Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For mainstream American blacks, the vast majority of churches have Hebrew names--Ebenezer, Mount Zion, Canaan, Mount Moriah, Taber...nacle, New Hebron, Mount Olive. Hebraic traditions run deep in the black church. More than any people on earth, including the Jews, American blacks have adopted the Mosaic model of social organization, with the exalted political prophet bonded to the "children of Israel" below. Blacks and Jews have in common a history of cyclical swings between cultural separatism and assimilation. Black Zionists helped establish an independent Liberia in 1847, some fifty years before the emergence of modern Jewish Zionism. Jews, who have canonized no new prophets in two millennia and who shudder at the memory of their false messiahs, look with both longing and horror upon the last generation's procession of black prophets: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson. Depending on one's prediction of the outcome, blacks and Jews are either intimate enemies or quarrelsome cousins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »