Galileo's Daughter

I wrote a while back about accepting the Astronomy Reading Challenge. I just finished one of the books I picked to read about an astronomer, Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel. I've been wanting to read this book for a while now, but for some reason I was under the impression it was a novel, not a biography. That was probably because I've read both of the Rashi's Daughters novels (and waiting patiently for the third one to be written). This also explains why I never found it when I looked for it several times in the fiction section of the library.

Anyway, it is a biography, and it's more of a biography of Galileo than his daughter, which is just as well, because Galileo was the famous astronomer, not his daughter. The book is uses the correspondence between Galileo and his daughter, who was a nun, to frame the story of Galileo's life. There are 124 surviving letters, all of them from Suor Marie Celeste to her father Galileo; none of Galileo's letters to his daughter have survived.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book; it is well-written, interesting and informative. I was especially interested in Galileo's thoughts on the intersection of science and religion. Even though he was convicted of heresy by the Inquisition for expounding the view that the earth moves around the sun, Galileo remained a faithful believer in the Scriptures and in the God-given ability of man to discover by means of his senses and intellect the way the universe works.

“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation, such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of those sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”

Do You Speak Yat?

Do You Speak Yat?

I do. First, let me explain what Yat is. Yat is a dialect of English spoken by native-born New Orleanians. The word comes from the greeting, “Where y’at?” which is the New Orleans way of saying. “Where are you at?”, meaning. “How are you?”

After more than 30 years of living away from New Orleans, most of my distinctive New Orleans accent has vanished, however it is still faintly discernable when I try to pronounce words like “iron”. It comes out something like “irn”. I still remember my grandmother’s (the one we called Mia, another New Orleaniism.) burl, and url (for boil and oil), and zink (for sink).

So, I’m reading Dava Sobel’s “Galileo’s Daughter”. Yesterday I read that while Galileo was in Rome being tried for heresy (He had the nerve to suggest that the earth moves around the sun instead of being stationary at the center of the universe), his hometown in Tuscany was being decimated by the bubonic plague. This is where the connection to the New Orleans dialect comes in: those stricken by the plague would develop festering sores called bubos.

When I was growing up we called any little cut, scratch or bruise a “bobo”, not a “booboo”, but a “bobo”. So when I was reading about bubos in Sobel’s book it got me wondering if bubos were related to my childhood bobos. After looking up the origin of bubo, I doubt it, bubos are strictly related to infectious sores from diseases like the bubonic plague. Bobos were simple little childhood booboos that your mom could kiss and make all better.

Some other “yat” expressions I remember from my childhood:

Dodo: sleep

Make big dodo (go to sleep)

Cap: An expression my dad used to call other men, usually a stranger, I’ve found out it’s a shortened form of Captain.

Cher: dear, my grandmother (the one we called Granmere), used this a lot, it means dear.

Minoux: a word for cat, we had a cat we called minoux, but shortened it to mimi

Alligator pear: These used to grow on a vine in our backyard, also known as mirliton. I’ve seen them in grocery stores in California called chayote squash.

More to come…

Lincoln's 200th Birthday

Lincoln The Railsplitter by Norman Rockwell

Of this work Norman Rockwell wrote, “I hope this painting might inspire the youth of this land to appreciate this man who believed so much in the value of education.”

“Lincoln the Railsplitter” depicts Abe as a young man during the time he pursued the occupation of surveyor in Sangamon County in central Illinois - a time documented in “The Prairie Years” by Carl Sandburg. (The book served as an inspiration to Rockwell as he created this work.) Lincoln prepared to be a surveyor as he would later prepare for his law career, by immersing himself in various text books. The painting depicts just such study, portraying the future president with an axe in one hand, and holding a text book with the other. A railsplitter’s tool is draped over Abe’s shoulder, and the painting also includes an image of a log cabin and a newly build split rail fence, with remnants of felled trees in close proximity.

Quote from The Butler Institute of American Art, who purchased Rockwell's original painting in 2006.

Rainy and Cold

trip to Disneyland on Monday:

Den of Vipers and Thieves

The quote below from our seventh president, Andrew Jackson, came to mind when I read in the news how corporate bankers, after begging billions of dollars of taxpayer money from the federal government to avert going under, proceeded to hastily give themselves billions of dollars worth of executive bonuses:

“Hey buddy, can you spare a few billion in chump change for a poor banker?”

