Making Sense of the Census

So, I was doubly honored to be called upon to serve as lay leader for the second week in a row this past Friday at Congregation Adas Emuno, and it seems only fitting to add my accounting of this service as well.  This week, after beginning as we always do with the candle lighting, I noted how in these very hot and humid days of July sometimes people sing Christmas songs to try to cool off, and along the same lines, we could start by reading the lyrics of a Chanukah song.  The song I chose was written by Peter Yarrow, and originally sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary, called Light One Candle, and it goes like this:

Light One Candle
Peter Yarrow

Light one candle for the Maccabee children

With thanks that their light didn't die

Light one candle for the pain they endured

When their right to exist was denied

Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand
But light one candle for the wisdom to know

When the peacemaker's time is at hand




Don't let the light go out!

It's lasted for so many years!
Don't let the light go out!
Let it shine through our love and our tears.




Light one candle for the strength that we need

To never become our own foe

And light one candle for those who are suffering

Pain we learned so long ago
Light one candle for all we believe in

That anger not tear us apart
And light one candle to find us together

With peace as the song in our hearts




Don't let the light go out!

It's lasted for so many years!

Don't let the light go out!

Let it shine through our love and our tears.




What is the memory that's valued so highly

That we keep it alive in that flame?

What's the commitment to those who have died

That we cry out they've not died in vain?

We have come this far always believing
That justice would somehow prevail

This is the burden, this is the promise

This is why we will not fail!




Don't let the light go out!

It's lasted for so many years!

Don't let the light go out!
Let it shine through our love and our tears.


Don't let the light go out!
Don't let the light go out!

Don't let the light go out!

In case you're not familiar with the tune, here's a YouTube video recording of Peter Yarrow performing the song live:

We can apply the spirit of the song equally to the tradition of lighting the Sabbath lights, and answer the call to justice as we answer the call to worship.  From this point, the service proceeded as usual, leading up to the Dvar Torah (word of Torah).  I started by saying that in leading services two weeks in a row, I was able to say, as you remember from last week...


And in this case, the portion or parsha, this one called Parsha Pinchas, really does pick up right where the other left off, with Pinchas the priest's zealous action in killing the sinners, the Israelite chieftain and Midianite princess who were engaged in relations in public, which in turn put an end to the sinful behavior of the Israelites with the Midianite women who had come to seduce them and turn God against them.  (See the previous post, Sounds of Silence and Talking Donkeys, for more on this.)  So now, at the start of the new parsha, God tells Moses that because of this, he won't punish the Israelites, and that he will reward Pinchas and his descendents. 


But this parsha has much more to it than this brief epilogue to the story of Pinchas.  It goes on to relate that God then commands Moses and Eleazar, the father of Pinchas and the son of Aaron, to take a census, saying:  "Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel from twenty years old and upwards, following their fathers' houses, all that are fit to go out to war in Israel" (Numbers 26:2).  The results of the census are then reported in great detail which I won't go into, but here's a summary, broken down by tribe:

• 43,730 from Reuben;
• 22,200 from Simeon;
• 40,500 from Gad;
• 76,500 from Judah;
• 64,300 from Issachar;
• 60,500 from Zebulun;
• 52,700 from Manasseh;
• 32,500 from Ephraim;
• 45,600 from Benjamin;
• 64,400 from Dan;
• 53,400 from Asher;
• 45,400 from Naphtali;

This section concludes with, "these are those counted of the children of Israel: six hundred and one thousand and seven hundred and thirty."  How that final tally was obtained is beyond me, and beside the point.  The question we might well ask is why do the results of this census, which are described in painstaking detail in this Torah portion, included at all?  Surely, the numbers change with time, so that the specific information has no particular utility.


One immediate answer is that the results are used to explain and justify the ways in which the Holy Land is subdivided among the tribes, so that, as it says immediately afterward: "You shall apportion the Land among these as an inheritance, in accordance with the number of names. To the large [tribe] you shall give a larger inheritance and to a smaller tribe you shall give a smaller inheritance, each person shall be given an inheritance according to his number" (Num. 26:53-54).  

After this, the Levites, who were not allowed to own land, but were considered a holy tribe and source of the priesthood, are counted as well, tallying in at 23,000.


But there is more to the census than property rights.  At the outset, the census is meant to count "all that are fit to go out to war in Israel," so it is also about organization for defense as the Israelites move through hostile territory in the Sinai desert, and prepare to return to the land of Canaan.  But even more than that specific function, this recounting of the census provides a model for how a people can organize themselves.  That's why governments today routinely take a census of their populations.  When the Israelites left Egypt, they left as slaves in great numbers, essentially a mob, a crowd, a mass, and the only social structure they had was a tribal system that worked fine for a household of a few dozen, maybe a few hundred, but could not effectively govern a population of hundreds of thousands.  That's why we see in the Torah the working out of new leadership structures, new forms of organization, a new model that the founding fathers of the United States looked to, and drew upon, when they endeavored to form a more perfect union.


We should also acknowledge that in order to take a census, you had to have a means of keeping track of numbers, a system of notation, of writing.  The first writing system was developed by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and it was developed by accountants to keep inventory, so writing began with numbers, or rather numerals.  The Sumerians were invaded and conquered by Semitic peoples that we call the Babylonians, and the first system of law, codifed law, written law, came from the Babylonian king known as Hammurabi--Moses is credited with the second such system.  We also believe that some of our stories in Genesis originated with the Babylonians, such as the Tower of Babel (that name's a dead give away),  the Flood, and maybe the Garden of Eden.  And one of the great cities of Mesopotamia was Ur, out of which came Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people, and the Arabic people as well.


