The Intellecutal Devotional

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.

The Lumiere Brothers

The french duo of Louis (October 5, 1864 - June 6, 1948)  & Auguste (October 19, 1862 - April 10, 1954) Lumiere did not invent cinema, but they are considered the founding fathers of modern film for creating the primitive motion-picture projector they patented in 1885. The brothers were inspired by the work of American inventor Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931), who in 1893 had unveiled a machine called the Kinetoscope, which allowed viewers to watch short films by peering into a wooden box that held the device’s components.

The Lumieres, whose family manufactured photographic equiptment and supplies, improved on the Kenetoscope with the Cinematographe, a lightweight, hand-cranked apparatus that was both a camera and a projector. And unlike the Kenetoscope, which allowed only one viewer to watch the moving pictures, the Cinematographe could project movies onto a screen, allowing members of an audience to watch a movie together.

The Lumieres patented the Cinematographe in February 1895, and many historians consider December 18, 1895, to be the birthday of cinema. On that day, the Lumiere brothers projected films for the first time for a paying audience at the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The program included ten films — among them Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895) — and lasted about twenty minutes.

In 1886, the brothers took the Cinematographe and their films on a world tour, including stops in London and New York City. According to legend, some spectators were so spooked by Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) — which was a single shot of a train as it approached a station from the background — that they ran away in terror.

By 1900, the brothers had created 2,000 films. But believing that “cenima is an invention without any future,” the brothers did not sell their camera to other filmmakers and went on to focus their efforts on still photography.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Louis Lumiere was a trained physicist.
2. Auguste Lumiere ran the family business, which manufactured photographic equipment and supplies.
3. The Lumieres hired a pianist to provide live musical accompaniment to their short movies at their first screening in Paris.

In 1997, a baby sheep named Dolly introduced the world to reproductive cloning. She was a clone because she and her mother shared the same nuclear DNA; in other words, their cells carried the same genetic material. They were like Identical twins reared generations apart.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland created Dolly by a process called nuclear transfer. Taking the genetic material from an adult donor cell, they transfered it into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material had been removed. In Dolly’s case, the donor cell came from the mammary glan of a six year old Finn Dorset ewe. The researchers then gave the egg an electric shock and it began dividing into an embryo.

One of the reasons Dolly’s creation was so astounding was that it proved to the scientific community that a cell taken from a specialized part of the body could be used to create a whole new organism. Before Dolly, almost all scientists believed that once a cell became specialized it could only produce other specialized cells. A heart cell ould only make heart cells and a liver cell could only make liver cells. But Dolly was made entirely from a cell extracted from her mother’s mammary gland, proving that specialized cells could be completely reprogrammed.

In many ways, Dolly was not like her mother. For example, her telomeres were too short. Telomeres are thin strands of protein that cap off the end of chromosomes, the structures that carry genes. Although no one is sure exactaly what telmores do, they seem to protect and repair our cells. As we age, our telomeres get shorter and shorter. Dolly revieved her mother’s six year old telomeres, so from birth, Dolly’s telomeres were shorter than the average lamb her age. Although Dolly appeared to be mostly normal, she was euthanized in 2004 at the age of six, after suffering from lung cancer and crippling arthritis. The average Finn Dorset sheep lives to age eleven or twelve.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Since 1997 cattle, mice, goats and pigs have been sucessfuly cloned using nuclear transfer.
2. The success rate for cloning is very low for all species. Published studies report that about 1 percent of reconstructed embryos survive birth. But since unsuccessful attempts largely go unreported, the actual number may be much lower.
3. Before she died, Dolly was the mother of six lambs, all bred the old-fashioned way.
4. A group of Korean researchers claimed to have cloned an human embryo in 1998, but their experiment was terminated at the 4-cell stage, so there is no evidence of their sucess.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (May 7, 1840 - November 6, 1893) wrote several of the most popular ballets in music history, including Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and his Christmas Classic, The Nutcracker (1892). In Addition to his dance works, Tchaikovsky composed dozens of orchestral works including seven symphonies.

Tchaikovsky was born in the small Russian town of Votkinsk and began studying Piano at the age of five. At first, his parents did not encourage his musical pursuits, believing that a “passionate” hobby would be dangerous for an already frail and sickly child. Eventually, however, Tchaikovsky moved to the Russian capital of St. Petersburg, where he completed his musical education. Czar Alexander III (1845 - 1894) was an admirer of his work. Another patron, Nadezhda von Meck (1831 - 1894), granted him a yearly stipend that allowed him to continue his musical endevors.

In addition to his ballets, Tchaikovsky is best known for his bombastic 1812 Overture (1880), which commemorated the Russian victory over the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)and includes cannon fire and church bells as part of the instrumentation. Tchaikovsky also wrote eleven (11) Operas. The most famous are Eugene Onegin (1879) and The Queen of Spades (1890), both based on dramatic poems by the nineteenth century Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin (1799 - 1837).

