I'm referring to Mark's
> There's a saying that where there are two jews there are three opinions.
> Jews love to argue. Except me.
In Italy they say instead:
Where there are two Italians there are three political parties, which is
right!
Besides this, and answering to Ken, I was shocked when I discovered at the
age of 14-15 at the nuns' boarding school that our Latin Literature was
filtered, and that for example we could only read some nonsense by Catullus
and nothing of his relationship with Lesbia. More than shocked, I would say
that I felt as if something had been stolen from me, and that was my trust
towards my teachers. That is partly why I loved French because our texts
were the Lagarde-Michard (I know of all that diatribe on the said books that
came out years ago, something similar to the Académie in the field of visual
arts) and there were some spicy poems, and they talked of drugs and
miserable lives, as I guessed things had to be, and as I had seen them
before in New York. Ah Italy at the time was a most bigot country, by this I
do not mean that it is different now. Besides being Il Paese Del Bel Canto,
the list of poets: female and male is as long as the one of the debts of the
3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th world, and again by this I do not mean that I
recognize them as such.
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
Friedrich Nietzsche
From: "Ken Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 5:28 PM
> Mark Weiss wrote:
>
>> Right, Reconstructionist, not Liberal.
>>
>> I attended a yeshiva that considered itself orthodox. Classes were coed,
>> however, and the political content was kibbutz socialist--the hope was
>> that
>> we would end up on kibbutzim carrying rifles.
>
> We're about the same age. I went to an afternoon school, not a day
> school. Nobody want to be identified as Jewish in my family. Kenneth
> is their version of Kalman, my paternal grandfather who died while my
> other was carrying me. The school never told us about the Shoa (maybe
> not a bad omission when the kids are 8), just about going to Israel,
> "making the desert bloom," and shooting camel-jockeys. I knew the words
> (in Hebrew) to Hatikvah right about the same time as the Star Spangled
> Banner. The Bible wasn't taught, but we were fed Bible stories which
> were watered down to the point of no formative value whatsover.
>
>> When I mention my yeshiva in
>> most orthodox circles the reaction is usually a sneer--too liberal by
>> far.
>> There were synagogue services at the school--those weren't coed.
>
> You might just as well have attended St. Francis Xavier High School, run
> by Jesuits:-).
>
>> The torah
>> and the historical books of the bible were our primer during the hebrew
>> part of the day.
>
> The historical books were kept away from us because you'd have to
> sidestep around nasty stuff like King Saul was a homicidal maniac and
> King David couldn't keep his pants up. How do you explain David,
> Bathsheba, and Uriah to a class of impressionable 8 year olds? "Jeez,
> y'mean the King got this guy killed so he could cover up that he knocked
> up the guy's wife?" The oft-told tale of Samson and Dalila was kept
> from us. Obvious why. The taking of Jericho was sanitized because
> Rahab was a whore. Who wants to present a hooker as God's instrument to
> save the Hebrews?
>
> God's banning of Moses from Canaan we learned--as in "see what's gonna
> happen if you lose your temper???" This may reduce the history of my
> people to 2nd Avenue Yiddish theater in 1920, but sometimes that's what
> it seems like now from 50+ years removed.
>
>> In the english part of the day the curriculum was
>> thoroughly secular. There was little discussion, in hebrew or english, of
>> the literal truth of the Genesis account(s) of creation beyond a
>> questioning of what "day" meant--was each day a million years? a billion
>> years?
>
> Oddly, none of this was given to us in the original text, but in reduced
> versions in a little book purporting to be our history. It was years
> before I learned the alternative, that the world was not created in 7
> literal days.
>
>> There was a lot of discussion of difficult-to-swallow Biblical
>> events--David's collection of foreskins, various decimations, etc. Nobody
>> had any problem with the magical stuff--we were little kids. And I
>> have no
>> idea how the sciences were handled in the higher grades, tho the
>> school did
>> produce a fair number of physicists.
>
> The one that got me came years later, and I learned about it via Thomas
> Mann's Joseph saga, which I then checked on with the Bible itself: the
> rape of Tamar, the willingly-undertaken circumcisions of her lover and
> his male family and retinue so he could marry her and do the right
> thing, and the treacherous butchery of the whole male household while
> they were recuperating. In the meantime, as a kid I bought the parting
> of the Red Sea at face value. And the fall of Jericho's walls. And a
> whole bunch of stuff from the earlier books that today strike me as
> "oughta be trues" but are most likely fables invented on the road out of
> Egypt to invent history and peoplehood.
>
>> There's a saying that where there are two jews there are three opinions.
>> Jews love to argue. Except me.
>
> I do that far too often though less than I used to. Truth is I hate
> it. I'd have made a sucky lawyer.
>
> ken
>
> --
> Kenneth Wolman
> Proposal Development Department
> Room SW334
> Sarnoff Corporation
> 609-734-2538
>
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