But it was in the Sinai desert that the first alphabet appeared, developed by Semitic peoples, and adapted from Egypt's hieroglyphics, the second oldest writing system.  This coincides more or less with the time period reflected in the story of Moses and the Exodus.  And in Semitic writing, in the Hebrew aleph-bet for example, numbers are represented by letters.  This means that every word has a numerical value, which is why the Hebrew word for life, chai, is associated with the number 18, and why when we write checks for bar mitzvahs, weddings, and synagogue donations, we often make the amount out to be multiples of 18.  The mystical practice of numerology has its roots in Semitic numerals, and the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, and specifically the method known as Gematria, includes the idea of searching for hidden meanings in the Torah and elsewhere by translating its words into their numerical equivalents.


So the Israelites in the Sinai had the advantage of both letters and numbers, literacy and numeracy, and this forms the basis for the Jewish cultural facility for arithmetic and mathematics, and later on, for finance.  We didn't invent money, or taxation, or interest rates, or accounting, or banking, but we had the literacy, numeracy, and abstract thinking to work in those areas when all else was closed off to us, and to work in those areas when others could not.  And those who were not literate or numerate, and limited to concrete thinking, could not understand how something like charging interest on loans works, and instead charged us with usury, reinforcing anti-Semitism. But it was the rulers, the nobility of European lands, who invited and encouraged us to do this work, in order to develop and fuel their economies, taking advantage of these skills in order to modernize their economies.


But to return to the ancient world, the census that is reported in this Torah portion is the second census that was conducted, the first having been done soon after the exodus from Egypt.  And the results of this second census reveal that, with the exception of Caleb and Joshua, and of course Moses, no one from the original exodus was still alive.  They had wandered the desert for forty years so that the generation that was born to slavery, and proven unfaithful at Mount Sinai, would die off, and a new generation born into freedom, and born into the new society governed by God's Law, by the Torah, could take their place.  

I think it is also true that what we call wandering was in no way aimless, but rather was a circling around, a cyclical movement, which is characteristic of the nomadic way of life.  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were essentially nomads, and in this way the Israelites could return to that original lifestyle after being captives in Egypt. They could reenact and recapitulate the lives of their ancestors as a prelude to reclaiming the land of their ancestors, Canaan.  And while today we no longer live as nomads, we too makes the rounds, year after year, as we move through the Torah portions, parsha by parsha.


This parsha also establishes the laws of inheritance, and in response to a claim made by the daughters of a man who had no sons, God rules in favor of the women, a highly unusual demonstration of progressive thinking in those ancient days:  "Speak to the children of Israel saying: If a man dies and has no son, you shall transfer his inheritance to his daughter" (Num. 27:8).  It is an incredibly rich and diverse section, one that also includes Joshua's selection to succeed Moses and lead the Israelites to the Promised Land, and various directives about ritual offerings are also listed.  

And this parsha says, "In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, [you shall offer up] a Passover offering to the Lord. On the fifteenth day of this month, a festival [begins]; you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days" (Num. 28:16-17).  Note that the first month is the month of Passover, the month of Nisan.  In other words, the new year begins in the spring, not the end of summer, as it does for us now.  This makes perfect sense, because Passover is the defining moment for our people,  the birth of a nation, so to speak, the exodus from Egypt is our Independence Day, and receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai 40 days later is our Constitution Day.  And a little later, it states, " On the day of the first fruits, when you offer up a new meal offering to the Lord, on your festival of Weeks; it shall be a holy convocation for you, and you shall not perform any mundane work " (Num. 28:26).  The festival of Weeks is Shavuot, when we commemorate God giving us the Ten Commandments and the other 603 that constitute the Law, the Torah.


Later on, it says, "And in the seventh month, on the first day, there shall be a holy convocation for you; you shall not perform any mundane work. It shall be a day of shofar sounding for you" (Num. 29:1).  Although not identified by name, this is Rosh Hashanah, at this time not the head (rosh) of the year (shanah), not the new year, but a special day nonetheless.  It was not until after the Babylonian exile that Rosh Hashanah became the New Year's Day for the Hebrew calendar.  And a little later, "And on the tenth day of this seventh month, there shall be a holy convocation for you, and you shall afflict your souls. You shall not perform any work" (Num. 29:7).  This is the basis of Yom Kippur.  And a little further on we find, "And on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, there shall be a holy convocation for you; you shall not perform any mundane work, and you shall celebrate a festival to the Lord for seven days" (Num. 29:12).  And this is the festival of Sukkot, a harvest festival where we also commemorate the nomadic lifestyle of our ancestors.


So we find in this parsha the beginnings of our cycle of festivals and holy days which, like the cycle of Torah readings, is a way in which we reenact the wanderings in the desert, which were not wanderings without purpose, but natural cycles and rituals of purification and spiritual communion.  Our Parsha comes from what is called the Book of Numbers, but the message is not about numbers, not about doing things by the numbers, for the original, Hebrew name of the fourth book of the Torah is Bamidbar, In the Desert.  And so, in the many deserts that we wander today, may we find justice and redemption, spiritual purification and communion, continuity with a  living tradition and a covenant with a power greater than ourselves.


At this point, we continued with the service, and in lieu of a closing hymn, we sang the song written and originally performed by Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind--here are the lyrics:

Blowing In The Wind
Bob Dylan

How many roads must a man walk down,

before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove fly,

before she sleeps in the sand?
And how many times must a cannon ball fly,

before they're forever banned?




The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,

the answer is blowing in the wind.




How many years can a mountain exist,
before it is washed to the sea?

How many years can some people exist,
before they're allowed to be free?
And how many times can a man turn his head,
and pretend that he just doesn't see?


The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.




How many times must a man look up,

before he sees the sky?

And how many ears must one man have,

before he can hear people cry?

And how many deaths will it take till we know,
that too many people have died?


The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,

the answer is blowing in the wind.

