MONDAY MESSAGE FROM RABBI ROB: SOMETHING TO PONDER (vol. 2) Waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day, and I mean REALLY way back, there was this creature who did something amazing. He stood upright and walked on two legs. It was a stunning achievement because it freed his hands which, in turn, started that whole eye-brain-hand thing. Sometime later, a relative of his did something pretty special. He made tools, and figured out a number of ways to use them. This guy was Homo Habilis.....Man Who Is Handy. But I posit that Homo Habilis might have been the guy who also started wondering about the wold around him. Im thinking that this guy....well call him Fred..... made the monumental shift from acting on instinct to conceptual thought. Fred, it seems, might have had actual ideas. But what kinds of ideas? Consider.....Fred is sitting around the campfire....yeah, they used fire.... or maybe hes sitting in the dark at night and looking up at the sky. He sees the stars. I wonder what he thought of that? Whatever it was, it probably wasnt a very deep though. Freds kind simply hadnt gotten that far. Still later.....a looooooong time later....we find a descendent of Fred. Hes a burly fellow, muscular. He and his people...Homo Neanderthalensis.... are a pretty sharp bunch, really. They live in group shelters. They make tools. They hunt in groups, and they have clever plans when they hunt big game. But what makes Oliver....lets call him Oliver....and his group so special it that they probably have rudimentary language. We know they had a social hierarchy. What we also suspect is that they had rituals that suggest a spiritual nature. OK, how do we know this? Well, weve found a number of burial sites of theirs, and Olivers kin folk seem to have been put to rest with some kind of ceremony. But theres one thing that Ollie and the gang do that is of monumental importance. They draw pictures.....beautiful and elegant pictures...on the walls of their caves. But why? Stay tuned for the further adventures of Oliver and company in the next SOMETHING TO PONDER series.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 14:08:49 +0000
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