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Tag Archives: Marxism

Do the Jews Prove God’s Existence?

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ Comments Off on Do the Jews Prove God’s Existence?

Tags

and the Search for Meaning, Communism, David Brooks, Faith, Frederick the Great, God, Jewish History, Jews, Marxism, Nikolai Berdyaev, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, religion, Russian Revolution, The Great Partnership, The Great Partnership: Science, The Meaning of History, Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau

Chief Rabbi

“How probable is it that a tiny people, the children of Israel, known today as Jews, numbering less than a fifth of a per cent of the population of the world, would outlive every empire that sought its destruction? Or that a small, persecuted sect known as the Christians would one day become the largest movement of any kind in the world?

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian Marxist who broke with the movement after the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He became an unconventional Christian — he had been charged with blasphemy for criticising the Russian Orthodox Church in 1913 — and went into exile, eventually settling in Paris. In The Meaning of History, he tells us why he abandoned Marxism:

I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint… Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.

Consider this one fact. The Bible records a series of promises by God to Abraham: that he would become a great nation, as many as the stars of the sky or the sand on the sea shore, culminating in the prophecy that he would become ‘the father of many nations’…

Somehow the prophets of Israel, a small, vulnerable nation surrounded by large empires, were convinced that it would be eternal.

‘This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night… ”Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the Lord, “will Israel ever cease being a nation before me” (Jeremiah 31:35-6).

There was nothing to justify that certainty then, still less after a thousand years of persecution, pogroms and the Final Solution. Yet improbably, Jews and Judaism survived.

King Frederick the Great once asked his physician Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau, ‘Zimmermann, can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?’ The physician replied, ‘Your majesty, the Jews.’”

__________

The distinguished and unfailingly charismatic Chief Rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks, writing in The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.

I know nothing about Berdyaev, but in the two minutes I spent looking him up I ran across three quotes of his that are worth filing away in the bank:

“Bread for me is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.”

“Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.”

“There is a tragic clash between truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.”

Not a fool.

Last month, Sacks sat down with David Brooks for a wide-ranging conversation about spirituality and meaning. It’s worth a watch.

Learn more:

  • ‘We are the people who sanctify life’: Sacks on the moral meaning of Israel
  • Galileo squares faith and reason
  • Viktor Frankl affirms the significance of life — even in a death camp

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The Occasional Pleasure of Advancing Years: Christopher Hitchens on the Passage of Time

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

A Moveable Feast, Age, Aging, Angela Gorgas, Capitalism, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, James Fenton, Martin Amis, Marxism, memoir

NPG x133006; Christopher Hitchens; James Martin Fenton; Martin Amis by Angela Gorgas

“In some ways, the photograph of me with Martin and James is of ‘the late Christopher Hitchens.’ At any rate, it is of someone else, or someone who doesn’t really exist in the same corporeal form. The cells and molecules of my body and brain have replaced themselves and diminished (respectively). The relatively slender young man with an eye to the future has metamorphosed into a rather stout person who is ruefully but resignedly aware that every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less.

As I write these words, I am exactly twice the age of the boy in the frame. The occasional pleasure of advancing years — that of looking back and reflecting upon how far one has come — is swiftly modified by the immediately succeeding thought of how relatively little time there is left to run. I always knew I was born into a losing struggle but I now ‘know’ this in a more objective and more subjective way than I did then. When that shutter clicked in Paris I was working and hoping for the overthrow of capitalism. As I sat down to set this down, having done somewhat better out of capitalism than I had ever expected to do, the financial markets had just crashed on almost the precise day on which I became fifty-nine and one-half years of age, and thus eligible to make use of my Wall Street-managed ‘retirement fund.’ My old Marxism came back to me as I contemplated the ‘dead labor’ that had been hoarded in that account, saw it being squandered in a victory for finance capital over industrial capital, noticed the ancient dichotomy between use value and exchange value, and saw again the victory of those monopolists who ‘make’ money over those who only have the power to earn it…

Christopher Hitchens and Angela Gorgas

I now possess another photograph from that same visit to Paris, and it proves to be even more of a Proustian prompter. Taken by Martin Amis, it shows me standing with the ravissant Angela [Gorgas], outside a patisserie that seems to be quite close to the Rue Mouffetard, praise for which appears on the first page of A Moveable Feast. (Or could it be that that box of confections in my hand contains a madeleine?) Again, the person shown is no longer myself. And until a short while ago I would not have been able to notice this, but I now see very clearly what my wife discerns as soon as I show it to her. ‘You look,’ she exclaims, ‘just like your daughter.’ And so I do, or rather, to be fair, so now does she look like me, at least as I was then. The very next observation is again more evident to the observer than it is to me. ‘What you really look,’ she says, after a pause, ‘is Jewish.’ And so in some ways I am — even though the concept of a Jewish ‘look’ makes me bridle a bit — as I shall be explaining. (I shall also be explaining why it was that the boy in the frame did not know of his Jewish provenance.) All this, too, is an intimation of mortality, because nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.”

__________

From the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

More from the memoir:

Christopher Hitchens

Friendship, Love, Irony, Humor, Parenthood, Literature, and Music

Hitchens at Home

The Grape and the Grain

Christopher Hitchens by Angela Gorgas

A Map of the World that Did Not Show Utopia

Christopher Hitchens Cancer

These Contradictions

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