Crit

Are We (still) Not Men?

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Fig. 1

FORTY YEARS AGO THIS WEEK, my friend Ralfh came over to my apartment, held up an album cover, and said, “You have to hear this.” He slid out the vinyl disk, put it on the stereo, lowered the tone arm, cranked the volume, and changed my life.

“Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!” was revolutionary band DEVO‘s first album, replete with such underground wonders as “Uncontrollable Urge,” “Space Junk,” “Come Back Jonee,” a solid cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and the anthemic “Jocko Homo” (the latter song making use of the album title as part of the chorus). Partly nihilistic, eminently danceable, the band’s message touted the “devolution” of modern humanity from its noble Homo sapiens roots to “monkey-men all / in business suits.”

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Torah

Two Letters, One Torah

THE FIRST THING YOU NEED to know is that, in Hebrew, the letter D (dalet) looks a lot like the letter R (reish). It’s so easy to confuse the two, in fact, that Source Critics (those who see the Torah as knit together from several other texts) like to explain some of Torah’s eccentricities as scribal errors — handmade typos, if you will.

Now, I mainly hold to the Source Critics’ view of the Torah, in that I believe the text we have now is a redacted compendium of several older documents (a theory better known as the Documentary Hypothesis, or DH). Unlike the critics, however, I don’t believe the Redactor was slipshod; rather, that what we call “mistakes” were actually deliberate features, put there in order to keep us talking about the Torah for lo these many millennia. Case in point, the debate over Deuel vs. Reuel:

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Life

Don’t Look Up

OF ALL THE PET PEEVES this modern life offers, one of the most soul-sucking is checking out at the grocery store.

I’m specifically talking about the debit-card machine. Time was, you could fill the two-to-three-minute transaction with friendly banter; ask after the checker’s health and/or welfare; comment on how busy the day is; even chat about the house music. It doesn’t matter what — it’s a friendly benefit for both customer and checker. When you’re working retail, these little conversations help pass the time and break up the daily monotony.

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Torah

365 Names of God: El Shaddai

EL SHADDAI is the name used primarily by the Biblical Patriarchs, usually translated as “God Almighty” and focusing on the deity’s providential or nurturing aspect. Scholars differ over whether “Shaddai” is cognate with similar Phoenician or Ugaritic words for mountains, breasts, or the act of sustaining. The last sense seems to best capture the Toraitic context.

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The Torah can be taken, among other things, as a ‘polyphonic’ text, or a loose anthology of competing claims regarding the legal stipulations of the covenant. The edited Torah, following this approach, was not meant to be read as a practical and coherent handbook on how to carry out the law, but as a collage of competing understandings of the requirements of the covenant.”

— Rabbi David Frankel

Crit

Words to Bring Back: “Amateur”

– Definition: n one who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession

– Used in a sentence: “He is a true amateur of cooking.”

– Why: What I would like to bring back is the usage “an amateur of _________,” which makes the word synonymous with “lover.” What I would like to get rid of is the connotation of “amateur” as “slipshod; half-baked; amateurish.”

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