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[This was first posted March 14, 2013, reposted June 9, 2015; the sequel to : MUST READ: Another “How to” read the Hebrew Scriptures.
Whenever we recommend a ‘must read’ we usually provide a sampling of what we call ‘book ends’, excerpts from the Introduction and Conclusion of the book. So these are from the Introduction, which was difficult to condense, though you’ll still get in idea of what to expect from the book. The 3rd article is still part of this introduction, but since the author discusses what he does in this book, we will separate it as another post. Read ALL of these and the whole book, dear S6K visitors; if you’re bothering to read these ‘come-on’ posts, that means you’re interested enough to progress from MUST READ to MUST OWN. Take our word for it, this book is worth the purchase! As usual, reformatting and highlights added.—Admin1.]
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Introduction
What are we to make of the Bible? It’s not easy to say. But a common approach goes like this: There are two kinds of literary works that address themselves to ultimate issues —
- those that are the product of reason;
- and those that are known by way of revelation.
Works by philosophers such as Plato or Hobbes are works of “reason,” composed to assist individuals and nations looking to discover the true and the good as best they are able in accordance with man’s natural abilities.
The Bible, on the other hand, is “revelation,” a text that reports what God himself thinks about things.
The biblical texts bypass man’s natural faculties, giving us knowledge of the true and the good by means of a series of miracles. So what the Bible offers is miraculous knowledge to be accepted in gratitude and believed on faith. On this view, revelation is seen as the opposite of reason in that it requires the suspension of the normal operation of our mental faculties, calling on us to believe things that don’t make sense to us —because they are supposed to make sense to God.
The dichotomy between reason and revelation that is the basis for this understanding of the Bible has a great deal of history behind it. The fathers of the Christian Church adopted it as a way of sharpening the differences between the teachings of the New Testament and those of the various sects of philosophers with which they vied for converts in late antiquity. Many centuries later, the philosophers of the Enlightenment embraced this same distinction as an instrument with which to bludgeon the Church, using it to paint Christianity as a purveyor of superstition and irrationality. Fideists and heretics alike have thus had ample reason to insist on this distinction, and many continue to do so even today.
A case can be made that the reason-revelation dichotomy does succeed in capturing something of what was unique and compelling about the teaching of Jesus’ apostles in the New Testament. But it’s much harder to make sense of this distinction in the context of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”). After all, the principal texts of Hebrew Scripture were written perhaps five centuries before the reason-revelation distinction was applied to them. They were written by individuals who spoke a different language from the Greek in which this dichotomy was framed, and professed a different religion from Christianity whose virtues it was designed to emphasize. Moreover, nothing in the principal Hebrew texts suggests that the prophets and scholars of ancient Israel were familiar with such an opposition between God’s word and the pronouncements of human reason when it is working as it should. In addition, the texts of the Hebrew Bible seem largely uninterested in the subjects that made the concept of revelation so important and useful in explaining Christianity. The hidden secrets of God’s previously unrevealed plan for mankind, the salvific power of faith, the availability of eternal life — none of these subjects are even top-forty in the Hebrew Scriptures, a fact so obvious and so jarring that it prompted Kant to argue that the Judaism of ancient Israel was not really a religion!
What is the Hebrew Scriptures?
Many of the same kinds of things that are found in works of reason:
- histories of ancient peoples and attempts to draw political lessons from them;
- explorations of how best to conduct the life of the nation and of the individual;
- the writings of individuals who struggled with personal persecution and failure and their speculations concerning human nature and the search for the true and the good;
- attempts to get beyond the sphere of the here and now and to try and reach a more general understanding of the nature of reality, of man’s place in it, and of his relationship with that which is beyond his control.
God is, of course, a central subject in the Hebrew Bible. But to a remarkable degree, the God of Israel and those who wrote about him seem to have been concerned to address subjects close to the heart of what later tradition calls works of reason.
Which raises the following question:
- What if the analytic framework that originally assigned the Hebrew Bible to the category of revelation was in fact ill fitted to the older Hebrew texts?
- What if its effect, historically, has been to force subsequent readers to see the Hebrew Scriptures as the early Christians saw them, eclipsing the concerns of the Jewish prophets and scholars who wrote them?