And while I have nothing against Bob Dylan's rendition, why don't we return to Peter, Paul, and Mary to get a sense of the simple spiritual beauty of this song:

In Hebrew, the word for wind, and breath as well, ruach, also means spirit, and in this sense we can understand the prayerful intent of this song.  And with that, the service was concluded.

Sounds of Silence and Talking Donkeys

Last Friday, I was honored to be the lay leader again for Shabbat services at Congregation Adas Emuno, and I thought I'd share with you some of that experience.

First, we opened by reading together the lyrics written by Paul Simon from the Simon and Garfunkel song, Sounds of Silence.  Here they are:

The Sounds of Silence
Paul Simon


Hello darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains

Within the sound of silence




In restless dreams I walked alone

Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

That split the night
And touched the sound of silence


And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence


"Fools", said I, "You do not know

Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you"

But my words, like silent raindrops fell

And echoed

In the wells of silence




And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming

And the sign said,
"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"

And whispered in the sounds of silence

I believe that the song is familiar to most, it was a big hit back in the 60s, but half a century later, you just never know, so here's a video from YouTube that plays the song while displaying the lyrics:

Paul Simon's lyrics draws on the Biblical polemic against graven images and idol worship, but brings a modern sensibility to it, and an insistence on social justice that has its roots in the Nevi'im, the books of the prophets, who truly came from the margins of ancient society, not the centers of power such as court or Temple.  There is also an echo of the commandment to not stand idly by while another is being harmed here, in the insistence that we not remain silent in the face of injustice.  It is a reminder of the silence that greeted the Holocaust, a protest against contemporary evils, and a call to action.

We then proceeded with the service, and later, before we reached the Mi Shebeirach prayer for healing, we read together the lyrics from the Leonard Cohen song, If It Be Your Will:

If It Be Your Will
Leonard Cohen


If it be your will
That I speak no more

And my voice be still

As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will


If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you

From this broken hill

All your praises
They shall ring

If it be your will

To let me sing


If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill

Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill

On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will

To make us well




And draw us near

And bind us tight

All your children here
In their rags of light

In our rags of light

All dressed to kill

And end this night

If it be your will


This is a song about pain and suffering, about going through hell physically, and/or emotionally, and praying for healing.  Here is another YouTube video with a recording of Leonard Cohen:

After completing the healing prayer, it was time for the Dvar Torah, literally, a word of Torah, and the parsha or Torah portion for last week was Parsha Balak, Balak being the name of the king of Moab who figures prominently in the story being told in that section.  It's actually a rather unique section of the Torah, because the focus is not on the Jewish people or any individual member thereof.  After all, once we get past the preliminaries, Genesis is about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his sons, and then the other four books are about Moses mainly, and sometimes about Aaron and his sons and grandsons, and Miriam, but mainly its Moses, and the Israelites collectively. 

But in this story, the focus is on Balaam, who is a sorcerer and also a prophet of God, but not one of the Israelites.  Balaam is a Midianite.  And this is an important point, in my opinion.  What this indicates is that you do not have to be Jewish, or an Israelite, or Hebrew, to worship God, or even be a prophet. You can trace this understanding back to the story of Noah, where a basic religion and ethical code for all the peoples of the world is presented. And so there are priests, shamans, and prophets who come from other peoples, and the outlook is that each people forges their own relationship with God. It has to be done as a community, the individual is not enough, the group must take responsibility for itself and its conduct. And every community, every people, has to make its own deal with God, to create their own just society. In the Torah, the Jewish people were chosen, and chose to accept a special covenant, special responsibilities, and special hardships. But there are as many relationships with God, pathways to God, as there are communities.  This stands in contrast to later, universalist religions where there is only one path to God that all must follow, and where the emphasis is on the individual relationship to the divine, rather than on the community.

So, the story begins with King Balak of Moab, who viewed the Israelites wandering through the desert as enemies, and is not willing to give them safe passage.  So he sends messengers to the Land of Midian, to speak with Balaam, and ask Balaam to come with them to Moab and to put a curse on the Israelites. But God appears to Balaam and tells him not to go, saying, "You shall not curse the people because they are blessed!" So he refuses, but King Balak sends more prestigious messengers, offering to reward Balaam with great riches, and this time God tells Balaam he can go, but he must only speak the words that God tells him to.
  Here's an excerpt, in English translation of course, from Numbers 22:

21. In the morning Balaam arose, saddled his she-donkey and went with the Moabite dignitaries.

22. God's wrath flared because he was going, and an angel of the Lord stationed himself on the road to thwart him, and he was riding on his she-donkey, and his two servants were with him.

23. The she-donkey saw the angel of the Lord stationed on the road with his sword drawn in his hand; so the she-donkey turned aside from the road and went into a field. Balaam beat the she-donkey to get it back onto the road.

24. The angel of the Lord stood in a path of the vineyards, with a fence on this side and a fence on that side.

25. The she-donkey saw the angel of the Lord, and she was pressed against the wall. She pressed Balaam's leg against the wall, and he beat her again.

26. The angel of the Lord continued going ahead, and he stood in a narrow place, where there was no room to turn right or left.
27. The she-donkey saw the angel of the Lord, and it crouched down under Balaam. Balaam's anger flared, and he beat the she-donkey with a stick.
28. The Lord opened the mouth of the she-donkey, and she said to Balaam, "What have I done to you that you have struck me these three times?"
29. Balaam said to the she-donkey, "For you have humiliated me; if I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now."
30. The she-donkey said to Balaam, "Am I not your she-donkey on which you have ridden since you first started until now? Have I been accustomed to do this to you?" He said, "No."

31. The Lord opened Balaam's eyes, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road, with a sword drawn in his hand. He bowed and prostrated himself on his face.

32. The angel of the Lord said to him, "Why have you beaten your she-donkey these three times? Behold, I have came out to thwart you, for the one embarking on the journey has hastened against me.

