The Life of a Russian Monk and Holy Fool in the late 1400s: Laurus

 

In 2016, the ESL Book Group I am part of began when four of us kept asking each other, "Did you read this book? What do you think about it?"

The first of many books we would read was Laurus, a book about a Russian Monk and Holy Fool set in the late 1,400s.  Sarah Gingrich loved this book and convinced Andrea Bailey and I to read it. 

I just finished re-reading it yesterday. At my age, much of it was new again five years later.  This Sunday afternoon our book group will discuss Laurus and for the first time a monk will be part of our discussion.  My best friend Cliff became Bruder Timotheus after both of us left the military in 1979.  He stayed in Germany at a monastery in Darmstadt.  Here is an introduction to Cliff.

I am very much looking forward to discussing this strange and wonderful book.  Here is what I wrote about my first reading.

Democrats Must Claim Patriotism, Family Values

At my Synagogue, our Monday Book Discussion Group is reading Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.  

As we finish the book, it is clear to me that in our divided country, the definition of patriotism is taking a severe beating.  If the Common Good has a chance of being restored in America, then the Democrats must define patriotism in public.  We must define what it means to be an American, or the anti-democratic party on the right will redefine America as a dictatorship.  

Since 2015, in every way possible, the right wing of American politics and culture has turned its back on democracy and grabbed for power to the point of celebrating immorality.  The attack on the Capitol on January 6 was promoted and orchestrated and blessed by the former President and his minions in Congress.  They celebrate the murder of police officers. They want more.

He is out of office, but his traitors continue to hold office in our democratic government.  That is wrong. Everyone who voted for the insurrection should be stripped of office.  The worst of them: Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and the lawmakers who brought the terrorists into the Capitol should be jailed for their crimes.  

The Evangelical Church in America takes the words of Jesus and pisses on them. How could anyone who has ever read the Sermon on the Mount think the former President is sent by or chosen by God?  He is a bully, a coward, and brags about breaking commandments.  The preachers who promote him are worse because they know better.  

Democrats are the only leaders who voted to help poor and needy Americans with relief. The recent rescue bill passed the Congress with the votes of those who care about Americans who lost their jobs, their health, their health insurance, and family members during the pandemic.  

Democrats care about and promote Voting Rights, Women's Rights, Civil Rights, and LGBTQ Rights. President Joseph Biden is fighting the pandemic and working to undo the damage done by the former occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

We fight for families, 

we fight for kids, 

we fight for the poor, 

we fight for jobs with a living wage, 

we fight for the free exercise of religion, 

the other side spews hate and fights only for donors.

Democrats want liberty and justice for all. We are the patriots. The party of Qanon and hate is not America.  

Books 2021: Red Sea Spies by Raffi Berg

 

In the late 1970s and early 80s, thousands of Ethiopian Jews escaped from their own country, through Sudan, another state that was an enemy of Israel.  The story of that escape and the Israeli Mossad agents who got the Ethiopian Jews to Israel is the subject of the book Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad's Fake Diving Resort by Raffi Berg. The dramatic events inspired a movie on Netflix also. 

Berg tells this amazing story with enough detail to show just how difficult and precarious the entire operation was from beginning to end, yet at a page-turner pace.  The two men at the center of the story, Dani the agent who organized the operation and kept it going, and Ferede Aklum, the Ethiopian Jew who worked from beginning to end to get his people to Israel, begin with getting a few Jews out with fake documents to the buying and running a diving resort on the Red Sea. The resort allows Jews to be taken out by sea and later is a base that allows hundreds to be flown out at a time on Israeli C-130 Hercules transport planes.  

It is a great story from beginning to end.  I knew so little about Ethiopian Jews and their exodus from remote areas of the country where they lived for more than a millennium.  Now I feel like a witness to a land, sea and air miracle in the late 20th Century.  

Enjoy! 

Being Wrong: A Normal Part of Life We Fight and Cover Up

 

I just finished the delightful book "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Schulz. The book is full of wonderful examples of how we are wrong, why we are wrong and the good side of our errors.  The book begins telling us why we are so delighted to be right and so defensive about being wrong.  We insist we are right about everything from loading the dishwasher to the origins of the universe and twist ourselves in knots to prove just how correct we are.  

My favorite passage in the book connects perception, the history of science and the universe that is the Model behind Dante's Divine Comedy. Schulz shows how thoroughly wrong we can be when all of our senses tell us we are right. 

"Step outside...in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars.  Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of the tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in the spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary--stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you. 

"It is, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonia porch is misleading.  The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say, we ourselves are not the center of the cosmos. Not only are these things wrong, they are canonically wrong. They are to the intellect what the Titanic is to the ego: a permanent puncture wound, a reminder of the sheer scope at which we can err. What is strange, and not a little disconcerting, is that we can commit such fundamental mistakes by simply stepping outside and looking up."

Schulz surveys the history of being wrong quoting many of the great thinkers of history from Augustine to Groucho Marx, so everyone who has ever been wrong should find something to connect with in this delightful book.
 

One Professor, Two Books, Two Americas

Space and Time in Special Relativity  by N.David Mermin

Two very good books on Special Relativity were written by the same professor at the beginning of his career and at the end of his career.  Together they show how much America has changed between 1968 when the first book was written and 2004 when the second was published.  

In the late 1960s during the zenith of science in American culture, N. David Mermin, a young professor of physics at Cornell University wrote SpaceTime and Special Relativity. I love this book. 

Mermin wrote the book after hosting a summer seminar for high school physics teachers. He taught the group special relativity with the goal of giving them the information they needed to teach special relativity in their high schools. Mermin’s book was published the year before the moon landing. 

He believed that special relativity could be taught and understood at the high school level because the only math required is algebra and trigonometry. In 2005, as he neared retirement, Mermin published a new edition of the book titled It’s About Time. 

It's About Time

The new edition reflected almost 40 years of teaching a course in science for non-science majors. In the preface, he also wistfully admitted his dream of high school kids learning special relativity had evaporated. The new edition is a better book with better examples, but I prefer the first one. 

Mermin has an interlude between chapters 10 and 12, a "Relativisitic Tragicomedy" in which he makes fun of Absolutists. He attacks his anti-science enemies with the same confidence and brio he brings to the subject of the book. For me the book helped me to see the real flaw in the Young Earth Creationist arguments and at the same time gave me a picture of God in the universe that Einstein gets beautifully right and the Creationists get horribly wrong. 

Before the new book was published, I wrote Mermin a letter telling him what I saw in his book. He wrote a long letter back telling me he was happy to hear what I found in the book and saying if he writes a new edition, it would not have a Chorus. It doesn’t.

Thinking about these books together reminded me how different Life, the Universe, and Everything looked when America was the world center of science and innovation.