An 800 Year Old Sephardic Sefer Torah

The Torah is the name generally given to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, or the Five Books of Moses. Christians refer to these books along with other Jewish texts, as the Old Testament. The word Torah can also refer to the entire breadth of Jewish law encompassing several texts as well as oral traditions.

The Five Books of Moses are the basis for the 613 laws that govern the Jewish faith, and they are the foundation for the world’s three great monotheistic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are as follows:

• Genesis: Tells the story of creation as well as the history of the Israelites, Abraham, Issac and Jacob and their families.
• Exodus: Recounts the exodus from Egypt to Canaan, including Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.
• Leviticus: Contains the rules and practices of worship.
• Numbers: Relates to the journey of the Israelites in the wilderness.
• Deuteronomy: Consists of speeches made by Moses at the end of his life that recount Israelite history and ethical teachings.

The five books are traditionally believed to have been given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Alternative theories claim that the beginning of the Torah Was given on Mount Sinai but that the revelation contained throughout Moses’s Life.

Historically, archaeologists have argued that the Torah was written sometime between the tenth and sixth centuries BC. Proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis, which according to Orthodox Jews is heretical, a claim that the original five books came from four sources, eventually compiled into one by a fifth author or redactor. The arguments in favor of this theory are the multiple names used for God, varying styles of writing and the repetition of stories.

From the beginning, the Torah was accompanied by oral tradition, which was necessary for it’s complete understanding. Although it was thought to be blasphemous to write the oral tradition down, the necessity of doing so eventually became apparent, leading to the creation of the Mishna. Later as rabbis discussed and debated these two texts, the Talmud was written in order to compile their arguments.

The Jewish tradition uses the text of the Torah to derive innumerable laws and customs. Rabbinic scholars have spent entire lifetimes parsing every word for meaning.

ADDITIONAL FACT

1. Torah scrolls, written in Hebrew by hand, contain 304,805 letters and may take more than a year to produce. If a single mistake is made, the entire scroll becomes invalid.

James Naismith

Of the three great American sports — Baseball, Basketball and Football — only one has a true inventor. On December 21, 1891, James Naismith, a Canadian-born physical education teacher, nailed peach baskets to two opposite walls of a gymnasium in Springfield Massachusetts, handed his students a soccer ball and announced thirteen (13) rules for his new game — and “basket ball” was born.

Naismith (November 6, 1861 – November 28, 1939), the son of Scottish immigrants, grew up in Ontario and was orphaned by age nine. (his parents died of typhoid fever.) After dropping out of high school at fifteen to become a lumberjack, he eventually returned to school, earning degrees from McGill University and Presbyterian College, where he studied to become a minister.

In 1890, he enrolled at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) international Training School in Springfield. While there, he and his fellow students were given the task of devising an indoor activity for the men at the YMCA to play during the winter, between football and baseball seasons.

At the time, calisthenics and gymnastics were the only indoor athletic activities, but they were deemed too boring by many of the men. The only stipulations for the new game were to “make it fair for all players and free of rough play.”

Naismith’s invention proved so popular, and his thirteen rules were soon published in a sports magazine to an enthusiastic response. in the following years, Naismith remained prominently involved with the game as it grew, particularly in the evolution of its rules into their current form. In 1898, he took a job at the University of Kansas, where he coached for ten years and remained as an athletic administrator and campus chaplain until shortly before his death at age seventy-eight (78).

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Naismith’s original rules did not permit dribbling — players could only pass the ball by passing.
2. Naismith became an American citizen in 1925.
3. In his senior year at McGill, an incident on the rugby field changed his life — another player uttered an explicative and upon seeing Naismith (an aspiring minister), he said, “I beg your pardon James. I forgot you were there.” At this point, Naismith realized that he might be able t help young men improve their lives through spiritual and physical development.
4. Naismith is the only coach at the University of Kansas History with a losing record. He notched fifty-five (55) wins and sixty (60) losses between 1898 and 1907.

"The Presocratics" book cover by Author Phillip Wheelwright

Throughout it’s history, one of the great themes of philosophy has been the distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction was central to the thought of the earliest philosophers, called the Presocratics, because they lived in the time before Socrates (469-399 BC).

The Presoctaics believed that the ultimate nature of reality was vastly different from the way it ordinarily appeared to them. For instance, one philosopher named Thales held that appearances notwithstanding, all reality was ultimately composed of water; Heraclitus thought the world was built from fire. Further, Heraclitus maintained that everything was constantly in motion. Another thinker, Parmenides, insisted that nothing actually moved and that all apparent motion was an illusion.

The Presocratics took seriously the possibility that all of reality was ultimately made up of some more fundamental substance. And they suspected that uncritical, everyday observation tends to present us with a misleading picture of the world. For those reasons, their thinking is often considered a precursor to modern science as well as philosophy.

