Returning to the Akeidah

I began my postings about Abraham with the Akeidah, and the idea that this was a story about the end of human sacrifice. Rosenberg ends his ‘biography’ of Abraham with the Akeidah, which is not surprising because not only is this chapter told late in Genesis, Isaac already having grown, but also because for many, the Akeidah is the ultimate test of Abraham’s faith. The sages teach that the Akeidah was the last of Abraham’s ten trials, the most demanding, and the one that proved Abraham’s merit to God. Rosenberg looks at the Akeidah from the opposite perspective; it was Abraham testing God, making sure that God would not upset the natural order by having Isaac killed. Neither one of these perspectives appeals to me, for the Akeidah comes too late in Abraham’s life for any of this. By this point in his life, Abraham had left Terah and all his old family; he had renounced idol worship for monotheism; he had answered God’s call and journeyed away from his old world, both geographically and spiritually; he had entered into the covenant; he had changed everyone’s sense of justice; yet both the sages and Rosenberg would have us believe, that at the end of Abraham's life, either God or Abraham felt compelled to impose one more test, one that demanded an unspeakable sacrifice, just to be reassured of the other’s loyalty and righteousness.

Rosenberg, in his incessant quest to place Judaism in the mainstream of Middle Eastern thought, as if by doing so he will convince everyone to stop hating Jews, claims that the Akeidah is really a dream, and that the dream metaphor would have been understood by contemporary readers of Genesis because dreams play a major role in Sumerian literature. I guess the point being that the Sumerians invented storytelling through dreams; thus the Akeidah (which incidentally never says, or even suggests, that its events are occurring in a dream) would have been familiar to its audience because they knew of the literary device of dreams, as having been passed down from the Sumerians. The problem with this absurd notion is that dreams were not invented by the Sumerians, but are part of human experience. This is like saying that the Bible’s use of dialogue in various passages has come from the Sumerians, because the characters in Sumerian legends spoke to one another. Of course they spoke; and of course they dreamed; and honestly, this is just a bunch of hogwash.

And while we’re at it, the same can be said for Rosenberg’s claim that the covenant is of Sumerian origin, because the Sumerians used written and sealed contracts to memorialize their transactions. Once again, the concept of contracts or covenants is part of the human social experience. Once people banded together, lived in villages or cities, and didn’t kill each other for sport or food or material possessions, contracts of some kind were inherent in the social structure. The idea of living alongside another, in harmony, or for mutual benefit is, by definition a covenant. So when Abraham and God entered into the covenant, that indicated that Abraham was human, not Sumerian. And by the way, if the covenant had been Sumerian, why didn’t Abraham make some record of it, and affix his seal, in the tradition of the times?

Rosenberg also distorts the Akeidah by claiming that human sacrifice was an anachronism by the 700s BCE, when he dates the original text of the Akeidah. (Rosenberg 268) (Apparently, the scholars agree that J did not compose the Akeidah story, but that it was written a couple hundred years later by the E author, the one who names God “Elohim”.) What Rosenberg is forgetting is that the Akeidah occurred not then, but twelve hundred years earlier, when Abraham came to Canaan. And at that time, human sacrifice was not uncommon. I know I’m mixing traditions here, but all of Agamemnon’s troubles supposedly resulted from his having sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, so that the Greek fleet could sail to Troy, some several centuries after the time of Abraham. In other words, long after Abraham had declared human sacrifice to be an abomination, the forefathers of the Greeks were still practicing this ritual, albeit with disastrous consequences for their behavior.

I think that many of Rosenberg’s problems can be traced to a perspective revealed by the following passage: “Abraham’s life and death represent the first time that religion, governed by the creator…informed secular culture in stories of truth and justice.” (Rosenberg 293) The impersonal, almost passive nature of this explanation fails to account for the fact that someone, a person, first articulated the ideas that came to inform society or culture – the same ideas that were later set down in Genesis. If the sages are correct, that person was Abraham, but was only speaking as God’s prophet; the words were God’s; and Abraham was chosen as the messenger. If I’m correct, then Abraham was a genius, an original thinker who first articulated the ideas that form part of the foundation of western thought. But these ideas were not the norm; they were not Sumerian; and they represented a dramatic break with the world that had existed prior to Abraham’s time. He was not Ivrit for nothing.