- What if the texts of the Hebrew Bible, or many of them, are in fact much closer to being works of reason than anything else — only we don’t know it because this fact has been suppressed (and continues to be suppressed) by an alien interpretive framework that prevents us from seeing much of what is in these texts?
It is my contention that something like this is in fact the case; that read into the Hebrew Scriptures, the reason-revelation dichotomy becomes a kind of distorting lens — greatly exaggerating aspects of the old Hebrew texts that their authors would never have chosen to emphasize, even as it renders much that was of significance to them all but invisible. This means that in reading the Hebrew Scriptures as works of “revelation” (as opposed to “reason”), we come pretty close to destroying them. We accidentally delete much of what these texts were written to say — and then, having accomplished this, we find that the texts don’t really “speak to us” as modern men and women.
This deletion of much of the content of the Hebrew Biblical texts is not just a theoretical problem in hermeneutics or some other esoteric academic discipline.
- It has a direct impact on the way the Hebrew Scriptures are handled in almost every intellectual, educational, and cultural setting in which the Bible is today considered for an appearance:
- It affects the standing of the Hebrew Scriptures in the public schools, where they are neglected or banned outright because they are seen as works of revelation, not reason.
- And it affects their status in religious schools too — certainly the Jewish ones, but Christian ones as well — where teachers and administrators confer in bafflement over how to transmit a love for the Bible to the next generation despite the fact that these texts are works of revelation, not reason.
- It also dictates the way the Hebrew Bible is treated in the universities, where professors of philosophy, political theory, and intellectual history consistently pass over the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures as a subject worth researching and teaching to their students, since they see their work as the study of works of reason, not revelation.
- And what is true for the schools and universities is true for the rest of our culture as well.
- Outside of religious circles, the Bible is often seen as bearing a taint of irrationality, folly, and irrelevance, the direct result of its reputation as a consummate work of unreason. This taint ensures that for most educated people, the Bible remains pretty much a closed book, the views of its authors on most subjects unaccessed and inaccessible. . . . .
The ongoing exclusion of the Hebrew Bible from the universe of texts whose ideas are worth being taken seriously is increasingly a subject of discussion in the universities. And in recent years a number of prominent scholars have actually published studies in which biblical texts are read as though they were works of philosophy — often with fascinating results. But all this is still quite a preliminary, and there hasn’t yet been a book that takes on the question of the Bible as a work of reason in a systematic fashion.
What I hope to provide in this book is the first direct and sustained argument in favor of approaching the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason.
- More specifically, I will argue that the Hebrew Scriptures can be read as works of philosophy, with an eye to discovering what they have to say as part of the broader discourse concerning the nature of the world and the just life for man.
- On the way, I will enumerate the obstacles — both prejudices and genuine problems of method —that stand in the way of reading the Bible in this way, and propose tools for overcoming them.
- I will then take the reader through a series of studies in which I read the Hebrew texts as work of philosophical significance.
- By the end, my hope is to have made it clear both that the Hebrew Bible can be fruitfully read as a work of reason, and how the Hebrew Bible can be read as a work of reason.
- It bears emphasizing that in arguing that the Hebrew Bible can fruitfully be read as a work of reason, I will not be defending any particular thesis concerning its status as revelation.
- In particular, I am not interested in denying the Bible is a work of revelation.
My point in this book is only this: If we are forced to choose between reading these texts as reason or as revelation, we’ll get much further in understanding them if we choose to read the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason. But I don’t actually think that the reason side of the Christian reason —revelation dichotomy is capable of doing full justice to the readers of these texts either. As I’ve said, the reason-revelation distinction is alien to the Hebrew Scriptures and ultimately this framework is going to have to be thrown out as a basis for interpreting the Hebrew Bible. But getting there won’t be easy.
In Christian countries, the Bible has been read through this distorting lens for many generations. Freeing ourselves from it, I suspect, will not be achieved in a single leap. It will be a two-step process:
- The first involves coming to recognize the riches that the biblical texts have to offer as works of reason.
- The second step involves discarding the reason-revelation distinction completely, and learning to see the world as it appeared to the prophets of Israel — before the reason-revelation distinction was invented. I have quite a bit to say about this second step, and I’ll touch on this subject again in my Conclusion.