Here’s what Andrew Jackson had to say to a delegation of bankers in 1832:

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

Inauguration Day!

Here's a scene from the very first inauguration day.

Wodehouse on The Art of Fiction

I enjoyed this interview with P.G. Wodehouse so much that I thought you might enjoy it too. He sounds like such a character, in fact like a character in one of his stories. In spite of being rather unfocused on the practical details of life, he managed to write 96 books, and countless short stories over a career that spanned 73 years (1902-1974).
Gerald Clark wrote this about Wodehouse in 1975, shortly before his death at 93.

Read the entire article here at the Paris Review.

When I first went to see him, I telephoned P.G. Wodehouse and asked for directions from New York to his house on Long Island. He merely chuckled, as if I had asked him to compare Euclid with Einstein or attempt some other laughably impossible task. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I don’t have a clue.” I learned the route anyway, and my arrival for lunch, only ten minutes late, seemed to astonish him. “You had no trouble” Oh, that is good. That’s wonderful!” His face beaming at having in his house such a certified problem-solver, a junior Jeeves almost, he led me without further to-do to a telephone, which he had been dialing all morning in a futile effort to reach a number in New York. He had, of course, done everything right but dial the area code, an addition to the Bell system that had somehow escaped his attention since he had last attempted long distance. He was intensely pleased when New York answered, and I sunned myself in the warm glow of his gratitude for the rest of the day. All of which is by way of saying that Wodehouse, who lived four months past his ninety-third birthday, had discovered his own secret of long life: He simply ignored what was worrisome, bothersome or confusing in the world around him.

BiblioMysteries

Me at Seven

I found myself relating at some level to this description of Israel Armstrong, the unlikely librarian-hero of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books. The book, set in the small Northern Ireland village of Tumdrun, is full of quirky and amusing characters. Here's a sample:

Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer’s afternoon, or eggs overbeaten with butter. He’ d been a rather bookish child. Right from the off, the youngest of four, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realizing or noticing, who raced thru non-fiction at an early age and an extraordinary rate, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors, and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide ranging vocabulary, and just about no earthly good to anyone. His expectations were sky-high and his grasp of reality was minimal.
Israel had grown up in and around libraries. Libraries were where he belonged.

Libraries to Israel had always been a constant. In libraries, he’d always seemed to be able to breathe a little easier. When he walked thru the doors of a library it was like entering a sacred space, like the Holy of Holies! The beautiful hush and the shunting of the brass-handled wooden drawers holding the card catalogues, the reassurance of the reference books and the eminent OEDs, the amusing little troughs of children’s books, all human life was there. And you could borrow it and take it home for two weeks at a time, 9 books at a time.

… his pocket bulging neurotically with emergency paperbacks and newpapers. Just in case he was ever caught short without something to read…

I noticed with interest that Sansom has a new addition to the Mobile Librarian Series: The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery. I'm adding it to my to-read list for 2009.

Happy Birthday Bud

Seventeen Years Ago today!

Where did this little guy with his Teddy go?

2009 International Year of Astronomy

These are 2 photos taken New Years evening about 7pm, looking SW, with my little Samsung Digimax digital camera. The picture on the left shows the crescent moon, and the picture on the right shows the moon (not sure what happened to the crescent, probably fuzziness because I changed the setting on the camera between the two shots.)But changing the setting also allowed Venus to show up in the picture. Anyway, one of my New Year's goals is to learn more about Astronomy.

So I noted with interest a couple of things: 1. That 2009 has been named the International Year of Astronomy. and 2. The International Year of Astronomy Reading Challenge 2009.

From: The Classical Bookworm Blog

Your mission:

Read one book from each of the categories of: History;Astronomers, Cosmology; Astrophysics, and Sci-Fi, and complete the two "extra-vehicular activities" described below.

EVA 1: Do some stargazing with a field guide and blog about it.

EVA 2: Visit your local planetarium or observatory and blog about it also.

