jack

Possibly we should talk about what what was divinely revealed to all these people who went to heaven and then wrote a book about it, but instead, I realised I really needed to know what was going on in history at the same time all this religious teaching was being written down.

You've probably read some of the Christian gospels and have some idea what Judea looks like in 1AD. But this comes after 500 years of being conquered, the temple destroyed, being taken away, and let go, and conquered again, and rebelling, and being conquered by someone else, etc, etc. The first bit about the being taken away to Babylon and then a generation later let go is described in the book of Daniel which also describes a bunch of visions about heaven the end of the world. Esther describes Esther marrying a Persian emperor (probably a fictionalised version of the historical one) c.f. Purim. Maccabees describes yet another revolt celebrated by Hannukah.

( Read more... )

In Parts I and II (see https://jack.dreamwidth.org/tag/boyarin-apocalypse), we saw Elisha Ben Abuya aka "Aher, the Other rabbi" get shunned for believing something heretical to ardent monotheists. The story describes four great rabbis entering a metaphorical "garden" and him seeing seeing Metatron giving orders from a golden throne, and crying "God?", and then legions of angels drag Metatron away to be whipped him for temerity. But why are they punishing Metatron here?

This was some sort of dualistic or binitarian belief, but what? This was central to the point Daniel Boyarin was making in these lectures. He's showing that despite quite a lot of strands of Jewish mysticism having no written records from about 300BCE to 200CE, they didn't vanish during this time but were probably actually common but disapproved of. This is an extended swipe at another unparalleled biblical scholar, Peter Schafer, who wrote books about ways Christianity did influence Judaism.

At some point Schafer described one of Boyarin's books using the "what is good is not new and what is new is not good" quip. Another time, he says "some scholars" believe Christianity didn't influence Judaism at all, but gives an example of a book by Boyarin. Boyarin angrily retorts Shafer his putting words in his mouth, he's saying THIS PARTICULAR story with the garden was an influence of a different tradition, not Christianity, and gave this fascinating lecture series to explain why in extreme detail.

Boyarin takes a number of specific examples that appear in the Talmud. For instance, the garden story was supposed to be a warning "IF YOU KNOW HOW TO GO TO HEAVEN DON'T WRITE IT DOWN THE KNOWLEDGE IS TOO MUCH FOR MOST PEOPLE" but the rabbis of a few hundred years later helpfully go into a lot of specific detail, including specific steps Rabbi Akiva supposedly undertook and the substances of seven onion-layers of heaven he travelled through.

Boyarin compares these to similar stories recorded earlier (e.g. 1 Enoch where Enoch travels to heaven in a similar way and is taken up as an angel taught great mysteries about everything) and later (e.g. 3 Enoch where someone else travels to heaven and meets Enoch-now-Metatron who complains about getting whipped for it, but gives him important visions), and demonstrates that these probably all influenced each other, as opposed to the ideas being re-imported from Christianity or another source. Conversely there's a story in Daniel about a great king and Someone sitting on a great throne and Daniel getting important visions, in both Jewish and Christian tradition, but this seems to be a slightly different version of the story emphasising who is in heaven and how they rule, not a human becoming an angel and getting whipped for going too far.

These likely relate to a much earlier story. The Sumerian King List records a sequence of kings stretching back before a Great Flood, and the seventh antediluvian king has a series of legends about being taken up into heaven, being allowed to run humanity and making a golden age, and then screwing it all up by being worshipped too much for his own sake and cast down again. Legends about a junior divine being who had been, or became, human, or who got too big for his boots and had to be cast down float about since then. The Sumerian religion at the time was later reformed by Zoroaster as Zoroastrinism.

This seems to be the earlier point of the Enoch-Metatron stories. The bible only says Enoch (seventh generation patriach) went off with God instead of dying. But this is back when the idea was that heaven was for angels and dead people went to some sort of underworld, so it may reflect the "went to heaven and was taught all the mysteries and became an angel" story recorded later. Then some Jewish people happily bought into the "Metatron rules on some days when God is busy doing accounts" plan whether or not Metatron had been Enoch. Others told them off with the "Yes, and he was PUNISHED FOR IT" bit of the Enoch/Metatron story. This is why Metatron's punishment for what Aher said seems to come out of nowhere.