But the focus of this book has to be that first step: coming closer to the ideas the Hebrew Scriptures were written to advance by learning to read them as works of reason. If we can make headway on that, it will be plenty for this one book. After that, I hope to devote a different work to the question of that second step.
If the reason-dichotomy works so poorly as a lens through which to read the Hebrew Scriptures as I’m suggesting, what holds this interpretive framework in place? Why do intelligent people keep reading these texts this way, as though they were works of revelation, and have nothing significant to contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the word through reason? There are certainly a number of factors at work here. But only one, I think, has to be considered decisive. This is the way people respond to the fact that these texts are punctuated by phrases such as: And the Lord said to Moses . . . Or, in the case of the orations of Isaiah or Jeremiah, by expressions such as Thus says the Lord . . .
For many readers today, the presence of these phrases is enough to bring them, more or less immediately, to a number of conclusions about the authors of these texts.
- First it is assumed that whenever these phrases appear in the text, the author intended to report that a miracle occurred — a miracle whereby knowledge is revealed to the mind of this or that individual without his having made use of the mental faculties that people normally use to understand things about the world.
- Second, it is assumed that the author’s understanding of the world, in which a God or gods could miraculously impart knowledge to the minds of men, is no more than fantastic nonsense recorded by the weak-minded and gullible; or just plain lies set down in books by unscrupulous manipulators pursuing dreadful ends now forgotten.
In either case, the very fact that these texts depict God as acting and speaking is enough to show that the authors of these books, whether weak-minded or lying, were not the kind of people from whom you’d want to try to learn anything.
So as lots of people see it, it’s the presence in the Hebrew Scriptures of all those instances of God speaking that makes the Bible a work of revelation, and rules out the possibility that these texts could be taken seriously as reason.
Now, you can’t avoid the fact that the biblical authors very often attribute speech and actions to God. And you wouldn’t want to, either, because such attribution is an essential feature of what the biblical texts have to say. But the line of argument that’s tacked on to this —
- that these texts are reporting miracles every time God is depicted as saying something;
- that this way of looking at the world can have no more to it than rank superstition;
- that their promotion of such reports makes the biblical authors weak-minded or liars, and the texts themselves the product of weak-mindedness or lies;
- that this rules the Bible out as a work of reason – all this is something else entirely.
It’s basically a propaganda line worked out by French philosophes and German professors in their campaign to discredit the Bible and knock the Church out of the ring as a force in European public life. Maybe there were good reasons for them to have adopted this line of argument when they did. But there’s nothing in that to recommend it to us. Like most propaganda lines, it isn’t really fair. And when you look at it more closely, you see that it doesn’t make much sense, either.
So let’s take the bull by the horns.
Is it true that in confronting a text that depicts God as speaking and acting, we really have no choice but to classify it as revelation; and, consequently, to rule it out as a work of reason?
The answer that should be given to this question is “No.”
It is not true that we have to classify works that have God speaking and acting in them as revelation, and to rule them out as works of reason. For if that were the case, then we would long ago have ruled out as works of reason some of the most famous works of philosophy ever written — works that are today unchallenged as works of reason, and, indeed, regarded as the basis for the tradition of Western philosophy.
[Author then illustrates this point with the writings of Parmenides “who lived 130 years later than the Israelite prophet Jeremiah (c. 647-572) writes philosophy as though it were — revealed to him by a god.” And he proceeds to discuss other Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato whose writings are insinuated as “receiving revelations and commands and dreams from the gods that give form and content” to their life and work.–Admin1.]
What these texts suggest is the following:
- During 200 years between Jeremiah and Plato, there flourished a philosophical tradition –the very tradition that gave birth to western philosophy –in which the ability to conduct philosophical inquiry was frequently seen as partially or wholly dependent on revelation or some other form of assistance from a god.
- In this tradition human beings were seen as being unable to attain answers to significant questions on the strength of their own native abilities, so revelation or some other form of divine assistance was needed if they were to reach the truth, which was the possession of the gods alone.
- Where philosophy in this tradition was successful, it was therefore presented as though it were words spoken or sent by a god, or under the direction of a god.