I accept the challenge. I've been wanting to read Dava Sobel's Galileos' Daughter so that will be my selection from History and Astronomers. I bought Dava Sobel's The Planets last year but didn't finish it, so that will be my selection from Cosmology/Astrophysics. I'll have to investigate the Sci-Fi options but I'm thinking one of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy novels.

I'm looking forward to EVA 2. I haven't been to the Griffith Park Observatory since it reopened after renovations several years ago. I've been planning to take a trip there for a while so I'll report back when the assignment is completed.

Happy New Year!

2009!

You crown the year with Your goodness,

And Your paths drip with abundance!

Wishing you and yours a year crowned with His goodness and dripping with abundance!

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas

Today is the day before Christmas eve and the space underneath our Christmas tree is filling up with wrapped presents waiting to be opened on Christmas morning.

Tonight is also the 3rd night of Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication. We lit the 3rd candle of the Hanukah Menorah tonight.

Christmas and Hanukkah go together. Jesus celebrated Hanukkah, why shouldn't Christians acknowledge the great miracle that happended when the Temple was rededicated in Jerusalem?

Want to read about a real "Raider of Lost Arks"? I came across this story of a rabbi who spends his time and money finding, rescuing and restoring Torah scrolls (Hand copied Biblical manuscripts) that were buried to hide them from the Nazis during World War II.

He couldn’t look less like Indiana Jones. His black yarmulke glistens after
our four-block walk in the rain from the bookstore—that’s his day job. His
slender body and high, sweet voice make him seem more like a boy than a
43-year-old father of seven. But as he takes off his glasses to wipe away the
droplets, his blue-green eyes sparkle with energy—a hint that looks don’t begin
to tell the story.

“I rescue Torahs—that’s what I have been doing since 1985,” he says.

“It is not just a book,” he says. “A congregation without a Torah is a
congregation without a bond between them and God.”

A Torah is also, in many of the Eastern European towns he visits, the only
tangible remains of communities that were wiped out in World War II. So he is
doing more than commemorating those whose lives were lost—he is bringing
survivors back to life.

Read the entire story: Raider of the Lost Ark by Susan Seliger

A Blogger's Christmas Card

In case you can't read the caption, it reads: "Oh, I am so blogging about this."
Available at: http://wondermark.com/store/card_blog.jpg

Bunny Trails: Bar Mitzvahs and Bibliophiles

(Note: I have officially run out of time and I need to go cook dinner and grade papers. I'll have to come back to this and add links and quotes.)

I love having a block of time to just sit and surf the internet. This afternoon provided me with just such an opportunity. I started off thinking I’d do a quick search to try to determine the origin of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony. I know that Jesus’ parents took him to the temple when he was twelve. I was wondering if there was any evidence of a coming of age ceremony while the Jerusalem temple was still standing.

I found some interesting information in the online Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) entry for Bar Mitzwah:

Nevertheless there are many indications…, that its origin must be sought in remote antiquity.

Masseket Soferim xviii. 5 is even more explicit: "In Jerusalem they are accustomed to initiate their children to fast on the Atonement Day, a year or two before their maturity; and then, when the age has arrived, to bring the Bar Mitzwah before the priest or elder for blessing, encouragement, and prayer, that he may be granted a portion in the Law and in the doing of good works. Whosoever is of superiority in the town is expected to pray for him as he bows down to him to receive his blessing."

But I became intrigued and distracted from my original quest by this statement at the end of the Jewish Encyclopedia article.

Regarding a strange custom of cutting a boy's hair when he became Bar Mitzwah, see Abrahams' "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," p. 144, note 2.

So I googled Abrahams' "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages”, and as “luck” would have it I found a good-sized preview of the book at Google Books.

The description of the preview of the book reads as follows:
Jewish Life in the Middle Ages By Israel Abrahams 1911. A study of the life and lives of Jews during the Middle Ages.
Contents:
The Centre of Social Life; Life in the Synagogue; Communal Organization; Institution of the Ghetto; Social Morality; The Slave Trade; Monogamy and the Home; Home Life; Love and Courtship; Marriage Customs; Trades and Occupations; The Jews and the Theater; The Purim-Play and the Drama in Hebrew; Costume in Law and Fashion; The Jewish Badge; Private and Communal Charities. The Relief of the Poor; Private and Communal Charities. The Sick and the Captive; The Medieval Schools; The Scope of Education; Medieval Pastimes and Indoor Amusements; Medieval Pastimes. Chess and Cards; Personal Relations between Jews and Christians; and Personal Relations. Literary Friendships.

