Comments on: My Aramean Father

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:42:27 +0000

Well, I didn't mean that they are normally coerced into doing so, but it is involuntary insofar as the encouragement is overt, and without such an encouragement they would perhaps never volunteer a question at all. In some cases, of course, it is actually coercion: singing "Ma Nishtana", for example, forces the kids to ask questions without realising it. Of course, that's not actually harmful coercion - not as bad as using sticks!

By: Joell Burville

Joell Burville — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:55:47 +0000

It was written in the article, “—-do things in such a fashion that their younger members will ask involuntarily.”

I was just wondering what INVOLUNTARY questions by the children meant in the first paragraph of the article, My Aramean Father? Does someone hold a stick over their head to force them to INVOLUNTARY ask a question, and/or are the questions supplied by the adults and a stick used as a threat to scare these stubborn little children into “INVOLULTARILY” asking a question? Shouldn’t the word be “VOLUNTARY?”

By: Jen

Jen — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:47:47 +0000

Yeh, it’s a bit more convoluted than the surface similarities show. Krishna was supposedly an incarnation of God (sounding familiar for a whole different reason now) and was sent down to bring about the downfall of his father, who was an excessively cruel king. Then he went on to have somewhere in the region of twenty five thousand wives. But I suppose that if you’re God then having so many wives wouldn’t be the logistical nightmare it would for mere mortals.

Pesach was good fun, with more fun added by the way that almost everyone at the table uses a different Haggadah, so when we go around the table with the English we get some interesting translation differences. How was yours?

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:12:18 +0000

You raise an excellent point. When the Bible says, כי ישאלך בנך (“When your son asks”), perhaps it should also talk about what happens when ישאלך גרך (your ‘sojourner’ asks). The questions of non-Jews are just as relevant, in my opinion, as are the questions of Jews who are too young or too unfamiliar with the rituals. Most of my family are also non-Jewish as a matter of fact.

As for the similarities between the Moses story and various other narratives, much was made of these once-upon-a-time. Freud was very keen on the idea, although I don’t mean to disparage the connection by associating it with his terrible book on the subject. Other (genuine) scholars of the ANE have also discussed this, although it does remain to be said (as Freud also noted, incidentally) that the Moses story has something of a twist. Unless I am mistaken, Krishna was a prince who was raised as a peasant. The great turn-around in his life was when he assumed the mantle of royalty and left his peasant life behind. Moses, on the other hand, was a slave who was raised as a prince. The turnaround in HIS life came when he rejected the pharaonic future in store for him and chose to be a slave again.

Nice to see you back here, by the way. I hope you’ve had a good Pesakh?

By: Jen

Jen — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:59:37 +0000

1. At my Seder my brother and I are the best at reading Hebrew thanks to our school education, and no one really understands most of the Hebrew. Combine this with the way that most of the kids in our extended family have non-Jewish partners and we’ve been converting more and more to English every year. It’s turned the Seder experience from struggling through something that almost none of us have the skills for, to actually being able to share the stories and the reasons behind the traditions. And said non-Jewish partners have taken the place of youngsters at our table in asking all the questions about the traditions ;)

2. The other day one of my Indian coworkers asked me about Pesach, so I told him a paraphrased version of the whole story, from Pharoah killing all the male children up until Mount Sinai. And what he had to say was this: The entire first part of the story about Moses’ survival and upbringing sounds almost identical to the Hindu stories about Lord Krishna.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s just one more proof (as if I needed it) that biblical stories should never be taken literally.