Yet despite the putatively revealed character of such works, they are today read as though they were works of reason, and not revelation –with historians and professors of philosophy writing about them and teaching courses about them as if they were any other philosophical work. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, for instance, devotes a short chapter each to Parmanides, Empedocles, and Heraclitus without so much as mentioning the role of gods in producing their philosophies. He does draw attention to the fact that Socrates believed he was guided by a divine voice, oracles, and dreams. But nothing is said to follow from this. And other histories of philosophy aren’t much different in this respect. Virtually all of them take the fact that some philosophers presented their works as divine revelation in stride, either ignoring it entirely or mentioning it in passing without drawing any weighty conclusions from it.
Now, what would happen if we were to apply the same rules of interpretation commonly used in reading, say, the prophet Jeremiah, to Parmanides’ text about his ascent to heaven in a chariot driven by gods? To his being led by the hand by the goddess and receiving commands from her? To his writing down the words he heard from her mouth, and descriptions of the things she showed him, so mankind could attain truth?
Applying the standards that are often applied today in reading the bible, we’d have to assume,
- first, that whenever Parmenides describes the goddess as speaking or acting or showing him things, or when he describes himself riding skyward in the chariot, or the actions of other gods he encounters, he is reporting on the occurrence of a series of miracles to which he was witness —miracles whereby knowledge was revealed to him not due to the operations of his own faculties, but due to the will of the gods who chose to reveal this otherwise hidden knowledge to him.
- Second, we’d assume that all this is no more than fantastic nonsense, and that Parmenides, in choosing to write these things down, must either have been weak-minded and gullible, or else an unscrupulous liar trying to manipulate his audience for the sake of ends now forgotten. And then, having understood that Parmenides is either a fool or a liar for making such false presentations to us, we’d naturally conclude that his writings aren’t works of reason, and that they don’t, therefore, have anything significant to contribute to our own effort to understand reality. We’d then dispose of Parmenides the way we’ve disposed of other ancient texts of unreason.
. . . . As the history of philosophy amply attests, we can’t expect the great figures of faraway times and places to see the world as we do on every issue, and not even on every issue we see as crucial. . . . .Perhaps we think that in the case of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the invocation of divine revelation was merely a stylistic convention. Or perhaps we believe that the goddess is a metaphor, after all. Or perhaps we believe that in the old days people simply interpreted what we today call the “insight” of the human mind as the speech of a god. Or perhaps we believe that Parmenides was in fact a little crazy, but it doesn’t matter because he came up with some good stuff too. Or perhaps we believe that he inherited old traditions concerning the speech of the gods and developed them in such a way as to make the philosophical lines clearer, while retaining the old story line. . . . .
So now the obvious question is this. If it makes little sense to dismiss Parmenides’ philosophy from serious consideration just because it presented as the revelation of a goddess, why should anyone take up this same approach to the text, which would embarrass us in the case of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and apply it shamelessly to the authors of the Hebrew biblical works? Is it not the case that however we wish to explain (or explain away) the character of Parmenides’ writings as works of revelation, these same explanations, or similar ones, will apply just as well to Jeremiah?
If we can forgive the Greeks the strange gods and oracles that speak to them, looking beyond this difficulty and judging them by the content of their teachings, why should not this same standard be applied to the writings of the Jews?
In my opinion, the answer to this question is just this:
We don’t approach the Greek texts by way of the same interpretive posture as we do the Jewish ones because we look at both through the prism of early Christian doctrine –that is through the prism of the reason-revelation dichotomy, which teaches us to see Greek wisdom as derived from reason, whereas what the Jews have to say is revelation.
This dichotomy is applied a priori, without any need for further investigation or justification. Permenides’ vision is studied as a work of reason because his is Greek wisdom; Jeremiah’s writings as revelation for no other reason than that his is Jewish wisdom. And this a priori categorization is self-fulfilling. For once scholars and educated people have been hard at work for generations trying to find what is reasonable and philosophical in Parmenides, they do find it. Meanwhile, the work that is done on Jeremiah’s text remains tightly focused on whatever seems to qualify it as revelation.