I spent a good portion of an hour reading the chapters of the book that were online. Then I got to the section on schools and education. There I found some kindred spirits as to book lovers and care of books, and some great book quotes to add to my collection. Since the online version of the book on Google books was only a preview, I couldn’t copy the text as text so I ended up retyping the quotes I liked so I could save them in my book quotes collection:

On Page 253, from the section on “The Care of Books”

But unlike most modern bibliophiles, they were very willing lenders.

‘If A has two sons, one of whom is averse to lending his books, and the other does so willingly, the father should have no doubt in leaving all his library to the second son, even if he be the younger.’

This twelfth-century piece of advice comes from Germany; another, emanating at about the same period from Provence, contains the following directions from Judah Ibn Tibbon to his son:

‘Take particular care of your books; cover your shelves with a fine
covering, guard them against damp and mice. Write a complete catalogue of your books, and examine the Hebrew books once a month, the Arabic every tow months, and the bound volumes once a quarter. When you lend a book to any one, make a memorandum of it before it leaves your house, and when it is returned cancel the entry. Every Passover and Tabernacles call in all your books that are out on
loan.’

There is a note of intense love of external as well as internal
beauty in books in another noble remark of Judah Ibn Tibbon:

‘Avoid bad society,’ he says, ‘but make your books your companions. Let your book-cases and shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If your soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from sight to sight. Then will your desire renew itself, and you soul be satisfied with delight.’

A scheme of study prefixed by the Spanish Jew, Profiat Duran, to the Hebrew Grammar which he wrote before 1403 admonishes:

(vi) Use only books which are beautifully written, on good paper, and well and handsomely bound. Read in a pretty well-furnished room, let your eye rest on beautiful objects so that you may love your work. Beauty must be everywhere, in your books and in your house. ‘The wealthy must honour the Law,’ says the Talmud; let them do this by paying for beautiful copies of the Scripture.

A footnote to the text sent me on another quest to find the source. Footnote (3) on page 352 reads:

Some of the quaint remarks on this subject by the author of the Book of the Pious were translated into English by the Rev. M. Adler in the Bookworm, 1891, pp 251 seq.

It wasn’t as easy to find the Bookworm from 1891 referenced above, but persistence paid off and several pages into my google search I found a NYT Times article from 1891 in which the translation of Rev. Adler was given. Again I had to retype it:

The Bookworm, An Illustrated Treasury of Old-Time Literature. Third series. New-York: A.C. Armstrong and Son.

Of all blessed old book worshippers, but in the broader, higher sense, must have been Rabbi Judah be Samuel Sir Leon, who in 1190 preserved precious manuscripts so as to keep them intact for coming generation. In his “Sefer Chasidim; or, Book for the Pious,” a work popular among orthodox Jews today, he devotes several paragraphs to the treatment of books.

“Do not,” he says, “bind two treatises together, for if you do you will be compelled to lend both, when a man only wants to read one, and somebody else will have to wait.”

“If you sit in the sun with a book, get sunstruck, but do not shield
yourself from the heat with the book. You want to dry a book of which the parchment is damp, and the fire smokes. You must not hold the book before your eyes; rather shed tears than blacken you book. Beware of bending the book on your knee, so as to make the clasps meet. You must never use books for a support for your head when you sleep. If a book and piece of money fall on the ground take the book up first. If there is a fire in the house first rescue the books.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here's a Thanksgiving Proclamation issued by Congress in 1782:

Following the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress recognized the need to give thanks for delivering the country from war and into independence. Congress issued a proclamation on October 11, 1782:

By the United States in Congress assembled.
PROCLAMATION.

