Page 2-The Canadian Jewish News, Thursday, October 12, 1989
M-T
s us
By
RABBI W.GUNTIffiR PLAUT
I sit down to write this column while the Blue Jays are still struggling to hold on to first place in the American League East, and by the time you read this you will of course know the outcome of that momentous struggle. My purjwse today is to establish a connection between the hallowed American (and now of. ' "^'^^i^' course also Canadian) game and a certain rabbi who made it to the Hall of Fame — though not the one in Cooperstown.
The rabbi's name is Tarphon, who lived during the first and second centuries in Roman-occupied Palestine, and his Hall of Fame is the FirkFi'Avdr(k\so)^ as Ethics of the Fathers); *There, in the second chapter, he is quoted as having said: "Vou are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."
So, what does this have to do with baseball?
I owe the connection to a column by Rabbi James Ponet which I read in the Jewish Post and Opinion. The article reproduced a talk which the late commissioner of baseball, Bart Giamatti, had-given-a few yeairs ago, and in that address-Rabbi Tarphon occupied the-central place.
Bart Giamatti
Rabbi Plaut
was
eta.
Giamatti was the man who, shortly aflei- haying suspended Cincinnati's Pete Rose from or^ gajiized baseball, had suffered a fatal heart attack. Jews, even those who don't care about baseball, should know that Giamatti was an extraordinary friend to whom our people owe a greiat deal.
In the days vyhen he served as president of Yale University, Giamatti, who was not a Jew, had been instrimiental in securing the future of Judaic studies
at the school and had concerned himself deeply with the welfare of Israel. And here Rabbi Tarphon comes into play. so to speak. In 1984 Giamatti delivered, during a baccalaureate address at Yale, a homily on Tarphon from which the following is excerpted; ■
"Recorded in times of threat and danger as severe as any faced by the Jews, the words of Tarphon [are] . . . a tough pragmatic recognition of our human limits . .. We will never make ourselves or our farpilies or our communities or our life perfect. We will never fully overcome our flaws, despitie our best hopes and our best efforts. Or destiny willnever be to^ee eviJLand want and pairi .banished from our lives or from the lives of our parents and children.
Imperfection, decay will be mankind*s lot
"But Tarphon, knowing this and more^ also says that because imperfection and decay will be pur lot, we cannot and must not act as if loss were our only condition; as if there were nothing to gain as well; as if We did not also have a way of Hnding a glorious freedom within, not d^pite, our confines. There exist for all of us those ideals that give meaning to our sacrifices, those beacons shining beyond time that beckon and guide our lives in time — if only we have the courage tb exercise bur freedom to remain free., '■ /.
"Rabbi Tarphon would .have us know that our best hopes will not be realized; he would nevertheless, and this is perhaps our glory, have us affirm that it is in our hands to make biir time mean some--, thing. Out of the dark knowledge that nothing wiil last or be completed we can, if we will ^ give meaning to our past and thus make'our future alive with dignity and purpose.-! —
The commissioner was a man for all seasons and "major league" all the way. His voice is sorely missed.
JERUSALEM (WZPS)-
The holiday spirit prevails this month with Sukkot, Hoshanah Rabbah, Shemini Atzeret and Sim-hat Torah. I:,^ Ks autumn now in Israel; the worst of the summer heat has passed, and the evenings are cool and pleasant. Sukkot, the autumn "Feast of the Ingathering, ■' honors the first fruits of the harvest, and recalls the sukkot, the little booths that served our ancestors throughout their desert wanderings.
On porches and in yards around the country, sukkot dot the landscape, adding eight days of cblbr to city life. Fortuitously, the holiday also coincides with the
seasonal trimming of the trees by the various municipalities; consequently, palm and other branches iEire left in piles on the streets, available for the taking. These will form the rOof and often part of the decor jaJLthe booth.
the Jews of Tunis make their sukkah primarily from palm and myrtle leaves, with a low arch designed to make those who . enter bow in; obeisance and respect. Moroccan Jews add a chair or stool by one wall, in honor of Elijah the prophet.
of fabric
, Ashkenazi Jews tend, to make the walls of their sukkah from fabric, with a pakn-leaved roof in order to ,see the star-lit sky. Sukkot-buiiders of eyery background make sure to add an especially colorful touch with strings of seasonal fruits, ihcluding pomegranates, fresh dates,
figs and apples. "Andyou shall take on the first day the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice beifoi^ the Lord seven days" (Leviticus 23:40). These are interpreted- to.r.refer-ta-the jjulav (palnfi frond) and etrog (citron) which are taken by the devout to the synagogue and kept in the sukkot throughout the holiday. '
Traditional foods for the holiday vary according to ethnic derivation. Tunisian Jews prepare "machmar" — stuffed: eggplant in tomato and onion sauce, and a form of couscous. Ashkenazi Jews tend to mark the harvest and thanksgiving days with an abundance of fruit and vegetable dishes. 7 : The seventh day of Sukkot, Hoshanah Rabbah, is celebrated with a special service in^ which a procession marches seven times
around the synagogue. Willow branches are beaten, the falling leaves*sym-bolizing the arrival of rains and the hope of renewed life. A traditional dish for this holiday is "kreplach," pockets of dough stuffed with meat.
On the eighth day of Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret,-prayers for rain and remembrance of the dead are included in the service.
4 ->
Children in Israel wear or carry flowers for the harvest festival of Sukkot. [RNS photo]
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can t invent nature,
it
• By
ELLEN GOODMAN
BOSTON-
We are watching nature on television. This time the central characters are chimpanzees, though they could as easily be lions or ants or whales. All sorts of creatures come into our home enlarged or diminished to the same 21-inch size. ^ We are loyal members of nature's audience, armchair naturalists who have the jungle and desert . brought to us by electronic room service. We have taken any number of two-sense specials to the Arctic or Outback, using our eyes and ears.
But it occurs to me this night that we are not alone in this posture; Most of us are observers or, at the most, visitors to nature these days. It isn't just true for those who live in concrete cities. It's true in the so-called country as well. The world we live in now is one of people and the environment as it has been altered" by people. . There is hardly a spot on JEarth now untouched by our species, hardly a place left where humans are part of nature rather than its masters and manipulators. There is hardly a spot untouched by human hand or plow or, for that matter, camera.
The settings for my nature shows, vast African preserves, are less "wild" than I would like to believe and more like the reproduced nature of San Diego's man-made zOos: artificially flavored. Untitled land, virgin prairie, is so rare that in North Dakota patches of it are marked for tourists as a kind of prairie museum. Come and see real live soil; .
However different the experiences of \yatching nature on televisibri or visiting it in clearly marked paths in national parks,'it is rare that we experience what our ancestors knew as a truly natural world. A world in which they felt awe and humility. Now, by altering the atmosphere, the very weather, there, is in fact nothing untouched by humans. '
This is why Bill McKibben's stunning piece on global warming in the Sept. 11 New Yorker is called The End ofNature. It is not a doomsday diatribe, although his reflections have the conceptual power of Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth. But from his home in the Adirondacks, McKib-ben doesn't chart the end of the world, but of the natural order.
"An idea can become extinct, just like an animal : or a plant," he writes, "the idea in this case is 'nature' — the wild province, the world apart from man, under whose rules he was bom and died."
By changing the temperature, we have
changed those rules. They are ours and not nia-ture's. The greenhouse effect is not just a metaphor about heat an^ light. The central reality of a greenhouse is that it is manufactured by people. "We have built a greenhouse — a human creation — where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."
Weather reports even now include smog levels, pollution counts. But the whole sense Toflheworld" changes when there' s August heat on a September day and October rain in January. When, as McKib-ben writes, "out in the wild, the sunshine on one's .shoulders is a reminder that man has cracked the ozone."
McKibben makes clear, as few scientific tracts could, that .doing nothing about the fossil fuels blanketing the earth "will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a comparable temperature.' 'But he is more than skeptical about hi-tech solutions. Though it might be possible to " survive in the greenhouse we are building by ever' more technological measures, just as it is possible to save a condor or to replicate human reproduction in a petri dish, it isn't possible to make nature. You can only let nature be.
In some ways that has been the moral message of the ecology movement. Limits. Restraints. We learned to stop using DDT and we are learning to do without chlbrofluorocarbons, and must stop releasing carbon dioxide. More profoundly, as McKibben writes, "Deep ecology suggests that instead of just giving better orders we learn to give fewer and fewer orders — to sink back into the natural world.'*
Americans, perhaps our whole human species, are better at building dikes to ward off the rising waters, and dams for power, at dealing with crises as if they were independent emergencies. But the problem here is much more radical:' 'The probjem is that nature, the independent force that has surrounded us since our earliest days, cannot coexist with our numbers and our habits.'.' How will we muster the will to see ourselves as the problem to. solye?
Nature is already pushed back tb prairie museums, zoos, national parks, protected endangered species. Now, in McKibben's work, there is another late reminder that if we don't limit our numbers and our habits, all we'll have of nature will be the videotapes.
(c) 1989, The Boston Globe Newspaper-Com-__/ypany/Washington Post Writers Group
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