Word: isaac
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...pundits have wasted a lot of breath lately wondering if, in the new America after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, irony is dead. Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is for sure. After "Isaac and Ishmael," Wednesday night's special, terrorism-themed episode of "The West Wing" - earnest in its tone, admirable in its charitable intent and God-awful in its condescending pedantry - if irony had been dead, it has by now clawed itself out of its coffin and is roaming the moonlit countryside looking for revenge...
...tells off a Dr. Laura figure who's been preaching that the Bible calls homosexuality an abomination, reeling off a list of petty misdemeanors that some passages of the Bible advocate punishing with death; the rant cam pretty much verbatim from a widely circulated anti-Laura e-mail. In "Isaac and Ishmael," Toby explains that the people of Afghanistan are not to be blamed for the excesses of the Taliban. The Taliban, he says, are like the Nazis, ordinary Afghans like Jews in concentration camps. It's a provocative, if hyperbolic point. And if you're really interested...
...might understandably ask why I should even bother criticizing "Isaac and Ishmael." It's timely, and was written and produced in record time. It contains a lot of sentiments, however hamhandedly expressed, that we need to hear now. It benefited charity. And it's undeniably a heartfelt response to an unimaginable tragedy...
...purrs like Isaac Hayes and screams like Jay Hawkins. He slips from quoting a standard hymn--"Just as I am, without one plea/but that Thy blood was shed for me"--almost straight into hip-hop: "Transform me/Translate me/I release you to rearrange me/Are you willing to be changed?" He does this without warning or acknowledgement. (If you miss one riff, don't worry, there will be another one along in moments.) And however leisurely Jakes' presentation may seem, each sermon eventually reveals itself as perfectly calibrated and balanced, cohering into an often exquisite extended metaphor...
...finished studying the signatures and walked past an emptying synagogue (Ringo’s shul, I joked) on the road back to the Tube station, I began to sense that what the great Rav Abraham Isaac Kook said of the Western Wall was also true of the world’s best-loved crosswalk: There are men with hearts of stone, and there are stones with hearts...