Capers With Carroll

(In mid September, 2022, I began a series commemorating the 50th anniversary of my coming-of-age trek across Europe and Israel in 1972. I posted eleven episodes before being interrupted at Thanksgiving time. This would probably come in at something like episode twenty, but I'm putting it here for other reasons which should become obvious. Technical difficulties prevented me from posting this when I first wrote it, on September 24, which was the 50th Yom Kippur since the 1973 war. It was also before the outbreak of the war now being fought.)

At a couple of minutes before 2:00, on the afternoon of Yom Kippur (October 6, in 1973, but ending at sundown this evening, September 25, 50 years later), when a coalition with troops from twelve nations launched a surprise attack upon Israel, many Jews both in Israel and elsewhere around the world were at synagogue services, observing their Day of Atonement, the most holy fast of the year. Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, in line by birth to the Levitical priesthood, was on the Greek island of Hydra, just off the Peloponnesian coast, with a woman named Suzanne (but not the Suzanne from his song of that name) and their toddler. He was 39 and feared he was washed up as a performer. He had never served in the military, even for his native Canada, and had the reputation of being something of a pacifist. Although he had lapsed as an observant Jew, at hearing the news of war, he took the ferry to the mainland, traveling light. He did not even take his guitar.

I, a gentile, was settling into my first year of marriage. We had spent our first six weeks at a family cabin at Mt. Baldy Village, just outside Los Angeles, and now we were back in the city. I had seen Cohen in concert at UCLA, three years earlier, from a second-row seat in the very center, smack dab in front of him. While attendees were arriving to fill Royce Hall, a voice in the back began to rant wildly and Cohen came from behind the curtain. The heckler came forward and the two sat on the edge of the stage and talked quietly. Cohen settled him down and gave him a parting hug. I did not know it, but just a couple of months earlier, while touring Europe, Cohen had talked his backup musicians into a concert at a mental hospital. When a patient stood mid-concert and challenged Cohen with a question about what the singer would do for him, Cohen set aside his guitar, went into the audience, and held the man in an embrace.

Only as I researched this essay did I learn that the interrupter in Royce had been actor Dennis Hopper, a friend of Cohen’s. For a period of eight days, right then, Hopper had been married to Michelle Phillips, recently divorced from both John Phillips and the Mammas and the Papas. She would be singing backup in the second half of the show, and Hopper had talked Cohen into giving her the job. For the first half of the concert, Cohen shared the stage only with a chair, a microphone, and his guitar. He sang songs that I knew well from his two albums, most notably, “Suzanne,’ “Sisters of Mercy,” “So Long, Marianne,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” Cohen’s genius was for quiet lullabies of detachment and desperation. Cohen had difficulty forming attachments, but he had a talent for turning goodbyes into great poetry and hypnotic music.

I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time
Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me
It's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea
But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie
Your eyes are soft with sorrow
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye

His goodbye to Suzanne (not that Suzanne) on Hydra was more of a ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I know I have to go, and I may be back.’ He got on the ferry, and then an airplane, and arrived at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv.

Eleven months previous, I too landed at Lod, with even less reason to be there. After graduating from UCLA, I bought a one-way ticket to London, thinking I would get as far as France to spend a year. Then, before I could actually use that ticket, I fell hard for the only woman I have ever loved, and to whom I am married today. Cohen and I are opposites in so many ways, yet his songs have fascinated me now for some 55 years.

I knew I was coming back Stateside in just a few months. However, while hitch-hiking through Europe, doors opened and doors closed, rides either materialized or didn’t, and instead of Paris, I visited Amsterdam, Berlin, Basel, Venice, Belgrade, and Istanbul. First in East Germany and then in the West, I encountered God in a way I could never go back upon, and in ways I don’t believe Cohen ever did. When doors opened to direct me to Israel, I was ready for it. I arrived at Lod airport on an El Al flight from Istanbul. At both ends of the flight, passengers faced the strictest security I have ever seen, even after 9/11. In that November, 1972, only six months had passed since members of the Japanese Red Army pulled machine guns from their luggage, killing 26 and injuring 80.

Cohen had been to Jerusalem in April, at the end of his 1972 European tour. Once on stage, he’d become flustered when the crowd applauded after the first few words of “Like a Bird on a Wire.”

Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

He stopped singing and explained why he could not go on with the concert, “…it says in the Kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. And somehow, the male and female part of me refuse to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem.” (https://www.israellycool.com/.../when-leonard-cohen.../) Cohen then walked off, followed by the band. At that point, the audience took up spontaneous versions of well-known songs in Hebrew. Back stage, Cohen shaved while the promoters and band tried to coax him back on stage. In his guitar case, he found an old package of LSD, which he split up among them, later describing the shared acid as “like the Eucharist.” It was Cohen’s special talent to use sacred imagery to describe the profane. After this ‘priestly’ duty, Cohen returned to the stage, crying, to listen to the crowd sing, and add a song of his own.

In Jerusalem, I located an acquaintance from UCLA, named Ilene. The next day, she snuck me onto a field trip with her Palestinian Archeology class. In the role of academics, we hopscotched north along the Jordan River, to stops in Galilee and catacombs near Haifa, listening to lectures. Then Ilene and I hitchhiked for a weekend in Safed, an artist’s colony and the highest city in Israel. Under the Ottoman rulers, Safed had been the study-center of Kabbalah. Alongside Israeli soldiers, we waited for rides at hitching points. The soldiers then put in a good word for us with any drivers who stopped. We rode along the border of the Golan Heights, chatting with our armed escorts. In Safed, we watched a continuous pattern of Israeli Air Force planes patrolling the Lebanese border, only about ten miles away.

In Tel Aviv, Cohen thought he would volunteer for work on a kibbutz, but visited cafés that he remembered from the disastrous tour of 20 months earlier. There, musicians recognized him and invited him to help entertain troops in the Sinai Desert, where the war was going very badly. They found him a guitar.

Actually, the war was going badly everywhere. The simultaneous attacks from Egypt into the Sinai and from Syria into the Golan Heights had caught an overconfident and relaxed Israel during a holiday. Observant Jews were between the first and second of the three main portions of the liturgy, and non-observant Jews were indulging themselves in secular pleasures.

Cohen would have been in this second group. Although raised in a Montreal synagogue founded by his rabbi grandfather, and deeply infused by its rhythms and language, Leonard Cohen was faith-curious, but living the life of a secular man. Israeli journalist Matti Friedman, author of WHO BY FIRE: LEONARD COHEN IN THE SINAI, describes Cohen’s public image as “a poet of cigarettes and sex and quiet human desperation, who’d dismissed the Jewish community that raised him as a vessel of empty ritual, who despised violence and thought little of states…” (p. 5). Yet much later, when Cohen was residing at a Zen Buddhist monastery, just two miles upstream from my family’s cabin at Mt. Baldy, he would tell an interviewer, “…I was never looking for a new religion. I have a very good religion, which is called Judaism. I have no interest in acquiring another religion.” (p. 41)

It intrigues me that Cohen, and an impressive list of other secular Jews, including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and Carly Simon, provided my generation with its musical score and lyrics, the Psalms of our secular experience.

Cohen knew well that he had been born in the bloodline of priests—Kohanim in Hebrew—running through his grandfather, then through 3,000 years of fathers and sons to the generation of Zadok, chief priest at the time of Solomon’s Temple. Finally it sound its Levitical source in Aaron, the brother of Moses. Cohen struggled with that. A new acquaintance in Tel Aviv sized him up quickly, “You must decide whether you are a lecher or a priest.” (p. 166). In notes he assembled just after the war, perhaps for a novel he never produced, Cohen recounts, “The interior voice said, you will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose.” (p. 48). In the Temple, one whole branch of the priests were singers. Cohen was at a point in life where he doubted even that hereditary gift.

What Cohen could not have known, at least until he was living at the Zen Monastery, was that DNA studies in the late 1990s concluded that the genetic code bore out the historicity of this Kohanim tradition. Researchers have identified a pattern of genetic markers that is as much as ten times more common among Cohens than for non-Kohanim-Jews. That holds true among both Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations, and even for Lemba tribesmen in Zimbabwe and South Africa, who maintain a tradition of Jewishness.

Out in the Sinai Desert, at one end of the father-to-son chain of Kohanim, Moses recorded God’s declaration that only men from this one family could service the Tabernacle. Among their duties would be calling the people away from their daily tasks, often ministering during the worship with singing and musical instruments. Now, at the other end of the chain, Leonard Cohen, much though he might want to escape the priesthood, was heading into the Sinai to minister in music to the troops.

