Rainbow Promises

Photo by Wing-Chi Poon

Although worldly promises are often like pie crusts (made to be broken), spiritual promises are sometimes like rainbows (made to be infinitely pursued but never possessed).

This motif is reflected in rainbow imagery from numerous traditions.  There is usually a visionary promise at the end of the rainbow, and that end is never quite reachable by mere human effort.

Take the pot of gold, for instance.  Leprechauns tend to be blamed for its unavailability, but the real culprit is the rainbow itself.  If the rainbow did not shift and/or disappear when approached, then all the leprechauns in (and out of) this world would not be able to keep that gold from human hands.

Then there's Iris, the elusive Greek goddess.  Although people have been naming their daughters after her for centuries, many are still scratching their heads while asking, "Who is she really?"  That's because Iris rides rainbows, allowing her to be just as flighty.  The Australian aboriginal Rainbow Serpent has been equally unpredictable.  Symbolizing creation and destruction, it may just as easily crush as nurture.

The Covenant of Noah's Rainbow seems like something that humankind can really count on.  Yet while assuring us that God will never again destroy most living things with floodwaters, it says absolutely nothing about nuclear meltdowns, plagues, meteorites, star wars, etc.  That's when faith needs to pick up the slack.  Unlike rainbows, it can continually brighten our Way.  

Resources

https://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Iris.html

https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-library/rainbow-serpent/

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%209&version=NIV

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/is-there-a-pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow-/5810673.html

 

Arlo Guthrie's Bubbe

Arlo Guthrie in 1979
Public Domain

Way before Alice's Restaurant, there was Bubbe's kitchen.  Bubbe was Arlo Guthrie's Jewish grandmother, and he warmly remembers Shabbat dinners at her home, saying: Nobody ever came close to her blintzes.  

Her name was Aliza Greenblatt, and she was the mother of Woody Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie Mazia (a Martha Graham dancer at the time).  Although from very different backgrounds, Aliza and Woody shared much in common.  They were both antifascists who were immersed in music and poetry: she an "Orthodox Jewish songwriter," and he an "Oklahoma Christian troubadour."

Bubbe's husband was not as enamored as she was with Woody.  In order to better fit in with the family, Woody embarked upon an intense study of Judaism.  Bubbe was one of his primary mentors.  

Although Woody had previously written songs based upon biblical stories (including those from the Hebrew Bible), he now wrote a number of songs about Jewish historical struggles.  Arlo's sister, Nora Guthrie, recalled that "Woody loved spirituality...[and] felt all religions sprang from the same well."  Arlo himself  has shown a special fondness for performing Bubbe's Yiddish songs and Woody's Jewish ones, all the while upholding ancestral traditions of social justice.

Resources

https://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/10614/

When truth is beauty and beauty is tulips

Two Lips!
Photo by Gabriel S. Delgado C.

What is it about tulips that has made them so compelling to humans?

The "tulipmania" of Holland in the 1630s resulted in single tulips being worth more than some houses.  From their humble origins on the steppes of Central Asia to their annual stardom on the streets of Albany, New York, tulips have been cherished by populations as diverse as Turkish sultans and Yugoslav soldiers.

The question is...  Why?

In her poem Tulips, Sylvia Plath provides us with clues.  As she lies depressed within a hospital, Plath laments the vibrancy of her bedside tulips with these words: The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here... I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty...  The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me...  Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color...  The vivid tulips eat my oxygen...  They concentrate my attention... The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat...

Famed journalist Michael Pollen investigates the relationship between people and tulips in his book The Botany of Desire.  He discusses the voluptuousness of these flowers that morph from a tightly-clenched "chaste" position to an open and "receptive" one.  He proceeds to disclose that when the tulip finally "collapses," the petals fall down around its sexually-exposed innards.

Such descriptions speak to the fatal attraction between humans and tulips.  They have engineered one another quite literally.  The modern-day tulip is as much a human creation as it is a natural one.  The modern-day human is quite the same.  Together they reflect the Madison Avenue motto that "beauty is truth and truth beauty," and together they replace the longings of the human soul with the desires of the human mind and body.

Resources

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp#:~:text=The%20Dutch%20tulip%20bulb%20market%20bubble%2C%20also%20known%20as%20tulipmania,of%20tulip%20bulbs%20to%20extremes.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49013/tulips-56d22ab68fdd0

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41021145-the-botany-of-desire

Felix Mendelssohn: A midsummer night's dilemma

Portrait of Felix Mendelssohn
Eduard Magnus, 1846 

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was just 17 when he wrote his famous Overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The year before that, he wrote his equally famous String Octet in E-flat major.  Warm-ups for both occurred between the ages of 12 and 14 when he wrote twelve string symphonies.

He might have instead become a theological prodigy like his grandfather, Moses Mendelssoh, were it not for the opposition of Abraham (Moses' son and Felix's father) to this Jewish legacy.  Abraham, a well-established German banker, felt that Jews should assimilate into the overall society.  Since he felt that the "heyday" of Judaism had passed, he not only changed the family surname to Bartholdy, but also decided against having his son circumcised.  Because of Moses Mendelssohn's fame as a Jewish scholar, Abraham later wrote to Felix: ...there can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucious...

Felix, however, never stopped using the name Mendelssohn.  He would sometimes combine it with the name Bartholdy as a concession to his father, but in public would often go by only "Mendelssohn."  When baptized as a Christian at age seven (six years before his parents took that same step), Felix was given the additional names of Jakob and Ludwig.

In addition to Mendelssohn's many secular compositions, there were also his grand religious works.  In 1829, he arranged and conducted a Berlin performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion (which set Matthew 26 and 27 to music).  Were it not for Mendelssohn's revival of this sacred masterpiece, the subsequent popularity of it might never have occurred.  The success with which his theatrical rendition was met led Mendelssohn to exclaim: To think that it took an actor and a Jew's son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!

Although Mendelssohn continued a biblical focus with his two famous oratorios, St. Paul in 1836 and Elijah in 1846, he also composed The First Walpurgis Night which highlighted pagan rituals of the Druids.  The famed German music critic and theorist Heinz-Klaus Metzger commented that this latter work was Mendelssohn's "Jewish protest against the domination of Christianity."

This seems a rather somber way of analyzing the genius behind such Christian hymns as Hear My Prayer and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.  Perhaps this midsummer night's dream of a composer had instead found a way to integrate his faith journey through the musical Gifts of his Spirit.

Resources

https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200156430/