Interesting comment on Jewish mystic thinking (the book of Zohar). The Bible suggests that before this world was created and allowed to exist, there were several other creations that failed. According to the Zohar, those former worlds could not stand on their own so they ceased to exist. Their collapses stemmed from the absence of internal harmony, from an imbalance between mercy and justice, masculinity and femininity - the building blocks upon which reality is founded.
What emerges here is the essence of the Zohar's almost ideological viewpoint, which sees marriage as an absolute necessity. Bachelorhood is a sin because it is imbalance, a world that cannot, as it were, stand on its own feet. Whereas the bachelor collapses, the married one, who obeys the commandment of "Be fruitful and multiply," enables the world to survive. Pic: Tomb of the kabbalist Luzzato ("The Ramchal").
12 comments:
Mystical bullshit, J. How can such an intelligent person have a weak spot for the kabbalah?
I agree with the message: "Be fruitful and multiply".
Sure, today we would formulate the same idea in a different way, but basically it is indisputable that our world - the West - is dying for lack of children.
Supposing polygamy was reinstated, as some Ultra-Orthodox are keen on doing, there would inevitably be bachelors. But it doesn't make sense to try to make sense of this stuff.
You are talking about a hypothetical social situation, that may have existed in African kingdoms or in Central Asia under Mongol rule. I dont know of any real society where there is a sizeable group of elderly bachelors who could not marry because of polygamy. Not even in strict Muslim societies like Gaza or Saudi Arabia. They have the problem of forced celibacy of young men because of the need of paying for brides but sooner or later they marry. What we have in Western (and Jewish) societies is a large group of males that does not want to marry and bring up children, and parallely a large group of women that are unable to marry and are desperate to have even a child.
J, it is a question of mathematics - if there are approximately equal #'s of males and females and some of the males have more than 1 wife, then there will not be enough women left for the others. To say that you do not know of any bachelors does not mean that they do not exist. Also unmarried young males are socially destabilizing. The longer they are forced to remain unmarried the greater the chances for social problems. The lack of economic opportunity in Arab societies due to their corrupt and kleptocratic nature only worsens the problem. All of the 9/11 hijackers were from this unstable strata of society.
K
I dont think those thesis have been demonstrated by reality anywhere. Polygamy has been practiced in many societies and they were not specially unstable. At the beginning of the 20th Century, there were 5 men for each woman in Buenos Aires (because of mass immigration) and it was perfectly viable thanks to the bordellos. Many "experts" say that China and India's gender imbalance will cause the collapse of those countries, but in my opinion it is nonsense.
Untrue-most of the 9/11 hijackers were from the upper middle class of Arab society, had overseas visas and education, many had girlfriends, and certainly would have had no problem finding wives. You think OBlL was an idiot, that he would entrust the most important mission in his organization's history to losers?
OBL, I mean.
The late OBL, you meant.
The late OBL, you meant.
The problem is the opposite, large numbers of females do not want to marry or have children, and large numbers of men are left without girlfriends or wives because all the women want to be with the top 20% of men (who are not necessarily the rich men) and are willing to choose the possibility of sex with them over the certainty of having a family.
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