Word: deeded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...found that my tradition was unwilling to let me wallow in my meaninglessness. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the greatest Jewish philosopher of our time, was only one of the many voices insisting that we start with what we can. "The teaching of Judaism is the theology of the common deed," he wrote. Doing things can make a difference. Powerful changes are in fact only possible by immersing ourselves in the world and trying to take part. "Perhaps the essential teaching of Judaism is that in doing the finite we may perceive the infinite...
...likes to work in clarity and well-lighted, advertent consciousness. For purposes of law, which is the operative word? "Hate"? Or "crime"? Which of them is the crime? The thought? Or the deed? Is it not enough for the crime to be a crime? Does the crime become more heinous because hate comes along as a vicious junior partner...
...hate thought ("I hate Jews/ blacks/ gay people/ Catholics/ old people/ Walloons/ Bosnian Muslims/ Italians/ Latinos/ Other") flashed for an instant in the perpetrator's brain, like summer lightning, but no deed was done, then would the mere thought - tagging along as, so to speak, cheerleader in the vivid, if Orwellian, phrase "hate crime" - be worthy, in itself, of 10 to 15 years in jail? If not, then why, under hate crimes law, is this matter of the perpetrator's state of mind taken into consideration...
...crime - Auschwitz, say, or the entire Holocaust - is a crime, surely it is an insult to the principle of law, and to the universality of the horror, to trivialize the deed by stipulating that it was a "hate crime." Further, suppose the people who did the daily work of Auschwitz really were "just following orders"? Was Adolf Eichmann executed in Jerusalem for the state of mind in which he pursued the Final Solution? No doubt quite a few Nazis could honestly claim that they were not anti-Semitic. Who would care to blaspheme by saying, "It's not so much...
...octogenarian is as matter-of-fact as a fried egg as he tells how he led the secret 1,800-man team that was responsible for delivering the first atom bomb to its target. Tibbets' tone can seem unnervingly detached from the immensity of his deed. "The seat slapped me on the ass" is how he recalls the moment when the five-ton bomb left the plane...