The Tables of the Law

Krista and I had a rejuvenating Labour Day weekend. It got started with dinner out at Murrieta's on Whyte Ave., and then Amy's birthday party on Friday night was a convivial time with friends old and new. On Saturday we cleaned and made beet borsht (with beets from our garden), waiting for our good friends from Victoria, Mira and Matthew to arrive. Spending the weekend with them was a breath of fresh air - good food and drink, conversation, prayer at Church and home, a visit to Fort Edmonton, and also reading the whole of Four Quartets together Sunday night.

My other good friend Matthew (from work) passed on to me Thomas Mann's novel about Moses, The Tables of the Law. It has a promising beginning:

"His birth was irregular, hence it was he passionately loved order, the absolute, the shalt and shalt not.

In his youth, in a blazing fit of rage, he had killed a man; so he knew, better than the innocent, that to kill is very fine but to have killed is most horrible, and that it is forbidden to kill.

His senses were hot, so he craved the spiritual, the pure, the holy; he craved the unseen, because he felt that the unseen was spiritual, holy and pure."

I am thinking that this novel would be a good companion to Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses.

This image of the giving of the Law, and the accompanying Golden-calf shenanigans in the Valley, is by the contemporary Jewish artist Shlomo Katz.