Plus, he forgot to interview 50 Shekel
Jody Rosen may be a fine music critic, but his religion chops are a little rusty. Two things confused me in his essay on Matisyahu. First he writes that Matisyahu's song Jerusalem is "a nonsensical riff on the Bible's most beautiful poem of exile, the 137th Psalm," although the song actually makes plenty of sense. As an example of what he means by nonsense, Rosen writes, "Matisyahu sings: 'Jerusalem, if I forget you/ Let my right hand forget what it's supposed to do.' Huh?" Huh what? If Rosen recognized the song as riff on the psalm, how does he not recongize that rhyme as being almost verbatim from verse 5?
And while Rosen is smart to take up the tricky issue, previously discussed here, of Matis's relationship with Christian rock, he does get his post-apocalyptic chronology a little wrong: "It's a reminder... that there's no one quite so beloved of the Left Behind crowd these days than Orthodox Jews, whose in-gathering in Israel is essential stage setting for the coming of the Rapture. (At which point, presumably, Jews will be cast into the hellfire.) "
Not in the least! After the Rapture, Jews will still have seven years to live it up amid the wars, earthquakes and boiling seas right here on earth. Then they'll be cast into the hellfire.
Comments
Just spotted these margin notes in a used book:
"The Jews - God's chosen 'gene pool' 10 tribes destroyed - 6 million European jews destroyed."
Do you remember:
"We are currently in the fifth seal... when the sixth seal opens you will cry... yea you shall surely cry, but God will not hear your cry because you refused to hear the cries of the innocent on this day and went about your works of inequity as if you would never be called to account."
-- Christian musician David Koresh, Branch Davidians, Waco, TX
Seals
Posted by: RC | March 14, 2006 2:44 PM