Tag: justice

The Fall

February 28th, 2026

The story of the Fall in the Bible is read during the season of Lent in the Catholic Church. It has always irritated me. Before I start ranting, allow me to post an abbreviated version of the narrative.

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Genesis 2:15-17

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” – Genesis 3:1-7

The story attempts to explain the effects of sin and the why there is evil in the world. To my mind, it explains very little, and it produces more questions than answers to the fundamental problems of life.

I am looking at the text as somebody who is responsible for raising a small child, namely our five-year-old grandson, Asher. As caregivers, my wife and I have to teach and protect our grandson. In the story God doesn’t really do much of that. Since, prior to eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve do not know good or evil. They essentially have the moral consciousness of toddlers. They know that “Daddy” told them not to eat the fruit of the tree because they will die if they do. However, at that point nobody in the world has ever died, so what does it mean to them when God talks about death? They apparently have adult bodies, but they are literally babes in the woods (or garden).

To phrase it modern terms, it is like God telling Adam ,

“Hey, Adam, go ahead and eat any fruit you like, but not from that tree in the center of the garden. Yeah, you know the beautiful tree with the really cool looking fruit. Leave that one alone! If you eat, you are going to die. Let Eve know too. Okay, I have go away for a while. I’ll be back in the cool of the evening. Be good! You hear me?”

That would be like me telling Asher not to play with the power saw in the garage while I go shopping. It’s a recipe for disaster. In the human world, God would be charged with gross negligence. Now, God’s instructions are exceedingly strange seeing as he already knows what will happen. He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and a bunch of other omni things. This clearly a set up. God, for some reason, wants to get the kids out of the garden. We can blame the serpent or Eve or Adam, but God is still in charge.

Does any of this even matter? I guess it does if the Church insists on reading this story every year. The Church tells its followers that all humans tend to sin because of the disobedience of our first parents. How is fair to punish the children for the sins of the fathers? Why would God want to have endless generations of flawed people? Where is his quality control? The official answer to my questions is that it is all because of our gift of free will, which we continually abuse. Depending on who you read, be it St. Augustine or John Calvin, the basic Christian message seems to be that we all suck.

During the Easter Vigil Mass, the holiest liturgy on the calendar, the priest recalls the Fall and speaks of it as the “felix culpa”, the happy mistake. I find that remarkable and encouraging. The message is that God would not have fully entered the world without Adam and Eve disobeying the Lord. History did not start until the Fall.

Why did God allow the Fall to occur? Genesis doesn’t say. If the act of creation did not end after six days, if it continues even now, then maybe God wanted cocreators working with him. Maybe he wanted some apprentices that He could train. Maybe God is still working on the ultimate work of art, and he wants us to participate in it, even if we are like kindergarteners fumbling with our finger paints. Maybe it’s not such a terrible thing to struggle and suffer if we are helping to build the universe. Maybe it’s actually all okay.

A Midrash

January 29th, 2026

I have a friend from our old synagogue named Jakob. He is an elderly gentleman. He is hard of hearing, but his thoughts run deep, and he is a very perceptive person. Jakob has taken a shine to my five-year-old grandson, Asher. He has in the past baked cookies for the boy. They were good. I had some of them. Recently, Jakob bought Asher a book. This is interesting because Asher doesn’t read yet, although he is quite competent at writing his name. My wife, Karin, read the book to Asher. It is a very short tale, and quite funny. Asher laughed a lot while Karin read to him, although he also found a couple parts to be rather sad.

The little book qualifies as a midrash about Noah’s ark, at least it does to me.

According to My Jewish Learning, a midrash is defined as:

“Midrash (מדרשׁ) is an interpretive act, seeking the answers to religious questions (both practical and theological) by plumbing the meaning of the words of the Torah. (In the Bible, the root d-r-sh [דרשׁ] is used to mean inquiring into any matter, including occasionally to seek out God’s word.) Midrash responds to contemporary problems and crafts new stories, making connections between new Jewish realities and the unchanging biblical text.”

The book is titled Meet at the Ark at Eight! by a German author, Ulrich Hub. The story is packed with absurdity and sprinkled with running gags and sly humor. There are very few characters in the tale. There are three rather clueless penguins whose antics somehow remind me of the Marx Brothers. There is an overweight, overworked, and overbearing white dove. Finally, there is Noah, who only makes a cameo appearance at the end of the story. As I mentioned, the book is hilarious, but it also delves into some serious questions.

There are people, especially among my Christian brethren, who are convinced that every story in the Bible holds a clear and concise moral lesson. This is of course nonsense. In the Torah the narratives are terse using a minimum of words. There is no extraneous verbiage. In fact, the person reading or listening to one of the stories will often have more questions than answers when it is over. The stories in the Hebrew scriptures tend to be a lot like life: confusing and ambiguous. They cry out for interpretation and additional details. Hence, the existence of the midrash, and of a little book about penguins on the ark.

Anybody who has read the story of Noah and actually pondered it, ends up with a kind of queasy feeling about God. The Lord does not come out looking good. Bad optics. Sure, He places the rainbow in the sky at the end of the show, but that is after He has totally trashed his creation. There is an unsettling question of justice in the Bible narrative. God decides that all of humankind, except for Noah and his kin, are irredeemably evil and worthy of destruction. Okay, God is omniscient, so He probably knows the moral standing of his creatures. But why kill almost all of the animals? What did they do wrong? Can a penguin sin? This topic comes up in the book. There are a number of odd theological questions that get broached in this modern midrash. Almost all of them make the reader smile.

I have time before Asher wakes up for school this morning. I am going to read the book again. It’s good. Asher recommends it.

