on canvas by Giovanni Lanfranco, Italian, 1582–1647. 229 x 426 cm. Purchased in 1856. https://www.aletheiatoday.com/thoughtswhileshaving/loaves-and-fishes Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back A Prayer for Comfort Hadassah Treu "Dear Lord, thank you that you are Jehovah Shammah–"the Lord is there". (Ezekiel 48:35) Dear Lord, thank you that you are Jehovah Shammah–"the Lord is there". (Ezekiel 48:35) You showed up centuries ago in the least likely place the Jews expected You–in the place of their captivity and exile; You showed in Babylon! Thank you, that You will show up in my place of bondage and oppression, too. You are always present and intimately involved in my earthly life, while preparing me for eternity with You. I can see the signs of Your presence being there in my preservation, endurance, and overcoming adversity. The Lord is there is my greatest possible comfort! He is there in the ruins, in the pain, in the garbage, in the suffering, in the darkness and in hopelessness. He not only knows; He also feels my pain. When I doubt–the Lord is there. When I am overwhelmed with grief–the Lord is there. When I break down–the Lord is there. When I can't take it anymore–the Lord is there. When I worry and fret- the Lord is there. The Lord is there–knowing, feeling, holding, comforting, and working. Lord, remind me always of this truth that brings the greatest possible comfort. Remind me You are with me, knowing me and the problem in all intimate details and feeling my anguish and pain. I am grateful that You are working on my behalf, sustaining and strengthening me until I see the light again. Whatever happens, help me remember that You are with me. Because the Lord is there, I may be "hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed but not in despair; persecuted but not abandoned; struck down but not destroyed". (2 Corinthians 4:8-9) I just need to stand and wait for You and Your perfect timing. In Jesus' name. Amen. Hadassah Treu is an international Christian author, blogger, and poet, and the Encouraging Blogger Award Winner of 2020. She is passionate about encouraging people in their journey to faith and a deeper walk with God. Hadassah is a contributing author to several faith-based platforms and devotional and poetry anthologies. She has been featured on (In)courage, Living by Design Ministries, Thoughts About God, Today’s Christian Living (Turning Point), and other popular sites. You can connect with Hadassah at www.onthewaybg.com. Return to our Summer 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back You have Nothing to Lose but Your Clouds...What if you could vote to change the weather? David Cowles May 3, 2022 Suppose every day we could vote what weather we were to have tomorrow. What fighting there would be, what killing of one neighbor by another…most things that we vote for do not really matter, you are a little more or a little less uncomfortable as the government does one thing or another but the weather oh dear…that would be a disaster.” “Suppose every day we could vote what weather we were to have tomorrow. What fighting there would be, what killing of one neighbor by another…most things that we vote for do not really matter, you are a little more or a little less uncomfortable as the government does one thing or another but the weather oh dear…that would be a disaster.” ( Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein) The year is 2075. Scientists have finally figured out how to control the weather. For centuries everybody has talked about it, but nobody has ever done anything about it, until now! Scientists now control the weather, but we still control the scientists. Each evening, we citizens decide by majority vote what the next day’s weather will be. We logon to our computers or smart phones and pick: high temp, low temp, sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy, windy, etc. Our present political parties would quickly disappear (irrelevant now), and they would be replaced by competing lobbies: beach goers, ice skaters, sunbathers, farmers, skiers, sailors, etc. But this state-of-affairs would likely prove unstable. As Ms. Stein suggests, it could quickly degenerate into social chaos with violent conflicts breaking out among opposing ‘parties’, i.e., gangs. On the other hand, I do like all the new political slogans that are cropping up. My favorite so far: ‘Sunbathers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your clouds!’ Of course, it is also possible that the reverse would happen. It just might occur to us that compromise was the only viable course: seasonal variation in temperatures, a mix of sun and rain, and a certain number of days set aside each year to meet the needs of ‘special interests’: swimmers, skaters, skiers, sailors, etc. In other words, we could decide to keep things exactly as they are now! Well, not exactly as they are. Nature has provided something for everyone, but the body politic might be willing to ride roughshod over the interests of a few folks on the edges: storm chasers, snow ploughers, rescue workers, i.e., and of course, meteorologists. Of course, there would be unintended, and at least initially unwelcome consequences: what would we talk about during those awkward pauses in a conversation? Could local TV news programs survive without a weather segment? But this fable raises many more serious issues, for example: How balanced are the forces of order and chaos in society? When they clash, what is it that determines the outcome? Are there limits to the justice or utility of majority rule? And if so, what lies beyond? If you enjoyed this ‘Thought while Shaving’ and would like to take a deeper dive into this topic, check out the feature length article, Meteorological Democracy , in Issue #1 of AT Magazine , to be published on 6/1/22. Anytime from 6/1 on, just click on aletheiatoday.com . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue The Great Convergence Yesterday, the Very Tomorrow Sometimes the very words we need to hear come from the most unlikely sources. Wisdom isn’t reserved for great philosophers, theologians, or grandparents alone. At the Beginning of the World: Dinosaurs, Genesis, and the Gift of Science The Bible isn’t a science textbook. And we shouldn’t expect it to operate as one. Theology Competing Creeds Suppose we were to express our generation's secular worldview as a 'creed,' how would it read? The Great Commandment “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. Philosophy Nihilism in Shakespeare (Editor’s note: It’s that time of year when many readers attend ‘summer theater.’ If Shakespeare is on the bill, you may find this essay relevant. Don’t leave home for the theater without reading this first!) Transubstantiation for the Rest of Us For many, though, this term is no help: the technical philosophical explanations are just as head-scratch-inducing as the claim itself. Yet once some of the finer points are made clearer, this explanation can be quite helpful. Culture & The Arts How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team If football is nothing else, it is a metaphor for life. The values of determination, responsibility, teamwork, flexibility, and focus apply to every aspect of life, not just football. This is a formula for success on a football field, but it is also a formula for success in life. Again And at the top of the stairs, we watched it again, the sunset. And that changed everything. Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults The Sultan and the Sea One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. Jesus is Badass At this point, Jesus could probably have saved himself a lot of trouble with a simple, “I’m really, really sorry for what I’ve done, and I promise I won’t ever do it again," but that’s not what happened! Education, Evangelization, & Prayer The People's Creed But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? Teaching Physics in the 21st Century Schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades four through eight, all based on The Yellow Submarine . Haiku Corner Challenges The Sultan and the Sea Challenge Take the Sultan and the Sea Challenge to win $100! Winner of The Haiku Challenge Which 17-syllable poem won our editors over? Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine. Haiku Check out this issue's haiku collection. ATM Renga Cycle 1 What's a renga? Find out and join the fun!

< Back How to Age Mathematically David Cowles Nov 12, 2024 “The last 20 years (25%) of your calendar life will only amount to about 6% of your experienced life…but you won’t see that coming!” Many children first encounter arithmetic when they struggle to understand the concept of age . When Aunt Mary asks, as she always does, “And how old are you, young man?” I can confidently hold up 3 fingers. (BTW, that gets me half way to a PhD!) Later, I will wrestle with the fact that even though I get older every year, I never seem to catch up to my siblings. How come? Eventually, the wonder of numbers will likely give way to the drudgery of drill but the question of how we age will continue to command our attention. By the time you hit double digits, you’ve already noticed that the insufferably long ‘year’ is slowly getting shorter. Thank God for that ! I couldn’t bear to wait another 10 years to turn 20. Fortunately, I won’t have to. I can ‘purchase’ future time with discounted dollars (i.e. shorter years). At 12 you put up a picture of Einstein on your bedroom wall. Time dilation is your best friend! After all, your life is dominated by a single subliminal goal: getting to the age of 21 as quickly as possible. If you’re precocious…or just posh…you may have already learned that time flows more slowly in the presence of stronger gravitational fields, e.g. in the neighborhood of a singularity (black hole). Your conception and birth is analogous to such a singularity. Time seems to flow more slowly close to that singularity and speed up as age