The Sinai was bathed in blood. The small troop of musicians would drive until they saw a cluster of soldiers, stop, and sing a few songs. Sometimes these soldiers were just arriving from hot battle, with minutes-old images of flying ordinance and falling comrades. Many were not sure who this singer was, nor could they understand the English of the songs he sang. He spoke no Hebrew. Few understood that here was a musician who had sung in 1970 before for a crowd of 600,000 on the Isle of Wight. Most were more excited to see the Israeli singers that they recognized. Cohen sang standing in a tight circle of soldiers, or sitting in the sand, or on the scoop of a bulldozer. One photograph shows him standing in front of General Ariel Sharon, who is talking to a well-known Israeli singer. Later, Sharon did not remember that Cohen had been there. (p. 141)

counter-offensive across the Suez into Egypt. At one point, Cohen helped carry stretchers with wounded soldiers from helicopters to a makeshift hospital. His memoire records that as they moved through territory that had seen recent battle, he recoiled against the sight of bodies littering the sand, but felt relief when he learned the dead were Egyptians, not Jews. Then he felt guilt for feeling that relief. Those had been some mothers’ sons. There was no LSD to cushion what he was seeing, only soldiers’ rations and quick naps on the sand. In between performances he worked out a new song, though the recorded version is gentler in places than the verses he sang in the desert.

I asked my father
I said, father change my name
The one I'm using now it's covered up
With fear and filth and cowardice and shame…
He said, I locked you in this body
I meant it as a kind of trial
You can use it for a weapon
Or to make some woman smile...
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me
Then let me start again, I cried
I want a face that's fair this time
I want a spirit that is calm…
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me

Of the three liturgical high points of the Yom Kippur commemoration—due to its solemnity, not to be confused with a celebration—the first, a thousand-year-old prayer called Unetaneh Tokef, had been recited before the coordinated attacks. It begins, “Let us relate the power of this day’s holiness.” It speaks of God’s judgements, the insignificance of man, and projects the idea that this Day of Atonement seals everyone’s fate for the coming year:

How many will pass on and how many be created,
Who will live and who will die,
Who will reach the end of their days and who will not,
Who by wind and who by fire,
Who by the sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst… (p. 16)

This prayer formed the inspiration for Cohen’s 1974 song, ‘Who by Fire.’

During the second high point, all the male Cohens in the congregation stand around the gathering to recite a blessing that was left as a vestige after the destruction of the Second Temple, by the Romans, in 70 AD. “May God bless you and guard you. May God shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. May God lift up His face to you and grant you peace.” (p. 17)

The third and final highpoint, reached at the very end of the 24-hour fast, when everyone is tired, is a reading of the Book of Jonah, the most complex history ever presented in 48 sentences. At the beginning of 2022, on my short list of New Year’s resolutions, I wrote that I wanted to better understand Jonah. Eighteen months later, I think I am finally getting it, although perhaps I’m not taking the same message that all Yom Kippur worshippers are receiving.

Jonah, a prophet of God, is told to take a message to the people of Nineveh, not only pagans, but as wicked and blood-thirsty a city as ever existed. Jonah hops a boat going the opposite direction. He knows that he cannot escape from God, but perhaps he can escape from his job description. In a storm, he finds himself in the hands of pagans more righteous than he, but God uses him to demonstrate to those pagans His own awesome power. Then Jonah is swallowed by a fish, and surrenders himself to God’s will. The fish spits him up on the shore, and Jonah goes to preach in Nineveh. I have seen speculation that after three days stewing in a fish’s stomach juices, Jonah may have arrived in Nineveh looking like God’s demonstration project. The Ninevites repent, and God spares them from the judgement that He had pronounced. Jonah goes to sulk on a hilltop, where God provides a vine for shade and then a worm to kill the vine. Jonah is angry at God, both for His mercy on the wicked Ninevites and for taking away the protective shade, and God challenges him that he has no right or reason to stand in judgement on the Creator.

Why should Jonah’s memoire be read as the culminating activity on the Day of Atonement? In a very real sense, Jonah is Everyman, and we are all in need of atonement. We have all, together, and each, individually attempted to run from God and the job descriptions He has given us. We have all and each of us attempted to cast judgement on God for both the unrighteous who He has blessed and the righteous He has apparently overlooked. Even honest atheists, if they examine their hearts, will likely discover that their disbelief in God is rooted in those judgements.

But for Israel—and ratchet it up a notch for the Cohens—the job description is even more direct. Beginning with Abraham, God’s chosen people, like Jonah, were chosen to be God’s demonstration project. In this allegory, the rest of us are Ninevites.