33. When the she-donkey saw me, it turned aside these three times. Had she not turned aside before me, now also I would also have killed you and spared her [the she-donkey]."

34. Balaam said to the angel of the Lord, "I have sinned, for I did not know that you were standing on the road before me. Now, if it displeases you, I will return."

35. The angel of the Lord said to Balaam, "Go with these men, but the word I will speak to you-that you shall speak." So Balaam went with Balak's dignitaries.

Now, this too is quite unusual.  Where else in the Hebrew Bible do we find a talking animal?  That's a motif that comes up commonly in myths, folktales, and nowadays in cartoons (can you imagine Eddie Murphy as the donkey?).  And the angel as well is much more conversational and personal than the typical supernatural messengers that appear in the sacred text.  All in all, the story of a talking donkey is a comedy, and a bit of a farce, and it may well be that this was a folktale that originated among the Midianites or Moabites, and not the Israelites, and then later became incorporated into the Torah.  It certainly has elements that indicate it is more like oral tradition than written scripture.  For that alone, I think this is a wonderful section of the Five Books of Moses.

After this encounter, Balaam arrives in Moab, and tells Balak to build seven altars, and offer sacrifices to God, which he does. And then Balaam blesses instead of curses the Israelites, saying, "How can I curse whom God has not cursed, and how can I invoke wrath if the Lord has not been angered?" King Balak is angry, takes Balaam to a second location, builds altars and offers sacrifices, and again Balaam has no choice but to bless the Jewish people. King Balak then tries a third location, with the same result. This illustrates a difference in mode of thinking, with the nonliterate, oral mindset of Balak, who thinks in concrete terms, and imagines the divine to be local, immanent, tied to a particular place.  In contrast, the story shows that for the monotheism of the Israelites, God is omnipresent (a similar theme is found in the book of Jonah, where it is shown that it is impossible to run away and escape from God).  This conception requires an abstract mode of thought that is all but impossible without literacy, and the religion of Moses is quite clearly a religion based on the sacred text received at Mount Sinai, a religion rooted in the written word.

So, Balaam makes with a blessing, the beginning of which is part of Jewish liturgy, but which then goes into a brutal, agonistic mode (this from Numbers 24):

5. How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel!
6. They extend like streams, like gardens by the river, like aloes which the Lord planted, like cedars by the water. 

7. Water will flow from his wells, and his seed shall have abundant water; his king shall be raised over Agag, and his kingship exalted.

8. God, Who has brought them out of Egypt with the strength of His loftiness He shall consume the nations which are his adversaries, bare their bones and dip His arrows [into their blood].

9. He crouches and lies like a lion and like a lioness; who will dare rouse him? Those who bless you shall be blessed, and those who curse you shall be cursed.

And then Balaam concludes with a prophecy about the end days and redemption, when the evil of Assyria, Esau, and the Amalek will be defeated. This is the first apocalyptic vision of armageddon that appears in the Bible.  The word armageddon comes from the Hebrew Har Megiddo, Har meaning mountain, so it literally is a geographical location, Mount Megiddo.  But for those interested in the so-called end days, this is where it all begins.

The parsha concludes with a second story, where the enemies of the Israelites try a new tactic, getting the Israelites to sin and thereby lose God's favor, and they do so by sending in Moabite and Midianite women to seduce the men.  God's anger at this immorality is reflected in the outbreak of disease in the Israelite camp, but we perhaps can understand it in contemporary terms as an outbreak of STDs, and it might even be that this was an early form of biological warfare (perhaps comparable to the early settlers in the New World giving the Native Americans diseased blankets?).  The response is quite extreme in this story, as God tells Moses to execute the guilty ones.  But what happens is that one of the leaders of the Israelites is cavorting in public with a Midianite princess, until Pinchas, the grandson of Aaron and therefore a priest, kills them both with his spear. Not only is this violent, but also phallic, as the way, I believe, the story is understood is that the couple are caught in the act, speared together in a manner that Sigmund Freud would certainly have much to say about.  It's brutal, but again these are ancient times, and the Israelites were not that much more advanced over their neighbors back then, it was a constant struggle according to the stories in the Bible.  But in this instance, the ritual sacrifice ends the plague, which perhaps can be understood as the threat of execution put the fear of God into the men, and put an end to the promiscuous behavior that spread the disease.

The point, I believe, is not to sanitize these stories, but to understand them, not necessarily taking them literally, but as a reflection of a struggle to emerge out of the oral, tribal, agonistic mode of life, and evolve into something new, and better, a people governed by law and justice, ethics and rationality. It was a long and difficult struggle, but the Israelites were engaged in it long before others were.  And we understood that you don't make progress by forgetting your history, and editing out all of your mistakes and failures and wrongdoings, but by remembering them, and striving not to repeat them, and to make things better.


The progress can be seen in the concluding lines of the Haftarah accompanying this Torah portion, taken from the Prophet Micah (6: 7-8), which comes after another apocalyptic vision:

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you, only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

For me, those this sums up better than anything what the Torah tries to teach us, what is the basis of our religion.

The service then proceeded as usual, but before the Mourner's Kaddish, I read a poem by Solomon ben Judah Gabirol, one of the Hebrew Poets of Medieval Spain, translated into English by the 19th century Jewish American poet, Emma Lazarus:

Almighty! what is man?

But flesh and blood.

Like shadows flee his days,

He marks not how they vanish from his gaze,
Suddenly, he must die-
He droppeth. stunned, into nonentity.

Almighty! what is man?

A body frail and weak.

Full of deceit and lies,

Of vile hypocrisies.
Now like a flower blowing,

Now scorched by sunbeams glowing.

And wilt thou of his trespasses inquire?

How may he ever bear
Thine anger just, thy vengeance dire?
Punish him not, but spare,

For he is void of power and strength!