One last point, and then we’ll close the book on Rosenberg. He claims that one of the major themes of the Akeidah is anxiety about inheritance. Will Abraham’s line survive? Will his descendants be as numerous as the stars, as God had promised? Or will the people face extinction? Now by the time the Akeidah was put on paper, everyone knew that Abraham’s line had survived until then. Bloom says that when J wrote, a couple centuries before E and the Akeidah story, she sought to explain how David had come to enjoy God’s blessing. What was it about David’s history, and the history of his people, that justified this blessing? Obviously, the line from Abraham to David had been unbroken, so it’s unlikely that, from J’s perspective, there was much anxiety about inheritance. However, a couple centuries later, when the Babylonians were threatening to conquer Jerusalem, perhaps E and his contemporaries were more anxious about their own chances for survival. Why this particular story, the Akeidah, would be used as a metaphor for that anxiety, however, is unclear to me.

I’ll stick by my original hypothesis. Nothing I have read in the past year, since these musings began, has convinced me otherwise. Abraham was a genius, who changed the world in which he lived. The Akeidah is a story that depicts his realization that human sacrifice was unacceptable, and should no longer be practiced.

Abraham and Justice - Part II

God visited Abraham one day in the plains of Mamre. Abraham offered God and his angels hospitality; God informed Sarah that she would have a child; and then God and Abraham walked off in the direction of Sodom. It was along this walk to Sodom that Abraham argued with God, and changed our notion of justice.

God advised that he had heard reports of evil behavior in Sodom. He needed to find out if these reports were true, but if so, “then destruction.” Genesis 18:20. There’s much that’s interesting about this story – the actual visit; the meal; the need for God to see Sodom for himself, and not to rely on the reports of others; God taking Abraham into his confidence. In fact, this may be one of the most interesting and perplexing chapters in all of Genesis, but I want to focus solely on the argument for the fate of Sodom.

“Will You also stamp out the righteous along with the wicked?” Genesis 18:23. This of course had been God’s solution to the problem of evil in the time of Noah. But Abraham is troubled by this concept of indiscriminate punishment. And in a remarkable dialogue, Abraham negotiates with God, and secures God’s promise not to wipe out the city, even if there are as few as ten righteous souls to be found. And so, the concept of justice was forever changed; and the notion developed that justice was individual, and not collective. The offending parties are to be punished, but not their innocent neighbors. Dershowitz points out another lesson learned from this story: “Silence in the face of injustice – even God’s injustice – is a sin.” Dershowitz 81. Furthermore, if the Jews are to have faith in their God, they need a God with whom they can argue, even remonstrate. Id.

Dershowitz later discusses one midrash, which teaches that God selected Abraham as his messenger, knowing the Abraham would speak out for justice and righteousness. Abraham was selected for the specific task of arguing with God on behalf of the city of Sodom. But I think the opposite was true -- God didn’t select Abraham; Abraham selected God. The only prior indication in Genesis that God appreciates this new perspective on justice is God’s remorse after the flood. But we have no conduct, no behavior that persuades us he’s really ready to change. If anything, the dialogue at Mamre reveals the same perspective. God intends to verify the rumors of Sodom’s iniquity, but assuming those tales are true, “then destruction.” Genesis 18:20. No, the real change has come from Abraham; just as all these changes came from Abraham – monotheism, the end of idol worship, the end of human sacrifice, the individuality of justice. On the road from Mamre to Sodom, Abraham is changing the world for all time.

One curious detail about the story, however. Abraham begins by arguing in favor of the innocent residents. “It would be a sacrilege …to bring death upon the righteous along with the wicked.” Genesis 18:25. God then responds by promising, should he find fifty righteous people in Sodom, to ‘spare the entire place on their account.” Gen. 18:26. Abraham then renegotiates, and asks if there are forty-five righteous, would God destroy, “the entire city”? Somehow the dialogue has shifted, and no longer does Abraham seek mercy for only the innocent, but now he argues on behalf of the entire city of Sodom. If there are thirty, twenty, ten, would God destroy the city then? Presumably by this point, although the text is ambiguous, God has agreed not merely to pick and choose among the guilty and innocent, but to weigh the fate of the entire town, based on how many righteous souls are present.