Many later philosophers — including Plato, Spinoza and Leibniz — followed in this tradition and presented alternative models of reality, which they claimed were closer to the truth than ordinary, commonsense views of the world.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. The distinction between appearance and reality is also central to the venerable philosophical tradition known as skepticism.
2. Immanuel Kent also addressed the difference between appearance and reality. He distinguished between things we experience and what he called a “thing-in-itself.”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“A specter is haunting Europe — The specter of communism.” With those words, Karl Marx  (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) and Friedrich Engels (November28, 1820 – August 5, 1895) opened their 1848 Communist Manifesto, a political broadside that launched one of the most powerful political movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At the time that Marx and Engels published their pamphlet, communism was a fringe movement associated with a few failed revolts and some obscure and difficult works of German philosophy. A century later, however, it dominated half the globe.

The communists believed that the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century had created deep economic inequalities, as factory owners and investors reaped enormous profits while workers toiled in poverty. Capitalism, the communists believed, created great wealth, but the middle class — the bourgeoisie — wanted to maintain their position of power in society instead of sharing it with workers — the proletariat.

The solution, Mark and Engels proposed, was for the working class to take control of the means of production themselves, establishing what they termed a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Since the bourgeoisie would never surrender their power voluntarily, Marx and Engels believed, violent revolution was necessary.

The communists were hostile not only to capitalism but also to imperialism and religion — which Marx described as “the opium of the people.” indeed, in the eyes of it’s opponents, communism posed a direct threat to the Western way of life.

Amid the poverty and social strife of nineteenth century Europe, however, communism found many adherents and spread steadily in the years after Marx and Engels’s manifesto. With the Russian Revolution of 1917, communists gained the ability to put their ideas into practice.

The growing clash between capitalism and communism defined the world politics of much of the 20th century, particulary the four decades of the Cold War. Although a few nations, such as China, remain nominally communist, the ideology lost much of it’s allure after the horrors of life in the “worker’s paradise” of the Soviet Union were exposed to the world.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Mark is best known for books such as The Communist Manifesto and the three volume Capital, but he also worked for many years as a journalist, publishing in British and American newspapers, including the New York Daily Tribune.
2. Though communism archived its first great victory in Russia, Marx and Engels regarded that country as backward and underdeveloped and hoped the communist future would be ushered in by the United States.
3. Marx was annoyed when communist philosophy was later labeled Marxism; he once reportedly proclaimed, “I am not a Marxist”

Music is organized sound that can be replicated through imitation or notation. Music is distinct from noise in that sounds of a door creaking open or fingernails on a black board are irregular and disorganized. The sound waves that map these noises are complex and cannot be heard as identifiable pitches.

Some of the basic ways that we analyze musical sounds are:

PITCH: How high or low a sound is to the ear. Pitch is measured technically by the frequency of a sound wave or how often waves repeat themselves. In western music there are twelve unique pitches (C, C-sharp or D-flat, D, D-sharp or E-Flat, E, F, F-sharp or G-flat, G, G-sharp or A-flat, A, A-sharp or B-flat and B). The pitches followed by sharps or flats are called accidentals and they are most easily described as the black keys on a piano keyboard. They are located musically, one half step between two pitches on either side of them. For example, D-sharp and E-flat have the same pitch. When referring to pitches in the context of notated, or written music, they are called notes.

SCALE: A stepwise arrangement of pitches (for example C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) that often serves as the basis for a melody. A piece, or a portion of a piece, will often use only notes found in a particular scale. Western music primarily uses the major scale or the minor scale, in one form or another. To most people, the major scale, because of it’s particular arrangement of pitches, has the quality of sounding “bright”, “Happy” or “positive”. A minor scale, likewise, is usually described as “dark”, “sad” or “negative”.

Key: An arrangement or system of pitches, usually based on one of the major or minor scales, that is meant to serve as a reference point and a guiding force of a melody. The tonic of a key is often the starting and ending point for a piece written in a particular key — so if a piece is in E major, then the pitch  E will serve as the piece’s tonal center.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. All of the basic elements can be notated on the staff, which is a repeating set of five parallel horizontal lines. Often it is divided into measures to indicate metric divisions in the piece and marked at the beginning of each staff of the page with a clef to indicate reference points for identifying pitches.
2. When a piece strays from it’s basic key, this is called modulation. Keys are indicated in written music by a key signature at the beginning of each staff.
3. There are hundreds of scales used in the world’s many different musical cultures. In India, music played on the sitar and other instruments chooses pitches from a collection of twenty-two possibilities, with the distances between scale steps sometimes larges and sometimes smaller then those used in Western music. This can make a differences between pitches extremely subtle demands a virtuosity from Classical musicians.