distances you from it. This process continues into your 30’s as you pursue the 5 Ps of contemporary ‘personhood’: pay, pad, pension (401k), partner (significant other), and pet (or kids). As you drift, semi-conscious on your best days, towards Milestone 40, you may feel a tug: Could time possibly be moving a little too quickly? On your 40th birthday you may feel the first real jolt: “I have lived half of my expected lifetime!” Such a thought could be disconcerting, if we allowed it to be! Instead, you’re quickly comforted, “It took forever (quite literally) for me to get here (age 40) so ‘same again’ is OK by me.” It’s virtually forever ; I feel ‘intimations of immortality’ (Wordsworth). Oh, the delusions of middle age! We measure age in calendar years, as if our experience of time was uniform and linear, and as if various atomic clocks and astral cycles had some actual significance for our lives. As noted earlier, by age 40 I have lived half a lifetime (80 years), speaking objectively . However, I experience the full term of my life to date (e.g. 40 years) as ‘one lifetime’. Subjectively , therefore, I have a full lifetime (40 years) left to live. I have lived one lifetime (40 years) and it literally lasted forever. I have no awareness of ‘myself’ before I was conceived. Therefore, it feels to me that I have lived a lifetime and have a lifetime left to live. “What, me worry?” (Alfred E. Newman) At the age of 40, 40 years = one lifetime. At age 80, 40 years = one half-lifetime (0.5). Therefore by age 40, you have already lived 2/3rds of your experiential life: 1.0/(1.0 + 0.5) = 66.7%. There’s no such thing as ‘same again’; at best it’s ‘half again’…like in a London pub. What a rip-off! But if this is so for everyone, if this is the human condition , why isn’t everybody in the streets banging pots and pans? Nature is way too clever for that ! After the mid-point (age 40), the future seems to linger, shimmering on time’s horizon. As you move toward it, it seems to recede. If we were going to live forever, this is surely what it would feel like. Crossing ‘40 Mile Road’, you could get serious about your contracting lifeline. You gaze at the horizon, expecting it to meet you half way like the ‘Prodigal Father’; but it doesn’t! In fact, it scarcely seems to get any closer at all, no matter how long you walk toward it. You become complacent; is mortality a mirage after all? Danger, Will Robinson, danger! It’s a trick! Don’t fall for it! The future is not hanging idly on a cosmic corner; it is hurtling toward you…and at an accelerating pace: the last 20 years (25%) of your calendar life will only amount to about 6% of your experienced life…60 is the really the new 72, but you don’t see that coming! It’s la grande trompe d’oeil . As you approach the end of your life, mortality seems to recede; time itself inflates: “And indeed there will be time…time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands…” (Eliot). Of course there won’t be! Yet, this illusion (like most) is not without some factual basis. A 60 year old has a 20 year NLE (age 80) but 20 years later, a surviving 80 year old still has a 10 year NLE (age 90). Unless you’re very fortunate, or read Aletheia Today , you will wake up one morning surprised to find that the mirage has vanished and that the singularity (death) is much, much closer than you’d imagined. Now it’s too late to save yourself. Relax and prepare to be elongated into a lonesome strand of spaghetti. What a way to go! The orientation of your ‘temporal field’ (like Earth’s ‘magnetic field’) suddenly flips. From birth your vision has been future oriented; without realizing it, you’ve understood the past in terms of that future: “I go to school to get a job; I work so I can retire, etc.” but you don’t realize that what you’re really saying is “I live to be spaghettified.” Now that you’ve crossed the event horizon, however, things are reversed; your vision is directed toward the past. From here on you’ll understand the future in terms of that past: it’s your legacy! Without meaning to, you’re literally tying up loose ends. Living has become estate planning. Borrowing from Proust, the future no longer creates new time; it redeems time past. You’re searching for some nugget of Goodness that might allow you to trick your way past St. Peter. Good luck with that! But in the meantime, “Wake up...please!” Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Kabbalah and Thomas the Train David Cowles “Children and tank engines are not so different from the rest of us. They crave meaning! They only settle for pleasure when…they lose hope.” How plugged in are you to the five-and-under crowd? Not so much? Ok, try this for an icebreaker: ask your favorite neighborhood terror to name his or her favorite character from movies, TV or books. Expecting Winnie the Pooh or Paddington Bear? You may be in for a surprise. Ask that question of any properly aged, English-speaking child on either side of the Atlantic, and you’re likely to learn a lot more than you ever cared to know about Thomas the Tank Engine and his Friends on the Island of Sodor in the UK. Created in 1945 and popularized in 1979, Thomas represents a very different take on the ‘childhood hero.’ Thomas is not mischievous; he is not introspective; he is not filled with existential angst; he’s not even heroic, and he certainly has no superpowers. Thomas defies the stereotype of childhood as fantastical, hedonistic, self-indulgent, and anti-social. His sole goal in life is to be “a really useful tank engine.” In this sense, he is the anti-Pooh. Thomas wants to earn the respect of his boss, Sir Topham Hatt, and the friendship of his fellow engines and rolling stock. He wants a sense of identity; he wants to belong. Unfortunately, young and inexperienced as he is, Thomas makes mistakes, each of which he feels deeply. He finds himself at times teased, ridiculed, ignored, criticized, and even disciplined – like any child his age. But he never loses his good humor; he never stops trying to ‘be all that he can be,’ and from time to time, he has well-recognized successes. Thomas may be sad, angry, or frustrated, but he is never depressed. His only response to adversity is to try even harder to be the tank engine he knows he was ‘born’ to be. Anything less is out of the question. So what’s so revolutionary about this? Defying the West’s philosophical consensus, Thomas puts zero weight on personal happiness . He evaluates himself by one and only one criterion: is he being useful, and, if so, is he being as useful as he could be? It turns out that children and tank engines are not so different from the rest of us. They crave meaning! They only settle for pleasure when, like The Great Gatsby , they lose hope: “Living well is the best revenge!” Pleasure is the graveyard of hope and a poor substitute for purpose. Imagine, children have an innate desire to be useful! Who knew? But we systematically frustrate that desire and divert it into self-centered pleasure seeking. Not you? You never offered a child a bowl of ice cream to ‘make up for’ some disappointment? Yet we marvel, “What’s the matter with kids today?” Answer: Look in the mirror! We do things to and for and occasionally with children, but we’re terrified to let them do anything on their own. We need to be needed, and we’re happy to exploit the children in our orbit to satisfy that need. “You will be dependent on me…or else!” A baby is born! Hallelujah! But somewhere along the way, no later than age seven, usually much earlier, we encase that ‘caterpillar’ in a chrysalis until its 18 th birthday when it is expected to emerge, fully formed and beautiful, as a butterfly. It’s a dangerous reproductive strategy, one that frequently goes awry. Yet with each hiccup, we double down. Like any species caught in an evolutionary cul-de-sac , we insist on making our adaptations work, empirical evidence notwithstanding. Crystlle Medansky creates children’s literature from the tradition of Kabbalah – an ancient school of Jewish mysticism related to, but not identical with, Hasidism. In one story, A Droplet , she tells the tale of a single drop of water, aptly named Dewy. Dewy lives in the sea but the experience is unsatisfying. Vast, undifferentiated water is not very interesting, and by itself it reveals nothing about the nature of Dewy, the ocean, or the world. So Ocean agrees to send Dewy on a quest of self-discovery; it begins with Dewy’s evaporation and resumes with his eventual recondensation. Dewy’s goal is to return to Ocean, newly enlightened about the world, the self (Dewy) and the other (Sea). It is the paradigm of all life-experience. The soul of any such quest is the journey itself, not the destination. After all, when all is said and done, we end up right back where we started. Oh, but the adventures we have along the way! Dewy is anxious to complete his quest by returning to the ocean of his birth, but he does not place himself and his interests on a pedestal. Along the way, Dewy encounters various fellow creatures who need his help. Despite the urgency of his own mission, Dewy does not begrudge others the help they need to complete their own life journeys. First, a stalk of wheat needs hydration. “I’m in a hurry, but if you need my help, I will stay.” And Dewy stayed with the wheat until it had ripened. Then a stream needed Dewy’s help to wear away enough rock to create an unobstructed pathway to the sea. Again, Dewy responded generously. Next, Dewy encountered a boat that needed a wave to push it out to sea; Dewy selflessly delays his own reunion with Ocean in order to accelerate the arrival of his ‘fellow traveler .' At last, just as Dewy can hear the roar of the ocean ahead, a young mother calls to him from the embankment: “Can you help me take care of my little child?” Of course I can! Quest complete, Dewy finally reunites with the source of his being, the ocean. We don’t know what Dewy’s expectations were when he embarked on his quest, but