Re: Mt Horeb 12/13/2018 08:58 PM
A favorite Emily Dickinson

I'm nobody! who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Emily obviously knew her Deuteronomy! which does not surprise me.
What fun!

Thanks, Jochen,
Barbara



On Thursday, December 13, 2018 6:27 PM, Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net> wrote:


Dear Barbara,

Thank you for your letter. Please give Micha my regards, and my very
best wishes for his recovery. The "long silence from Mount Horeb" to
which you allude, requires no apology. It goes with the territory, so to
speak, with the burning bush and its imperative, if one takes seriously
the legends with which the name has descended. I am fascinated by the
power of language vicariously to fashion the world in which we live.

"The burning bush is an object described by the Book of Exodus as being
located on Mount Horeb. ... In the biblical narrative, the burning bush
is the location at which Moses was appointed by Yahweh (God) to lead the
Israelites out of Egypt and into Canaan."

"Thought to mean Glowing/Heat, Mount Horeb is one of two names given to
a mountain mentioned in the book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible as a
site where the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God. Described in
Exodus at the Mountain of G-d, Horeb is also known as the Mountain of Yhvh."

"The town got its name from Englishman George Wright in the mid-1800s.
Because of the area's hilly nature, Wright — the area's first postmaster
— named the local post office Mount Horeb after the mountain where Moses
received the Ten Commandments." When Postmaster George Wright, as we are
told, later moved to Iowa, he obviously left Mt Horeb behind and had his
mail forwarded.

It appears what is said to have happened on the original Mount Horeb
depends on the syntax of ones Internet inquiry, or in pre-electronic
days, at which section of the Pentateuch the believer's needle happens
to separate the pages of the Holy Book.  The reference is to the custom
of inserting a needle between the pages of the Holy Book to discover the
revelation of the day.

Talismane werd' ich in dem Buch zerstreuen,
Das bewirkt ein Gleichgewicht.
Wer mit gläubiger Nadel sticht.
Überall soll gutes Wort ihn freuen.
            (Goethe, Westöstlicher Divan)

[Magic in the book I'll scatter
  that will make for equal treasure
  With faithful needle, (faith does matter);
  every word will be a pleasure.]

My own idiosyncratic interpretation of the denial on Mt Horeb of giving
a name to the divine (I am that I am), is linguistic. By giving a name
to a person or to a thing, one creates a social reference, one exposes
that which one has perceived (was man erlebt hat) to the public.  The
prohibition of naming deity, as it is associated with the burning bush
on Mt Horeb, was the discovery (or the invention) of subjectivity, of
inwardness. It was the equation of what is human with what is divine; an
identification which makes life meaningful, if not indeed, possible.

A law is by its nature, a publication of the spirit. Hence the
promulgation of laws, of the Ten Commandments, by Him, from the same Mt
Horeb where His name was denied and forbidden to be spoken, strikes me
as the ultimate repudiation of His inwardness. You sort it out. I can't.

Jochen