Divrei ben Abuya

In the Babylonian Talmud, Elisha ben Abuya was a great sage who lost his faith in God. So great was he that his and subsequent generations continued learning from him - to the extent that the authors of the Talmud needed to create a story that would serve to legitimise his teachings despite his apostasy. His lesson is a lesson for us all: that great stature is not contingent upon blind faith, nor high learning upon the observation of Torah precepts.

May 13, 2006

Well, here I am in a bit of a conundrum.
I am, effectively, reading three different books at the moment - none of which are related to my Honours work. One is entitled, "The End of Wisdom" (Martin Shields, PhD Sydney Uni) and is a study of Ecclesiastes; the second is, "The Bible in History" (Thomas L. Thompson) and is a presentation of his (minimalistic) philosophy; and the third is the famous "Don Quixote" by Cervantes. My Honours thesis, however, is supposed to be an analysis of the locative heh (also, "heh locale"), with a view to appreciating its apparant decline in Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) literature. To that end, I've done virtually nothing - and it's due in less than six months.

Problem is, I'm a deadline person. I do my best work closest to the time when the work needs to be submitted, and I have my best ideas under pressure. Prior to that, I am inherently lazy. Between reading these three books (watching films and episodes of Family Guy to boot!), I'm really doing nothing else. Oh, I have a kick-boxing class ever Thursday evening in Bondi, and I teach a scripture class at a local high school every Friday morning (not to mention going into uni for a few hours each day, and all day on Mondays) but - aside from all that - I'm doing nothing. No Honours work.

Thinking of taking up the piano again, actually...

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home