Tchaikovsky became popular around the world during his career and toured the United States in 1891, introducing Americans to his now classic compositions. Two of his works — The 1812 Overture and The Nutcracker — have become sentimental favorites in American Culture and are often performed on the Fourth of July and at Christmastime, respectively.

Swan Lake

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. Tchaikovsky’s last work was his Symphony no. 6, entitled Pathetique (1893). The composer died nine days after premiering the work, which was played as a requiem at his memorial.
2. Though there was once speculation that Tchaikovsky commited suicide after being exposed in a homosexual affair, most scholars today believe that he died of cholera.
3. Though Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin is considered a masterpiece, the Russian author Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) dismissed it as “silly” and “slapdash” saying that everything in it “insults Pushkin’s masterpiece.”

Lascaux Cave Paintings

The cave paintings at Lascaux are among the earliest known works of art. they were discovered in 1940 near the village of Montignac in the central part of France when four boys stumbled into a cave. Inside they found a series of rooms with nearly 1,500 paintings of animals that were between 15,000 and 17,000 years old.

There are serveral theroies regarding the function of the paintings. A natural feature of the cave may have suggested the shape of an animal to a prehistoric observer who then added highlights to relay his vision to others. Since many of the paintings are located in inaccessible parts of the caves, they may have been used for magical practices. Possibly, prehistoric people believed that the art of drawing animals, especially with a high degree of accuracy, would bring the beasts under thier control or increase their numbers in times of scacity.

The animals are outlined or portrayed in silhouette. they are often shown in what is called twisted perspective, that is, with their heads in profile but their horns facing front.  Many of the images include dots, liner patterns and other designs that may carry symbolic meaning.

The most magnificent chamber of the cave, known as the great Hall of the Bulls, contains a painted narrative. From left to right, the pictures depict the chase and capture of a bison herd.

As soon as the paintings had been examined and identified as Paleolitihic, the caves were opened to the public in 1948. By 1955 however, it became increasingly evident that exposure to as many as 1,200 visitors per day was taking it’s toll on the works inside. Although protectivemeasures were taken, the site was closed in 1963. in order to satify public demand, a life-sized replica of the cave was completed in 1983, only 200 meters from the original.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. The cave painters were conscious of visual perspective: they painted figures high on the wall, styled so that they would not appear distorted to the viewer below.
2. The only human figure depicted in the cave appears in the Shaft of the Dead Man. The fact that is is drawn more crudely than the animals suggests that they did not think it was endowed with magical properties.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In many respects, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” was the first true 20th Century novel — even though it was published in 1866. this story of murder, guilt, alienation and redemption set the stage for many modernist and existentialist works of the century that followed, and it continues to make it’s mark on both literature and film today.

Set in St. Petersburg, Russia, the novel focuses on Rashkolnikov, a young student who believes himself capable of greatness but feels frustrated by poverty and lack of opportunity. He decides that, because of his extraordinary potential, it would be justifiable for him to kill a miserly old pawnbroker and use her amassed fortune to achieve great things. When he acts on his plan, though, he panics, botches the robbery, and inadvertently kills a second woman without managing to steal the money. Tormented by this failure, Rashkolnikov sinks into malaise and questions his real motives for the crime — and all the while is hounded by an investigator who may or may not have proof of his guilt.

“Crime and Punishment” is renowned as one of the first — and still one of the greatest — examples of the psychological novel, in light of its intricate exploration of Rashkolnikov’s motivations and mental state. At the same time, it is a remarkable work of suspense: Tension builds as we wonder whether Rashkolnikov will get caught or whether he might even confess of his own accord. In fact, much like a crime potboiler, “Crime and Punishment” was published serially over the course of a year. The novel brought Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821 - February 9, 1881) a desperately needed financial windfall that enabled him to catch up on his gambling debts, and his contemporaries, including the novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910), immediately hailed it as a landmark. In the years since, Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939), Friedrich Nietzche (1844 - 1900), Jean-Paul Sarte (1905 - 1980) and Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), among others, have cited it as a direct influence.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

1. “Crime and Punisment” inspired two of Woody Allen’s most highly regarded films, “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) and “Match Point” (2005).
2. In his late twenties, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad for participating in meetings of a clandestine left-wing political group. Czar Nicholas commuted the sentence at the last minute, and the author was sent to a Siberian labor camp for four years instead — an experience that indisputably inspired parts of “Crime and Punishment“.
3. Dostoyevsky struggled for years with a compulsive gambling habit. Luckily, he was ble to mine this compulsion for it’s literary value, producing the novel “The Gambler” in 1866.