Conversely, if Jesus or the Holy Spirit has any relationship to this story, they don't have any of those bits, so the bit with Metatron being seen by the Rabbis going into the garden derives from earlier Jewish tradition, not a denouncement of contemporary Christianity. And so (says Boyarin), Boyarin's long detailed lecture series is correct and Shafer's throw-away snarky footnote is wrong.

In the Talmud there's a famous story about four Rabbis who enter a fine garden. The word is "Pardes" which literally means orchard, but is a distant cousin of the word paradise. To no-one's surprise this turns out to be (spoilers!) a metaphor for heaven or divine knowledge which is Making a Point. In fact, I think the whole story is recorded not for its own sake but as a supporting example to a general prohibition, if you meditate and study so hard you gain divine insight that gives you miraculous powers, only share the knowledge with sober-minded over-40s of good character, in case someone is a bit reckless and heat-visions an entire landscape or designs a robot that runs amok and destroys Prague, or whatever.

You will also be shocked, shocked, to learn that when reach these heights of divine knowledge, three of them act incautiously and get comeuppance for it, and R Akiva is sensible about it and gets out safely and becomes One of the Most Famous Rabbis in the Talmud ever.

According to later versions of the story, the first rabbi, Ben Azzai saw God and died. In the earliest version is just says he went into the garden and "glimpsed and died", and what exactly he glimpsed was something only contained in oral versions of the story. The real life Ben Azzai was another Talmud Rabbi famous for all sorts of things, although apparently he did die young-ish and never officially got recognised as a rabbi in his lifetime.

The second, Ben Zoma, looked around and saw too much, but not so much that he died, and went mad. The original cliff notes version quotes a bit of the bible about not eating too much honey here, so something like, he didn't know what was too much. Apparently he also died without becoming a Rabbi but was famous for his learning anyway.

The third "trampled the stalks" which is bad in a field, and super super bad to do in heaven. The expanded version says he saw God and Metatron and said, "oh look, there's two Gods!?" and caused a holy hullabaloo across all of heaven, and got kicked out. And in real life, he abandoned being a great famous Rabbi and became a super super heretic, and went around gratuitously sinning all over the place -- or perhaps, adopted ideas of a different sect of Judaism that the people writing this down wanted to tell everyone how BAD it was. His name as Elisha ben Abuya, but he's known as "Acher" which means "The Other" all through the talmud where's an example of what absolutely not to do.

And Akiva entered the garden peacefully, did no harm, and left again safely. The Talmud usually likes Akiva.

Next time we'll talk about Acher's heresy in a lot more detail. Also (spoilers) the angels drag Metatron from his throne and whip him with thousands and thousands of fiery whips (yes, really) which may give some satisfaction to those of you who read Good Omens.

Several countries got the number of infected people almost back down to where they started, and are cautiously considering relaxing restrictions. This means they need to *quickly* lock down any areas with a new infection until they've traced and tested any contacts, but hopefully they will be able to do so.

I can't help but wish more countries had been able to jump to that point from the start without having an infection get out of control and need a more serious lockdown first. I guess that's similar to what Taiwan and New Zealand did?

Conversely the number of infected people in the UK has levelled off but not really gone down. And now the government is talking about relaxing restrictions. It seems like even sensible, desirable relaxations, or proposed future relaxations, will overall make people less cautious, which in this situation will make the number of infection go up again. Which will make it take that much longer to get down to a safe level again even if effective measures are found. So any plans or June need to be based on, "when the infection rate goes up, will the government reverse direction and lock down harder again? Or will they go on pretending everything is fine while the situation gets even more out of hand?"

