Word: spero
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Existentialism, one of the century's most important philosophical movements, has had little influence on Jewish intellectual life in the U.S. The reason, according to Orthodox Rabbi Shubert Spero...
Under the influence of existentialist thought, writes Rabbi Spero in the magazine Perspective, "the criteria of a meaningful religious system are no longer the mental stability it may bring or its possibility of social acceptance, the doctrines it shares with other religions, or its sweet reasonableness. On the contrary, the very elements of Judaism which but yesterday were in ill repute-our unique chosenness, the reality of evil, the deadly seriousness and unconditional demands of the life of service to God-have today been reinstated...
Existentialism is important to Orthodoxy, thinks Rabbi Spero, partly because it has exposed the inadequacy of the liberal, merely rational, versions of Judaism, and partly because it has managed "to create the philosophic climate, and to popularize certain categories of thought, wherein the classic Biblical concepts can again be spoken and appreciated...
...spiro, spero-while I breathe, I hope-is young John Henry Johnson's motto. What he hopes for, he tells his astonished Congressman Jack Fairweather, is some of the gold in Fort Knox. Impossible, cluck-clucks Fairweather. and just what would he do with it if he got it. The answer convinces the congressman that he has been catering to the screwball vote: "I've developed a process for changing gold into dirt...
Jane A. Borden '57 of Concord, Mass. and Briggs Hall was elected alternate delegate to N.S.A., and Jill C. Spero '56 of Glencoe, Ill, and Bertram Hall, sub-treasurer...