While discussing the latter half of J.T. Waldman's "Megillat Esther" in class this week, someone mentioned that they read that there is a theory that Esther and Mordecai are Ishtar and Marduk in a retelling of the ancient Babylonian myth (they weren't saying they believed it, just that they had read about it). I was interested to hear that because I'm always fascinated by such ideas. The reason why I am fascinated is because people will come up with all sorts of excuses not to believe something. The people coming up with these theories would rather create these ideas instead of examining the truth of the Bible on its own merits. As a born again Christian, I believe the Bible to be God's Word. I find such theories as the Esther/Isthtar one to be offensive to people who believe in the truth of the Hebrew Bible as well as people that believe in the truth of the New Testament. The reason I find these ideas offensive is because they are attempts to deny the truth of the Bible by grasping at straws.

My comments are not meant to offend anyone in anyway. I've just noticed that there are many ways in which some people avoid examining the truth of the Bible, whether talking about the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament or both.

Rachel and Leah: Fulfilling God's Purposes in Spite of Themselves

Overall I have not been overly impressed with J.T. Waldman's "Megillat Esther." My main issue is that I do not like his artistic style very much. It's too cluttered for my taste. That being said, Waldman's work has some interesting and unique components. Putting a book of the Bible into graphic novel form is not an original idea but Waldman executes it with some unique elements. He has interludes and little side plots in the book. My favorite is the Rachel/Leah dispute going on, in which their competitive nature shines. Waldman did this, presumably, because Esther and Mordecai are descended from Rachel and Jacob, while Haman, the bad guy, is descended from Jacob's brother Esau. Waldman has them arguing (seemingly just to argue). For instance, on page 106-107 Rachel and Leah are hidden amongst the plants on the bottom of the two pages arguing. Esther is important because she saves the Judaic people from genocide by risking her life to ask the king to spare them. To me, this little side story of Rachel and Leah in the story is great because it reminds the reader of their descendants. Esther, who was vital to her people's survival, was descended from Rachel, while from Leah came the Davidic line, of which Jesus Christ was a part. So, both sisters helped fulfill God's plan for the world in spite of their bitterness towards one another and selfishness. To me personally this is also a great example of how God uses people to fulfill His purposes despite people's failures and shortcomings.

The Israeli Role in the Sabra and Shatila Massacre

Following the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese Christian Phalangist party leader, the party retaliated by murdering Palestinian refuges in Beirut at the Sabra and Shatila refuge camps. Based on the discussion in class, the film "Waltz with Bashir" itself and my own research, there is the question of what exactly Israel's invovlement was. Undeniably, they were at least enablers to an extent by allowing the Phalangists into the camps and setting off flares in the dark so the Phalangists could carry out their "work". Although the intent of the Phalangists was supposedly just to find the PLO terrorists allegedly responsible for Bashir's death, they murdered for sure several hundred people and possibly up to three thousand. Why they decided to kill children, for instance, is beyond comprehension. Perhaps it could be argued that they were just following orders, but my question is, who gave these orders, or did they somehow misunderstand their orders?

And the Israeli involvement is hugely disturbing as well. The fact that Ariel Sharon is considered at least indirectly responsible for the massacre and then managed to make such a successful political career comeback is bizarre and unsettling. I guess I just don't understand how all of this was allowed to happen; I'm not blaming any one person in particular because I don't pretend to have all the facts. Apparently no one does. It reminds me of the Holocaust - how that happened boggles my mind as well. As was brought up in class discussion, there is the claim that people involved were just following orders. I think that's a ridiculous excuse for murdering innocent human beings. The entire situation with the massacre is disgusting and upsetting. It could easily happen again to anyone, anywhere.

Animation vs Actual Footage - The Contrast in "Waltz with Bashir"

This week in our class, we watched the film "Waltz with Bashir." This was a very interesting film to watch for many reasons. The form of animation is unique and fresh. The story was very interesting and the animation allowed it to be told in a certain way. The film presented very disturbing situations that occured during the Israeli-Lebanon War of 1982. The massacre of Palestinian refuges by the Christian Phalangists was very disturbing, although this is the intended reaction I'm sure. One important aspect of the final minutes of the film is that there is a switch from animation to actual footage of the aftermath of the murders, when Palestinian women are walking around the area of Beirut that held the refuge camps and they are crying and wailing. I think this was a brilliant choice on the part of the filmmakers because it forces the viewer to recognize that these were actual events, not just a cartoon. With animation it is all too easy to convince oneself that one is simply watching a movie, but to see footage of the actual event, or in this case, the direct aftermath, prevents the viewer from walking away without having an emotional reaction of some sort.