According to Dershowitz, God overlooked this logical defect in Abraham’s argument; after all, if Abraham is urging God not to murder the innocent purely on account of their evil neighbors, it makes sense that the converse should be true. God should not spare the evil townsfolk, just because there are a few righteous citizens. If justice is truly individualized, the innocent are spared, but the guilty are punished. Dershowitz sees Abraham as an early advocate of our principle (often overlooked today) that it’s better to acquit a hundred guilty people, for the sake of avoiding the conviction of a single innocent person. And apparently, the traditional explanation of Abraham’s inconsistency is that God overlooked the fault of Abraham’s reasoning, because God was merely testing Abraham’s sense of justice and mercy, to determine if he merited selection as God’s first prophet on earth. The problem with this explanation, however, is that God had already chosen Abraham, not just at the time of his call, but the covenant had already been sealed. Abraham had circumcised himself a few days before the visit to Mamre. Wouldn’t it have made sense to have tested the messenger before having sealed the covenant? What happens to the covenant if Abraham fails God’s test thereafter?

In any event, the distinction between Abraham’s argument for the righteous souls, and God’s promise to spare the entire city comes to naught, for there aren’t even ten righteous persons in all of Sodom; and after a harrowing night outside Lot’s home, Lot and Abraham flee, just ahead of God’s rain of fire. So the story ends with everyone knowing that God still intends to wipe out all evil from his world, even if Abraham has refined his sense of justice. We now call that a win-win.

Abraham and Justice - Part I

Abraham is recognized throughout the west as the patriarch of the three major religions, the first monotheist. And for the Jews, he is the first Jew, the father of our people, and a figure of unique standing. Danny pointed out in a comment to an earlier post that, according to Heschel, Abraham served God only out of love, and with no ulterior motive. But what often goes overlooked in appreciating the significance of Abraham is his contribution to our understanding of justice.

In order to appreciate Abraham fully, one needs to step back in time, and consider the Noah story. According to Genesis, God destroyed the entire world, all living beings, except Noah and his family, and those animals lucky enough to have secured passage on the ark, because people had become evil. Of course, it stands to reason that not all people were evil; a few people aside from Noah must have been good, or if not good, then at least okay. And what about all the little kids? How many kids under the age of say, six years old, together with their mothers, were killed in that flood, on account of evil acts committed by their parents and elders? Or how about all the animals; certainly, the animals weren’t evil. Giraffes, and peacocks, and chipmunks, and caribou; even lions and tigers weren’t evil. What had they done to merit their complete destruction?

In case there’s any misunderstanding here, it only took God about five minutes after the flood to realize that he had made a grave mistake. To make amends, he put a rainbow in the sky, and promised Noah that he wouldn’t kill everyone again. He also promulgated the first laws, so that people would know what was right and what was wrong, and that would help save them from falling collectively into evil practices in the future. It does seem to me, in retrospect, that God might have been well advised to have passed these laws first, to have let his people know what was permitted, and what was forbidden, thus saving him and them from a lot of needless killing.

But that’s not the way the world worked before Abraham. If people were bad, then they got wiped out; all of them, including their children, including their animals; everyone got killed. There are two ways to see this; God versus man, and man versus man.

I heard a news story on NPR a few weeks ago; some guy was interviewing people in the Philippines, who had just endured a catastrophic typhoon. Villages had been destroyed; families had been torn apart; loved ones lost to the storm. A villager described the typhoon as ‘the whim of God’, and the NPR guy was patronizing that perspective, all the while knowing how simple-minded and primitive this kind of thinking was. But the truth is that the guy was right, and that the smug NPR reporter couldn’t figure that out. A typhoon is the whim of God. It is a disaster without explanation; it wreaks havoc and death on the guilty and innocent alike. Fires, floods, earthquakes; none of these pick and choose their victims for any reason at all.

So really, the story of Noah is purely descriptive; it contains no didactic message. In the ancient world, particularly the ancient Middle East, with everyone living near the rivers, civilization was at the mercy of the elements, and subject to destruction by floods. It’s fair to assume that everyone in those days had some memory, personal, familial, or collective, of the floods. And Noah’s story is an attempt to make some sense out of that. And when one considers that Noah’s story was written centuries later, after God and Abraham, after the Exodus, and after the building of the Temple, it’s easier to see how an ethical dimension was introduced into the story. People didn’t get killed randomly; they got killed for a reason. They were evil. And if people are evil, they get punished.