The temptation for the chosen is to run as Jonah did, or to pass the job description off on others. Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye, addressing God, says, “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?”

God very clearly sets out the stakes in this demonstration. By the time we get to Deuteronomy, chapters 27-30, Moses has completed his 40 years leading the Hebrews around in the Sinai. He gives his final instructions—rules against theft, mistreatment of the vulnerable, and lechery. Then, before turning them over to Joshua’s leadership and sending them across the Jordan, Moses tells the leaders that once they are in Israel, they are to put half the people on Mount Gerizim. There, they will shout a list of blessings that will come from obedience to God. Facing them, the other half will stand on nearby Mount Ebal, to shout curses that will follow disobedience. The script acknowledges that it’s for demonstration purposes. Concerning the blessings: “Then all the peoples on earth will see that you are called by the name of the LORD… “ (28:10a) Then later, concerning the curses: “The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.” (28:25). And again: “You will become a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the LORD will drive you.” (28:37)

The curses require a long chapter, remarkably foretelling the actual experience of the Jewish Diaspora: “Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other…” (28:64) “Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.” (28:65-66)

However, Chapter 30 speaks of a restoration. Many of the families that were taken away to Babylon in the exile never got back to Israel. Cohen’s ancestors became Polish and Lithuanian Ashkenazim. Other families became the Sephardic population of Iberia. Yet over the course of 2,500 years they never lost their identity or the pull of the land. “Then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the LORD your God will gather you and bring you back.” (30:3-4)

That pull was so strong, that when a secular and lecherous Canadian Cohen, while fleeing his priestly calling, heard that Israel was under attack, his response was, “I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I know I have to go, and I may be back.”

(We interrupt the previously scheduled episode recapping my 1972 Coming-of-Age Jaunt through Europe, to interject this Thanksgiving message.)

I am thankful, three weeks before my 73rd birthday, that most of my deadlines these days are self-imposed and freely adjusted. Had I been able to maintain my original plan, this week would have had readers with me in Jerusalem, where I celebrated my 1972 Thanksgiving meal with a jar of peanut butter and the loaf of bread I hoped to stretch for a few more days. Instead, the recap falls short by six weeks and eleven nations. I was still in England, and still thinking I would spend most of my sojourn in France. I anticipated upgrading my high school French and working on my novel. I certainly had no inkling of getting as far as Israel. I had, however, just committed to visiting a new friend in Switzerland.

I give thanks for my God-bestowed but only-recently-acknowledged ADHD. Even as—at this stage in life—unfinished projects challenge me in space and time, the fascinating twists and turns of my distractibility refuse to let me become bored. I am rich in both hobbies and relationships. All by itself, my whimsey in spiders has brought me friendly correspondents on six of the seven continents. My early teaching career allowed me to teach groups of junior high students, and in some cases, my later career brought me their children and grandchildren. Members of each group now show-up richly on my FB friends list. As God supplied me with diverse teaching venues, I once had a class of Cacua-speaking adults from the remote jungles of Colombia. They needed the basics of government and economics to help them pass their (Spanish-language) primary-school equivalency exams. We taught the class tri-lingually. Later, in China, I had three weeks with high school and college students who hoped to improve their English. Over the years, God gave me experiences with both public and Christian school students in California. In the middle, for a decade, I taught a tightly-knit cadre of students in Colombia. Some of those children I had the privilege of shepherding from fifth grade through twelfth, and I’m able to correspond with them now as adults. For all this I am thankful.

I am thankful for the families God has given me, both the family of my birth, and the family I began 50 years ago (next July) by marrying Vicki. In July, I camped with the cousins among whom I grew up. We who could remember our wonderful grandparents and great-grandmother could now see each other’s grandchildren. This week, Vicki and I have three of our five children, with their spouses, and seven of our fourteen grandchildren. My step-counter tells me that in the five days since the grandkids arrived, my daily walking stats double over the average from the previous six weeks. Few gratifications in life can match watching grandchildren grow and their parents negotiating the challenges. The oldest two boys have their voices changing. The younger ones still want to cuddle with Papa and have stories read. I also thank God for the amazing technology that allows me to teleport to Brazil to help homeschool my grandsons there, and then zoom over to England to keep current on the antics of my British grands.

