Dear Friends, shalom,
The grape harvest and education
Significantly the grape harvest coincides with the end of the school’s summer vacation.
During the last week of summer vacation I took Tamar, now more than 5 years old, grape harvesting in a vineyard near Mazkeret Batya, a pioneering settlement on the way to Tel Aviv.
After being protected by mommy Sigalit and daddy Boaz for more than 5 years, Tamar will be going to compulsory pre-school where she’ll get into shape for Primary School next year.
The kids on vacation are like the grapes hanging, happily in bunches on the vines. The kids in school are like harvested grapes crammed into a pressing vat to get squeezed and made into wine.
The first story the Bible tells after the flood, which was supposed to purify the human race and make it more moral, is about Noah’s sons getting drunk and having sexual relations with their father.
It seems that this is the Bible’s way of telling us that harvesting grapes and making wine shouldn’t be done by uneducated people who don’t have any idea that it can lead to immoral behavior.
For the first time in the history of the world intoxication and sexual relations with one’s father are declared immoral.
This kind of behavior must have been very common if the Bible is trying to eradicate it.
There’s nothing new in somebody getting drunk or having sexual relations with one’s father, but associating the two and declaring them immoral is revolutionary
According to Judaism the function of education is to eradicate these and other forms of immoral behavior.
The Greeks may have been the first to educate children for material success but the Jews were the first to educate children for morality.
Jewish children were sent to school because someone, perhaps God saw education as the only solution to avoiding immorality and that intoxication can lead to it.
In a few words the Bible vividly describes what immorality is and that drunkenness leads to it.
I’m sure that for thousands of years, until this revolutionary declaration a sexual union with one’s father was considered “okay” and drunkenness was considered natural and beneficial to good living. Probably the word “moral” never even existed.
Noah’s sons committed an immoral act on their father because of their drunkenness. Their uneducated condition left them unable to distinguish a moral act from an immoral one and worse still being uneducated made them incapable of seeing the possible consequences of intoxication and resulted in a lack of any desire to control their drinking habits.
Only through education people can learn to control their intake of alcohol. The more educated a person is the more capable he is of controlling his wine intake.
An animal will drink until he drops. An educated man might stop himself being aware that he’ll drop if he doesn’t stop. To be an educated man means to know one’s limits.
Without education man doesn’t know his limits.
An uneducated man can only avoid intoxication by a complete prohibition of alcohol.
For example by totally prohibiting the consumption of alcohol Islam is declaring its acceptance that it’s impossible to educate human beings sufficiently to control himself.
It takes an educated man to appreciate when he’s had enough to know enough to control his intake and stop himself when he feels the need and to start again when he feels the inclination.
An educated man is truly free because he’s in control of his life.
He lives a life full of choices; he can choose between a myriad of grades of behavior between a lot and a little, high and low, beautiful and ugly, loud and soft, love and hate etc. etc. That is what is meant by saying a controlled life is a free and full life.
An uneducated man has only one choice; high or low, hot or cold, happy or sad etc. He doesn’t have grades on the scales of his life.
Being uneducated he’s not free but must be either obedient or disobedient to a power higher than himself, like God or a person he considers above him in wisdom or power.
Tamar learns to swim
I decided to teach Tamar swimming as soon as she was born. Sigalit had other ideas but Tamar loved water from the moment she was born. When she was about a year she got a pair of galoshes to go splashing in the rain puddles.
Tamar finally, smilingly, confidently climbed down the stairs into the pool at Tal Shachar, where we stopped on our way to pick grapes at Mazkeret Batya, for the first time without inflated floats on her arms, with Mommy Sigalit tremulous but brave, looking on.
Look grandpa I can jump, I can dunk my head in the water, all the basic actions that make a little girl a beginning swimmer.
Wishing you a great no news day
Yours truly
Leon Gork
Come for a Jerusalem Walk with Leon Gork
Jerusalemwalks.com legork@netvision.net.il Tel: 052 3801867