Changing Gear but Not Direction

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-120
Author(s):  
Lionel Blue
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

Abstract In this article, Lionel Blue contemplates approaching the end of life. The rabbinic tradition describes this world as a ‘prozdor’, a corridor to the world to come. We are ‘in between’ creations, with a toehold in heaven, yet intimations of heaven can be found in this life. As for dying, that can be a messy business. ‘I do not like the pain which accompanies all transformation.’ Dying is very different in the experience of those who are left behind, who wish to hold on to the one who is dying, whereas the latter may need silent companionship and permission to depart. Lionel offers some personal stratagems for dealing with old age. Indulge yourself and treat yourself insofar as your medication allows. Treasure friendships. Keep up your conversation with God.

scholarly journals Services for the Elderly in Israel: Privatization or Nationalization-An Unending Dilemma-A Reflection

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Avi Bitzur ◽  
Mali Shaked
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Aging In Place ◽  
Elderly Person ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Baby Boomer Generation ◽  
The World ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
The Government ◽  
The One

The world in which we live is aging at a dizzying pace and expressions like “70 is the new 50” or the creation of concepts such as the “Silver Tsunami”, a nickname for the aging baby-boomer generation, have become an inseparable part of the reality in our society.On the one hand, the spread of aging is a welcome phenomenon – a sort of solution to the great human effort to reach immortality. On the other hand, however, old age can be perceived as a period burdened by economic, social and health-related challenges and it is becoming more and more clear that throughout the world, and in Israel in particular – the focus of this article - we must begin to prepare systems and services for the provision of rapid and comprehensive solutions for the tsunami of aging that befalls us. This stems from an understanding that the services we have in place today are not sufficiently prepared to handle the range of challenges and issues that will arise as a side effect of this phenomenon.The dilemmas that come hand in hand with the aging of our population are innumerable, however five particular issues stand out: the first is who should be responsible for the elderly and their care – the government or the person’s family? The second: Should all of the elderly receive the same care or should the treatment assistance vary differentially – meaning each elderly person should receive care according to his or her economic, social and health status and receive only according to their needs? The third is, should we provide assistance to the elderly directly (e.g. specific medications) or should the elderly receive financial assistance equivalent to the value of their needs and should we hope that they purchase the relevant medications, for example, and not something else instead? The fourth dilemma is: should we provide assistance for specific projects or should we work on long-term solutions through legislation to provide care and assistance to the elderly? Fifth, which is also the main questions, is should the services provided be privatized or should the treatment be the responsibility of the state and its institutions?The question of privatization or nationalization is the main focus of this article, and while we do not pretend to offer a firm stance on the issue, the authors offer to shed some light on the basic concepts associated with our aging population and how we as a society might handle these issues from the perspective of comparison between privatization versus nationalization of services rendered. The main focus of this article will be around the issue of the residential arrangements for the elderly: Mainly - should the elderly move into what are typically called “old age homes” or should we allow for “Aging in Place” – an approach that favors allowing the elderly to remain in their own homes for the remainder of their lives. Which is the most favorable solution? This issue also falls under the dilemma of whether or not homes for the aging as one possible solution should be a state-provided service or if “aging in place” will result in the privatization of the services granted to the elderly.The focus of this article is the situation in Israel, a country in which a significant portion of the population is elderly and where, by 2035, 15% of the population will be considered senior citizens. We will present the dilemma through the lens of the situation in Israel. The article shall begin with an introduction offering an in-depth examination of the dilemma presented. We will continue by presenting basic concepts from the general literature in the field of gerontology available today. We will then examine the situation in Israel between the years 2017-2019 and conclude by examining the concepts of privatization and nationalization in regards to services for the elderly, while once again emphasizing that comprehensive solutions to these dilemmas are unlikely to be reached in the near future.

scholarly journals Educational research as a threshold of meanings to come

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Silvia Grinberg ◽  
◽  
Luis Porta ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Educational Research ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

In this dossier, we propose to install the question about criticism, about how to remain critical in times of digitization of culture that seems to drag with it precisely any perspective of knowing that is not willing to think beyond the drifts of applicability. In this sense, educational research opens as a journey, as a search for readings, techniques, developments and forms of conceptualization that bring us closer to understanding what schooling is being today. The group of articles that make up this special dossier on educational research opens up new meanings, as thresholds that project us to take the floor in public affairs and delves into the threads, the power relations and the crystallizations of such a social practice. Central as is the one that allows those who come to the world to be part of it.

scholarly journals Buddhist Science in Kundalakesi

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-30
Author(s):  
Sankar M
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Scientific Ideas

The Buddha attained enlightenment by renouncing royal life and practicing meditation and yoga to alleviate the sufferings of the people due to illness, old age and death. The one who made the world realize the lofty thought that desire is the cause of suffering. Many of the scientific ideas have been stated during the time of Buddhism which appeared to be centered on his teachings. The main purpose of this article is to show how thoughts are recorded in Kundalakesi.