My life puts flesh to the end-time description given by God to Daniel, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” (Dan. 12:4, ESV). Living now, two-and-a-half millennia after God instructed Daniel to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end,” I am grateful to have a storehouse of ‘to-and-fro’ memories from visits to twenty-some countries. I also carry more information through my pocket phone than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson could access had they owned every book then in print. I am thankful for capabilities unavailable to any previous generation. I am also grateful for the Scriptures that provide a solid place to stand as floodwaters shift the sand from all around us.

As a child born just at the end of two World Wars, I have lived through a Cold War and times of increasingly dangerous proxy wars. I am thankful that both I and my children have been spared the call to arms. Amidst ‘wars and rumors of war,’ I am thankful that, in my call to overseas service, I could carry literacy rather than kill-or-be-killed armaments. I could spread the Word of Life rather than the Kiss of Death. I am thankful to be living in a pocket of peace, the likes of which so many in our world are unable to enjoy. I am not facing a winter without heating, nor the threat of incoming missiles. I have done nothing to deserve these blessings that I enjoy, just as many of the people without them have done nothing to deserve their absence. Even in Colombia, which was struggling with a civil war within our earshot, I could say, as did David, “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, LORD, make me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 4:8). For this I am thankful.

(A conversation, just now, with my Brazilian son-in-law reminds me how thankful I am to be familiar with the tastes of both the peaches, apricots, and plums that won’t grow in the tropics, and the tree-ripened mangoes, papayas, and bananas that only show up in North American grocery stores with a pittance of their sweetness and flavor. I have tasted avocadoes, sweet and creamy as only the tropics can produce them, but have temperate-zone persimmons in the back yard as I write this.)

I am thankful that though riches and fame were never high on my list of ambitions, God’s plan for my life has delivered for me a modest level of each. I enjoy a nice house, a satisfactory pension, and a yard big enough to entertain my horticultural curiosities. Although—as late as 2016—I entertained no ambition to run for elective office, in 2018, I finished ahead of the Libertarian in my race for Congress, and in 2020, an amazing 42,015 voters marked their presidential ballots for me. I am thankful for each one of you. That total exceeds even the popular votes for George Washington (39,624 in 1788-89, and 28,300 in 1792) and for John Adams (35,726 in 1796). I am thankful that both Washington and Adams performed so well in the strenuous times with which they were faced—as have generations of patriots since—and that my family and I can enjoy the benefits thereof. I pray that those benefits will continue.

Even as God blessed me in ways I never sought, He has also gratified the desires I did entertain. I wanted to leave the world a better place for my having been here. Now, I can look at five grown children who are each contributing to the betterment of mankind. I can look at three generations of students whose lives I have touched. I can see riders lined up to utilize a bus system for which God put me in the right place at the right time to help get started. I can look back at teenagers I encouraged in the 1980s—coming from the pre-literate, indigenous peoples of Colombia—students who went on to graduate from prestigious universities, and who now supervise educational systems they have built from the ground up, on land to which their people now hold legal title. I hear of hundreds now worshipping Jesus among people-groups that had none fourty or fifty years ago. Oh, the marvels I have witnessed! Thank you, LORD!

On this Thanksgiving Day, 2022, I pray that each of my readers will enjoy a time of family and good food. I pray for God’s peace among those, worldwide, who currently feel the weight of man’s free will, expressed as it so often is, as man’s inhumanity to man. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

On this December 14th, and just one day shy of my birthday, I’m looking back at my 2021 New Year’s resolutions and the goals I set out in January, and which I hope to recalibrate for the year ahead. For starters, twelve months ago I resolved to reduce the amount of stuff that encumbered me. There I’ve had partial success. I did empty out one storage shed, though I had hoped to complete a second one. A visitor might not notice the improvements in my garage and office, but I do. Health-wise, I had hoped to drop 30 pounds in 2021, in preparation to lose another 30 in 2022. For this year, I only have 25 of the 30 to go, but I will keep trying. I intended to get out and walk more. After previous annual averages of 1.6, 1.5 and 1.4 daily miles, I’m at 2.0 for 2021. It helped that I discovered podcasts and a headset, but I had hoped for closer to five. I will keep working at it. I had hoped to finish my novel. Oh, well. I will pursue that in 2022, if the Lord tarries. My most successful efforts came in my reading and Bible study. I wanted to read once through the entire Bible and then spend extra time in Jonah. On that, I am on track for success. I’ve been on-and-off in Jonah throughout the year, and in the daily readings from The One Year Bible, Jonah shows up, well…for today, December 14. Jonah interests me because I think that those of us who have God’s Word—and who can see the signs of coming judgment—are called to carry the warning while there is time for the world (and individuals in it) to seek God’s mercy. Jonah understood the task, but tried to flee. God, however, would not let him get away. There are powerful lessons to be learned in that. My study of Jonah was helped by the mid-year discovery of the Bible Project Podcast, and their weekly teaching. They spent one whole month on how to read the Bible, and used Jonah as their sample text. I don’t believe I have missed any of their programs since March or April. Over the summer, I put several of their episodes on repeat, listening to individual programs four and five times while I worked in my yard. I hope to continue that in the next year, and recommend them to my readers. Forty-nine Octobers ago, I discovered that the greatest victory in life came from surrendering one’s life to Christ. During these 49 years, I have managed complete reads through the Bible five times. One summer I used the vacation to go straight through, Genesis to Revelation. Other years I’ve used various reading plans, including The One Year Bible. Last year I was about 60% successful. This year, I’m on track to finish the 365 fifteen-minute portions on December 31. Each day comes with a couple of chapters from the laws, histories, and prophets of the Hebrew authors; a chapter or so from the New Testament; a section from Psalms; and two or three verses from Proverbs.

