"Brit-Am Now"-264
July 3, 2003
Contents:
1. Lord Byron: On Jordan's Banks
2. Theodor Opatowski : "10 tribes" criteria
3. Betty Rhodes: Here's to the crazy ones
4. CLAUDIA HOLMER: quote
5. Interesting Web-site on Hezekiah
6. The Celt Belt in the USA
7. Defending the Bible
1. Lord Byron: On Jordan's Banks
On Jordan's Banks
by George Gordon, Lord Byron
(From Hebrew Melodies - 1815)
1
On Jordans banks the Arabs camels stray,
On Sion's hill the false one's votaries pray,
The Baal-adorer bows on Sinai's steep
Yet there, even there, Oh God! thy thunders sleep.
2
There where thy finger scorch'd the tablet stone.
There where thy Shadow to thy people shone!
Thy Glory shrouded in its garb of fire:
Thyself none living see and not expire!
3
Oh! in the lightning, let thy glance appear!
Sweep from his shiver'd hand the oppressor's spear:
How long by tyrants shall thy land be trod!
How long thy temple worshipless! Oh God?
2. Theodor Opatowski : "10 tribes" criteria
> >2. The Doing of Justice Implying Social Empathy and Responsibility.
Further to my previous message on the above subject, the reason why I called
it 'wooly' is because everybody's idea of what is justice differs,
especially in our day and age. As for 'social empathy and responsibility' -
words fail me. A criteria, to be of any use, must be clearly defined and
testable.
The true criteria is Torah. It is the Torah definition of the above
concepts that matters, all other interpretations are as many as the number
of people involved. It is a lot deeper than that English law has its
origins in 'Hebraic' law. They implement the Torah in many ways to this
day. Here are a few more examples.
The English law court system consists of magistrates courts of three where a
magistrate is (or can be) accompanied by two 'lay' assessors, district
courts, Area and Travelling Assises, the Central Courts, Courts of Appeal
and finally, the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. You will
find a close similarity with the Torah court system right up to the
Sanhedrin.
In the army, thre is the use of bugles to call various activities, not only
in war and there is the talk given by officers to men before battle, which
almost always used to invoke the help of HaShem.
There is a story about a vote that was taken in a New England (USA) small
town where everyone voted on everything. The subject is not important but
when the vote came to be taken there was one vote against. The speaker was
surprised because the person who had voted against was known to be a strong
supporter of the proposal. When asked about it he replied, "well someone
has to be against it!"
Why? It is an interesting fact that if, in a case that involves the death
penalty, all the Sanhedrin are unanimous about his guilt, the defendant goes
free!
Some might say that it was only to assert his independence. And that is a
major characteristic of the Israelite and of the English male. As it says
in 'Rule Britania', "Britains never never never will be slaves". As is
known in Britain, one cannot serve two masters. If one is the servant of
G-d one cannot be the servant of any earthly person. That is why the
farmer is king in the countryside and in the towns the British are known as
"a nation of shopkeepers" (and small-business men). It is the closest to
independence from others that they can get. You do not find this
determined independence in all nations.
And those who wish to enslave others know it. I recently came across a
diatribe against the Jews (they claim not to be anti-semitic) but what is
interesting is that the English were considered only slightly less bad than
the Jews! It takes our enemies to recognize us.
Theodor Opatowski
3. Betty Rhodes: Here's to the crazy ones
Here's to the Crazy Ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
{Some} see them as the crazy ones, {some} see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world, are the ones who do.
Written by Apple Computer people
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time
to pause and reflect." ~~~~~Mark Twain
4. CLAUDIA HOLMER: quote
Hi Yair, I just saw this quote on another web site. Maybe you`ve
seen it. ~Claudia~ "The strongest human instinct is to impart
information, the second strongest is to resist it." Kenneth Grahame
5. DNA Reminder
A recent news item stated:
<<The article states that British and Danish molecular biologists found
that 50% of Vikings came from the Middle East. Since this could not
be right, they reexamined the evidence and found that certain areas
of the genetic material, which is particularly important for the
determination of the origin of a person were damaged, giving wrong
results. >>
http://www.netzeitung.de/servlets/page?section=984&item=226764
In other words the results were not politically and ideologically "correct"
and therefore they had to be
"re-examined".
5. Interesting Web-site on Hezekiah
http://www.biblehistory.net/Chap23.htm
6. The Celt Belt in the USA
From RGriff9243@aol.com
Subject: The Celt Belt
washingtonpost.com
The Celt Belt
Folk Festival Links Scotland, Appalachia By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2003; Page C01
[Extracts Only]:
Make no mistake about it. The Scotland and Appalachia sections of the
Folklife Festival on the Mall are not just showcases of rural cutesy-quaint
for the cultural voyeurs of the urbanized 21st century. They are direct
pipelines into a major wellspring of the American character.