it’s doubtful he expected to be gone for so many years. Still, it’s a small price to pay for the Pearl of Great Price, aka Enlightenment. Dewy’s quest allows him to realize that the meaning of life is not mystical union with the sea, but the helping hand he can lend to others on their own personal quests. Life is what happens while you’re waiting to begin living. Dewy was waiting to complete his quest so that his enhanced life with Ocean could begin. Instead, he discovers the real meaning of life lies in the projects of the others he encounters on his way. After an experience like this, Dewy will not be satisfied with the simple pleasures of frolicking with Ocean. Dewy, like Thomas, has discovered purpose…and nothing else will ever satisfy him again. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Summer 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance Shalvi Waldman "I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Harriet Tubman Joins Six Women of Courage in the Exodus Story--Passover Part Two Ayala Emmett "Let us follow these biblical women and Harriet Tubman’s unflinching courage. Let us be agents in our time in the political arena to support and stand with all who struggle for freedom here in America, in the Middle East, and around the world." In 2015, we added to our Seder Harriet Tubman, who joins the six women who shaped the history of the Exodus. The women belong at the Passover table because all seven emerge as consequential political catalysts. All are remarkably brave, amitzot , all are women who at great risk take bold actions in the political/religious arena of their time and speak directly to contemporary concerns of justice. Tubman joins six agentive women in the Exodus story who are connected across ethnic and class differences. Who are the biblical women and how do they influence the history of the Exodus? Two of the six are midwives, two are mother and daughter, and two are women of high rank, the daughter of Pharaoh, and the daughter of a Midianite Priest. The women inscribe courage as a dominant element in the Exodus story that begins in oppression, slavery and attempted genocide. Pharaoh orders the two midwives Shifrah and Puah to do the unthinkable, “when you deliver the Hebrew women look at the birthstool: if it is boy kill him” (1:16). Pharaoh invades the gendered domestic sphere of childbirth and the midwives without hesitation step into the dangerous political terrain. They are defiant, “the midwives who revere* God did not do as the king of Egypt told them.” The two midwives offer us the first biblical lesson in civil disobedience. The text is (deliberately?) unclear about the identity of Shifrah and Puah. Their ethnicity has been debated in rabbinic commentary; the majority of the rabbis, including Rashi the 12th century commentator identify the midwives as Hebrew women, while other sages view them as Egyptian. Their actions, however, are unambiguous, they defy Pharaoh’s edict to kill all Hebrew newborn boys. Commentators who believe that the midwives are Egyptians praise them for standing up for an oppressed minority. The midwives defiance, regardless of their ethnicity has become a symbol for standing up for the powerless and has been understood as reverence for God. The midwives defiance makes possible the upcoming events, which focus on the actions of the mother and daughter. The narrative states unequivocally that mother and daughter, whose names at first we don’t know, are Hebrew women of the tribe of Levi, “a certain man from the house of Levi went and married a woman a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son” (2:2). Her son was not killed because the midwives refused to comply with Pharaoh’s edict, which in turn enabled the Hebrew Levite mother to have a live baby boy. Yet, after three months the mother realizes that she can no longer hide her son. She makes the most heartbreaking decision, to send away her baby in the hope that he would be rescued. The Levite mother constructs a waterproof basket and places her son among the reeds on the Nile. The baby’s sister is watching from a distance as he becomes the first biblical child asylum seeker. Entering the scene is the fifth woman who immediately knows that this child is of the oppressed minority, “This must be a Hebrew child” (2:7) says Pharaoh’s daughter who without missing a beat decides to take the child. A women’s conspiracy follows, the baby’s sister offers to find a Hebrew woman who would nurse him, the princess agrees, and the boy, still nameless is returned to her weaned, becomes her son and she names him Moses. With few words, mother, sister and adoptive mother (Egyptian) are bonded in saving Moses’ life in defiance of Pharaoh’s violent decree. Moses, as the text tells us, grows up in Pharaoh’s house, kills an oppressive Egyptian task-master, escapes to Midian and marries Zipporah, (a Midianite of high rank), the sixth woman in the Exodus text. God tells Moses to go back to Egypt to “free my people.” A