IT being the indispensable duty of all Nations, not only to offer up their supplications to ALMIGHTY GOD, the giver of all good, for his gracious assistance in a time of distress, but also in a solemn and public manner to give him praise for his goodness in general, and especially for great and signal interpositions of his providence in their behalf:

Therefore the United States in Congress assembled, taking into their consideration the many instances of divine goodness to these States, in the course of the important conflict in which they have been so long engaged;

the present happy and promising state of public affairs; and the events of the war, in the course of the year now drawing to a close;

particularly the harmony of the public Councils, which is so necessary to the success of the public cause;

the perfect union and good understanding which has hitherto subsisted between them and their Allies, notwithstanding the artful and unwearied attempts of the common enemy to divide them;

the success of the arms of the United States, and those of their Allies, and the acknowledgment of their independence by another European power, whose friendship and commerce must be of great and lasting advantage to these States:

----- Do hereby recommend to the inhabitants of these States in general, to observe, and request the several States to interpose their authority in appointing and commanding the observation of THURSDAY the twenty-eight day of NOVEMBER next, as a day of solemn THANKSGIVING to GOD for all his mercies:

and they do further recommend to all ranks, to testify to their gratitude to GOD for his goodness, by a cheerful obedience of his laws, and by promoting, each in his station, and by his influence, the practice of true and undefiled religion, which is the great foundation of public prosperity and national happiness.

Done in Congress, at Philadelphia, the eleventh day of October, in the year of our LORD one thousand seven hundred and eighty-two, and of our Sovereignty and Independence, the seventh.

JOHN HANSON, President.

Charles Thomson, Secretary.

Preoccupied Parents Trying to Write

Why Does This Remind Me of Blogging???

(ht: Amanda Shaw, First Things )

A Tribute to Preoccupied Parents, Elder Siblings, and Longsuffering Relations
(In all due Respect to their Little Angels)

Playing with children is a glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood why it is considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils.

Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother’s brick, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister’s picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother’s unlawfully lighted match. Just as he is solving this problem upon the principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. . . .

He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words. Then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister’s necklace because the sister pinched him at Littlehampton. That is how an article is written.

—G.K. Chesterton

Room with a View (of the fires burning across the Valley)

This was the view from my balcony this afternoon. My prayers are with all those who lost their homes over the last few days in this round of wildfires.


I came across these quotes on the dry Santa Ana winds which bring on the fire conditions in Southern California. The first is from Raymond Chandler:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
"Red Wind"

Actually the dry conditions make my hair straighter, but the dryness and howling winds do make my nerves jumpy and skin itchy. I wouldn't know about booze parties or full glasses of beer at cocktail lounges, but I think I'll stay away from carving knives.

The next quote is excerpted from a 1968 book of essays by Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem):

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.

...

Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Prayer for Leadership in our Country

“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”

This is a prayer which the late Derek Prince prayed during World War II when he was a British soldier in North Africa. At that point in time things looked bleak for the allied forces in Africa. The British army was forced on a 700 mile retreat, the longest retreat in the history of the British army. The stakes were high. Defeat at the British army's final stand near Cairo would open the way for the Nazis to move unhindered through Egypt into Palestine and to gain control of the Holy Land. It would mean certain annihilation of the Jewish community there.

Derek Prince describes the circumstances which led to the retreat, the result of lack of confidence in the leadership causing low morale among the troops in Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting.

If there was ever a time when our nation was in need of prayer for righteous leadership, it is now. I was encouraged by Derek Prince's accounts of three different times when prayer turned circumstances around, resulting in earth-changing victories. The first of the accounts took place at the North African front in World War II. Here it is:

From 1941 to 1943, I served as a hospital attendant with the British forces in North Africa. I was part of a small medical unit that worked with two British armored divisions—the First Armored Division and the Seventh Armored Division. It was this latter division that became celebrated as the “desert rats” with the emblem of the white jerboa.

At that time the morale of the British forces in the desert was very low. The basic problem was that the men did not have confidence in their officers. I myself am the son of an army officer, and many of the friends with whom I grew up were from the same background. I thus had some valid standards of judgment. As a group, the officers in the desert at that time were selfish, irresponsible, and undisciplined. Their main concern was not the well-being of the men, or even the effective prosecution of the war, but their own physical comfort.

