cellio | Shabbat (mostly)

We sometimes have baby namings at Shabbat services. This week we had one (for a family I don't know); the two mothers and their other two children gathered on the bima along with the newest addition to the family. I did not hear anyone say anything about the makeup of the family, either negative or positive -- it was just another family. That's refreshing.

The morning torah-study group reached the part in Numbers where God gives prophecy to the seventy elders so Moshe won't have to do everything himself (this is near the end of chapter 11). The text tells us that in addition to the seventy, there were two men -- Eldad and Medad -- who also got in on this, though they didn't join the others at the tent of meeting. Joshua hears about this and gets upset, apparently because they're encroaching on Moshe's territory or something. But since prophecy is clearly something that is done at God's instigation -- or, at the very least, with God's cooperation -- how could that be? I don't see anything in the text to imply that Eldad and Medad did anything; it's not like they were stow-aways or something. My read is that they were in the camp going about their business and -- blam -- they were prophesying. We didn't get to most of the commentaries today, so we'll return to this next week.

This probably means we`'re going to also talk about the people gorging on heaven-sent quail next week, because that's next in the text. My rabbi pointed out the coincidental timing with Halloween. :-)

Tonight after Shabbat we went to Hunan Kitchen, the successor (or reincarnation, or something) of Zen Garden in Squirrel Hill. It's no longer a purely vegetarian restaurant, but there are still plenty of vegetarian dishes on the menu. The meal was good except for the sizzling-beef incident. Someone at another table ordered something that comes sizzling in a skillet; apparently something went wrong and the dish emitted a great deal of smoke only after it got to the table. Everyone in the place was coughing. It was actually kind of funny, as the cough migrated outward from ground zero. (We weren't affected for the first minute or so, but then we were a little.) I didn't notice what happened to the dish in all this.

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Someone said that the Christian denomination whose members sometimes "speak in tongues" are basing that on this. Apparently (and I welcome correction here!), the idea is that when God talks to you it transcends language, and you say things that sound like coherent text to you but gibberish to everyone else. I'd heard of speaking in tongues before, of course, but didn't know it was tied to the idea of prophecy. (I wasn't sure what it was.) I always thought the point of prophecy was to convey God's words to everyone else (the prophet is just a vehicle), which would require doing so in a language your listeners understand. If this description of speaking in tongues is correct, that seems to be something that's about the speaker personally (and God), not about a message to the community.

When I belonged to a Baptist Church where the members spoke in tongues, briefly, when I was a teenager, it worked exactly as described above. According to our minister, sometimes the one who was touched by the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues was speaking as they spoke after the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Gen 11:9 KJV Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Kinda reminds me now of John Dee and his "angelic" language that uses only the characters in the English/Middle English language.)

According to the minister and deacons, some of those languages have disappeared from the earth, and so the person who was "speaking" was speaking in a language none of us would understand. Interstingly, always, always someone in the congregation was also called by the Holy Spirit to interpret for the one who was prophesying in tongues. (Kinda reminds me now of John Dee and his "angelic" language that uses only the characters in the English/Middle English language.)

And, they could always tell you when someone was going to call on God to speak in tongues, and put it in the program the week before.

The whole thing was too much for my mom, so after a year or so we went to one of the "mainstream" concgregations. I was glad we didn't move to a congregation of either snake handlers or foot-washers. We had both in the area.

Now, at the one Maranatha revival meeting where everyone was touched by "the holy madness of God," and everyone rolled on the floor and gabbled in tongues, and I felt nothing, [Cue "I Felt Nothing" from A Chorus Line]I propped myself in the corner and gabbled with my eyes closed in the rythmn of sentences. I don't know if everyone else was also feeling the way I was, but it was the reason I left the movement.

Sorry this may be a little snarky. This is one of the reasons I am no longer a Christian....

That is, when I briefly belonged to a congregation. Sometimes the speaking went on for up to half an hour.

That does sound...awkward. Thanks for the reply. I've never seen anything like that; my relatives are mostly Catholic with some Greek Orthodox in one branch, and those are mostly the services I've attended. There are, or were, some Presbyterians too, but I never had much contact with their services. Exposure to anything else mainly comes through friends' weddings, and so far that set of experiences hasn't included Baptist. (I assume that a wedding would be different than a regular Sunday service, though -- it's impolite to steal attention from the bride and groom, right?)

Depends on the preacher, m'dear. The "homily" that some pentecostal and evangelic ministers give at weddings can go on for a very long time, but most of the time it's short, reminds us all that adultery is bad and that we are there to support the new family, and then things get along with.

I think my exploration through denominations (and finally settling on Thelema) have a great deal to do with my need for ritual and my need for Gnosticism and self-affirmation; I was happy with the tiny Episcopalian church (about 30 people) because the rituals were so intimate. However, eventually (post first marriage and 7 years of non-church attendance), I went looking for something with both ritual and being touched immediately by the godhead. Speaking in tongues wasn't it.

Shabbat (mostly)

Speaking in Tongues

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Re: Speaking in Tongues