Lighting a torch in the darkness
We’d become very successful very quickly. I remember walking down the high street and girls were coming out of the clothes shop and screaming at me. I thought: “This is amazing.” But you can’t turn it off. I thought that proving myself would make me happy, but I still wasn’t and that was a f**king shock.
—-Kevin Rowland, founder of the band Dexys Midnight Runners, and the author of the hit song “Come On, Eileen,” reflecting on his past in The Guardian.
I came across a posting of a 2000 essay by Rabbi Elias Lieberman, suggesting a connection between the New England Thanksgiving celebrations and the ancient Jewish festival of Sukkot, known to us as the “feast of tabernacles” (or “festival of booths”) or the “feast of ingathering”.
Sukkot is mentioned in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy; From Leviticus 23:
On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of the Lord seven days. On the first day shall be a solemn rest, and on the eighth day shall be a solemn rest. And you shall take on the first day the fruit of splendid trees, branches of palm trees and boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. You shall celebrate it as a feast to the Lord for seven days in the year. It is a statute forever throughout your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All native Israelites shall dwell in booths, that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
Our early Pilgrims, known as The Separatists, were a persecuted Calvinist sect who left England and sojourned in Holland for a time. Predominantly they settled in the university city of Leiden, where they produced cloth for the textile industry. They would have rubbed shoulders with another persecuted minority group, the Sephardic Jews, who had fled from persecution in Roman Catholic Spain.
In his 1996 book The World of Jewish Cooking, Rabbi Gil Marks notes:
Before reaching Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims spent several years in Holland, where they came into contact with Sephardim who had immigrated to that country, following the expulsion from Spain.
He points out that a classic Pilgrim dish, Boston baked beans, are a variation of a slow baked sabbath bean stew known as “Shkanah”.
As Rabbi Lieberman puts it:
While we cannot be certain about what motivated those Pilgrim settlers to initiate a feast of thanksgiving, it is likely that they consciously drew on a model well-known to them from the Bible they cherished. Seeing themselves as new Israelites in a new “promised land,” the Pilgrims surely found inspiration in the Bible, in the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in which God commands the ancient Israelites to observe the Feast of Booths — in Hebrew, Sukkot, “to rejoice before Adonai your God” at the time of the fall harvest [Lev. 23:40].
(Available at interfaithfamily.com)
There exists debate as to how much the early Pilgrims were influenced by Jewish practices. As quoted in Jewish News Service, Brandeis University professor of American Jewish History, Jonathon Sarna says,
The Puritans did not believe in fixed holidays. If it was a good season, they would announce a thanksgiving, but it’s not like the Jewish holiday which occurs on the 15th of the month of Tishrei (Sukkot). They did not believe in that. So in that respect it’s different.”
Regardless, we offer our warmest greetings to all who celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow. It is customary at Sukkot, to sing Psalm 136:1-3, and we here take up the refrain as well:
O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.
O give thanks unto the God of gods: for his mercy endureth for ever.
O give thanks to the Lord of lords: for his mercy endureth for ever.
Our prayers go out to the victims and families of the recent mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. This kind of thing is becoming depressingly common
I must shower after reviewing this yucky story. In 2005, a jealous 46 year old machinist and Sunday School teacher named Thomas Montgomery killed a younger coworker, Brian Barrett. The two were in love with the same cyber entity, an 18 year old blonde girl named Jessi, who had the handle “talhotblond” on a video game chat room. Montgomery had been posing as a 20 year old marine combat veteran. His posts apparently exhibited some troubling “rage issues” and he expressed the desire to “slide all the snake slowly into his lady.” (His Sunday School pupils will likely need some therapy after this).
Many of the creepy twists and turns of the story I will pass over, but they are the subject of a documentary and a recent article by a Larry Getlen in The Daily Beast. As police investigated the murder, they were led to get in touch with Jessi, the young blonde. However, they quickly discovered that although Jessi was a real person residing in Oak Hill, WV, she had no clue about the communications. Her photos and identity were actually being used by none other than her own mother, 45 year old Mary Shieler. Mary had taken revealing photos of her daughter and used them to fuel a fantasy life online.
Mary, who is now divorced, apparently expressed no remorse, and said to her daughter during the proceedings, “Why don’t you just get over this?” Getlen concludes:
The final irony to this case and talhotblond is that behind the well-matched youthful sizzle of the Jessi and Tommy personas lay another, equally well-matched pair: the two malcontented strangers who created them. Montgomery and Shieler were both lonely people who reached their mid-forties with their best days behind them, who then created deadly deceptions in the hopes of recapturing the glory of youth, and of finding real intimacy by fervently denying their true selves.
Few stories better deserve the appellation of our recurring category, “Reflections of the Fall”
I am still processing my emotions after binge-watching the Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House.” As with most shows and movies produced lately, this tale is nearly devoid of any traces of Christianity, so I recommend it mainly as creepy fun for Halloween—the media equivalent of visiting a haunted house attraction. Yet I think it transcends the horror genre a bit more than most haunted house movies.
“The Haunting of Hill House” is as much a psychological tale of dysfunctional relationships as it is a supernatural tale of ghosts. It is also a good specimen of the classic gothic literary genre, like Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher—classier and spookier than many of the more comically outrageous special effects-laden haunted house movies out there (in which I include the 1999 movie “The Haunting”, inspired by the same Shirley Jackson source novel)
I therefore have mostly praise for this series. Solid acting and writing effectively establish an atmosphere of sadness and foreboding, as the Crain family’s present day struggles are set against a tragic backstory that is slowly revealed. Along the way it achieves moments of creepiness that I have scarcely seen since “The Sixth Sense.” While not above an occasional jump scare, the show’s spookiness is mostly earned through more subtle storytelling.
I’ve seen mixed reviews of the final episode. Some praised it for wrapping up the story lines and revealing the mysteries in an emotionally satisfying way. Others raged that it offered a “cheap” happy ending, slapping on a saccharine finish that betrayed the dark depths to which the story had previously gone. (One contemplated version of the ending had the Crain family remaining trapped in Hill House forever). Much as I sometimes enjoy an art house movie with a grim ending, in this case I am glad they opted for the former. The father’s sacrifice to save his children was dark enough for me, and tugged at my own feelings as a parent who loves his children deeply. Few movies bring tears, but Hugh’s final scene pulled some out of me. I would have been disappointed if he had died in vain.
Reviewing this story from a theological perspective, of course, Hugh’s sacrifice has a lot of resonance. His character was certainly not a perfect Christ figure: Hugh was guilty of willful blindness early on, and he was emotionally unavailable to his children later. I’ve rarely seen a more muted and tortured character than the quiet mumbling man who showed up for Nell’s funeral. But at the end, he showed some redemptive mettle. He put his family first, to the point of being consumed by a sacrificial death that allowed them to live.
The seductive nature of evil is another theme, especially in the last episode. Evil offers a false echo of goodness that promises to assuage some deep hurt or satisfy a craving, but this proves illusory. The mirage dissolves, and evil instead devours its prey.
Finally, the way in which a life can be “haunted” by past mistakes was portrayed compellingly. “Guilt and fear are sisters,” Nell’s apparition tells her family near the end. The final sequences of dreams play on these powerful “demons” in the lives of Steve, Shirley, and Theo, and demonstrate how these forces have dragged down and “haunted” each of the characters, more so than the actual ghosts of Hill House.