Akim - Google Blog Search |
- 3quarksdaily: The War On, For, or About Christmas
- Is it prescribed to repeat the phrases of the iqaamah twice? | Al Noor <b>...</b>
- N.S.T: Lirik Kembali by <b>Akim</b> & Stacy
| 3quarksdaily: The War On, For, or About Christmas Posted: 16 Dec 2012 09:30 PM PST December 17, 2012The War On, For, or About Christmasby Akim Reinhardt
It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for these religious Hindus. Each year, with women on one side of the room and men on the other, the genders separated by the large, decorated tree, they joyously worked their way through about a half-dozen classics. Sometimes they sang in unison, and sometimes they traded parts while they consulted xeroxed lyric sheets. When it came to "Deck the Halls," everyone always got a chuckle out of the men warbling "Fa la la la, La la la la!" For me, an American Jew then in my mid-20s, it was a liberating experience. Christmas might not be everyone's favorite holiday, but there's no denying that here in the United States, it is THE holiday. None of the others can really compete. It is front and center in the cultural consciousness for no less then a month, beginning its inexorable, swelling crescendo the minute Thanksgiving ends in late November. The din of Christmas music, a parade of TV specials, holiday parties one after the next, wrangling a tree, shopping for gifts, writing and reading year-in-review cards from friends and family, and a dozen other tasks and signposts: the United States is consumed by Christmas for roughly four weeks every year. And it doesn't even end on the 26th. Rather, that merely kicks off a week's worth of giddy de-escalation, the Christmas season not finally relinquishing its hold on society until the New Year's arrival. If you have overwrought memories of and expectations for Christmas, it can be quite stressful. If you've become jaded about the holiday's commercialism and relentlessness, it can be incessantly annoying. But if you're Jewish, and thus imbued from an early age with a uniquely difficult relationship to Christianity, then it can be downright oppressive and wrought with the a deep sense of inner conflict that tears at you from every direction. To be Jewish, at least in my experience, is in some ways to feel like a victim of elder abuse. It is to know that Judaism is directly responsible for Christianity. We spawned it way back when. But as that child grew to maturity, it far surpassed us in size and popularity, aggressively claiming countless millions of converts. And along the way, it turn ed violent towards us.
Crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, the Holocaust. Century after century,
Christians fomented and manifested their weird love-hate relationship
with us. They rape, they pillage, they torture, they kill, but they
can't let us go. Because in the end, they know they are of us. Because
Jesus himself was a fucking Jew. It seems almost Oedipal.And for Jews? To live in the Americas or Europe is to be swallowed up whole, to live forever in the presence of that gargantuan spawn, carrying the burden of centuries of vicious abuse, unable to escape the overbearing presence of Christianity. And it's to be trapped by a nagging sense that this broken relationship is eternal. To forever wonder, even if it's only in the back of your mind, when the abuser might lash out again. Or at least that's how it felt for me growing up in the Bronx, the grandson of Eastern European Jewish refugees who had gotten out just in time. And I'm only half-Jewish. The worst of it wasn't drunken hooliganism spilling over from St. Paddy Day parades, or the specter of ultimate blame that shades the pastels of Easter. No, the worst of it was typically at Christmas. Because that's when fear and resentment transformed into envy. Goddamn if those Gentiles didn't seem like they were having the time of their lives. All of a sudden everyone was in such a good mood, doing nice things for each other, extending holiday greetings, and sharing moments of real, heart-felt sincerity. Christians, even relative strangers, have a way of looking in each other's eyes during the Christmas season and saying just the nicest things in the world and seeming to really, really mean them. Were these actually the same people calling me "Christ-killer," who used "Jew" as a synonym for "cheap," or who in a fit of rage on the playground screeched "Hilter was right!" But their seasonal kindness and fraternity wasn't merely enough to make me forgive. It also made me jealous. Jews
were never this nice to each other. Not in my experience anyway.