I recall one officer who became sick with malaria and was evacuated to a vase hospital in Cairo. For his transportation to Cairo, he required on four-berth ambulance for himself, and a one-and-a-half-ton truck to carry his equipment and personal belongings. At the time, we were continually being reminded that trucks and gasoline were in very short supply, and that every effort must be made to economize in the use of both. From Cairo, this officer was than evacuated to Britain (a procedure that certainly was not necessitated by a mere bout of malaria). Some months later, we heard him on a radio broadcast relayed form Britain. He as giving a very vivid account of the hardships of campaigning in the desert!

At that period our greatest hardship was the shortage of water. Supplies were very strictly rationed. Our military water bottles were filled every other day. This was all the water that we were allowed for every purpose – washing, shaving, drinking, cooking, etc. Yet the officers in their mess each evening regularly consumed more water with their whisky than was allotted to the other ranks for all purposes combined.

The result of all this was the longest retreat in the history of the British army – about seven hundred miles in all – from a place in Tripoli called El Agheila to El Alamein, about fifty miles west of Cairo. Here the British forces dug in for one final stand. If El Alamein should fall, the way would be open for the Axis powers to gain control of Egypt, to cut the Suez Canal, and to move over into Palestine. The Jewish community there would then be subjected to the same treatment that was already being meted out to the Jews in every area of Europe that had come under Nazi control.

About eighteen months previously, in a military barrack room in Britain. I had received a very dramatic and powerful revelation of Christ. I thus knew in my own experience the reality of God’s power. In the desert, I had no church or minister to offer me fellowship or counsel. I was obliged to depend upon the two great basic provisions of God for every Christian: the Bible and the Holy Spirit. I early came to see that, by New Testament standards, fasting was a normal part of Christian discipline. During the whole period that I was in the desert, I regularly set aside Wednesday of each week as a special day for fasting and prayer.

During the long and demoralizing retreat to the gates of Cairo, God laid on my heart a burden of prayer, both for the British forces in the desert and for the whole situation in the Middle East. Yet I could not see how God could bless leadership that was so unworthy and inefficient. I searched in my heart for some form of prayer that I could pray with genuine faith and that would cover the needs of the situation. After a while, it seemed that the Holy Spirit gave me this prayer:

“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”

I continued praying this prayer every day. In due course, the British government decided to relieve the commander of their forces in the desert and to replace him with another man. The man whom they chose was a general named W.H.E. “Strafer”:Gott. He was flown to Cairo to take over command, but he was killed when his plane was shot down. At this critical juncture the British forces in this major theater of the war were left without a commander. Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Britain, proceeded to act largely on his own initiative. He appointed a more-or-less unknown officer, named B. L. Montgomery, who was hastily flown out from Britain.

Montgomery was the son of an evangelical Anglican bishop. He was a man who very definitely fulfilled god’s two requirements in a leader of men. He was just and god-fearing. He was also a man of tremendous discipline. Within two months, he had instilled a totally new sense of discipline into his officers and had thus restored the confidence of the men in their leaders.

Then the main battle of El Alamein was fought. It was the first major allied victory in the entire war up to that time. The threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and Palestine was finally thrown back, and the course of the war changed in favor of the Allies. Without a doubt, the battle of El Alamein was the turning point of the war in North Africa.

Two or three days after the battle, I found myself in the desert a few miles behind the advancing Allied forces. A small portable radio beside me on the tailboard of a military truck was relaying a news commentator’s description of the scene at Montgomery’s headquarters as he had witnessed it on the eve of the battle. He recalled how Montgomery publicly called his officers and men to prayer, saying , “Let us ask the Lord, mighty in battle, to give us the victory.” As these words came through that portable radio, God spoke very clearly to my spirit, “That is the answer to your prayer.”

I believe that the prayer which God gave me at that time could well be applied to other situations, both military and political:

“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”

Aramaic Professor meets Hollywood

I wrote before about one of my Professors at UCLA named Yona Sabar. Prof. Sabar's son, Ariel, just happens to be a journalist and an author. He has written a book about his father, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.

He relates some interesting encounters between Aramaic and Hollyood in this article: When a Professor of Aramaic Meets Hollywood: You get asked some pretty strange things when you speak the language of Jesus.

Chinese 2008 Gold Medal Gymnasts

all met the minimum age requirement of 16 says the FIG...

Case Closed!

HT:Live.Breathe.Love Gymnastics