Tuesday, May 31, 2005

lenses and dichotomies: a brief observance

Yesterday I spent some time at my friend's house after a really fun Memorial Day picnic with Ahavat Yeshua : our Messianic Synagogue at Broad Ripple park. Played football, ate some good food, and walked alot, talked alot. What a fun day. Then we went to his home and hung out with his family, looked at pictures of England, and did some bible study later that night. While we were talking he (who is obsessed with the Indy 500) was talking about ideals and lenses. It got me thinking. What type of lenses do we view our faith through to understand? The Bible says we see through a glass darkly now. What if that glass are the lenses we view life through? For my friend we think it might be the way the 500 vs. Nascar to him epitomizes and symbolizes that which is good and that which is evil on even a metaphysical level (takes alot more explanation than I have patience to explain). But it could be true. None of us, save Yeshua, can view with all purity and objectivity the world. Can a Creator be truly objective about his own creation? A heretical question? Who knows. Much rumination lately on all kinds of topics. What lenses am I using? Are they cracked? I remember The Lens of Truth magnifying glass from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. When you looked at something through it it showed you as it really was not the illusion in front of it. Will the Lord, if we ask, show us the truth and repair our cracked lenses? I am pretty sure He does if we ask Him for truth in love that he will give it to us.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

A Terrible Beauty

Yom HaShoah. The Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance is soon to be celebrated in my synagogue and others worldwide. Yom HaShoah is a solemn day. Understandably. A day to ponder the evil and how we must never, never let it happen again. Recently, a friend of mine asked me what could be beautiful about the Holocaust. This in response to the fact we had just got done reading from Ecclesiastes 3:17 17 I thought in my heart, "God will bring to judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time for every deed." and also Ecc 3:11 He hath made every [thing] beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

The question isn't what can be beautiful about the Holocaust which the instigators and results both of which are evil. The apathy of the people who turned their faces blindly toward Hitler and the Reich and took up the brutal anti-semitism of said Third Reich without thought.
(Luke 23:34Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." ). Oh they knew what their aims and motives were. To destroy the chosen people of God. Did they understand the eternal significance of what they were doing by laying their hands on the Apple of HaShem's eye?
No the Holocaust was not beautiful. What came of it...despite the executions, exterminations, ghettos, starvation, and the rest of the brutality that characterized the dark moments of that time? Well, it is not the Holocaust itself but the survival, faith, courage, and the doing what needed to be done...just to survive. A terrible beauty. An odd phrase no? How can beauty be terrible. Just that it's not that which is terrible that is beautiful it is the wheat separated from the rotten chaff in this case. May we never have to see so terrible a beauty such as that again.
Zachru, Eretz Israel.