Plenty nice, sure, yeah. But there was no equal sense of love for your
fellow man, perhaps because we were each expected to pledge our loyalty
to the tribe. There was certainly no religious experience as
cathartically loving as Christmas. Passover is a wonderful time for
families, but its spirit is more akin to the 1969 New York Mets baseball
team (the ultimate underdogs) winning the World Series than it is about More than anything, I wanted to partake in the brotherhood of Peace on Earth and Goodwill towards Men. I wanted to look someone in the eye, shake their hand, and exchange that depth of love. And of course there were the gifts. They start with a decorated Christmas tree, that coniferous shrine of positive reciprocity, which is certainly one of the coolest things in and of itself in the eyes of a child. But the gifts themselves? For a pre-pubescent, the orgy of Christmas gifts is about as close as you get to sex. Consequently, to be an American Jew is to be surrounded by Christian discomfort for 11 months, only to be submerged into a pool of Christmastime envy during the twelfth. Really, it's a bit much. For many American Jews, all that torment and envy has created a desire to compete. And the result has been the transformation of a relatively minor holiday, Chanukah, into something that attempts, but fails miserably, to ape Christmas. Here in the United States, every Jewish child is intimately familiar with the desire and pressure to have Chanukah vie with the distinctly American version of Christmas. But Chanukah is a very poor substitute for Christmas. Because the Jewish calendar is an adjusted lunar model with a leap month, the sprawling eight days of Chanukah almost always take place in December, and tend to overlap with Christmas about every third year or so. This simple coincidence of timing has elevated its importance for many American Jews, placing it in the untenable position of trying to compete with THE American holiday. I remember, when I was young, checking the calendar some time during the fall, when distant rumblings of Christmas could first be felt. I hoped to find that this would be one of those years when we had an excuse to be festive when everyone else was. But even when the stars aligned, it was not enough. Indeed, in some ways it merely underscored how inadequate Chanukah, the "Festival of Lights," was when compared directly to Noel. For
starters, a menorah is no Christmas tree, and only a burgeoning
pyromaniac could find approximate joy in one. Latkes, Jewish potato
pancakes that are the dish of the season, are good. But they pale in
comparison to the candy canes, sprinkled cookies, gingerbread houses,
and whatever the fuck else sugar plum fairy bullshit people cram
in their mouths this time of year. And while teaching a child to spin a
dreidel is a good way to help him or her develop a gambling habit, the
few coins or minor trinkets he or she might earn along God damn those gifts. Historically, Chanukah has had little of anything to do with gift-giving. But in a failed attempt to compete with Christmas, in a vain effort to keep their children from feeling inadequate as their goyishe classmates drown in wrapping paper, Jewish parents often give their children some gifts during Chanukah. It's like offering a teenager a virgin colada while all the adults are drinking wine and cocktails at a wedding. For me, the pleasures of Christmas as a child were not completely foreign because I am a half-breed. My father was raised Lutheran. While his family was in far off California, my mother's was close by, so the Jewish influence was much greater, and I was raised Jewish, from Bris to Bar Mitzvah. At the same time, both of my parents were skeptical of organized religion and the gross commercialism of every holiday, from Christmas on down to Mother's and Father's day. But they weren't exactly heartless ideologs. We always celebrated one or the other, either Christmas or Chanukah, some years both. Either way, we exchanged a few relatively modest gifts. And though it was usually Chanukah at the fore, there were a few years in which we had trees. There was a small, silvery aluminum thing for a while. Once it started to shed, my mother tossed it. We even had a couple of actual pines until my kid sister was born; it turns out she was allergic to them. Gave her asthma. I mention this merely to illustrate that I was not raised in a restrictive Jewish household, and that I was not a complete outsider looking in. I was from a mixed family living in a mixed (Jewish and Irish) neighborhood in the Bronx. My envy of Christmas was not the hopeless yearning of some Dickensian street urchin, wind-burnt face pressed up against the glass, watching wealthier folk feast on braised goose and baked ham. Rather, I was Jewish enough to not feel any real kinship to Christmas, but enough of a goy to have some semblance of what it actually was. And that, no doubt, shaped my envy. As I got older, my unrequited love for Christmas