I find great value in juxtaposing passages that may have been written a thousand years or more apart. The Bible deals with the biggest of all possible pictures, and needs to be seen in its continuity. Themes, conflicts, and puzzles introduced in Genesis find climax, answers and denouement in Revelation. Although a cursory understanding of Jesus—sufficient even for someone to find faith—can come from just a few New Testament verses, a deeper appreciation comes from long and careful study that includes the early writings from Hebrew. Conversely, the multiple mysteries presented in the Old Testament find their solutions in the New. We see God set up a standard to which no generation nor any single individual can manage to achieve, and yet God promises forgiveness, acceptance, and that there will be a group who enjoy unlimited and unending fellowship with Him. As well, God identifies the Hebrew people as His choice among all the peoples of the world, and yet He promises to bless all those other peoples through the Hebrews. Readers follow the developing promise of a coming someone special, but that someone looks sometimes human and sometimes divine. He is sometimes presented as gentle and self-sacrificing, even unto death; but then, in passages that seem to be chronologically later, he is revealed as the ultimate conquering king. Without Jesus, so many of the stories in the Hebrew histories seem random and contradictory. What’s with Abraham sacrificing Isaac? How do we explain Joseph tossed into the pit by the brothers who are later held up as Patriarchs? How do we interpret the bronze serpent in the desert? We’re given strange dreams, recorded with the idea that someday they would make sense, and given festivals for which God exacts very precise details. We plod through failure after failure by the supposed heroes of the story. We see prophetic voices announcing the most horrendous judgments, and yet those prophets end their individual writings on optimistic looks into the future. All this comes within a pattern of God accomplishing seemingly contradictory goals in ways that could not have been humanly imagined, yet each makes perfect sense after it is completed. God is master over the mutually exclusive. Common to both sections of scripture are the promises of separation and restoration. The Hebrew people, true to promises in Deuteronomy 28, have spent much of their history blown around like dust in the wind, spread among every other nation on earth. One year before my birth they again became a nation with a physical homeland under their own government. The Messiah also went away with the promise to come back. When His disciples asked Him when that would be, He gave them a parable about a fig tree. They had, in fact, seen Him curse a fig tree, just a day or two before His crucifixion, and the tree had died. In the Bible, the fig tree is often used as a symbol of the Hebrew nation in physical possession of the land, as opposed to grape vines and olive trees, which held reference to spiritual and religious aspects for the Jews. Jesus tells His disciples, “Now learn the parable from the fig tree: as soon as its branch has become tender and sprouts its leaves, you know that summer is near; so you too, when you see all these things, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. (Matthew 24:32-34, see also Mark 13 and Luke 12). The children who in 1948 watched news reels of the Israeli flag hoisted for the first time over Jerusalem are all older than me, and I will be 72 tomorrow. The clock is ticking on the cohort just ahead of me. Jesus warns us that “about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” (Matt. 24:36) Then He draws a parallel with the generation lost in the flood during Noah’s time, and follows with two stories of people who were not paying attention, nor were they ready at the arrival of a calamity or an important person that they should have expected. He finishes with a command, “Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming.” (Matt. 24:42) Throughout history, various ones who have tried to calculate the day and the time of Christ’s return have ended up sadly embarrassed. In 1843 and 1844, in the heat of the Second Great Awakening, followers of William Miller went through a succession of anticipated dates. They gave away properties, dressed in white, sat on rooftops waiting, and ultimately were let down by the Great Disappointment. In the 1950s and ‘60s, as Mao Zedong’s Communists murdered perhaps one million believers, or about one out of every three Chinese Christians, we can perhaps forgive those Christ followers for expecting that Jesus would soon return. The same might be expected among Christians in Afghanistan today, or in Nigeria, or North Korea. Yet Christ absolutely tells us to be watching