For me personally, the reaction was one of shock and dismay. One of the characters in the film talks about walking through the camps right after the massacre stopped and seeing a little curly haired girl in the rubble; only her head and a hand visible. This reminds him of his own little girl. The dead child is shown animated and then when you see live action the little girl is shown. I was saddened when they had this scene in animation but seeing the real little girl, knowing this actually happened to a child, is absolutely horrifying. The viewer cannot escape from it because it is real. While there is always a level of distaste when showing corpses on film, I feel it is an important way to reach people emotionally and force them to acknowledge the horrors of violence. For this reason I feel the filmmakers made the right choice when they decided to end the film with footage of what had happened.

A Talking Feline

Reading Joann Sfar's "The Rabbi's Cat" is interesting because the cat is narrating the story. I thought having a cat narrate the story was a creative idea and it makes for a unique perspective on what happens throughout the book. This cat does many fascinating things and has interesting thoughts. For a portion of the book the cat gains the ability to speak. I enjoy this aspect of the book because I've always wished my cats could speak English. Knowing what is going on in their little heads would be quite amusing, although they are so naughty in general that knowing what they are thinking could cause me aggravation at times. However, communicating with them through language would be an interesting experience. I wonder if Sfar's idea to make the cat speak came from his desire to have his cat speak to him.

In class it was mentioned that the cat is able to speak after eating a parrot and people wondered if this is a reference to The Fall in the Garden of Eden and the knowledge humans gained from eating the fruit they were forbidden by God to eat. I hadn't considered that idea while I read the book but I think it has merit. Sfar may very well have intended the reader to interpret the situation that way. If so it's interesting because a cat has no business speaking any more than people should be disobedient to God, but the cat ate the bird because of its selfish reasons just like people go their own way out of selfishness.

Different Geography, Different Customs

Reading this week's reading "The Rabbi's Cat" by Joann Sfar was interesting because it opened my eyes to the fact that there are different Jewish cultures in a sense. The rabbi and his daughter are North African Jews. I never considered North Africa as a place where Jews live or lived. The differences between North African Jews and French Jews become somewhat obvious in the last section of the book when the rabbi travels with his daughter and her husband to Paris to stay with the son-in-law's family. The rabbi becomes angry on page 106 when he discovers that the son-in-law's family is not very religious. He refuses to stay in their house, saying "I just can't do that" (106). Later on after he comes around he comes to the family's house and speaks to the son-in-law's father, who is really not very religious. In fact, this man finds it odd that his son became a rabbi even though he had raised him to be non-religious (139). The differences between the two families are interesting to me because it seems that the French family is more secular and urbanized while the North African family is more religious.

The book also mentions two different types of Jews. On page 51 the rabbi is asked a question by a man with a hypothetical question concerning etiquette on different food customs. The Askenazim and Sephardim are the two groups mentioned. According to what we learned in class, Sephardi are Mediterranean Jews (technically the term should only apply to Jews of Spanish descent but it's used more broadly) and the Askenazim are European Jews. I thought this was interesting because I had never thought before about different Jewish groups based on geography and it's also interesting that they have some different customs relating to food and such because I tend to think more of similarities than differences about groups of people.

A Survivor's Habits

I've noticed repeatedly throughout the second half of Art Spiegelman's "Maus" that Vladek, Art's Holocaust surviving father, exhibits rather odd behaviors as a result of his experiences. For instance, on page 112 Vladek draws a diagram of the bunker in which he and Anja had hidden in one of the ghettos, saying "such things it's good to know exactly how was it - just in case." I interpreted this to mean that Vladek desired that his son have an idea how to create a bunker in case of some type of desperate situation, such as a war. Vladek probably realized that what had happened to him could happen again.

On page 118, Vladek and Art are walking along as Vladek shares part of his story and picks up telephone wire, telling his son that "it's good for tying things," to which Art replies "you always pick up trash! Can't you just buy wire?" Vladek says in reply "Why always you want to buy when you can find?" This exchange reveals Vladek's desire to save money by picking up discarded objects instead of buying things new, and also we learn from this discussion that this is not an isolated incident because Art's comment tells us Vladek has done this before. On page 134 Art's stepmother Mala says that Vladek has quite a bit of money in the bank and yet is very cheap. On page 133 she says that when they married and she needed some new clothes he tried to give her his first wife's clothes. Mala feels that his stinginess is not a result of being a Holocaust survivor because "all our friends went through the camps. Nobody is like him!" I think that Vladek's desire to spend as little money as possible resulted from a fear that perhaps there would be another war and he had discovered in WWII in hiding and in the ghetto that having savings meant the difference between life and death - money meant food and sometimes a hiding place. I think he picks up things off the street because he learned to get by with very little during the war and desires also to save as much money as he is able.