Al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock on Google Earth

I just discovered another cool feature of Google Earth - the placement of 3D models of various buildings on sites such as Jerusalem. I've found several of the Dome of the Rock, one of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, of the Western Wall (Kotel), and of David's Citadel. I've been spending a lot of time this semester looking at various maps of Jerusalem, since I'm teaching a course on the city (actually, this is exam week, so the class is now over).

The images below are of the interior and exterior of the Dome of the Rock, the exterior of Al-Aqsa, and both buildings placed on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.

Hanukkah - who is the "Red One" of Maoz Tzur?

On a happier note than the previous post, it is the fourth night of Hanukkah. I'm facing my menorah with its four lit candles (plus shamash) and thinking about the words to Maoz Tzur, the Hanukkah hymns. According to the Birnbaum siddur, it was composed in the 13th century (Philip Birnbaum, Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem [New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1969] 777). (The article in Wikipedia makes the same statement, based on Zunz).

The article on Maoz Tzur in MyJewishLearning.com refers to an article by Ismar Schorsch, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, published in the journal Judaism in the fall of 1988, entitled "A Meditation on Maoz Zur." Schorsch's family escaped from Germany on the first day of Hanukkah of 1938, after his father had been freed (he had been arrested on Kristallnacht). He writes that his family always sang the first five stanzas of Maoz Tzur with great fervor during their Hanukkah celebration (p. 459): "The poem's theme of redemption seemed to offer a poignant comment on our family's experience." They omitted the sixth stanza, however.

He records the history of the poem as follows (p. 460): "In its present form, Maoz Zur consists of six stanzas. Since the days of Leopold Zunz, the first five have been ascribed to an unknown German poet named Mordecai, who lived sometime before the middle of the thirteenth century and whose name survives as an acrostic formed by the first letter of each stanza." Schorsch writes that the poem is written as if shortly after the Maccabees had retaken the Temple from the Syrian Greeks. "The rescue from 'Greek' tyranny triggers a recollection of earlier cases when God's intervention redirects the course of Jewish history." These are in Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia. The fifth stanza describes the "redemption at the time of the Hasmoneans."

The sixth stanza was composed later than the first five, and it is (p. 461) "an unabashed messianic plea for divine retribution upon Israel's Christian oppressors." He comments that it is often left untranslated in modern prayerbooks (like the Birnbaum siddur, which translates only the first five stanzas). The fifth stanza adds the final subjugator of the Jewish people - Edom (which in rabbinic interpretation is equated first with pagan and then with Christian Rome, thus becoming the code name for Christianity as a whole).

My rough translation (helped by Schorsch's discussion on p. 462):

Reveal your holy arm (cf. Isaiah 52:10) and bring near the day of salvation.
Avenge your servants against the evil kingdom.
The time has lengthened, and there is no end to the evil days.
Destroy the red one (Admon=Christianity) in the shadow of the cross,
and send forth the seven shepherds [Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David]

This stanza is a more urgent request for divine salvation - rather than remembering the past salvation from danger and oppression at the hands of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, it directly calls God to save his people from the Christians. Schorsch believes that this stanza was also written by an Ashkenazic Jew (p. 463), "stirred by the tremors and aftershocks of the Reformation," who believed that the Christian kingdom could only be overcome by direct divine intervention.

With this understanding of the meaning of the text, it's clear why Philip Birnbaum did not care to translate the stanza into English. Although he does not mention it in his entertaining introduction (full of jabs at earlier translations and editions of the prayerbook), he refrains from translating quite a number of potentially troublesome passages, particularly mystical ones, and in this case, one that could be viewed as an open attack upon Christianity, something that he presumably thought would be unwise even in the United States.

Sarah Palin and Barney Frank at the Gridiron Club

Last night was the annual winter dinner for the Gridiron Club in Washington, and Sarah Palin and Barney Frank were the featured Republican and Democratic speakers. The New York times Caucus blog reported on The Comedy Duo of Palin and Frank. Apparently the evening was open to the news media - the Gridiron Club usually requires that the dinners be off the record.

This made me think again of the fact that my grandfather, Richard Lawson Wilson, was very involved with the Gridiron Club, which only admitted women as members in 1975. See this highly entertaining account of how women were finally admitted thanks to the feminist movement:

....the women in Washington turned their sights on another institution, the Gridiron Club, once described by Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times as “an assembly of troglodytes.” Nonetheless, it held a dinner each year, then as now, spoofing national leaders and attended by many of those leaders. But women were shut out. After several years of picketing, the women decided to hold a Counter-Gridiron Party. In 1974, they rented the gym at nearby Mount Vernon College and got big-name people like former Attorney General Elliott Richardson to participate. The highlight was Martha Mitchell, wife of Attorney General John Mitchell and notorious for her late night phone calls. For $5 and the cost of the phone call at the Counter Gridiron event, Mitchell would make one of her calls to whomever you asked. Most recipients didn’t believe it was really Mitchell calling. In 1975 the Gridiron Club voted to admit women. Fran [Frances Lewine] and UPI’s Helen Thomas were first female members.

My grandfather loved the Gridiron Club (and that other bastion of Washington establishment journalism, the Washington Press Club, which only admitted women in 1971), and it's hard to imagine how his conservative and proper psyche would have reacted to a double bill of Sarah Palin and Barney Frank. Politically, he was a Republican, but certainly not from the populist, ignoramus wing of the party, so he probably wouldn't have approved of Palin appearing as the Republican representative. I doubt he could even have imagined an out gay man as a Congressional Representative, much less a major speaker at the Gridiron Club.

Sometimes the frustrations of the present day blind us to the changes that have been made in a fairly short time, historically speaking.

The Ubiquity of Exaptation

Over the early fall I read Stephen Jay Gould's book, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, which I found fascinating. One of the most interesting concepts he introduced was of exaptation. P.Z. Myers, at Pharyngula (The Ubiquity of Exaptation), has just written a very lucid explanation of how this concept can be used to explain the evolution of the nervous system from very simple cells. Gould's quick definition of the term (p. 171) is - "those useful structures that arose for other reasons or for no conventional reason at all, and were then fortuitously available for other usages, we call exaptations." A structure that evolved to suit one purpose then taking on another purpose is an exaptation.

I learned a lot from reading Gould's book, enough that I started reading another anthology of his articles, put together after his death, The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould. I haven't finished it yet, because the semester intruded on my time to read, but I hope to get back to it soon.

I never took a college biology course, but when I read these books, and articles on science blogs, it makes me think that I would really enjoy doing so - perhaps one summer when I'm not feeling like doing much of my own research....