and alert. We are to be cognizant of famines, earthquakes, and events in the weather, ‘wars and rumors of wars,’ and events in the heavens. His return would come after the Good News (Gospel) had been preached to the whole world, a process that I was privileged to observe in a small part during my time in Colombia. One after another, Bible translation teams delivered that prerequisite into remote languages that had never previously had it. The Bible also gives us patterns to internalize as New Testament events fulfill Old Testament prototypes. Jesus—whom John the Baptist calls ‘The Lamb of God’ (i.e., the Passover sacrifice, John 1:29)—at the Last Supper interpreted His broken body and shed blood as the bread and wine of the traditional Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread. His death on the cross, at the very moment that priests in the nearby Temple were sacrificing lambs for the nation, and on the same mountainside where Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac—fulfilled such passages as Genesis 22:8, Isaiah 53, and Exodus 12. Even as the Jewish leaders tried to avoid crucifying Jesus during the feast, Jesus exerted control, assuring that His sacrifice would occur at the correct prophetic moment. Fifty days later, on the Feast of Pentecost (Weeks, or First Fruits), the Holy Spirit fell on the crowd of worshippers, giving birth to the church, the ‘first fruits’ of Christ’s harvest. The next prophetic event, corresponding as well to the next feast on the Jewish calendar—the one I will be watching for this year, and the next, and the next, until it happens—is Christ’s return, or Second Coming. The feast is called variously Yom Teruah, Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets (or shouting), or sometimes, ‘the feast of which no man knows the day or the hour.’ This last is because on the first day of the seventh month, the announcing shofar is blown only when those watching the heavens actually see the first sliver of the new moon. That could be delayed by cloudy weather. Observant Jews set aside all work and spend the day in quiet and prayer. The Apostle Paul describes the event I am waiting for this way, “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) This year, one of my resolutions is to be watching the heavens during Rosh Hashanah (September 25-27, 2022). If necessary, I will do the same in 2023 (Sept 15-17), and 2024 (Oct. 2-4). It’s possible that in this coming year, I will be joined by many who have no interest in Jesus. Those observers will be captivated by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). In this first attempt at kinetic impactor technology, NASA hopes to ram an asteroid out of its set path. Their target is Didymos B, a smaller asteroid, or moonlet, that orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos A. Launched November 23, 2021 from California, DART is set to intercept the Didymos duo 6.8 million miles away from Earth, on September 26, 2022. We will all be watching on the same time September days. ‘Didymus’ means ‘twin,’ and with a slightly different spelling, it was a nickname for Thomas, the disciple who was not present when Christ first appeared to the other disciples. Upon hearing their report, he said, “Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.” Eight days later, when Christ again appeared to them, He turned to Thomas and said, “Place your finger here, and see My hands; and take your hand and put it into My side; and do not continue in disbelief, but be a believer.” Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you now believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.” (John 20:27-29) My 2022 New Year’s resolutions will include more attention to losing some weight and getting out to walk more. I will work on my novel, the garage, and that last shed. I intend to read again through the whole Bible, but this time, maybe I will set a schedule to finish before Rosh Hashanah. And now, I need to go read Jonah, and passages from Revelation 5, Psalm 133, and Proverbs 29.

My future wife and my mother, seeing me off at LAX as my trip began, September, 1972.

Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, where I did spend some time.  Photo by Alex S at en.wikipedia, from Wikimedia Commons

Golgotha, the Garden Tomb, or "Gordon's Calvary," which I did not know to look at when I was at the bus station.  Photo by Footballkickit at en.wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons

Archaeological diggings at Jericho, which I did not get to see.  Photo by By Abraham at pl.wikipedia, from Wikimedia Commons

Map based on http://wikimapia.org/#lat=31.8451463&lon=35.5019931&z=15&l=0&m=b

Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, at Qasr al Yahud, photo by צילום:דר' אבישי טייכר, via Wikimedia Commons