very reluctant Moses goes back to Egypt with Zipporah his wife and his sons and on the way God wants to kill him. The “him” that God seeks to kill is not named. The text is far from clear whether God wants to kill Moses or one of his sons, but whoever it is, Zipporah in that critical moment of facing God, acts quickly, she circumcises her son and for unexplained reason it works “and He lets him go.” (4:25). Zipporah closes the circle of the six women as she, like the others, saves a life by crossing into the religious sphere that could be dangerous if entered inappropriately. What is appropriate for women in the religious domain has been reinterpreted for generations and in our time we witness greater inclusion in ritual practices. While Miriam has been restored and given a place at the Seder symbolized by placing her cup next to Elijah’s it is time to follow rabbinic Midrashic tradition of honoring by naming, since it is the sages who named Pharaoh’s daughter Batya. We honor at our Seder tonight all six women, the midwives Shifrah and Puah, the mother and daughter Yochebed and Miriam, the princess Batyah and Moses’ wife Ziporah. They all are seminal leaders in the history of the Exodus and this year they are joined by Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman is a woman “who went on to run spy missions for the Union army in the South, including a gunboat expedition that freed more than 700 South Carolina slaves. Harriet Tubman will be the first African-American and the first woman to have her image cast on the front of a currency note.” Let us follow these biblical women and Harriet Tubman’s unflinching courage. Let us be agents in our time in the political arena to support and stand with all who struggle for freedom here in America, in the Middle East, and around the world. * The Hebrew “vatirena et HaElohim” (1:17) is an idiomatic expression that is best translated as revering God. This was republished with permission from T he Jewish Pluralist . It is first in the series Four Women’s Collected Essays on the Meaning of Passover . Click here for introduction to the series. Image: " Moses Found in the River ." Synagogue fresco from 244 CE. Ayala Emmett Ph.D. is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester. You can read more about her accomplishments and writing credits by following this link . Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next

< Back How To Think Like a Woman: A Brief Accounting of Unacknowledged Philosophical Genius Regan Penaluna Author Regan Penaluna on female philosophy and the risks of being too smart throughout history... Read this essay in full by following this link . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson "Land is imbued with holiness, which means that, like God, it is beyond human measures of usefulness or control." As we prepare to close the Book of Leviticus, the Torah’s pinnacle, we are left with a message of responsibility, consequences, and possibilities. God presents us with the benefits of making wise choices and the consequences of choosing poorly. Then the Torah provides for the funding of the sanctuary and its staff: our participation with monetary support, pledges of animals or homes. But when it pivots to pledges of land, the Torah shifts gears entirely. Land, you see, is ours to borrow and to use. But humans presume they can own land. In reality, the land makes its claim on us, and we can either open ourselves to its ground rules, or we risk a rootlessness that leaves us clinging when the next sandstorm swirls. We are, as the book reminds us, “resident strangers ( Leviticus 25:23 )” on earth. The Land precedes us and the land will bury us when we no longer need our bodies. We are dust, and we return to dust ( Genesis 3:19 ). On some deeper level of reality, it is all just dust, earth, soil. Judaism directs our attention to the centrality of earth through the regular rhythms of Shabbat (seven days) Shmita (seven years), and Jubilee (seven Shmita cycles). In this last parasha of Leviticus, we are told that when we think we are selling the land, we are actually letting someone else live on it or use it for a finite duration of time. At the next Jubilee year, the land reverts to its designated, original family of caretakers. Land is inalienable, and we are meant to be too. If one consecrates their land after the jubilee, the priest shall compute the price according to the years that are left until the jubilee year, and its assessment shall be so reduced. And if one who consecrated the land wishes to redeem it, they must add one-fifth to the sum at which it was assessed, and it shall pass back to them. But if they do not redeem the land, and the land is sold to another, it shall no longer be redeemable. When it is released in the jubilee, the land shall be holy to the Lord, as land proscribed; it becomes the priest’s holding ( Leviticus 27:18-21 ). There is a holiness inherent in the land, a quality not subject to human dominion and not vaporized by human standards of utility. It is that holy something extra that means were are residents visiting the land, and its only really owner is God, who is also holy, meaning beyond human measures of usefulness or control. Jubilee comes every 50 years to remind us that the worth of creation is beyond our evaluation and does not emerge from ways we find it beneficial. “Proclaim release to all the inhabitants of the land ( Leviticus 25:11 )” because it is in recognizing that worth and value spill beyond the constraints of practical utility or human benefit that we, too, are released. Our worth and value spill beyond how we can be used too. Published with permission and minimal edits from hazon.org. Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson is the Roslyn and Abner Goldstine Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice President of American Jewish University. He is also Dean of the Zachariah Frankel College at University of Potsdam, training Conservative/Masorti rabbis for Europe. Previous Next

< Back Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! David Cowles When you were very young, were you ever afraid of your mother’s vacuum cleaner? Most kids are. Were you scared it might suck you up? And, if so, what would happen then? Would you just vanish? Of course, you’re much older now, and you know that something like that could never happen…or could it? More than 50 years ago, a famous Rock and Roll band known as The Beatles made a movie called Yellow Submarine . In this movie, the four Beatles (John, Paul, George, and Ringo) sail from Liverpool (England) to a magical world outside of space and time called Pepperland. They made the voyage in a yellow submarine. But this is not like any family vacation you’ve ever been on. The Beatles travel across a Sea of Time and a Sea of Science (Space) into a Sea of Monsters. In this Monstrous Sea, the yellow sub is attacked by a bunch of fierce creatures and machines…but nothing is more frightening than the dreaded Vacuum Monster. Like most monsters, this creature looks a little bit human but where it should have a nose and a mouth it has instead a large cone-shaped funnel. This funnel looks very much like an attachment you might put on a real vacuum cleaner. And sure enough, true to its name, the Vacuum Monster uses this funnel to suck up everything in its path. First, it sucks up all the other monsters; then it sucks up the submarine itself. But it’s not done yet! It sucks up spacetime. Now there is nothing left in the whole universe except the Vacuum Monster. But it’s still not done! Now, it sucks itself up and vanishes, along with almost everything inside it. Why does it do that? Why does it suck itself up along with everything else? Because it can’t help itself! As long as it lives, it can’t stop sucking. It’s a vacuum cleaner, after all; sucking is what a vacuum cleaner does, no matter what the consequence. But unlike your mother’s vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t have an off switch. So, when there’s nothing left for it to suck up, it sucks up itself. We’re not like the Vacuum Monster. We have free will. We can decide what we want to do and when we want to do it. And we can stop doing it when we want to stop doing it. There’s nothing we can’t do (up to the limits of our ability) but there’s also nothing we have to do. There are things we should do and things we shouldn’t do, but whether we actually do them or not…is up to us! We get to decide, but the vacuum monster doesn’t. It does what it’s programmed to do, nothing more, nothing less. It has no choice but to suck itself into oblivion. What if it didn’t? That would mean that our world was really two worlds…a world of things that get sucked and a world of things that do the sucking. But that’s not the way our world works, is it? Our world is one world, not two. In our world, everything sucks, and everything gets sucked. If something sucks, and doesn’t get sucked up by another sucker, it will eventually sucks itself up too. In our world, what you do to others, you eventually do to yourself as well. You’ve probably heard of the Golden Rule. It goes something like this: “Do to others what you would like them to do to you.” If you would like to be treated kindly, for example, then you should treat others with kindness. If you would like others to be generous towards you, then you should be generous towards them. It’s a good ‘rule’ and most of the time things work out better for us when we follow it. In fact, Jesus himself taught the Golden Rule; however, there is another rule in the Bible called the Great Commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says it, St. Paul says it, St. James says it, but it was first said in the Torah (law), the first 5 books of the Old Testament. The Great Commandment is like the Golden Rule, only different. According to the Golden Rule, you do nice things for other people because it’s the right thing to do and because you hope they’ll do