Know Your Roots

The squabble over school prayer is quite – at least until the election heats up. It is, of course, a tempest in a teapot. No child is now, or ever has been, denied the right to pray ay school, providing it is a quiet, private prayer which does not disturb the school routine.

Of much greater importance is the absence, in the school curriculum, of study of the basic experiences from which came the foundations of our ethical civilization. Many of those foundations are derived from the Jewish literature of two thousand to twenty-eight hundred years ago. Writings from other ancient cultures, particularly the Greek, contribute as well to our speech, our laws, our customs and our ethical values.

How can one understand the phrase, “handwriting on the wall”, without knowing of the fall of Babylon, as told in the book of Daniel, Chapter 5? A “siren song” becomes much more tantalizing and intriguing when one has read of Ulysses tied to the mast of his ship to prevent his yielding to the sirens’ enticement. The “golden calf” acquires more meaning within the framework of the Israelites’ orgy at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Incidentally, there is a bit of sardonic humor in the story when Aaron, disclaiming responsibility, explains to Moses how it happened: “I threw the gold rings into the fire. And Moses, you aren’t going to believe this, but that calf just walked out.” Bowing to the golden calf, a symbol of fertility and wealth, is not too different from our canonization of productivity. We tend to place a higher value in greater quantities of things than on human relations, and the contest at the foot of Sinai is reenacted again.

Marathon running has become a mass participation sport, but few of the racers of the spectators realize they are celebrating one of the turning points in the history of the Western world. The first marathon was run by a courier from that city to Athens with the joyful news, “We conquer”, announcing the destruction of the Persian navy and army by the Greeks; an event that saved the Western world from becoming a satrapy of the Persian Empire. Incidentally, the same emperor who lost at Marathon had liberated the Jews who were taken into exile by the Babylonians, and allowed them to return to Palestine and rebuild Jerusalem, laying the groundwork for today’s Middle Eastern problems.

There should be in our schools a course possibly titled, “Readings in Ancient Literature – Sources of Our Civilization.” Seventy years ago in our reading textbooks we had, “The Death of Socrates,” lifted verbatim from Plato’s dialogue, “Crito”. We had selections for Homer’s Odyssey. There were no stories from Jewish literature. We did have, by law, the reading of ten verses from the Bible every day, but those readings were mostly from the Psalms and none of them were particularly impressive at that time. The material from Homer and Plato had religious significance for the authors and their readers of the era when they were written. Those religious elements were simply ignored as irrelevant for us.

In Jewish literature, for starters, there could be several good stories without religious significance. Judges, Chapters 14–16, tell the story of a “free-spirited” but not very intelligent jock, the macho man in vogue these days. Samson comes on as a male chauvinist pig when he refers to his wife as “my heifer”. The current movie “Samson and Delilah” tries to glamorize what was really a stupid and treacherous affair. The Book of Ruth corresponds to the modern romantic novels without any super-steamy verbiage but still suggests how feminine wiles were used to trigger a rich landowner’s interest.

 For evil plot and counterplot, and mob violence, again with a bit of feminine trickery, few stories can match that of Esther, in which a personal vendetta blows up into a mass riot.

Besides the entertaining stories there is a ferment of new ideas. The meeting of Nathan, the prophet, with David (I Samual 11-12) and Elijah, the prophet, with Ahab and Jezebel (L Kings 21) were harbingers of the Magna Charta and Declaration of Independence. Those meetings were the beginning of the end for the doctrine of “divine rights of kings” and of royal death squads. The humblest subject had rights on which the highest authority dare not trample.

Amos demands justice for the poor and concern for the weak and helpless (Chapters 4-6). Ezekiel discovers a new truth – individual responsibility (Chapter 18). No longer is a person swallowed up in the mass of people. Each person has a unique dignity and worth. The hippies of the 1960’s may echo the plaint of the Jewish exiles, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But Ezekiel says it isn’t so. The generation gap may exist, but it is a source of hope rather than despair. There is always expectancy and faith in individual persons in a new generation.

It is not necessary to teach all this in terms of religion. We hear appeals to the spirit of America’s “Founding Fathers”. Actually, the founding fathers got most of their ideals from the Greek and Jewish literature. The roots from which our democratic and humanitarian principles have grown were planted in Greece and Rome two thousand to twenty-eight hundred years ago. To nurture rich blooms today we need to know the roots from which they have blossomed.

Let’s teach about those roots in our schools.