Can One Be Holy But Overweight? |
I have just consulted with various rabbinic sources (i.e., the shul newsletter) to find out what time Ahuva will be lighting candles. Imagine my surprise and delight to discover that this week’s parsha was not just Achrei Mot, but also Kedoshim. Who knew?
I was immediately reminded of my earlier years, when I was in graduate school, taking a course in Medieval Literature (which was only exceeded by the course in Linguistics for mind-numbing vapidity and boredom). The professor, some woman named Lillian something who appears in my memory cells as the spitting image of Ruth Bader Ginsburg but probably looked nothing like her, noticing that I was wearing a yarmulka and absenting myself from class on Jewish holidays, suggested that I make use of my knowledge of Jewish lore on my term paper.
Since I was always interested in sin, both theoretical and practical, I finally came up with the idea of contrasting the ways in which certain “Deadly Sins” were treated and portrayed in Christian and Jewish medieval traditions. On the Christian side, with its tendency towards celibacy and asceticism, examples abounded. Dante pictured the deadly sins in graphic, almost prurient, detail. Chaucer’s stories were full of them and people doing them, which is undoubtedly why Chaucer was so popular for a few hundred years, before education went out of fashion. Many of the Church writings occupied themselves with the sins of the flesh.
I was doing just fine with........