October 11, 2017 at 10:28 pm
There was a moment in today’s class that should not go unnoticed. The reading assignment this week in RN101 The Bible was Exodus 19-34, Leviticus 18-20, and a bunch of chapters from Deuteronomy for Friday. Yesterday we looked at the framing of the Sinai covenant, the quasi theatrical scene in Exodus 19, the deity’s physical […]
October 8, 2017 at 12:03 pm
We don’t know whether there was a historical Moses. As Jan Assmann wrote in his Moses the Egyptian, Pharaoh Amenophis IV “Akhenaten” was a figure of history but not of memory, while Moses is a figure of memory but perhaps not of history. And yet, Moses, as a figure of memory, has exerted considerable historical […]
September 30, 2017 at 11:40 am
I meet Michael Zank at his office, on the fourth floor of the Elie Wiesel Center. The first thing I notice is that it is full of books. No surprise there. The second thing I notice is a wind catcher that has the Israeli flag on one side and the Palestinian flag on the other […]
September 28, 2017 at 10:59 am
This morning I learned something new about the well-known story of creation of Genesis. It was my friend John who taught me, as we were walking our dogs in Franklin Park. He mentioned something he’d noticed in Carl Jung’s book on Job that he had recently found and read again after many years. (Goes to […]
September 14, 2017 at 8:14 am
A Meditation on Enuma Elish and the Primordial History of Genesis Let us ask just one question about Genesis 1-11 in comparison with the Akkadian creation epic: how do human beings appear in these two stories? To ask this question, we do not need to decide in advance whether the authors of Genesis deliberately produced […]
September 11, 2017 at 10:16 pm
My colleague, Elie Wiesel, was a year older than my mother-in-law, Sarah Shenitzer, and six years younger than my mother, Rosel née Koch. Sarah was from Vilna, the capital of Lithuania and a Jewish cultural center, Wiesel from Sighet, Hungary. He was a Hungarian Jew, my in-laws were Polish Jews. Like Sarah, Wiesel was interned […]
[Sonntag 4. Juni, La Boca bei Trinidad, Santo Spiritus] Letzten Dienstag fuhren wir nach Trinidad. Dort war unser Sohn mit seinem Patenonkel Tomás Anfang Januar gewesen. Sie fanden damals fast keinen Raum in einer der vielen Herbergen In der Nebensaison hatten wir keinerlei Schwierigkeiten dieserart. Unsere von Katya empfohlene Herbergsmutter Theresa, eine gestrenge Hausherrin, holte […]
In Santa Clara gingen wir wieder regelmäßig spazieren. Hier sind ein paar Bilder. […]
Mittwoch, 24. Mai, kurz nach zehn Uhr morgens Wir hatten gerade Besuch. Eines meiner Vorhaben hier in Kuba ist es, mit der hiesigen jüdischen Gemeinde aufzunehmen. José Portuondo, unser kubanisch-amerikanischer Berater aus Boston, der uns auch die Herberge von Katya und Maikel empfohlen hatte, rief hier an um uns eine Telefonnummer durchzugeben, unter der der […]
Sonntag, 21. Mai 2017, 1:10 morgens Wir sind in Santa Clara, bei Maikel und Katya, im Haus Itaca. Das Haus ist nach oben modernistisch ausgebaut, z. T. noch im Rohbau, ein Kontrast zum kolonialen und etwas heruntergekommenen Stadtbild, das uns am Busbahnhof begrüßt hatte. Dort wurden wir von Taxifahrern bzw. deren Fahrtvermittlern (Taxi! Taxi!) belagert […]
