alexander de grote & yehosjoea hanatsri also known

as 'hamasjiach' ~
oftewel:
'de ene benadering
& de andere'


This
"hidden transcript,"
preserved before our eyes in the Talmud,
provides an elegant demonstration of the argument that
"what may look from above like the extraction of a required performance can easily look from below like the artful manipulation of deference and flattery to achieve its own ends."
A neat comparison is afforded by the injunction of an African American to his grandson in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:
"I want you to overcome 'em with yesses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit
or bust wide open ...
Learn it to the young 'uns."
If flattery fails,
says Rabbi Hiyya,
then defeat them by bribing
them. And the text concludes:
"They say:
That is how Rabbi Yonathan behaved.
When he saw a powerful personage come into his city, he used to send him expensive things.
What did he think? If he comes to judge an orphan or a widow,
we will find him propitious towardss them"
(Yerushalmi Shabbat 1:3; 3c).

If Esau
was the legendary ancestor of Rome,
Jacob, his brother, was the exemplary rabbinic male.
It is important to emphasize to what extent Jacob already in the Bible is a virtual "trickster,"
that figure of folklore all over the world who "represent{s} the weak, whose wit can at times achieve ambiguous victories against the power of the strong."
Twice in his life, as described in the Bible, Jacob, the weak emblem of Israel, achieved victory,
respectively over Laban, the ancestor of the Aramaeans, and then ~ and this is much more relevant for our text ~ over Esau, the eponymous ancestor of Rome and thus of Christendom.
These figures and their stories were paradidmatic
for the self-fashioning
of the Jewish male
and for collective
self-fashioning.

OOK
Yehosjoea haNatsri aka haMasjiach
was zo'n 'slimme joodse jongen' als het ware bij wijze van spreken en schrijven:
in de loop van bijna 2000 jaar heeft hij alle voorgaande bijbelse mydiverhalen in zich 'verenigd' als zijnde
deel van 't kosmische spel van 'go{e}d & kwaad' tussen 'schepping' & 't einde 'der dagen'.
Het hemelse koninkrijk g ds is binnenin ons: alleen zo [rak kach] kan het
in ieder van ons [tat tvam asi] &
rondom ons
gebeuren.

engel
blozen
cool!
11 jul 2008 - bewerkt op 11 jul 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Profielfoto van Asih
Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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