Dershowitz discusses how Job is unable to comprehend God’s ways; how human understanding is incapable of making sense out of the disasters that befall us. And that’s true. The Book of Job offers no explanation for why bad things happen to us. The point is not why these things happen; the point is how to cope with the things that do happen. And Job remains true today, even if there is no sense to these things. Human understanding is incapable of explaining some of the disasters that befall us, simply because there is no explanation for these events. They just happen.

So Noah is really a story about the world in which we live, where floods, or fires, or disease seem to strike us down, without discrimination, without purpose, without any particular meaning. But I’ll suggest that, before Abraham’s time, that was also true of the world in which we lived, in that nations, or tribes, or cities, visited the same kind of indiscriminate death and destruction on their neighbors. It was a savage world. A world in which one tribe would slaughter another, killing everyone -- men, women, children. Justice, such as it was, was a collective concept. If someone violated a family member, then you wiped out their entire family; you didn’t just punish the guilty party. Abraham’s contribution was to distinguish between the good and evil, punishing only the latter. It was a novel concept, and one that has influenced all western thought for four thousand years.

Genesis 14

The more I read, the more I convince myself that I’m right. I just don’t understand why no one else can see these things, however.

My latest revelation comes from Rosenberg’s book, the First Historical Biography of Abraham. Rosenberg points out that one of the chapters of Genesis is much older than all the other text, perhaps seven centuries older even than J’s text. It’s Genesis 14, known as the Battle of the Kings. The chapter tells of an invasion of Canaan by a group of kings from the North; Lot is taken captive. Abram joins with a second group of kings, and they pursue the captors. Abram leads a group of 318 men who rescue Lot, and recover all the stolen plunder. Upon his return, Abram is offered all the recovered possessions, but he turns that offer down, and accepts only a modest share for his men.

This chapter is dated around 1700 BCE from the place names, which names were no longer in use by the time of Solomon’s court, when J undertook to chronicle the history of the Jews, having been replaced by newer Canaanite names. The kings’ names are apparently the old Sumerian or Akkadian names as well, and not the names used centuries later by the Canaanites. Chapter 14 differs from the rest of Genesis in other ways as well. For instance, God never makes an appearance; this is merely a tale of Abram, his military prowess, and his political relations with his neighbors. The traditional Jewish explanation of this chapter, which clearly stands out from the remainder of Genesis, is that it tells us of the courage and leadership of Abraham. The modern perspective sees it differently. Rosenberg suggests that this chapter reinforces his thesis that Abraham is merely a single historical figure in the continuum of middle eastern history – one among many. Nothing new here according to Rosenberg.

But both of these interpretations are wrong. This tale of Abraham’s military prowess perhaps belongs amid the rest of ancient middle eastern chronicles and mythology, but it really has little to do with the Abraham of Genesis, other than to tell us that Abram was known to his contemporaries. And the supposed ethical lesson that Abram teaches the other kings -- not to accept their spoils, and not to enrich himself as a result of conquest -- may set him apart from his contemporaries, but it does not define him in the same way that his call, or the Akeidah do.

The importance of the story for me is that Genesis 14 contains the first reference to Abram the Ivrit, the other. Abram was already different from his neighbors, and they identified him as so, well before he refused any spoils from the victory. His otherness preceded his participation in this military struggle. And while the military or political story was of interest to his neighbors, or to the Sumerian author of 1700 BCE, no one at the time could figure out exactly why it was that Abram was different. All they knew was that he was different, that he was Ivrit. Seven hundred years later, when J wrote the first chronicle of our people, her departure point was Abram’s difference, his otherness. She could have cared less for this battle.

Part of the difficulty here is the looking forward and looking backward. Abram changes the way we see the world, but his contemporaries are unable to appreciate his originality. It takes seven hundred years, all the generations of Genesis, all the time in Egypt, all the time wandering through the wilderness, and then the time conquering Canaan, and really up to the time of Solomon, before our first author sits down to write about what makes us different, why we are Ivrit, why we are chosen, why we enjoy God’s blessing. When she does that, she looks back through time to recreate Abraham, and to make him and his ideas come alive in her chronicle. And she tells of an Abram who looks into the future, who receives God’s covenant, who is promised that his descendants will be more numerous than the stars. He looks into the future; but he does so through the text of J, who is looking back into the past. As a result, it’s never easy to sort out exactly what happened and when. All we really know is that Abraham, either the character or the man, was present at the origin of our people and our thought. Whether those ideas came to Abraham from God, or whether they came from Abraham inspired divinely, or whether they were, in fact, Abraham’s ideas, attributed to God in an effort to give them credence, they were new ideas, original ideas, and the ideas which forever changed the way that everyone in the west saw the world.

