To Love Ru Darkness Op

[Agalia Valcin]

Amosreflects on his early childhood in British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel) with his mother Fania and father Arieh. His parents are Ashkenazi Jews who have immigrated from Europe to Jerusalem. Amos's mother finds life difficult because Jerusalem is a desert, because her family lives in Tel Aviv, and because communication with them is difficult. Amos, an only child, is particularly close to his mother, who frequently tells him stories based on her childhood that often have unhappy or violent endings.

Amos's parents regularly lend him out to a childless couple they are friends with. On one occasion this couple take him to visit a friend of theirs, a Palestinian Arab. They warn Amos to be quiet and not make much fuss lest he offend their hosts, but while playing with a swing he accidentally injures the Arab's little son. Terrified, Amos's father calls the injured boy's father and promises to pay all of the hospital fees.

On November 29, 1947, Amos' family and others from the neighbourhood gather around a radio in the street to hear the passing of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which adopted a plan to partition Mandatory Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states. Amos' parents are overwhelmed with joy. His father tells him how savagely his grandfather was treated by anti-Semites in Europe and how, now that the Jewish people have a country of their own, that anti-Semitism will disappear forever. Arieh tells Amos that while he may be bullied someday for being an intellectual, no one will ever mistreat him for being a Jew.

Soon afterward, civil war erupts between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. Amos' father enlists to fight in the war, while Amos and other children are recruited to gather bottles for 'cocktails' and bags for sand for the war effort. One of Fania's friends is killed by a Palestinian sniper while she is hanging up her family's laundry.

Although the war soon ends in defeat for the Arabs, Fania falls into major depression and becomes unable to sleep or eat. Amos and Arieh try their best to hide her depression from their friends and family. While taking anti-depressants, Fania abruptly becomes her former, more lively self and begins to act normally with her husband and son. During a meal at a restaurant, however, she relapses once more. Saying that he doesn't know how to help her, Arieh sends Fania to her sisters in Tel Aviv. Despite her sisters' efforts to lift her spirits, Fania commits suicide by a deliberate overdose in 1952. In voiceover, Amos expresses a belief that his mother felt so much pain that she had come to see death as a lover with whom she longed to unite herself.

Years later, Amos goes to live on a kibbutz, where he works to fulfill his mother's dream of making the desert bloom. During a visit from his father, a teenaged Amos shows off his new life but admits that despite his attempts at being a strong and healthy farmer, he is still a pale and weak intellectual.

According to Portman, she optioned the rights to the book over tea, while visiting with Oz and his wife. It took her eight years to write the script and find funding, during which time she insisted that the adaptation remain in Hebrew.[6]

It is the second film in which Portman speaks Hebrew. In order to play the role of Amos Oz's mother, an immigrant from what is now Ukraine, Portman made considerable efforts to remove all traces of an American accent from her Hebrew.[7]

Of all the gods he [the god of love] is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. [This sentence comes from Aristophanes, but I include it here as it fits well]

The arts of medicine and archery and divination were discovered by Apollo, under the guidance of love and desire; so that he too is a disciple of love. Also the melody of the Muses, the metallurgy of Hephaestus, the weaving of Athene, the empire of Zeus over gods and men, are all due to love, who was the inventor of them.

He is always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment,

In other words, there is real evil in the world, and there are people fully committed to real evil. I told my audience yesterday that evil people exist who really do hate Christianity, Christians, and everything that we hold near and dear. We dare not be nave about the reality of evil, and those who are fully committed to it.

But sadly, far too many Christians ARE nave and clueless about the reality of Satan, of evil, and of the fact that we are in an all-out war. The spiritual war that is taking place all around us is of course manifest at all levels: social, political, ideological, moral, cultural, and so on.

In the light of all this, let me point out this sad fact: One of the great problems of the Christian church today is that everyone knows John 3:16 by heart and can easily recite it anytime, anywhere. But the great majority of Christians do NOT know what the very next five verses say.

While we can all rejoice in the truth of John 3:16, that God does love us enough to send his only Son to rescue us from sin and self, it becomes a half truth when divorced from the verses that immediately follow. Indeed, it becomes a real distortion of biblical reality.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.

As long as we foolishly believe that people are basically nice, that everyone is really a good guy, and God is quite happy with us all just as we are, we will be of no use for Christ and the Kingdom. Only a fully biblical view of mankind will suffice.

Those two tyrants gave full vent to their sinful and fallen condition. They were evil men who did evil things, because they preferred darkness to light. But all of us likewise prefer darkness to light. That is our default position, and only the miraculous work of conversion can change us from evil and selfish sinners, to saved and holy saints.

Let me offer a bit of commentary here on this text from John 3. I will make use of just one source here: Martyn Lloyd-Jones, drawing upon two of his important works. The first comes from his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. Commenting on Matthew 5:14 he says this:

If you want to know what this world is like, look what it did to him. There was the Son of God. He had left the throne of heaven, he had come and humbled himself, and he gave himself to healing people, and to instructing them. He never did anyone any harm. He went about doing good. What was the response of the world? It hated him, it persecuted him, it rejected him. It chose a murderer before him. It crucified him, it killed him. And there on the cross he exposed the world for what it is. And the clever men of the world today are laughing at the cross, they are mocking it, they are jeering at it, they are making fun of the blood of Christ, and they are trying to ridicule it. They are only doing what their prototypes did in the first century. That is what the world has always done to him.

Yes exactly. Until Christians get a firm grasp on just how God views fallen mankind, we will not be in a position to offer it the necessary hope and help. Unrepentant sinners are in an utterly diabolical and hopeless situation. Only when faced with the stark reality of their situation will the message of the cross make any sense.

Too many Christians know nothing about their adversary the devil. If you try to point out he has a lot of power they defensively cry out are you saying he is more powerful than God? Others seem to think he is bound and gagged in hell since his defeat at the cross as is no threat and some even say well we know how it all ends. As if that excuses in action.

It might be easier to be in the darkness and harder in the light but easy is not often good and temporary difficulties have long-lasting rewards. The straight and narrow road is not smooth is a rough hard journey you can only complete through perseverance and while the wide road is smooth and an easy journey taking hardly any effort to complete the rewards at the end of the straight and narrow are beyond what you imagine while at the end of the wide road is judgment beyond your imagination. Better to have the difficulties NOW an a smooth path later than a great time now and the unimaginable difficult time LATER.

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

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