Your friend Beth from Jerusalem.

“Dear God; So far, today has been a good day for me. I have told no lies, I did not swear, steal, lust or hurt anyone. I have not commited any sins. I am going to get out of bed soon and I’m fairly certain that I will need your help from then on.”

I have been contemplating my morning prayer routine, as part of an ongoing conversation about making davenning more meaningful, and here’s what I concluded:

In thinking about creating a personal prayer practice, I found that my choices were very greatly influenced by the way in which I think prayer works, or perhaps, to put it another way, what prayer does. So I began by trying to clarify my own thinking about that before I began to address prayer itself.

Primarily, I think prayer is a way of verbalizing or sometimes embodying intention. I want to establish and then reinforce healthy frames of mind. I want to align myself with that which is best in me and to support that which is best in my community. I literally believe that if enough of us worked at this, the world itself would change, so it is not just an exercise in naval gazing or self-improvement. I think it is an act of tikkun olam.

At the start of the day I want to prepare myself to go out and meet the world, to begin my work of the day, whatever it is. There is a phrase from my Episcopal days “Lift up your heart”. When I do this there is an actual physical sensation – it is as if a river of love and gratitude is flowing through me. I want to begin the day in that way. Music is more likely to get me there than words. And since I have the stereo going, a little rhythm to get the body moving and the blood flowing is good as well. That is as far as I have gotten with the routine — music that lifts my spirit and makes me a channel for peace. It needs words. It needs affirmations of the values I want to represent in the world. Words have power and repeating them cements them in your mind, so that they arise spontaneously during the day when you need them. The words might change with the seasons and crises of life.

Actually, I’m using Jesse Cook’s rhuma connection as a sort of niggun to get my head in the right place. Thanks for introducing me to his music.

Hang in. If you can afford to come out here and let the wind blow through your hair and mind for a little bit, take a break. You won’t live in Philadelphia forever.

2) Weren’t most of the first Christians Jewish?

3) Were Jesus’ followers just sitting shiva?

This 21-page scholarly journal gives a rather exhaustive analysis of the passage, and appears to be a pretty reasoned argument for the former — that Job expects bodily resurrection.
http://www.atsjats.org/publication_file.php?pub_id=329&journal=1&type=pdf

Other translators look at it differently. For example: The Revised Standard Version Bible says this:

“For I know that my Redeemer1 lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth2; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then without3 my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!”

1 Vindicator.
2 Or dust.
3 Or from.

The key difference here is this person interprets “from” to mean “without.” A debate as to whether a certain preposition like “meh” — “from” — can or cannot mean “without” is something best left to linguistic experts who have a more comprehensive view of how biblical writers used prepositions. I know that prepositions like “meh” — which is just the letter Mem — can have a great many different meanings.

Whether or not this is an argument for a biblical view of bodily resurrection does not, I don’t believe, change the thrust of my argument. Biblical references to a bodily resurrection after death are few and far between.