Almighty! what is man?
By filthy lust possessed,

Whirled in a round of lies,

Fond frenzy swells his breast.

The pure man sinks in mire and slime,

The noble shrinketh not from crime,

Wilt thou resent on him the charms of sin?

Like fading grass,

So shall he pass.
Like chaff that blows
Where the wind goes.

Then spare him, be thou merciful, O King,

Upon the dreaded day of reckoning!




Almighty! what is man?

The haughty son of time

Drinks deep of sin,

And feeds on crime

Seething like, waves that roll,

Hot as a glowing coal.

And wilt thou punish him for sins inborn?

Lost and forlorn,

Then like the weakling he must fall,

Who some great hero strives withal.

Oh, spare him, therefore! let him win

Grace for his sin!


Almighty! what is man?

Spotted in guilty wise,

A stranger unto faith,

Whose tongue is stained with lies,

And shalt thou count his sins so is he lost,

Uprooted by thy breath.
Like to a stream by tempest tossed.

His life falls from him like a cloak,

He passes into nothingness, like smoke.

Then spare him, punish not, be kind, I pray,

To him who dwelleth in the dust, an image wrought in clay!




Almighty! what is man?

A withered bough!
When he is awestruck by approaching doom.

Like a dried blade of grass, so weak, so low

The pleasure of his life is changed to gloom.

He crumbles like a garment spoiled with moth;
According to his sins wilt thou be wroth?

He melts like wax before the candle s breath,

Yea, like thin water, so he vanisheth,

Oh, spare him therefore, for thy gracious name,

And be not too severe upon his shame!


Almighty! what is man?

A faded leaf!

If thou dost weigh him in the balance lo!

He disappears a breath that thou dost blow.

His heart is ever filled
With lust of lies unstilled.

Wilt bear in mind his crime
Unto all time?

He fades away like clouds sun-kissed,

Dissolves like mist.

Then spare him! let him love and mercy win,

According to thy grace, and not according to his sin!

The medieval mentality is also different from our own, less comforting and gentle, but it too is part of our long history, a tradition that encompasses the ancient and medieval as well as the modern and contemporary, a tradition of balance and harmony, orality and literacy, and a tradition of freedom, justice, and memory.

Edmund Carpenter 1922-2011

The passing of Edmund Carpenter on July 2nd is a loss for the field of media ecology, for anthropology, and for scholarship is general.  Ted Carpenter's contributions were not always well acknowledged, but certainly of great significance to us all.

It is especially sad that he passed away during the Marshall McLuhan Centenary, as he was McLuhan's closest collaborator and greatest influence during the years that McLuhan formulated his most seminal work that led to the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.   As McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto from the late 40s to the late 50s, Carpenter might well be considered an important member of what has been termed the Toronto School, but unlike McLuhan, he was not a Canadian, but rather was born in Rochester, New York (the site of the 5th annual MEA meeting), lived for many years in California, and most recently resided in New York City and the Hamptons out on Long Island.

Carpenter worked with McLuhan in Toronto as part of the interdisciplinary Explorations group, obtaining a grant from the Ford Foundation in 1952 that, among other things, funded the creation of a journal called Explorations (after which the MEA's Explorations in Media Ecology was named), which Carpenter edited.  This was the moment when media ecology as a unified field, rather than as separate strands of intellectual inquiry, first coalesced.  Although only 9 issues were published, Explorations had a significant impact on a select and fortunate network of intellectuals during the 1950s, creating in its readership the beginnings of a community and invisible college of what we would call media ecologists.

An anthology consisting of selected articles from Explorations was published in 1960, under the title of Explorations in Communication, edited by Carpenter and McLuhan.  It is sadly out of print, but truly a major work in the media ecology literature.  Christine Nystrom once remarked to me that most of the main ideas that made McLuhan famous in the 1960s can be found there.  Certainly, the "Acoustic Space" chapter co-authored by Carpenter and McLuhan, represents one of the key insights about sensory biases as they relate to media, and Carpenter's piece, "The New Languages," was frequently reprinted, and enormously influential and in the field of communication, especially mass communication, and what would become known as media studies; also, it is a pioneering work in what would become known as media literacy. 

As an anthropologist, Carpenter played a role in the adoption of the anthropological concept of culture into McLuhan's work, as opposed to the more literary view of the popular arts that can be seen in McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride.  And especially, Carpenter was interested in language, and the differences between different languages, in vocabulary, grammar, and worldview.  He was a proponent of what is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, otherwise referred to as linguistic relativism, that languages play a central role in thought, perception, and culture, a view that was attacked and repressed by Chomsky and his followers, and is only recently being retrieved and resurrected.  And Carpenter identified the anthropologist Dorothy Lee as a major influence on himself and McLuhan, although the influence on McLuhan may have been indirectly, through Carpenter. 

Lee is the only author to contribute more than one piece to Explorations in Communication, aside from McLuhan and Carpenter themselves, and while she did not publish extensively otherwise, and has been largely forgotten outside of media ecology circles, she was known as a stronger advocate of linguistic relativism than even Benjamin Lee Whorf, so that some feel it only appropriate to refer to the Sapir-Whorf-Lee Hypothesis.  Her position is articulated in "Linguistic Reflection of Wintu Thought," but it is in the chapter entitled, "Lineal and Non-Lineal Codifications of Reality" that Lee's contribution becomes abundantly clear, as she provides the basis for the key insight about nonlinearity which McLuhan associated with electronic media.  Both articles were also included in her own book, Freedom and Culture, another important work in the media ecology intellectual tradition that is sadly out of print; I know from correspondence with Walter Ong that he thought very highly of that book, which begins to bridge the gap between linguistic anthropology and orality-literacy studies.