The Case of Australian Reluctance With the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Mona Chung ◽  
Bruno Mascitelli
Keyword(s):  
Global Strategy ◽  
Trading Partner ◽  
Belt And Road Initiative ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
China Trade ◽  
One Belt One Road ◽  
The World ◽  
Belt And Road ◽  
Trade Relationship ◽  
The One

The One Belt One Road initiative is a global strategy proposed by President Xi in 2013. It was referred to as the new silk road approach which includes a land-based and ocean-based routes. The BRI, were it to reach its milestones, would be a landscape changing plan of the world and not just for China. As Australia's number one trading partner, China plays an important role for Australia especially for its economy. However, there has been a poor and lacking understanding of this strategy since 2013. The chapter highlights the importance of the strategy and the approach by the Australian politicians. Fearing being left behind, Australia politicians begin to pay attention to the strategy and especially any related plans which may or may not include Australia. The aim of this chapter is to ascertain and explain why Australia has adopted a cool and almost negative approach towards the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). With further exploration of the Australia-China trade relationship, the chapter raised the question of the importance of China to Australia.

Voices That Are More Benign

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. M. Luhrmann ◽  
R. Padmavati
Keyword(s):  
Psychotic Disorders ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
Persons With Schizophrenia ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

Persons with schizophrenia and other serious psychotic disorders often experience a wide range of auditory events. We call them “voices,” but in fact, people hear scratching, buzzing, bells. They hear voices inside their heads and voices that seem to come from outside, from the world. Sometimes the voices are clear; sometimes, indistinct. Sometimes they make kind and even admiring remarks (“You’re the one. You’re the one I came for.”) Sometimes they are horribly mean. Sometimes they command, and sometimes they comment. In general, on average, people with schizophrenia in India are more likely to experience their voices as people they know or as gods, and in general the voices are more benign than they are for many patients in the US. That may make it easier to live with them. This chapter considers the voice-hearing experience of a Chennai housewife with schizophrenia.

scholarly journals Wêreld- en tydsbeskouing in antieke kulture

2003 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Nel
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World Views ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

View of the world and time in ancient culturesThree important cultures that dominated the Ancient Near East in the three millennia BCE are investigated to delineate their world views, as well as their views of time and eternity. The aim of the article is to describe the view of the world and time in ancient cultures. The Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Vedic Indian cultures and theologies largely have the same view of the world, namely that it is an ordered unity that would keep on existing as it is known for all ages and time to come. Among these cultures there is no expectation of a world that would be made perfect, or become immutable in its perfection. They did not fantasize about a world without chaos. Chaos is the one factor that exists through all ages alongside order. Chaos is known to human beings in their daily existence in the form of warfare, drought and floods, with resultant famine. These conditions were typical of those times in areas where, with the exception of the fertile valleys alongside rivers, desert conditions otherwise prevailed and are interpreted theologically in terms of a combat between order and chaos, or between gods and demons.

scholarly journals Radical Hope or the Moral Imperative of Images in the Work of Susan Sontag Jean-Luc Godard

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idit Alphandary
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
Life Challenges ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Form ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

In the films For Ever Mozart, In Praise of Love and I Salute You Sarajevo, Go-dard’s images introduce radical hope to the world. I will demonstrate that this hope represents an ethical posture in the world; it is identical to goodness. Radical hope is grounded in the victim’s witnessing, internalizing and remembering catastrophe, while at the same time holding onto the belief that a variation of the self will survive the disaster. In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida argues that choosing to belong to the disaster is equivalent to giving the pure gift, or to goodness itself, and that it suggests a new form of responsibility for one’s life, as well as a new form of death. For Derrida, internalizing catastrophe is identical to death—a death that surpasses one’s means of giving. Such death can be reciprocated only by reinstating goodness or the law in the victim’s or the giver’s existence. The relation of survival to the gift of death—also a gift of life—challenges us to rethink our understanding of the act of witnessing. This relation also adds nuance to our appreciation of the intellectual, emotional and mental affects of the survival of the victim and the testimony and silence of the witness, all of which are important in my analysis of radical hope. On the one hand, the (future) testimony of the witness inhabits the victim or the ravaged self (now), on the other hand, testimony is not contemporaneous with the shattered ego. This means that testimony is anterior to the self or that the self that survives the disaster has yet to come into existence through making testimony material. Testimony thus exists before and beyond disaster merely as an ethical posture—a “putting-oneself-to-death or offering-one’s-death, that is, one’s life, in the ethical dimension of sacrifice,” in the words of Derrida. The witness is identical to the victim whose survival will include an unknown, surprising testimony or an event of witnessing. The testimony discloses the birth or revelation of a new self. And yet this new self survives through assuming the position of the witness even while s/he is purely the victim of catastrophe, being put to death owning the “kiss of death.”

The Republicans Pivot

Crackup ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 152-190
Author(s):  
Samuel L. Popkin
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Global Crisis ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
White House ◽  
Inaugural Speech ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Trade Wars

President Trump’s inaugural speech, a dark vision of “American carnage,” foreshadowed the administration to come. He considered presidential power a monetizable asset to convert into a family fortune, and the GOP—in unified control of Congress but deeply divided as a party—needed him and his voters so much that they exercised only minimal checks and balances. Chapter 6 charts the tempestuous relationship between the president and GOP leaders during a term marked by chaos in the White House and complicity in Congress. Despite a fervent desire to disrupt government, Trump’s West Wing staff was woefully unprepared for the task. In two years of unified control, the one major accomplishment was a massive tax cut for the top 1 percent of the country. His trade wars damaged exports, bankrupted farmers, and hurt American steel producers. His preferences for dictators rattled NATO and set back efforts to control North Korea and Iran. The GOP could not even repeal Obamacare, let alone replace it with something better. Republicans were blown out in the midterm election, losing control of the House, but they maintained their loyalty to Trump, forsaking the rule of law in favor of the rule of public opinion, and acquitting him of impeachment charges in the Senate without calling a single witness. However, the self-inflicted wounds from Trump’s administration were nothing compared to his abdication of leadership in the face of a true global crisis: COVID-19. Soon, the country with the world’s best science and medicine had the most cases and the most deaths in the world.

Jesus, Mary, and Akiva ben Joseph

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-141
Author(s):  
David Brodsky
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Desert Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
Egyptian Desert ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Syriac Christianity

Early parallels to and commentaries on Massekhet Kallah (a rabbinic text from the Talmudic Period) read the story in it about a woman and her ill-conceived son as being about Jesus and Mary. While some modern scholars have shied away from this reading, I argue in this paper that Massekhet Kallah should be read as engaging its cultural context, particularly its Syriac Christian milieu. In the passage under discussion, Rabbi Akiva tricks the woman into revealing the circumstances under which her son was conceived by falsely promising her life in the world-to-come. False oaths, however, are strictly forbidden in rabbinic literature, which leaves scholars scrambling to justify Rabbi Akiva’s behavior. Read as an anti-Christian polemic, this and other anomalies begin to make sense and seem to be crafted to counter Christian ideology. If the narrative is read through this lens, it appears that the author is attempting to establish that Jesus is not the son of God, but the product of adulterous and impure sex; that the “true” revelation is of Jesus’ lowly birth rather than his divine conception; and that rabbis, rather than Jesus, have the power to grant a person eternal life. Typical of polemical literature, certain passages, like the one about the child and his mother, attack central Christian tenets, and the broader themes of Massekhet Kallah do appear to be wrestling with its Christian counterparts over the definitions of holiness and sexual asceticism; however, other passages present stories that can be read as consistent with those proliferating in the Christian monastic literature of the Egyptian desert fathers popular in Syriac Christianity. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Massekhet Kallah is a text that is engaging with its Christian milieu – at times striving with it and at times consonant with it. This article, then, is an experiment in reading Massekhet Kallah in that Christian context.

Karl Barth

1969 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Torrance
Keyword(s):  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Eternal Truth ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
Modern Era

Karl Barth died in the early hours of 10 December 1968, God's greatest gift to theological science in the whole of the modern era. Albert Einstein once wrote of Isaac Newton: ‘To think of him is to think of his work. For such a man can be understood only by thinking of him as a scene on which the struggle for eternal truth took place.’ That is surely the way in which we must remember Karl Barth, for in him there took place a profound struggle for the eternal Word of God in which the whole framework of the Church's understanding of God from ancient to modern times was subjected to critical and constructive inquiry in the search for a unified and comprehensive basis in the Grace of God for all theology. He has no need of praise from us, for the work he was given to accomplish will endure to bless the world for many centuries to come. If Karl Barth has left behind no school of ‘Barthians’, it is because he belongs to the whole universe of theology in a way that no mere leader of a new movement of thought ever could.

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