I hope that's wrong. Fiends I trust to be sensible ARE talking about what will happen in June. I agree lockdown can't last forever. But where is it wrong? What will happen instead?

What would I do if I were in charge? My best guesses would be:

* Have regular announcements announcing advice stricter in some ways but less strict in others. E.g. allow people to go to the park with relatives 2m apart, but offer more precise restrictions in other areas to show "we need to take this seriously" not "ok, relax".
* Have different advice for different regions.
* Don't focus on the minutiae of people working from home and mostly not seeing people. Work out what's supposed to happen for the biggest obstacles, companies that need people to work safely, what guidance is there? People with children, don't wish away the problem, offer government support to work part time, or allow people to share childcare within a small, fixed group of families.
* Hand a big check to someone in the NHS and say "sorry we fucked up procurement for treatment and testing. go organise it however you would usually organise it".
* Have a series of milestones for relaxing lockdown. E.g. "infection rate below X", "test and trace infrastructure is working"
* Have a plan for phased return to normal life. Pay attention to the people for whom the current situation is most difficult. Make it transparent. You could just copy France's.
* Stop hinting contradictory things. Decide what the strategy is. Decide what messaging communicates that. Communicate that clearly through all channels, regular announcements, adverts. Force newspapers to communicate it clearly, and not to communicate confusing hints.

What happens after that? I don't have an "after" yet. My best guess is that a sufficiently effective test-and-trace infrastructure will slowly allow normal life to resume with local lockdowns when necessary. Or maybe some other scientific breakthrough. Probably not a vaccine, but maybe quick home tests. Or some research breakthrough in how it spreads and can be prevented. Etc.

People have started talking about an exit strategy. Which would be good, but talking about that as one unrelieved concept is bad.

It's never too early to think about when, how, and under what circumstances, quarantine could be relaxed. Before we ever got into lockdown, people were certainly speculating about what would happen after, and we could have had lots of academics and civil servants writing plans.

But how that happens depends very much on what happens beforehand. I'm fairly hopeful on having SOME kind of breakthroughs. We might get a vaccine. We might get reliable antibody tests that can be mass manufactured and change colour on a strip of paper and don't need to be sent back to the lab. We might discover which types of distancing are useful and which don't work as well. All of these would lead to different outcomes.

But all of those lead to different strategies! And honestly, the UK is sufficiently behind other countries that the simplest thing to do is probably just copy what most countries do. And they probably all need to come with a caveat of "almost any relaxation will lead to the disease continuing to spread, does it have tracing and testing to keep it in the dozens, and if it doesn't work, when does lockdown resume?"

The thing I'm objecting to is too many people calling for "an exit strategy" while deliberately avoiding looking at any of the details. Not, "which distancing measures aren't worthwhile and we can discontinue" or "at what point is it relatively safe" or "these are the circumstances where we should lockdown and these are the circumstances where we should relax". But, in effect, "we want to end quarantine and we don't care about the consequences". If you're not willing to say what the consequences are, that's a bad sign for being willing to accept them.

We've been intermittently playing some casual bridge with Liv's sibs or ghoti and cjwatson, usually on an online bridge site with videoconferencing open in the background.

Would anyone else be interested in joining in if we arrange it again and it would make numbers work well?

I feel like I've finally speculated and played enough I might be ready to run some of the other ideas I have in mind. Current forerunners, something set on Barrayar, and a swords-and-sorcery wander-the-landscape-fighting-dark-lords.

But I keep having further ideas for what can work well.

One is to borrow the idea from various places of a "reputation" track, where progress is measured in terms of how much, when NPCs meet you, they treat you as a famous wizard/scary badass/etc/etc. Or how much your standing with your personal god, or patron organisation, etc rises and how much support and lattitude they're willing to give you. Since having responsibility is fun, but only when it feels real.