nice things for you. The Great Commandment says something a little bit different. According to the Great Commandment, when you do nice things for others, you also do something nice for yourself… immediately and automatically . And of course, when you do mean things to other people, you’re being mean to yourself as well. If you make another person happy, you make yourself happy, and if you make another person sad…well, you know what’s coming next, don’t you? Whatever you do to another, you also do to yourself. Your actions affect others…and yourself…at the same time. Yellow Submarine follows the Great Commandment, not so much the Golden Rule. The Vacuum Monster is a sucker. It sucks up its neighbors and oops, when it sucks up its neighbors, it sucks up itself too. What it does to others, it does to itself…automatically. I said the Vacuum Monster sucks itself up and vanishes, along with almost everything inside it. Not everything inside it, almost everything inside it. What survives? Just one thing: the yellow submarine and its crew! How come? Because the yellow sub doesn’t exist in Liverpool only; it also lives in the magical world called Pepperland. The yellow submarine is how people go back and forth from Liverpool (our world) to Pepperland. As far as we know, there is no other way! Going from Liverpool to Pepperland and back is quite a trek, but it is not a trek in space or in time. The yellow submarine travels in another dimension; it is always right here, always just now! So, when the Vacuum Monster sucks up everything ‘in Liverpool’ (our world), even the yellow submarine itself, the sub survives. Why? Because it exists in Pepperland as well as in Liverpool, and nothing in Pepperland can ever disappear. Pepperland is the ‘forever place’, the place of ‘evermore’! Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is, and it’s called a ‘Black Hole.’ Black holes exist throughout space, and one is even sitting right now at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. A Black Hole sucks up everything around it, yes everything, including space and time and subs and even the black hole itself. And just like the Vacuum Monster, eventually black holes even suck themselves into oblivion. According to the famous physicist Stephen Hawking, when a black hole sucks, it sucks up more than just things. It sucks up information (or knowledge) too. The things that get sucked up disappear…but the knowledge stays behind. But there’s a catch! The knowledge that survives is so jumbled and confused that you can’t make any sense out of it, much less use it for anything worthwhile. This very same thing happens in Yellow Submarine . After the Vacuum Monster sucks itself into oblivion, there is no more space and time. What’s left is a real ‘nowhere land.’ The Beatles find themselves alone in a totally empty world…empty, that is, except for Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD. Dr. Boob, – a real ‘nowhere man’ living in this nowhere land. He knows everything that has ever been known by anyone anywhere…but really, he knows nothing at all because he doesn’t know what he knows. It’s as if you memorized a speech in a foreign language that you don’t know how to speak. You might be able to recite it, but you would have no idea what you were saying. That’s how it is with Dr. Boob. And that’s how it is when a black hole vanishes. With the Beatles’ help, Dr. Boob begins to organize his information and slowly but surely, he learns to make use of it. Eventually, he joins the Beatles on board the sub and accompanies them for the rest of their voyage, through the Sea of Holes into the Sea of Green to Pepperland itself…but that’s another story, perhaps for another day. Now back to Liverpool. Would it surprise you to hear that there are stories in the Bible that sound a lot like this story? Take creation, for instance. Genesis says that the earth was once without form or shape; in other words, it was a real-life Nowhere Land. Then God said, “Let there be light and there was light…and God separated the light from the darkness.” God separated sky from earth, oceans from dry land, and day from night. In other words, God organized everything so we could make sense of it…and put it to use! Then on the seventh day of creation, God rested. Now our job is to continue to make sense of this world and to continue to organize it so that we can accomplish useful things. The same thing happens at the other end of time, when our world finally comes to an end…only it happens in reverse. Christ, the Son of God, finishes the job. He puts everything in “proper order” and he even destroys death itself. Then he draws all things to himself, and finally, he turns all things, including himself, over to God the Father, “so that God may be all in all.” Christ acts just like the Vacuum Monster, except that when he draws everything to himself , he does not draw everything into oblivion but into Heaven(Pepperland)! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next