A Bridge to Palestine

September 11th, 2025

There is a pedestrian bridge that crosses over Lincoln Memorial Drive in Milwaukee. It connects Brady Street to Veteran’s Park on Lake Michigan. Two days ago, after dropping off my grandson at school, I walked to the bridge. On it I saw three young people hanging a Palestinian flag over the railing for the oncoming traffic to see. I approached the group and then, on a whim, I stood across from them and leaned against the railing on my side of the bridge. They were busy watching the cars below us and waiting for the next honk of a horn.

I asked no one in particular, “So, is this doing any good?”

I asked that because for many years, I protested in a similar way. I was involved with different causes way back when, but the methods don’t really change. I marched and carried signs, and that isn’t much unlike hanging a flag for all to see.

A young woman with glasses and dark hair looked at me and said,

“Yes, it does some good. Why are you here?”

“I just took my grandson, Asher, to the Waldorf school.”

The young guy next to the woman asked me, “What kind of name is that? It sounds Slavic.”

“No, it’s Hebrew. His name means ‘Happy’.” The young woman smiled. Then she told me her name. It was Arabic.

I told her, “I have Israeli friends and Palestinian friends. The situation is complicated.”

At that moment, she launched into a passionate monologue with various pro-Palestinian talking points. She made it clear that to her the situation was not at all complicated. Her talk was a bit tedious, because I had already heard much of what she was saying many times before. To a large extent, I agree with her. The killing needs to stop. The Israeli response in the Gaza war is grossly disproportionate. But is what she and her compadres doing right now of any real use?

I sighed, and said, “I am not entirely ignorant.”

Then I asked her, “What about the Israelis? What happens to them in the long run? Do they get displaced? 75% of them were born in Israel.”

The young woman snapped back, “But their parents probably weren’t born there! My people have been there for generations. I am Palestinian and I have just been back there, and it is worse than I have ever seen it.”

The young man in her group chimed in, “The Israelis can just move to the U.S. Most of them have family here anyway.”

“Wow,” I said to myself, “I don’t think he has thought this through.”

The three of them told me more about the situation in Palestine. I knew a lot about it. They peppered their comments with words like “Zionist”, “Imperialist”, “Colonialist”, “Capitalist”, and “Racist”. I hate that. Those adjectives are like “woke”: they can mean nothing or anything. They are just emotional triggers that get people wound up.

After they stopped proselytizing, I explained to them,

“I used to do what you are doing now. I was very much antiwar. I used to stand on a corner downtown in the cold in the winter of 2002 protesting the probable invasion of Iraq. Well, we invaded Iraq anyway. And my oldest son enlisted and went to war there.”

The Palestinian woman said, “I’m sorry.”

“Are you really?” I had pain in my voice.

“Yes, I am. Nobody should get sent to fight this country’s wars.”

I went on, “I got busted for civil disobedience. I went to jail in protests. I did all this. I did not get what I wanted. My point is that all you’re going to get here is maybe five seconds of a driver’s attention. You might get a few honks of a horn. Maybe one out of a hundred drivers will remember your demonstration and maybe write their congressman. Maybe one out of a thousand will get involved. We may all be long dead before there is peace. It might take three generations before things are better. What you are doing is an act of faith.”

The young woman replied, “It’s more than an act of faith. I owe this to my family, to my people. I am living here in the heart of the empire, with all these privileges, and this is the least I can do for the Palestinians.”

I had to respect her. She was sincere. She was standing up for her belief in justice. She was an honorable person.

I told the young woman that I had tutored the kids in a Syrian refugee family. I told he how a Tunisian friend took me to Iftar during Ramadan. She smiled about that.

An older woman came across the bridge. She walked slowly between us. The woman wore an olive drab sweatshirt that said, “Israel Defense Forces”. I had to smile. It was a subtle and silent counterprotest.

I told the young woman, “I donate money to SAMS, the Syrian American Medical Society. I wanted to help the people in Gaza without getting anybody killed.”

She nodded.

Then I said, “I also give money to Magen David Adom, the Israeli version of the Red Cross.”

She frowned. “You know, a lot of the money that is given to these humanitarian organizations flows directly to the Israeli government.”

I rolled my eyes. What she said was the mirror image of what people told me about Palestinian aide groups: “It all goes straight to Hamas.”

I asked her, “Would you prefer that I only donate to Palestinian groups?”

“YES.”

“Well, this is all I can do. I’m not willing to wave a flag.”

She shrugged.

She paused and said, “You’re an empathetic and thoughtful person. We come here a couple times a week. Come over and talk with us some more, if you like.”

“I don’t know if I will. I have to care for my grandson. You know, I believe that names have meaning. A person becomes their name. My name is Frank, and it means ‘Free’, although I don’t know if I match the name yet. What does your name mean?”

She said, “It means ‘A gift of God’.”

“And that you are…and so is everyone else.”

They got ready to leave.

I said to the woman, “Be blessed.”

She replied, “You too.”

Yesterday morning, I returned to the bridge. There was a different team with their flags and banners.

I saw a little blonde girl on her tricycle at the far end of the bridge. A woman, apparently her mother, was kneeling on the bridge drawing with chalk.

I looked down at what she was writing. She had written,

“LOVE, LOVE, PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE”

Below that she wrote,

“DEATH, DEATH TO THE IDF”

I have a friend whose son was in the IDF. I said to the woman,

“I don’t think that helps much.”

She didn’t bother to look up at me. She chanted slowly and softly,

“Death, death to the IDF.”

Then she said, “Oh, this does help.”

I just walked away.