But this is all wrong. The idea that a given composition can’t be a work of reason — indeed that it can’t be philosophy –because it presents itself as revelation is nothing but a bare prejudice. And nothing other than this bare prejudice of ours justifies denying Jeremiah the same consideration as Parmenides. If approached with appropriate respect and common sense, the great Israelite prophet will, I think, be quickly found to have at least as much reasoned discussion and philosophy to offer as many others who have long been studied as philosophers. And the same will be the case with many other texts of the Hebrew Bible, if not all of them.
For much of Western history, the reason-revelation dichotomy was maintained and elaborated primarily through the efforts of the Church. But the cultural terrain has shifted, and over the last two centuries perhaps the most influential purveyor of this distinction has been the modern research university. Before proceeding to describe the outline of this book, I’d like to briefly consider the special role that the universities have played — and continue to play — in holding the reason-revelation dichotomy in place as the basis for our understanding the Bible.
The Christian reason-revelation dichotomy was intended to impart a conviction that works of revelation were in some important sense superior to works of mere reason, and therefore worthy of especial awe and respect. So it’s not the Christian version of the reason-revelation dichotomy that is responsible for the common view that takes Parmenides to have been an epoch-making thinker, while Jeremiah is seen as a half-mad street preacher hearing voices in the air. This view of things owes its force and currency to the philosophers of the end of the 18th century, who retained the reason-revelation dichotomy but reworked it to achieve ends entirely alien to those of the Christians who originally popularized it. As is well known, French and German culture during this period was characterized by extraordinary enthusiasm for Greek philosophy and art. In Germany, especially, it was common to speak of the classical Greeks almost as a kind of super-race, and to hold them up as the sole example of a segment of humanity worthy of serving as an ideal for contemporary Germans. . . .
To find one’s ideal only in the Greeks.
To draw inspiration from the Greeks alone.
These were fighting words in Christian Europe, and one doesn’t have to think too hard to figure out whom they were aimed up. The elevation of the Greeks to the sole source of learning and knowledge announced a profound reconfiguration of Christian Europe’s self-understanding —a reconfiguration in which the old Judeo-Hellenic synthesis was declared to have been, in retrospect, a mistake; and all that was Jewish in the history and thought of Europe would henceforth be deemed as having been, in fact, detrimental and unneeded.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment applied their formidable skills to constructing an understanding of European history that worked in just this way. Associating the texts of the Jews with ignorance and superstition, they argued that no genuine works of reason had arisen among the Jews and that nothing was originally Hebrew had made a significant contribution to the history of ideas. Kant, for example, wrote that it is safe to bypass the Hebrew Scriptures in a history of the development of Western thought because they were written by an ignorant people, who gained whatever wisdom they may later have obtained from the Greeks.
As he writes:
The Jewish faith was, in its original form, a collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization; for whatever moral additions were then or later appended to it in no way whatever belonged to Judaism as such. Judaism is not really a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws [Only later was Judaism] interfused, by reason of moral doctrines gradually made public within it, with a religious faith — for this otherwise ignorant people had been able to receive much foreign (Greek) wisdom.
[He then discusses a similar argument by Hegel.–Admin1]
. . . the leading thinkers of the German enlightenment introduced a new twist into the history of the reason-revelation dichotomy, mixing contempt for revelation with an acid anti-Semitism to create a new view of Western history, in which absolutely nothing of worth is to be attributed to the Jews.
The impact fo this way of looking at the history of the West was immense. From 1810, the German universities were, under Humboldt’s leadership, reorganized, with the new natural sciences rather than Christian philosophy at their center. This revamping of the universities was in many respects an extraordinary success, placing vast new resources in the hands of scholars capable of conducting research int he natural sciences and mathematics. German universities quickly became the world center for academic achievements in a dazzling array of disciplines, including mathematics, physics, biology, and medicine. But the scientific worldview was not supposed to be limited to mathematics and natural science alone. History, too, and the study of religion, were also refashioned as sciences. . . . In the decades that followed, the German universities became an international engine for the dissemination of the Enlightenment philosophy. . . . and the Enlightenment interpretation of the history of western ideas as well. And it is this interpretation that is studied and taught, almost exclusively, in universities around the world today.
[Author discusses same approach including the political thought of Christianity as found in the New Testament and the writings of the Church Fathers, especially Augustine. . . and on to “revisionist” histories . . .–Admin 1]
In these works, and in every other competitor I’ve seen, the contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideas of the West is either passed over in silence, or else dismissed in a handful of (often quite offensive) sentences.