began to ease. Drifting into atheism helped. While I've always held
onto my half-breed Jewish ethnicity, leaving God behind washed from me much
o By my late teens and early 20s, Christmas was something I got good at ignoring to some extent. It was that day when all the stores were closed. It was a good day to see a movie and grab some Chinese food. You know, before all the gentiles also began to realize that this is actually a good way to spend a day off, especially after you've been cooped up with your family for far too long. But now you can't go near a theater on December 25th. Tragic, really. However, spending several Christmases with my Gujarati friend's family was a real turning point. Because it helped crystalize for me the difference between the ancient Christian holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus, and the secular American holiday that doesn't have a damn thing to do with Jesus. Three generations' worth of Indian immigrants and their progeny would decorate a tree, wrap and exchange gifts, and even sing overtly religious songs like "Oh Holy Night." They were Hindus. Not only weren't they Christian, a number of them didn't even really know all that much about Christian theology. Yet there they were, not only "doing" Christmas, and not being threatened by it at all. Hell, they were enjoying it as much as the next guy. The War on Christmas agitators, especially the propagandists in big-time right-wing media like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, are largely full of shit of course. Christmas dominates American culture during the entire month of December and almost everybody celebrates in one way or another, including millions of non-Christians. But the religious Christians who complain that one of their most sacred holidays has been exploited and debased by commerce and secularization? The folks who rail against "Xmas," decrying the removal of "Christ" from "Christmas?" I think they're absolutely right.
In other words, my Indian friends weren't singing the praises of Christ's birth because they were about to convert. Rather, they were taking Christmas and making their own. They were turning something ostensibly Christian into something that was decidedly un-Christian. Of course many Americans comfortably overlap the religious and secular incarnations of Christmas, finding ways to accommodate both the generalized seasonal festivities and sincere Christian devotion. But in a way, making room for both only reinforces the necessity of faith and devotion to co-exist with popular culture in the 21st century West, and particularly here in the United States. Because in a nation where citizenship is based on a political ideal instead of an ethnicity, and where where national ethnicity itself, "American-ness," is an incredibly dynamic and flexible thing, celebrating the secular, pop-culture version of Christmas is a fast track to actually being accepted. It's a harmless (though potentially expensive) form of assimilation. That's what my Gujarati friends understood. Celebrating the birth of Christ is a way to be Christian. But decorating a tree, eating gingerbread cookies, exchanging gifts, and even singing "Fa La La," is way to be American. I no longer harbor dark resentments or glowing envy for Christmas. Rather, I've come to embrace its secular form, though only partially. I still don't bother with a tree; it seems like too much trouble. And I can also call on my Jewish roots and my inherited opposition to commercialism to avoid all that gifting. I don't actually like giving or receiving gifts; I never know what to get anyone, and receiving gifts makes me uncomfortable. Maybe I should speak to someone about that. Regardless, I have found a way to partake in Christmas to some degree, and in the process, to share in the warmth and fellowship I always found so appealing. Each Christmas Eve, an old friend and three generations of his small but energetic family host dinner and drinks a tavern in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan. He invites friends, and typically anywhere from a dozen to twenty people show up. I've been going for about 15 years now. It's a time to reconnect, break bread, toast, and revel in the glow of the Christmas season. This weekend I'll drive from Baltimore to New York City, and on Monday night, once again I'll be at Coogan's on W. 168th street. I'll be back home, among friends, on Christmas. And this half-breed atheist Jew will be happy.In that spirit, I wish you all a Merry Christmas. Fa La La La La! -- Akim Reinhardt blogs regularly at The Public Professor. If you visit his site and like something you see or read, feel free to leave nice comments. But Please. No gifts. Posted by Akim Reinhardt at 12:30 AM | Permalink |