If the New England Pilgrims, Virginia Cavaliers and Pennsylvania Quakers
shaped our national institutions, argues historian David Hackett Fischer of
Brandeis University, it was the Scotch-Irish of Scotland and northern
Ireland who most defined our culture and who define it still.
They arrived later than the others and settled in the mountain back-country
of pre-Revolutionary America (richer, earlier settlers held the fertile
lowlands), and carved out a hard scrabble existence that for all its
hardship and terrors was as proud as it was independent. There were a lot
of them. Puritan immigrants numbered about 21,000, Fischer says. The
Scotch-Irish numbered 275,000. Their heirs have fought our wars, written
our music, shaped our churches and otherwise most defined our essence as a
people for the past 200 years, Fischer says.
Shouldn't we maybe say thank you?
Down on the Mall, the festival participants aren't looking for thank-yous.
They would probably be puzzled by them if not embarrassed. As much pride as
they have as individuals, the Scotch-Irish have never chosen to leverage
their collective ethnicity into political power, unless you count the
election of Andrew Jackson as president -- their first great political hurrah.
Asked, for example, if the Appalachian foodstuffs she was hawking on the
Mall were produced by local agricultural cooperatives, Phyllis Deal of
Clintwood, down in Virginia's mountainous southwestern toe, said, "No,
there's a traditional resistance to cooperatives in our area. We're just
not very cooperative."
In his landmark 1989 study "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in
America," Fischer traces the fractious independence of the Appalachian
Scotch-Irish to the centuries of warfare along the borderlands of northern
Ireland and southern Scotland from which Appalachian settlers emigrated in
the mid-1700s. It was, apparently, a sort of 18th-century Hibernian Middle
East: The fighting never stopped.
Since they were subject to violence and raids from both warring factions,
Fischer says, the Scotch-Irish developed a distrust of all governments and
most institutions other then their own family or clan. Loyalty to clan
twinned with suspicion of strangers and with a cultural conservatism that
clung to traditional beliefs and folkways. It also produced, Fischer says,
an evangelical passion in religion that emphasized one's powerlessness to
shape the future. And a land-hunger that spread them across the continent.
"Albion's Seed" argues persuasively that the instability of that ancestral
homeland shaped an Appalachian culture that lent its distinctive character
to everything from marriage customs and costumes to speech patterns, gender
roles and food.
Somewhere in the middle of all that comes music, the most magical festival
link between the musicians visiting from Scotland and their New World heirs.
Jean Haskell, one of the coordinators of the festival's Appalachian program
and a former teacher in the Appalachian Studies program at East Tennessee
State University in Johnson City, said the grandparents and
great-grandparents of today's Appalachian musicians "carried this cultural
heritage almost unconsciously. . . . They'd know a ballad they'd learned
from their parents just as 'a really old-timey song.' But these kids today
grow up in that same tradition, find themselves playing bluegrass and get
interested in the roots of the music. Next thing you know they become
neo-revivalists."
J.P. Mathis, banjo player with the East Tennessee State University
Bluegrass Band, said Appalachian musicians and musicians from Scotland
playing together often discover they know the same tune stock, "though
often the verses are different."
Historian Fischer says the ballads were no more nor less than the mythic
evocation of a violent existence -- the only one most of the Scotch-Irish
knew before they arrived in America. Unlike the Puritans, Quakers and
Cavaliers -- their fellow English-speaking immigrants -- the Scotch-Irish
came not for political or religious reasons but for economic ones, he says.
The earlier arrivals, considering them dangerous rabble, shunted them right
through the existing Colonies to what was then the backcountry frontier.
Having been landless for the most part in the old country, the Scotch-Irish
arrived as opportunists, and even while maintaining their colonization of
Appalachia they would soon send their sons and daughters westward to settle
the rest of the continent. They were warrior men and strong working women,
some as famous as Patrick Henry, George Patton and John C. Calhoun, others
as literate as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, still others as infamous as
Clyde Barrow and Jesse James, or as flamboyant as actress Tallulah Bankhead.
In music their mournful ballads would give rise not only to bluegrass music
and Texas swing, but to the somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs of the
contemporary country and western playlist.
7. Defending the Bible
A lot of people who believe in the Bible have never heard of Brit-Am. Even
after having the concepts of Brit-Am patiently explained to them they may
not accept them. Brit-Am is not for everybody, not yet. Just because
somebody does not believe in Brit-Am it does not mean that they reject Brit-Am.
On the other hand,
These days a lot of people refuse to accept the Bible for all kinds of
reasons. Many of these people are good persons but misguided.
Brit-Am Proofs happen to be a good weapon to bring people to believe in the
Bible. Brit-Am proves Biblical prophecies and Brit-Am writings often add
historical background to Biblical events and opinions. Even if the Brit-Am
claims are rejected this can lead to an intensified interest in what the
Bible does say. And if the argument fails for whatever reason, Brit-Am
can absorb the blame rather than the Bible.
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