Friday morning I woke up at 4 am with lots of allergy symptoms, runny nose and all. The felt too early, so I took some pill and at length went back to sleep, then my timing was off in the morning and I ran late to my first meeting. This morning I woke up at 5 and didn't want to take pills two days in a row. Plus I have to be up for an early flight west Wednesday, so I figure I just gotta roll with this early schedule and see how it goes. I know that Mary is generally a later bed goer and riser than I am, but maybe we are more divergent on that front than I thought and I'm meant to be one of these old dudes that goes to bed and gets up really early, I've just been suppressing it. We'll see.
So I made coffee, did my yoga and stretched, and sat down with the Bible. By now I am in Deuteronomy, which reiterates much that was said in Leviticus and Numbers but, quite frankly, in a very agreeably more succinct manner.
So I am getting to know this Old Testament God thing I've heard so much about and, indeed, that is one motherfucker you don't want to be messing with. I thought my mom was strict! All the Israelites needed to do was worship one little idol for a few days and he would smite the fuck out of them. And as to the people in their path as they made their way home from Egypt, well, sorry was their lot. "Kill em all," said God. Indeed, it would appear that the Old Testament is the urtext of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I do wonder how the rabbinical tradition reconcile that with a spirit of coexistence with others or, indeed, how one would ground a critique of Hitler and the idea of lebensraum in the Old Testament. It seems implicit.
Yet another reason that people shouldn't be grounding ethics in individual old texts, be it the Bible or the Constitution.
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