| Is it prescribed to repeat the phrases of the iqaamah twice? | Al Noor <b>...</b> Posted: 22 Dec 2012 10:06 PM PST Praise be to Allaah. Saying each phrase once, apart from the takbeer ("Allaahu akbar") at the beginning and the end, which is said twice, and the phrase Qad qaamat is-salaah (prayer is about to begin), which is also said twice. So the number of phrases is eleven in total. This is the madhhab of the Shaafa'is and Hanbalis, and is also the opinion of the Maalikis, but they also say Qad qaamat is-salaah (prayer is about to begin) only once. See: al-Mughni (2/59); al-Mudawwanah (1/179). This is the iqaamah of Bilaal, the mu'adhdhin of the Messenger (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him). According to the hadeeth of 'Abdullah ibn Zayd about the adhaan:
It was narrated that Anas ibn Maalik (may Allah be pleased with him) said: Bilaal was ordered to say the phrases of the adhaan twice and the phrases of the iqaamah once. Narrated by al-Bukhaari (605) and Muslim (378). It was narrated that Ibn 'Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) said:
In another version, the phrases of the iqaamah are exactly like the phrases of the adhaan, with the addition of the phrase Qad qaamat is-salaah (prayer is about to begin), which is said twice. So the number of phrases is seventeen in all. This is the view of the Hanafis and some of the Shaafa'is. See: al-Mabsoot (1/219). This is the iqaamah of Abu Mahdhoorah (may Allah be pleased with him), which was taught to him by the Messenger of Allah (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him). It was narrated that Abu Mahdhoorah (may Allah be pleased with him) said:
Everything that is proven from the Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) is Sunnah and should be followed. So there is nothing wrong with the mu'adhdhin reciting the iqaamah of Bilaal or the iqaamah of Abu Mahdhoor (may Allah be pleased with them both), although what is better is to do one sometimes and the other sometimes, so that the entire Sunnah will have been followed. Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyah said, after noting that the hadeeths indicate that saying the iqaamah in both forms is permissible: As that is the case, the correct view is the view of ahl al-hadeeth and those who agreed with them, which is to accept everything that has been proven concerning that from the Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) and not to reject any of it, because varying the format of the adhaan and iqaamah is like varying the format of recitations and tashahhuds and the like. No one has the right to reject any precedent or Sunnah that the Messenger of Allah (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) established for his ummah. As for those who have gone so far as to disagree and split to the point of forming friendships, feeling enmity and fighting on the basis of such matters, in which either of the two versions are acceptable, they come under the heading of those who divide their religion and break up into sects (cf. 6:159). To follow the Sunnah properly in such cases means doing it one way sometimes and the other way sometimes, one way in some place and another way in another place, because abandoning what has been narrated in the Sunnah and adhering to something else may lead to what is Sunnah being regarded as an innovation and what is mustahabb being regarded as obligatory, which would lead to division and differences if others follow the other way. The Muslim should pay attention to general principles which include adhering to the Sunnah and the main body of Muslims (as-sunnah wa'l-jamaa'ah), especially with regard to matters such as prayer in congregation. End quote from Majmoo' al-Fataawa, 21/66 He also said: No one has the right to take the words of one of the scholars as a slogan that must be followed and forbid anything else that is mentioned in the Sunnah; rather everything that is mentioned in the Sunnah is broad in scope, such as the adhaan and iqaamah. The one who says the phrases of the iqaamah twice has done well and the one who says them once has done well, but the one who regards the one way as being obligatory but not the other is mistaken and has gone astray. And the one who regards as a friend the one who does it one way but not the other just because of that is also mistaken and has gone astray. End quote from Majmoo' al-Fataawa, 22/46 And Allah knows best. Islam Q&A (http://islamqa.info/en/ref/111893) |
| N.S.T: Lirik Kembali by <b>Akim</b> & Stacy Posted: 19 Dec 2012 10:19 PM PST Hati ini kan terasa sepi Tanpa senyuman indah yang meruntumkan jiwa Jadi kelam dunia bila kau menjauh Bukan cinta membahagiakan Hanya keihklasan di dalam hati mu Untuk merasakan ikatan hati kita Ku ingin kau berada disisi ku Dalam waktu sukar atau bahagia Oh cinta panjatkanlah pinta hamba ini Cinta kau berikanlah kekuatan Untuk meniti cubaan dari mu Semoga hari kami kembali menyinari Ku ingin kau berada disisi ku Dalam waktu sukar atau bahagia Oh cinta panjatkanlah pinta hamba ini Cinta berikanlah kekuatan Untuk meniti cubaan dari mu Semoga hari kami kembali menyinari |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Akim - Google Blog Search To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
Tiada ulasan:
Catat Ulasan