The other is, that in order for players to relax and have fun, they have to be able to go into fights clowning about and it not being a big deal if they lose. Be able to play their character and have the scared one and the CHARGE one, etc, etc. But you only really get to that point if they can try things out and see what happens. Which is POSSIBLE if you have a "beaten up but victorious" mode (i.e. a big buffer of healing potions always). But maybe easier if you assume that losing means "embarrassingly driven back" or at worst "left for dead" not "throat slit". So I think I should try building that in from the start, both in terms of plot (i.e. have most enemies have a reason to skirmish and retreat, and fighting for a goal which can be lost without dying), and in terms of mechanics (i.e. make dying default to 'knocked out' not 'dead', and make more forgiving healing, but be more ready to provide informal consequences for losing, like just acting like it was a failure.)

For years I've been thinking "My life is going pretty well on a personal level, although I wish the world wasn't in such a mess at the same time". Recently has been that but more so.

Rachel and I started working from home just over three weeks ago, before the government started taking measures. I've been counting time since then. It's hard to stay in sync even though I'm working regular weeks. With the exception of being separated from our other partners once tighter measures came in, we were very fortunate to mostly continue much the same: working from home, setting up video chat with colleagues, and moving social events online, but otherwise continuing work, social life, walks, etc.

I was very conscious of being fortunate I could, but also worried about everything I couldn't control, and the things we were missing out on started to slowly creep up.

Then, a week ago, Rachel showed symptoms that didn't fit any cold she'd had before. She's been mostly ok, still working, but with some weird discomfort. But the symptoms fit Covid and the timeline fit her being infected when she went to the dentist in the first week.

So we felt like surely I'd been most probably already exposed as much as I'd been going to be, but the responsible thing to do was separate ourselves as much as possible. We'd agreed that if we needed to, the ill-er person would take the main bedroom next to the bathroom, and the other person would find somewhere else to sleep, so I took over downstairs, doing all the cooking and household chores, and bringing plates of food to R.

The spare bed was quite good when I had the living room to myself and the biggest problem was making sure all the glass doors had covers to keep light out.

We didn't avoid talking from 2m away, mostly from landing to office or top of stairs to bottom and had some nice dates that way.

Given that Rachel is so far only got fairly mild symptoms, it may be overkill, but we felt like we needed to. But really really really hopefully, she will get better, and I will either also have a mild case or not have any case, and then we can go back to going out in moderation and stop worrying about it (and the government won't ban that). Although also likely more events will have overtaken everyone by then...

This month's "daily diary" was due last thursday when we did a practice work from home day. But instead I'm just going to describe a typical wfh day this week.

We're both working from home. My office was 99% set up for this already. All our meetings were in google hangouts anyway and our meeting rooms used automagically know which meeting to connect to from the calendar, for the benefit of anyone WFH that day or coworkers in america. Most technical chit-chat was in appropriate slack channels for searchability and not distracting the open office. Lots of people worked from home here and there or semi regularly. So we basically had all the infrastructure already. So we just needed to iron out a few infrastructure overloads when everyone was running builds remotely at once.

There have been some other adjustments. Meetings have extended a bit to give us more face-seeing chitchat which I'm usually eager for. And implicitly use just to communicate and gauge people's status by nonverbal cues. Slack chat is more active. I may suggest setting up some coffee time video hangouts and extra chat channels.

Skipping commute has meant more leisurely mornings when we're more in sync with each other. And I can have kitchen chat and lunch with Liv instead of coworkers, with commensurately more hugs. I am very glad we're together. A lot of sympathy for people with fewer or many more than 2 in their household.

As long as I can I will keep up jogging outside even if it isn't safe to go to the gym. But I need to work out what jogging is actually as effective. And my body is impatient for commute-equivalent exercise, so I may need to work out what that is -- maybe lunchtime walks, or longer weekend walks?

I've recently not been having that many evenings out anyway, so my social life isn't that different either. But I'm making sure I do continue to build social connections to people so they don't wither away. I can feel the need building up over a week. And I'm mentally planning a lot of online social events for future, even though I'm still quite busy right now.

This post was just about our current life, it left out all of the worries. There will be other posts.