Attention: Message from God

Two books I'm reading have variations on the theme: Attention: Message from God. In The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill retells the cliff-hanger where God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac; Abraham, knife in hand, prepares to kill Isaac; and only at the last moment does God say Stop! Faith and obedience have been demonstrated, Abraham, no need to proceed with the actual killing. In Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner Of Heaven, Dan Lafferty also received a message from God instructing him to kill his brother's wife and daughter - punishment for apostasy. I was doing God's will, which is not a crime, say Mr. Lafferty. Unfortunately for the victims, there was no follow-up message from God. Maybe I'm just a knee-jerk anti-authoritarian, but the voice I'd prefer to listen to is: Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.I don't care who the boss is.

How to create a successful partnership in business and marriage

Differentiate and homogenize. Specialize and maintain your commonality. Differentiation enables the partners to cope with complexity - You handle this; I'll handle that. Homogenization ensures that we remain in contact with, understand, and have some empathy for one another's activities. Today's New York Times tells of success in several unusual family/business partnerships in which husbands work in their wives' organizations. One failure that resulted in divorce struck me as an interesting twist on the differentiation/homogenization mix. According to the husband, the relationship at work succeeded because the partners had clearly differentiated responsibilities; at home, however, there appeared to be no differentiation; there was never any clarity as to who was to prepare dinner, take out the trash, do the dishes, and other household chores. And it was this ambiguity that led to frequent conflicts and ultimately to divorce. Finding the balance between differentiation and homogenization in all partnerships is a key to success. Differentiation without homogenization leads to territoriality, turf warfare, and the breakdown in relationships. Likewise, homogenization without differentiation results in lack of clarity, role confusion, and conflict. Differentiate and homogenize!

Making our histories more interesting

My father came to America as a young boy from a shtetl in Russia speaking no English. He married late in life so by the time I knew him he had mastered the language enough to be a steady writer of letters to the editor, warnings to my brothers and me about the dangers of cigarette smoking along with other life lessons, and Jeremiah-like warnings to debtors about punishment from a higher power if they didn't pay up. His greatest language accomplishment was his 93-page memoir written in his late 80s. It was full of interesting, sometimes spectacular, sometimes miraculous tales from his childhood in "the old country." I remember asking him if all of this was true; he dismissed the question as irrelevant to the larger mission of making one's history interesting. Who would read it otherwise? Well that dampened my enthusiasm regarding the value of the whole enterprise.
Today I'm reading Thomas Cahill's The Gift of the Jews in which he indicates how ancient Sumerian legends found their way into Biblical stories - the Garden of Eden from Ishtar's tree of life guarded by a serpent, Noah and his ark from an ancestral figure whose unique piety enabled him to save a remnant of life in the great flood, the tower of Babel from the ziggurat of Harran aimed at scaling one's way to heaven. Juicy stories from the past too good to resist juicing up one's own history.
My father's been gone for many years; I wish he were alive so I could apologize for whatever disrespect I showed to his memoir. Little did I realize that it was part of an illustrious story-telling tradition.