My New Favorite Movie

I spend more time working on my biblical postings, but rarely generate much in the way of comments. However, no matter what I write about baseball, I seem to pique everyone’s interest. So even though we’re in the stretch run for the NFL playoffs, and despite the hoops season being in full swing, let’s return to America’s pastime.

I now have a new favorite movie – the 2007 World Series film - as MLB so creatively named it. I’ve only watched it three times since it arrived on Thursday, but it has all the hallmarks of a classic. Good production values - great drama - wonderful cast – happy ending. 2004 was a completely magical year, but the Sox victory was almost overshadowed by the whole 86 years thing – the Bambino, the curse, 1918, all that baggage. In contrast, 2007 was pretty much all about baseball. We had some of the same drama in the ALCS. The Sox fell behind 3-1, and had to play in consecutive elimination games. And while nothing will ever match the magic of games 4 and 5 in 2004, two of this year’s games against the Indians were much closer than the final scores indicated. Games 5 and 7 were one run games into the late innings, even though looking back it might seem that the Sox dominated because of the lopsided final scores. And this year’s Series was also much more dramatic, mainly because the Rockies played tough, and came back in Games 3 and 4, unlike 2004, when the Cards never really challenged after Game 1. So even though this year’s movie suffers from having Matt Damon, and not Dennis Leary, as the narrator, it’s more of a pure sports documentary, and less a chronicle of history. Anyway, more detailed discussion of the post-season will have to await the release of the multi-disc set, so that I can relive and recount every moment of October, and not just the highlights.

In the meantime, let’s catch up on a few bits of baseball trivia. Eric Gag-me is gone; back to the National League where he had so much success. Of course, that success is now tarnished as Gag-me got listed among the substance abusers. During his brief tenure with the Sox, he single-handedly blew as many saves as the rest of the staff, and thereby managed to keep the AL East race close. Had the Yanks overtaken us at the season’s end, G-Man would have had to share the scotch with Gag-me.

I was looking over the season’s standings the other day, and realized for the first time that the Sox led all the majors in fewest runs allowed. That’s includes the National League, where by definition, fewer runs are scored. What an astonishing turnaround, and one that probably escaped the attention of most fans. The image of the RedSox remains Papi and Manny, and a dominating offensive lineup from top to bottom. Most pitches per at-bat; Youkilis battling at the plate , the sweat dripping into his eyes, and in the process setting a record for hits in the ALCS; even the runty Pedroia getting in on the act – knocking in five runs in Game Seven, and then leading off the series with a home run. But this year it really was all about the pitching. Beckett so dominant in the post-season; Dice-K and Schilling inconsistent, but overpowering at times; Papelbon and Okajima unhittable when it mattered most. And next year, always next year when we talk sports, it will be Dice-K’s sophomore year, with Lester and Buckholz back into the rotation. Are you kidding me? When does spring training start?

The Call

I’m still searching. I thought I might find some answers to the origins of Abraham’s thought in a recent book by the co-author of The Book of J, David Rosenberg. Rosenberg’s contribution to that work, which by the way has been the only enlightening book I’ve read over the past year, was the translation of the edited J text, understood by many biblical scholars to be the original text in what later became the Torah.

Rosenberg’s new book is entitled, Abraham, the First Historical Biography, and attempts to place Abraham in the continuum of civilization which began with the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and ended up, a couple thousand years later in Solomon’s time, when the J text was composed, when the first authors wrote the history of our people that later was added to, edited, redacted, and then compiled into what became the Tanach, the Bible. This scholarship is at odds, of course, with traditional Jewish teaching. If the Torah was the word of God, given to Moses on Sinai, verbatim, it could never have been composed in this manner – by successive unnamed authors, whose work was later compiled and redacted. So obviously, Rosenberg comes to us not through the traditional Jewish teaching, but through the intellectual wing of religious studies.

Unfortunately, what Rosenberg does is fall victim to a popular intellectual assumption of today – one that rejects in general the idea of genius, and tries instead to place all ideas in their historical and cultural context. Shakespeare was a product of his time, as I suppose was Isaac Newton. So here we have Rosenberg’s Abraham, or actually Abram, a product of Sumerian culture – educated in Sumerian schools, literate, observant of Sumerian religious practice, familiar with all their art and customs. He then leaves all that, not to mention his family, and its lovely two-story house with courtyard, and moves to Canaan, where he will spend the rest of his days, in tents, without art, without culture, and without the religious and dramatic festivals of the Sumerians. It turns out that this book is less about Abraham and more about the ancient Mesopotamian world.

As a result, the historical Abraham posited by Rosenberg has become less a person, and more a reflection of his times. “By referring to [Abraham’s] mind, we invoke his education, his personal and cultural history in Ur and Harran.” (Rosenberg 69) These are the seeds he carries to begin a new history in Canaan. ”History is now more than a reporting; it is a journey….” (Id.) Rosenberg’s more general reflections on who Abram was are really just platitudes, so it’s not yet clear whether Rosenberg’s thesis makes much sense. Not until we get down to the details. After explaining that the Sumerians had personal household gods, and recall that Abram’s father, Terah, was a craftsman who fabricated these personal gods, little statues kept in everyone’s home, Rosenberg suggests that when God called to Abram, it was understood that his personal god made that call, and not the God who later made the covenant with Abraham. Listen to this: “it was Abraham’s personal Sumerian god who advised him to leave Harran; only later would Abraham be made aware of Yahweh’s Canaanite identity.” (Rosenberg 102) “Abraham would have heard the voice of Kulla (the Sumerian family god) advising him to “come out of your father’s house”.” (Id. 103) Rosenberg does note that somehow, by the time Abram arrived in Canaan, he had left Kulla behind. And that, for some unexplained psychological reason, Abram never returned to his father’s house, despite the importance of family in Sumerian culture. Needless to say, this is all nonsense. And it makes far less sense than the traditional explanation of Abraham’s call, all described verbatim in God’s own words. At least the Orthodox have a coherent, and internally consistent story. Rosenberg has written what’s really an incoherent version of Abraham’s call.

I’m digressing, and it’s not helping me get to any answers, but it seems to me that the problem with this enlightened look at Abraham’s life is that it’s infected by a discomfort over the idea of the Jews as chosen people. Rosenberg doesn’t want us to be different; he wants us to fit into the continuum of middle eastern history. Perhaps what he, and other writers, like Bruce Feiler, hope is that once everyone reads their books, they’ll stop hating Jews, and we can all be one big happy family. That would be nice, but it’s not an excuse for distorting what occurred. Jews are the chosen people, not because God chose the Jews, but because we chose God. And we are different from everyone who preceded us. Abram is described as Ivrit – the other. Abraham was by definition different from his neighbors.

So back to Abraham’s call, the defining moment of Judaism, in my opinion. Abram did not receive that call from Kulla, or anyone else in the Sumerian tradition. When he left Ur, or Harran, or Mesopotamia, or Babylonia, he not only left physically, he left there spiritually and intellectually. Yes, the journey to Canaan was a physical journey, to find a new land; but more importantly, it was a metaphorical journey, which signified to everyone that Abraham had left the old world behind. That’s why he never returned to his father’s home; why he never journeyed back to Ur. Abram rejected all of the Sumerian culture and practices, not just the idol worship and the multiplicity of gods. And so by definition, Abraham’s call had to have come from God, or what Abraham understood to be God.

The real story here, the one that’s still untold by Rosenberg, and by anyone else, at least insofar as I have been able to determine, is the examination of the originality of Abraham’s thought. Genesis wasn’t written for almost another thousand years. And I will concede that there could have been a literary tradition that informed the first authors, including J. But J did not make up the story of the Jews, from Abraham, through Joseph and slavery, through Moses and the Exodus, through Sinai, Joshua and the conquest of Canaan. Those events had happened, and J looked back at them when she sat down to chronicle our story. But the ideas in J’s story, and in the Torah at large, had originated somewhere. And contrary to Rosenberg, I don’t believe for one second that those ideas were just some reflection of Sumerian and Babylonian thought, perhaps modified by Abraham and his descendants. They were not just a step on the intellectual path through the ancient middle east. They were new ideas. The observant would tell us they were communicated directly from the mouth of God. I would suggest that they represent the original thought of our patriarch, and I will leave open whether that thought was divinely inspired. Either way, they represented a break with the past, a past which has by now disappeared over time, worn away by the sands, and known to us only through historical artifacts. In contrast to that lost world, Abraham’s ideas still inform most of western thought, whether the rest of the world wants to admit it or not.

