Insight on the News
The Wailing Wall
● The Western Wall of the temple area in Jerusalem known as the Wailing Wall, is today the most sacred spot for practicers of Judaism. (Up above, on top of the temple platform area, are two Moslem Mosques, and that area is under Moslem religious control.) Now a great debate is on in Israel about the Wailing Wall. The issue? Whether to weed or not to weed the grass growing in the crevices between the wall’s massive stones.
Religious leaders favoring the weeding say that the grass endangers the wall, since the roots could seriously damage the stones. Opposing religious leaders say that the ‘grass represents the destruction of the Temple and the longing of Israel for redemption’ and so argue that the grass should be allowed to remain. Of the two most prominent contenders in the ‘battle of the weeds,’ the Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazic (European) community and the Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic (North African) community, a New York “Times” dispatch says: “The two men are jealously competitive and rarely agree on anything.”
In the first century, Jesus of Nazareth said that religious leaders of that time were guilty of ‘straining out the gnat but gulping down the camel.’ (Matt. 23:24) Those leaders rejected him as the Messiah and he foretold God’s condemnation and judgment due to come as a result. Today, religious leaders argue over weeds on a wall and fail to see the divine message involved in the destruction of the temple and the fact that it has never been restored.
Of Birds and Babies
● Apostate people of ancient Israel said, “The way of Jehovah is not adjusted right.” To which God replied, “Are not the ways of you people not adjusted right?” (Ezek. 18:25) In our day, also, people have strange ways of looking at matters and strange standards for judging.
As an example, a leading New York newspaper recently published an editorial protesting the planned killing of millions of blackbirds. The birds have been roosting in a certain region in two southern states, and officials claimed that they were forming a serious health hazard to humans and domestic animals. The editorial said that the “poignant spectacle of millions of dead and dying birds ought to make Army and municipal officials reconsider this hideous project.”
Without attempting to assess their view on this, it is nevertheless curious to see on the same page, directly above that editorial, another one about the recent manslaughter conviction of a Massachusetts doctor accused of killing a live human fetus during an abortion. The editorial termed the conviction “misguided” and “almost unbelievable.” It questioned the competence of the jurors to decide when human life begins because they were said to have been influenced in their decision by the fact that a picture of the fetus “looked like a baby.”
Apparently the “poignant spectacle” of hundreds of thousands of unborn babies robbed of the opportunity to live does not affect the editorialists as much as that of dead birds.—Compare Luke 12:6, 7.
Roots of Hunger—Where?
● There is much talk about global scarcity of food. Evidence piles up, however, to show that the ‘scarcity’ is substantially due to the world system of food distribution and use—not to any inability of the earth to feed the present population or even a considerably expanded population. Thus, an article in “Harper’s” magazine (February 1975) says that the “roots of hunger” are not captured by photographs of parched lands or starving people. Why not? Because those roots lie in a greedy commercial system that “appears so normal . . . while in fact it is condemning most of humanity to continual hunger.” Rejecting the view that the situation for mankind is nearly hopeless, the article says: “The suffering may be brought before our eyes [by pictures], but the evil lies elsewhere—in . . . an economic machine that can’t be seen but generates untenable inequities and unending misery.”