7 February, 2025 09:28

Quote un quote Western thought is and has been dominated by ancient greek philosophy. On top of that mountain is Aristotle. There are many before and a few after – but nearly every University at some point has an intro to Philosophy class and they discuss Aristotle. And one should. RamBam [and many other top historical jewish greats] held Aristotle as perhaps the pinnacle of how to see and understand the world – if there was no God. What about other cultures? Other ancients? What did the Mayans / Aztecs, ancients of Africa, Australia, China, Japan think?? Do we not have any idea what other people thought about the nature of our world? [to be continued]

Before I go into that deep dive, let us focus on the lines of Pikey Avot that list items [?] that were there at [embedded so to speak] in Creation itself. One should take their time and look over the list and actually spend time thinking about each item. The mouth of the donkey – – mind you, not the donkey itself[!]. The mouth was and is an essential piece of creation itself – walla. Do we just breeze through our own tradition every summer with no thought at all? Why do we search around the world [or close by Greeks] for answers, when our OWN tradition buries them in lines that some read every year. [continued]

It seems to me that an essential part of the creation is exactly what it sounds like – everything is here because of this item [again, need to look at the list]. The entire existence of what was, what is, and what will be is listed in these items [and] one of those items is "the mouth of the donkey."

I suggest that perhaps instead of flipping through the pages of our siddur, Piki Avot, and making sure that we continue to appear to whatever Dati means to other people, that we actually spend at least more than one second on the list presented in every siddur of every text. There is a reason for Piki Avot in the book that every religious Sabbath-observant has in every beit knesset of every tradition.