Explorations in Communication also included 4 contributions by McLuhan, "Classroom without Walls," "The Effect of the Printed Book on Language in the 16th Century," "Media Log," and "Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath," and some of the other chapters are "Tactile Communication" by Lawrence Frank, "Time and Tense in Spanish Epic Poetry" by Stephen Gilman, "Buddhist Symbolism" by Daisetz Suzuki, "The Language of Poetry" by Northrup Frye, "Kinesics and Communication" by Ray Bridwhistell, "Space Conception in Prehistoric Art" by Sigfried Giedion, "The Moving Eye" by Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, "Pure Color" by Fernand Léger, "The Oral and Written Traditions" by David Riesman, "Reading and Writing" by H. J. Chaytor, "Channel Cat in the Middle Distance" by Jean Shepherd, "Joyce's Wake" by W. R. Rodgers, and "Communications Revolution" by Gilbert Seldes.  Truly fertile soil for McLuhan's media ecology.

Carpenter, along with Harold Innis, also helped to shift McLuhan's attention towards the concept of media, and Carpenter himself was a pioneer in using the media, having his own radio and television program for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, so in this as well he set an example for McLuhan to follow (and of course vastly exceed).  And working with and in different media led him to think about their differences, to argue that each medium is a language with its own grammar and worldview, thereby broadening the Sapir-Whorf-Lee Hypothesis (Louis Forsdale later suggested that McLuhan's perspective on media was an extension of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).  Carpenter also stated that languages are media, an argument that many traditionalists in communication had trouble with, but that makes perfect sense from a media ecology approach.

Carpenter is considered a pioneer in visual anthropology, as Harald Prins, John Bishop, and Michael Wesch have made clear, and the work he did founding and leading an interdisciplinary program in Anthropology and Art at San Fernando Valley State College (today known as California State University-Northridge) from 1959-1967 was simply amazing, as can be seen in the documentary, Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! By Bishop and Prins.  We were fortunate to have been treated to a preview screening of the film at the 4th annual MEA meeting at Hofstra University on Long Island, and I've used it many times in classes.  It is incredibly rich in ideas about language, art, culture, and media, and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in media ecology. 

Unlike most documentaries of that sort, this one is quite affordable, only $24.95 direct from the filmmaker, via Media-Generation.  Here's a preview:



McLuhan brought Carpenter with him to Fordham University when McLuhan was given the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities during the 1967-1968 school year, and Carpenter had an important impact on what might be called the New York School of media ecology (in later years, he would teach courses at various schools in the metropolitan area, including New York University, the New School, and Adelphi University).  He also held the Carnegie Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, and had a position at the University of Papua, New Guinea, where he conducted anthropological research that was captured on film, and included in the Bishop and Prins documentary. 

Carpenter was condemned by his colleagues for experimenting on the tribal peoples that he visited in Papua, capturing their first reactions to media such as photographs, sound recording, radio, and film.  He himself seemed ambivalent about the fact that he had interfered with these cultures, but in the film you can see them using a steel, mass produced razor blade to perform the ritual scarification that figured in their rites of passage, so they were not exactly pristine.  You can also see them attending Roman Catholic mass, and the church is well known for its effort to change tribal cultures, so again, they were not free from foreign influences, and some tribesmen also wore articles of "civilized" clothing.  Moreover, the New Guinea government was mounting efforts to reach the tribal populations through education, exposing them to movies, radio, and literacy. 

Here's another excerpt from the Bishop and Prins documentary:




And of course the very presence of an anthropologist taking notes changes things, as the documentary also shows us, by way of a tribe member who had "invented" his own form of "writing" which just amounted to making marks on paper, but this already deviates from what Ong termed primary orality, where the members of the culture do not even know of writing.  It was only a matter of time before the tribe members were introduced to these other media, an event that would otherwise occur without anyone observing and analyzing, so there is ample justification for what Carpenter did.

Carpenter's conclusions are quite clear, and essential for the field of media ecology:  that media swallow cultures rather than the other way around, that culture does not have a significant effect on the way that individuals use or relate to different media, but that media have significant effects on cultures, on thought, feeling, worldview, and ways of life.

The title of the Biship and Prins documentary is taken from the title of Carpenter's most important and popular book in media ecology, Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me, published in 1972. 

The title is an allusion to Don Quixote, and his encounter with the windmill, and the book was Carpenter's follow-up to McLuhan's Understanding Media, which Carpenter stated that he made unacknowledged contributions to. Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me begins with the words,


"Electricity has made angels of us all. Not angels in the Sunday school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit, freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere. The moment we pick up a phone, we’re nowhere in space—everywhere in spirit.  That is Saint Augustine’s definition of God: a being whose center is everywhere, whose borders are nowhere." 

This is another book that is sadly out of print, but available electronically in various ways, including in hypertextual format online, courtesy of Mike Wesch, at .   This work was preceded by They Became What They Beheld in 1970, with Ken Heyman given co-authorship credit having done for this book what Quentin Fiore did for McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, as an experimental, visually oriented publication.  Other major works by Carpenter include Eskimo (1959), Eskimo Realities (1973), Patterns That Connect (completing the work of anthropologist Carl Schuster, in 1996), and Two Essays: Chief and Greed (2005).

Carpenter's relationship with McLuhan after the Fordham year became somewhat strained, which Carpenter attributed in part to McLuhan's illness, and the after effects of the major brain surgery he had that year, and this is reflected in the essay that he wrote, "Remembering Explorations," published in the spring 1992 issues of Canadian Notes and Queries, and in abridged form as an appendix in Donald Theall's 2001 book, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan.  But he also was quite generous in taking care of McLuhan in the Hamptons after McLuhan had his debilitating stroke.

