Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. I've spent much of the morning
reading the appellate report of your case, which, as I
suspect you know, is published in full on the Internet.
http://openjurist.org/769/f2d/1235/namenwirth-v-board-of-regents-of-university-of-wisconsin-system
Reading between the lines, leaves me awed and appalled
by your ordeal. I can well imagine that since the controversy
is behind, you want to leave it there, and not reconsider any
of its dimensions.  The judges' tortured expositions bring to
mind another Rilke quotation:

"Das ist der Sinn von allem was einst war,
dass es nicht bleibt in seiner ganzen Schwere,
dass es zu unserm Wesen wiederkehre,
in uns verwoben, tief und wunderbar."

As you can imagine, my interest extends to all aspects of the
issue: your scientific interests and your academic work, your
publications, the social and political environment at the 
university, the reactions of your friends and your family,
the consequences for your own existence. I won't ask any questions,
but for whatever you want to reveal, you have a very sympathetic
reader.

If the accounts of my own experiences in court were of interest
to you, I wouldn't be stingy with the details.  My legal exploits
include six cases to which I was a party, and one, perhaps the most
consequential, where my testimony as an expert witness foiled a
prosecutor's plan to convict an innocent man of first degree murder.
In general, however, the rehashing and rumination of legal controversies 
seems to me of little merit, especially since legal argument is
inherently prejudiced and contrived. I find recitations of legal
arguments irreparably corrosive of intellectual honesty.

In further considering the poem by Rilke, "Der Schauende", which
we discussed, where Jacob wrestling with the angel is represented
as vanquished, "tief besiegt", I looked at the source in Genesis 32:23-30,
and found to my surprise that in all translations except the Septuagint,
Jacob is adjudged to have prevailed over the man with whom he wrestled
until dawn. There's no mention of Jacob's being vanquished.
The Septuagint characterizes Jacob as "dynatos" which means
forceful or mighty, - but does not logically preclude his being overcome. 
However the circumstance that the wrestling match was ended by the coming
of day, precludes the possibility that it was ended by the defeat of
either contender.

Unfortunately, I am ignorant of Hebrew, - and too old to start learning
it now.  I've long since concluded, that if in 225 A.D. it required seventy
rabbis to translate the Bible, the original Hebrew must have been very obscure,
and the translation on which they agreed must have been unavoidably
arbitrary, its spotty vagueness and contradictions reflecting the committee's
inability to agree on the meaning to be attributed to an unintelligible text.
Is it conceivable that the translation of the Septuagint represented in
fact a rediscovery, a reinvention of classical Biblical Hebrew?
Genesis 32 in the Septuagint relates that Jacob was alone, that he wrestled
with a man (anthropos) all night, that when dawn came, one of the wrestlers
said to the other, - and it's not clear to me which to which - "Let me go."
and the other replied, "I won't let you go until you give me tenure."
(The Greek is eu-logeo, to speak well of, to praise, - like the Latin,
benedicere). The other wrestler told Jacob to change his name to Israel;
but when Jacob asked the other wrestler "What's your name?" he received
the reply "Why do you want to know?" And the Septuagint then reports
that he gave him tenure (blessed him); but again it's not clear to me
who gave tenure to whom. It's arguable that the other wrestler was God,
in which case the blessing could have gone in either direction, from
Jacob to God, or from God to Jacob. According to the Septuagint blessing
and praise are the same; and "praising God" is the very essence of man's
relationship to him. Jacob's psychiatrist would surely have pointed
out to him that by defrauding Esau of Isaac's blessing, Jacob
had offended both Esau and God, that he had reason to be afraid of
both, that he had reason to receive the blessing of both, and that
he had reason to try to ingratiate himself with either or both
of them by bestowing his blessing.  Esau was after Jacob with 400 men,
how many angels God had lined up receives no mention. Presumably God
has as many angels at his disposal as he wishes; and besides, it takes
only one angel to do the job.

Maybe it was Esau rather than God with whom Jacob was wrestling, and the
"blessing" that was changing hands at the dawn of day, was that blessing
from Isaac of which Jacob had defrauded his older brother. The lines 
of the Septuagint in which the story is told are confused and confusing
as if written by a class of slow-track fourth graders trying to fudge an
answer which they didn't know.

Jochen