National Arbor Day 2009

...then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice
before the Lord" for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth: he shall judge the world with righteousness, and the people with his truth.
Bible, Psalms XCVI, v. 12-13


Arbor Day doesn't seem to get as much publicity as it once did, now that it has been overshadowed by Earth Day. I think Arbor Day is a holiday the Lord would enjoy; after all, He planted trees. God planted in Eden toward the east— the direction of beginnings, the direction of His return.

Planting a tree puts one in touch with eternity. Digging in the earth’s elements is always a bit like connecting with the ancient—mankind’s primeval assignment on the earth: to cultivate it and keep it. And yet rarely do we feel such hope of reaching to the future as we do when planting trees; living monuments that endure for generations.

Tax Time and the Old Testament

The Old Testament opens the topic of taxation in Genesis 41 with the story of Joseph and Pharaoh. Joseph had interpreted the Pharaoh's dreams as omens of seven years of prosperity and seven subsequent years of famine. After a bit of consultation, Pharaoh pulled out his signet ring and put Joseph in charge of coming up with an economic plan.

The basic plan is outlined in verse 34: Let Pharaoh exact a fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt in the seven years of abundance. A fifth part is a 20% tax rate.

Rabbi Lapin comments on this: That an outsider's recommendation to tax an entire country stretches credibility. That his subjects also found the recommendation pleasing can mean only one thing— The tax rate they were anticipating, reports Talmudic tradition, was considerably higher than Joseph's 20%.

A reasonable tax plan which allowed the Egyptians to keep 80% of their labors and promised protection against the future famine actually spurred the economy on. Verse 49 reports, "Thus Joseph stored up grain in great abundance like the sand of the sea, until he stopped measuring it, for it was beyond measure."


Yet another mention of taxation is found in Proverbs 12:24. "The hand of the diligent shall bear rule: but the slothful shall be under tribute." Under tribute means subject to taxation. Some translations read put to forced labor. Forced labor is work done without payment or benefit, which goes against the biblical principle that a workman is worthy of his hire.

According to the 11th century sage, Rabbi Solomon Yitzchaki, this passage warns that excessive taxation hinders productivity and comes to pass only through the laziness and indifference of citizens who decline to resist oppression. In other words, resisting a government's impulse to tax requires vigilance and energy.




Information pertaining to the rabbis was taken from an undated Wall Street Journal article.

Good Friday Recollections

My earliest memory of Easter is actually a Good Friday memory. My mother and I were outside by the backyard clothesline. She had done a wash earlier in the day and by now the bed sheets were dry and rippling rather vigorously in the wind. We were there to rescue all the clothes off the line before the raindrops would hit. My job was to hold the clothespin bag and collect all the clothespins.

Where we were standing, and all the way to the south and southeast, all was gloriously sunny. Jonquils nodded their reflections of the deepest yellows. No leaves filled out the trees yet, and the sunlight that filtered though the branches lit up the greenest grass of the year. But in the rest of the sky, the dark clouds of an impending thunderstorm were building.

I remember mom commenting that it was almost 3 o'clock in the afternoon and a storm was coming, much like the storm that came the afternoon Jesus died on the cross. That was a very poignant moment that seemed bigger than life. Looking one direction, the world seemed fully peaceful and ready to bloom into new spring life. But turn around—and it seemed all the forces of the universe were assembling in the heavens and about to release their fury.

No doubt, extra ions were in the atmosphere. I remember an electrifying clarity of life and death vying across time and space. It was profound.

April Fools

I am happy, or perhaps more accurately relieved, that my kids have outgrown the silliess of an April Fools's day prank.

Which is not to say that I don't appreciate a good joke. I just don't appreciate being the object of the joke. Perfectly reasonable. I still like to hear about them.

Several years ago I came across a website for the Museum of Hoaxes. The brick and mortar museum is in San Diego, California—I think—if they didn't just make it up. There is a virtual museum that anyone can visit here: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/

They list 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes, but I'm going to comment only on numbers #5 and #7.

#5 is The Guardian newspaper's stunt from 1977 when they described an archipelago, The Republic of San Serriffe, with a set of two major semi-colon-shaped islands in the Indian Ocean. The two primary islands were called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. The capital of Bodoni was on the larger upper island. The smaller island had a swampy interior as well as a forested area which was the habitat of the national bird, the Kwote.

I love the typography typology. That alone makes it fun. But the rest of the story was in its marketing success. Over half of the layout was advertising, and these were big advertisers that the average person would recognize: Texaco, Kodak, Guinness. Alas, great economic leaders are hard to find. In 1989 General Pica was deposed by a cabal of senior officers; or so they said.

#7 is a circumspect story. Here, from 1998, was an article in New Mexicans for Science and Reason claiming that "the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0."

The creation of San Serriffe had been intended as a hoax. The article about changing the value of pi was intended as a parody. It seems the original author had wanted to make a statement about teaching religion in public schools. Perhaps he ought to have done a bit more research.

The closest the Bible ever comes to giving a value for pi is in 1 Kings 7:23. In a description of a bath crafted by Hiram the bronzeworker for Solomon's Temple, you can read that "he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." The diameter is 10. The circumference is 30. That should be close enough for government work, but…

The Hebrew alphabet is alphanumeric: each Hebrew letter also has a numerical value and can be used as a number. ... The common word for circumference is qav. Here, however, the spelling of the word for circumference, qaveh, adds a heh (h).
The q has a value of 100; the v has a value of 6; thus, the normal spelling would yield a numerical value of 106. The addition of the h, with a value of 5, increases the numerical value to 111. This indicates an adjustment of the ratio 111/106, or 31.41509433962 cubits. Assuming that a cubit was 1.5 ft., this 15-foot-wide bowl would have had a circumference of 47.12388980385 feet.
This Hebrew "code" results in 47.12264150943 feet, or an error of less than 15 thousandths of an inch!

~ The answer to this difficulty was discovered by Shlomo Edward G. Belaga and appeared in Boaz Tsaban's Rabbinical Math page and is also reported in Grant Jeffrey's The Handwriting of God, Frontier Research Publications, Toronto Ontario, 1997.

Perhaps the measurement was not quite as foolish as it first appeared.