I've heard that Carlos Castaneda of New Age fame was one of Carpenter's students, and he also was a mentor to one of McLuhan's daughters, Teri, who published a number of books about Native Americans as T.C. McLuhan.  I've also heard that he was quite the ladies' man in his time, which is perhaps reflected in the fact that he was twice divorced.  

But it seems he found his soul mate in Adelaide DeMenil, who was also very much his collaborator, doing the camerawork in New Guinea, working with him on many research projects (I recall him mentioning about frequently visiting a dig in Siberia near the arctic circle, where some of the oldest human remains were found), and in curating museum exhibits.

We were fortunate indeed to have Ted Carpenter as a featured speaker at the MEA's 6th Annual Meeting held at Fordham, and it was a great honor to meet him, and Adelaide, and then to be able to publish his talk about McLuhan, simply entitled "Marshall," in Explorations in Media Ecology (5:3, 2006).  That brief essay is an altogether brilliant bit of writing.

Ted Carpenter was truly one of the great ones, in media ecology, and in scholarship and the arts in general, and he will most certainly be missed, and remembered.

Green Green Lantern

So, since I wrote about the recent X-Men prequel in my last post, The Magneto Question, I might as well say a few words about the recent Green Lantern movie in this next one.

First, let me acknowledge that yes, the critics are right, the movie's plot is a bit of a mess, looks like five different writers worked on it, and the seams are showing, there are logical inconsistencies, non sequiturs, lapses and lacunas, etc., etc.  

But for all that, I enjoyed it, it was visually appealing, not artsy but attractive, and another nice use of 3D technology that doesn't hit you over the head with it.  Overall, it resembled less the other super heroes movies of recent years, and more the Star Wars films in its look and sensibility.  And it was exciting, despite the problems with the plot.

You can get some sense of the look of the film from the trailer (but of course it really needs to be seen on the big screen):

Let me add that, in my opinion, the Green Lantern comics superhero is a great subject for a major motion picture, and I was thinking that way for a long time now, going back to the first great Superman movies of 1978 and 1983 that starred Christopher Reeve.

Not that they were the perfect comic book adaptations, but they were entertaining films that capitalized on the new interest in science fiction and special effects that followed the introduction of Star Wars in 1977.  There were two more Superman films made in 1983 and 1987, neither very good, as well as a Supergirl movie in 1984, also not particularly memorable, before the more recent Superman Returns in 2006.  Then there were the two Batman movies with Michael Keaton in 1989 and 1992, with further sequels starring Val Kilmer in 1995, and George Clooney in 1997, before the series was rebooted with Batman Begins in 2005 and The Dark Knight in 2008, with Christian Bale in the lead role.

If you're wondering why I'm not mentioning Spider-Man or some of the other superheros, it's because I'm focusing on the the DC line of comics in this post, and the superheroes associated with them, who appear in Warner Bros. movies because DC is owned by TimeWarner.  And admittedly, Batman is the second most popular DC character after Superman, but Green Lantern is much closer to Superman in sensibility, as a truly superpowered hero, albeit one whose powers are derived from a ring that does or creates whatever the user wants it to, limited only by the individual's will power.  

The idea of will power was a powerful one in the early 20th century, albeit one with some problematic associations due to Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.  But there was a great deal of talk at that time about will power, much as we talk today about how you can do anything if you put your mind to it, and how you define your own reality (aka The Secret).  Where there's a will, there's a way, we used to say.  It fit in well with the emphasis on individualism that had become the dominant ideology in the west, particularly in conjunction with the rise of literacy and print culture, before it was eroded by the electronic media.

But the point I was getting at is that Green Lantern was up there with Superman as one of the DC Universe's "big guns" so to speak (I believe that metaphor comes from World War Two), and the association between the two can be heard in one of the top hits of the sixties, Donovan's Sunshine Superman:

And here are the lyrics:

Sunshine came softly through my a-window today
Could've tripped out easy a-but I've a-changed my ways
It'll take time, I know it but in a while
You're gonna be mine, I know it, we'll do it in style
'Cause I made my mind up you're going to be mine


I'll tell you right now
Any trick in the book now, baby, all that I can find
Everybody's hustlin' just to have a little scene
When I say we'll be cool I think that you know what I mean
We stood on a beach at sunset, do you remember when?
I know a beach where, baby, a-it never ends
When you've made your mind up forever to be mine


Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm
I'll pick up your hand and slowly blow your little mind
'Cause I made my mind up you're going to be mine
I'll tell you right now
Any trick in the book now, baby, all that I can find


Superman or Green Lantern ain't got a-nothin' on me
I can make like a turtle and dive for your pearls in the sea, yeah!
A you-you-you can just sit there a-thinking on your velvet throne
'bout all the rainbows a-you can a-have for your own
When you've made your mind up forever to be mine
I'll pick up your hand and slowly blow your little mind
When you've made your mind up forever to be mine


I'll pick up your hand
I'll pick up your hand

Okay, so it's just a little passing reference, but in those days, any kind of reference was very rare indeed.  Not that it's all that common today.  

But the point I was getting at is that Green Lantern is an excellent subject for a movie, and one that was long overdue.  In a way, maybe, too long overdue.  If they had gone for Green Lantern back in the eighties, the story would have been much simpler, as he was a Silver Age superhero, perhaps the first who was truly a space age hero, a test pilot with the right stuff out of the mold of Chuck Yeager, a bit of a swinging bachelor, not a womanizer like Star Trek's Captain Kirk though, as he had a girlfriend, Carol Ferris, who was more independent-minded back then than the stand-by-your-man version in the film.

The early take on Green Lantern was that he was a space cop assigned to our space sector, a sheriff mostly on his own, with occasional interaction with the Guardians of the Galaxy on the planet Oa, and his fellow Green Lanterns.  The movie has one thread along those lines, with Hal Jordan's origin story, and his earthly nemesis, Hector Hammond with the supersized skull.

But in the past few decades, more of the Green Lantern back story has been filled in, making him less self-confident before he gains the ring, more human and fallible, while making his alien enemy Sinestro, the renegade Green Lantern into an early mentor, and putting more emphasis on his working with the Green Lantern Corps off planet, and with the Guardians on Oa.  These other threads made for a movie on a much grander scale than it would otherwise have been, but also for a more confusing end product, as the various elements really needed to be dealt with one at a time to create a coherent storyline.

I do understand what happened.  There are all these cool items in the Green Lantern mythos, the Green Lantern Corps made up of aliens from every part of the universe, 3600 strong, one for each sector (how they arrived at these divisions is never explained, but it is a nice round and mystical number, a multiple of 9 and therefore of 3, and 12 for that matter).  There's the idea of a Green Lantern boot camp (part of a shift in presenting the Corps more like a military force as opposed to police or peace officers) run by a tough, pig-like alien.  There's the alien Sinestro (love those unsubtle sixties names for villains) who is thought to be the greatest of the Green Lanterns before Hal Jordan arrives, but who turns out to be a control-freak, we-must-have-order Hitler type, and is drummed out of the Corps, gains a yellow ring, and becomes a renegade supervillain.  There's the planet Oa where the central green lantern battery resides, along with the Guardians of the Galaxy who formed and powered the Green Lantern Corps, and give them their orders.  There's Parallax, the fear entity, fear being the opposing force to will power, and whose color is appropriately enough, yellow (in the Silver Age comics, Green Lantern's weakness was that his ring was powerless against anything colored yellow).

And while the film deviated from the comics in the way some of these elements were dealt with, it did try to cram them all in, along with the human villain Hector Hammond, and the Green Lantern origin story.  Too much, too much.

Sure, it was great to see the alien Lanterns, and Oa, and the Guardians, and outer space action, that was the real beauty of the film.  So why not stick with those elements?  Because, for some reason, the producers of this, and most superhero movies, feel obliged to begin with the hero's origin story.  Now, if you spoke to anyone who knows anything about superhero narratives, I am confident they would tell you that almost all origin stories are the least interesting aspect of the hero, and the whole point typically has been to get past them as quickly as possible, and into the real action.  Before he gets the ring, Hal Jordan is ordinary, uninteresting, and for the most part, unsympathetic (apart from the tragedy of witnessing his father's death as a child, but there was no room for any real psychological subtlety in the film).

Let me reiterate here.  Origins are boring!

Why bore us with a Green Lantern, for example, who is so very, well green?  That's what I meant here by titling this post Green Green Lantern, with apologies to my friend Paul Levinson, whose most recent book is New New Media.  Green Green Lantern is bumbling, insecure, foolish, and lacking in serious purpose.  Now, I know this is supposed to humanize the character, make him easier to identify with, and make the movie more broadly appealing.  But these are modern-day myths and romances, and they require something more from the narrative.  Like the Homeric epics, we need to be brought in medias res, into the midst of things, into the action, that's what works best.  

If you feel that an origin is absolutely necessary, put it in as a brief flashback later on in the film.  Want an example?  How about the first X-Men film?  And the second?  And the third?  Only after two sequels are we getting to the origins in two (so far) prequels.  And hey, look at Star Wars, and consider the difference in reception between the first trilogy, and the second three prequels.  For that matter, look at Star Trek too, and the failure of the last television series, Enterprise, another prequel.  Origins are boring, too much green, in between (and all around).  And especially for DC's heroes, who are more iconic, mythic, less rounded than Marvel's heroes with hang ups.

Why does Green Lantern have to be son green?  That's my question, but I suppose I should note that green was a popular color for comics (initially, they only had four to work with), and DC has a hero called Green Arrow as well as Green Lantern.  In the Green Lantern comics most recently, it's explained that green is the color of will power (why, I don't know).   But there are other connotations.  Green is the color of money, at least in the United States, where we have our greenbacks (the color of money is also, typically, the color of pool tables).  Green in recent years is the color of environmentalism, a better fit for the Green Arrow character (a Robin Hood-like archer) than Green Lantern.

Green is also the color of Islam, and I wonder what the reception and interpretation of the character is over in the middle east?  Note that Green Lantern's secret identity is Hal Jordan, the connection no doubt unintentional.  Of course there are other human Green Lanterns, the golden age Green Lantern (whose power was magical in nature rather than scientific, and whose weakness was wood rather than yellow) is Alan Scott, while the other human Green Lanterns in the GL Corps are Guy Gardner, John Stewart (the Green Lantern who is black, that is, African American), and Kyle Rayner (the youthful Green Lantern).  And with all of those other alien Lanterns, diversity is very much a part of the contemporary Green Lantern narrative.

Speaking of religion, there is a religious element to the oath that Green Lanterns take as they charge their rings.  It goes like this:

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil's might,
Beware my power... Green Lantern's light!

Yeah, I know, the rhyme is a bit hokey, but it was appealing when I was a kid, and the Silver Age heroes of the sixties were primarily meant to appeal to young readers.  The golden age Green Lantern had a different oath:

...and I shall shed my light over dark evil.
For the dark things cannot stand the light,
The light of the Green Lantern!

Now, that sounds downright biblical!  No rhyme there, but it sounds like Hebrew poetry, or rather the English translation of Hebrew poetry, where parallel structure rather than rhyming is used, and lines often begin with "and" (like the prayer that goes, "And you shall love the Lord your God..." which comes from Deuteronomy).

Notice that in both versions of the oath, the operative element is light, not being green.   When it comes to being green, well, I think you know who put it best:

Of course, green is also the color of envy and jealousy, the green-eyed monster, and sickness as well, and there are other negative connotations...

But maybe Leonard Cohen put it best:

In other words, what would be best is less green, more lantern!