Chen Rocks Macallan

Last night's visit to Chen's for a quick dinner out in the midst of this season's first winter storm turned into an unexpected surprise, a Chanukah treat, so to speak. Chen likes malt whisky, Macallan's specifically. He always has the 12 behind his bar, moderately priced. Once or twice in the past, I have noticed a bottle of 15, but the last time I ordered that, he jokingly told me the bottle was for him, not to share with anyone else.

Yesterday, as we walked past the bar on the way to our seats, I noticed the 15 on the shelf above the bar, and before anyone could decide that it didn't belong in the restaurant, that it was intended for delivery to Chen's residence, I promptly advised our server that I'd like a glass. Two bottles of Macallan sat side by side on the shelf, so I was careful to advise, "Fifteen, not twelve. And neat please; no ice." Chen generally has the staff schooled on the proper way to serve Macallan, but one never knows. There have been times that the bartender was so new at this business that Chen himself had to come behind the bar and explain what 'neat' meant; and into what glass we pour the malt; and the proper portion; all the necessary information.

Anyway, Chen overheard my conversation with the server and stopped by the table. He let us know that he also had the 21 in the restaurant. Can you imagine? Macallan 21 in a Chinese restaurant. But at twenty-something a pour, I told him that was a bit rich; I'd stick with the 15. We chatted whisky for a few minutes, and the waitress returned with a nice pour of the fifteen, a perfect beverage for a snowy night out.

As dinner was winding down, and after I'd finished the glass of Macallan, Chen stopped by the table once more, this time with a glass of whisky in his hand. Macallan 21, on the house. Now I wasn't just another customer; I was a fellow malt whisky lover; and he was just my host, wanting to share a taste of his finest whisky with someone who'd enjoy it. Perfect hospitality, I'd say. The twenty-one is even fuller and richer than the seventeen; the taste builds up luxuriously, and then lingers in the mouth long after the whisky has been swallowed. Danny got a bottle of this last year for Chanukah, and I'd enjoyed a glass or two with him. It was every bit as good as I'd remembered. The only drawback is the price, over $200 a bottle. But on a Monday night in Chen's, on the house, what could possibly be better?

G-Man Meets Danny

Big news: G-Man made his long awaited visit to Rochester, at which time he delivered the payoff for last season's bet. The wager was a bottle of HP 18, nothing to sneeze at. But in a display of extraordinary generosity, G-Man paid off with Macallan 17, the current gold standard. How sweet was that?

We spent the better part of the weekend enjoying malts, touring the local package stores, which I'm pleased to say impressed him favorably, and sitting for hours waiting for our table at Max's. During part of that time, we got together with Danny (and the lovely Randy), and set the wager for next year: again the outcome turns on which team has the best regular season record. The wager is dinner for the winners - at Keen's. (The dinner and drinking part is win-win; but the loser gets the check.) Because there's two of them, and only one of me, I get to invite a guest. Now, as I'm posting, it occurs to me that perhaps John and Rico want to join in; they could agree to similar terms, and the understanding would be that the payoff occurred in one large party.

And speaking of Keen's, I received the notes from John's recent visit. Thanks, junior. But, the notes do not satisfy your obligation to post. Any visit to Keen's requires a posting. No exceptions. The notes included brief messages from all those in attendance, and while I was able to decipher the meaning of what each of the young attorneys had to say, I was unable to translate or decipher the cryptic messages from Dave, Tunic and Yanni. Need some help here.

Anyway, it was fun putting G-Man and Danny together. They told the requisite Yankee stories; there was much nostalgia for the good old days of the late twentieth century; lots of speculation about the upcoming Santana deal; and many hopeful toasts for the future of the pinstripes. Funny though, I would have expected the force to be strong with them; power from the dark side. But I just didn't feel it. Perhaps it was the good cheer; but perhaps it's a sign. Twenty-zero, seven years now. Is this just the beginning? Who knows?