[He gives an example in the 3-sentences attribution of Sheldon Wolin–Admin1]:
For the religious experience of the Jews had been strongly colored by political elements . . . . The terms of the covenant between Jahweh and his chosen people had often been interpreted as promising the triumph of the [Jewish] nation, the establishment of a political kingdom that would allow the Jews to rule the rest of the world. The messiah-figure, in turn, appeared not so much as an agent of redemption as the restorer of the Davidic kingdom.
Thus according to Wolin, a thousand years of Jewish political thought prior to the advent of Christianity can be effectively nutshelled as the belief that the Jews should seek ultimate political power with the aim of establishing their rule over the entire planet.
[Author cites Bertrand Russell’s and Anthony Kenny’s New History of Western Philosophy–Admin1]
This work refers to the Hebrew Bible for the first time in a section entitled “Judaism and Christianity,” which begins as follows:
For the long-term development of philosophy the most important development in the first century of the Roman Empire was the career of Jesus of Nazareth.
[Kenny then proceeds to discuss the moral teachings of Jesus, nowhere returning to consider what ideas may have entered philosophy from the Hebrew Scriptures.–Admin1]
The trend is perhaps at its most blatant in moral philosophy — a field that one intuitively supposes must have been influenced in some significant way by the constant exposure of Western thought to the Hebrew Scriptures over more than 20 centuries. Yet this possibility is all but absent from the best overviews of the field of moral philosophy.
[He cites books discussing ideas of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hume and Bentham–Admin1]
. . . But neither of them makes even a passing reference to the Hebrew Bible.
[He continues to explain the lack of attribution to the Hebrew Bible–Admin1]
. . . I suppose this isn’t any more remarkable than the fact that even university Bible studies programs often tend to devote little or no attention to the question of the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures were written to advance.
[He then describes the “source-critical” method for studying the Bible–Admin1] —-which understood the biblical texts as “corrupt” –the result of centuries of tampering and abuse by anonymous scribes representing mutually hostile religious sects. This tampering is said to have resulted in texts that are little better than patchworks of fragments that are at times less than a single verse in length. The hypothetical authors of these text fragments – J, E, P, and D – are seen as different “layers” in the biblical texts, with the later laters (P,D) effectively defacing the texts that had been composed earlier on (J, E). For Julius Wellhausen and the founders of the source-critical method, none of this is innocent either. They saw the later layers as having been written by the inventors of “Judaism,” whether the earlier layers had been written by authors whose worldview was much closer to being Christian — so that in the hands fo the scientific Bible scholarship of Enlightenment Germany, the Jews turn out not to have been the authors of the Old Testament, so much as those who perverted and corrupted it. The anti-Semitism of the authors of this theory has been commented upon by Jewish scholars working in the field of biblical studies time and again. But here, too, as with Hegel’s history of philosophy, it is simply assumed that the truth of the theory is independent of its anti-Semitic provenance.
In light of this picture of a corrupt and fragmented Bible, the idea that the biblical texts could be capable of advancing a consistent view on any subject has come to seem far-fetched in the eyes of many scholars. And indeed, the majority of academic Bible scholars have, for over a century, avoided the investigation of the ideas the biblical texts were written to advance for precisely this reason. The result is that today the field of biblical studies produces a steady stream of works on the philology, compositional history, and literary character of the biblical texts. But the ideas that find expression in the Bible — the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy of the biblical authors — have all too often eluded the interest of academic scholars of Bible. Moreover, the incapacity to deal with the Hebrew Scriptures as works of reason affects numerous other academic disciplines, including the history and archeology of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the history and philosophy of law, the history and philosophy of science, the history of Western languages, and more.
The upshot of all this is that there may be no real reason for treating Parmenides as an epoch-making thinker, while Jeremiah’s writings continue to languish under the weight of their ill repute as works of unreason. But it makes little difference. At the universities, the reason-revelation dichotomy continues to barrel onward, the many centuries of accumulated momentum carrying it through. Each discipline passes responsibility for inquiring whether there is something wrong to its neighbor. None seem to feel the disgrace and danger that a profoundly flawed understanding of our history may bring in its train.
Continued in: