Book Review: "The 99 Names of God" by Daniel Thomas Dyer

Daniel Dyer, author and illustrator of this beautiful children's book, has created a wonderful set of lessons for connecting with God's presence in the world around us.  Although The 99 Names is intended for Muslim children, it's really a treasure for all ages and faiths. In fact, it could be used as a basic primer on spirituality, and would be a fine addition to any religious library. I defy anyone to read this book and not come away with a deeper appreciation of God's presence in the universe.

In a time when there is so much misinformation (and hostility) about Islam in the Western world, this book goes a long way toward opening a window on what true Islam is really like. If there's one thing Jews and Muslims have in common, it's the plethora of hostile websites claiming to "unmask" us by taking quotes out of context and compiling lists of every negative thing ever said by any of us anywhere.  For years it has been an uphill climb for me to convince non-Jewish readers that we Jews even have any spirituality. Recent dialogues with Muslim teachers have shown me that they, too, have this same struggle. Hence my delight in finding this very accessible book.

A sunset reminds us of God/Allah
as The Majestic One

The author begins by explaining that Allah is simply the Arabic word for God. In Arabic-speaking countries, non-Muslims -- including Christian priests -- also call God "Allah."  This is an important point, since many Christians in America assume that Allah is a separate deity from the Creator in Genesis. I have more than once been told that Muslims worship Allah, not God, which is as absurd as saying that Germans worship Gott and the French worship Dieu as separate deities. In fact, "Allah" comes from the same Semitic root as "Elohim," the name of God used in the first chapter of Genesis.

God/Allah is the Giver of Life 

Here again, Muslims and Jews have something in common, namely, the distortion of our God-language in the American public mind.  Non-Jews tends to think of the "Jewish God" as an "angry Jehovah" (which, by the way, is not how YHVH is pronounced) and some even go so far as to claim that Jews don't believe in God at all.  The "Muslim God," Allah, is seen as nothing but a cruel warmonger. Both of these are negative stereotypes that purposely disguise the fact that all three Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- worship the same Creator of the universe.

This book serves as a primer for teaching us that true Islam is indeed a peaceful, reverent path that respects all life. Dyer, who is a British convert to Islam, was initially attracted to the faith through the poetry of Jalal'u'Din Rumi, a thirteenth century Persian mystic and scholar who taught: “Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged.” Rumi saw the evidence of God's presence everywhere.  This poetic universalism comes across in the book, teaching children to build bridges, not walls, among the faiths and peoples of the world.

Jalal'u'Din Rumi

Each lesson in The 99 Names has one or two Names (depending on context) in Arabic calligraphy, transliteration, English translation, and a quote from the Quran using the Name. This is followed by a simple but meaningful explanation of how that aspect of God is manifested in the world around us. Also included are teachings and stories from the Prophets and various Muslim sages, both male and female, and positive references to other religions.

Most non-Muslims (including me) would be hard put to name 99 different attributes of God -- which is what the Names really are. God is the Compassionate, The Merciful, the Sovereign, The Holy, the Source of Peace... and so many more. This, I believe, is a great gift that Islam has brought to the world at large, to remind us of how many different ways God manifests his/her Presence.  All too often, we limit God to a single attribute -- such as Love or Peace -- and forget how all-encompassing Omnipotence really is. Love is an attribute of God, yes. But God is so very much more.

A cat manifests God/Allah's
attribute of Watchfulness

I have gained a lot of new insights from contemplating the lessons that author Daniel Dyer sees in these Holy Names.  As author of a nature blog, I especially like the way the lessons connect the Names with nature, encouraging the reader to look for God's ways in all things. (The nature photos here are my own, not from the book. They are examples of how I see God/Allah's presence through the eye of my camera.)

 Once again,  Muslims and Jews are on a similar quest, to bring our urbanized children more in harmony with the wonders of God's world and our responsibility to care for it. This is where all people can come together in harmony, since we live on one earth. (I was also happy to read that Muhammad loved cats.  Readers of this blog know that I do, too!)

Each lesson has a "Signs of (Name)" section, with many examples taken from nature.  The cat, for example, is Watchful, pairs of geese are Faithful, a sunrise is Glorious.  The lessons also have a "Reflections and activities" section where children and parents can discuss/do things together. As author Dyer explains in his introduction,  "No answers are contained in this book. The important thing is that we learn to ask questions, reflect, research, and discuss with others to arrive at out own considered point of view."  Rather than being a book of dogmas, it is a map for exploration.  I highly recommend it.

(This essay was updated by the author on April 5, 2017)

No end of the world today

According to an old Mayan prophecy, the world was supposed to end at 5:11 AM today.  (In my time zone at least.)  Well, it's 12:00 noon and I'm still here.   Not that I really expected the world to end.  But this does give me an opportunity to answer some common questions about Judaism and "the End Times."

First of all, we need to clarify that the word olam in Hebrew can mean either "world" in the sense of the physical planet, or "eternity." The best modern translation is probably something like "space-time continuum."   (I have always wondered if this fact had any influence on Einstein's ability to imagine a point at infinity where space and time converge.  He wasn't a religious Jew, but culturally he must have heard the word olam.  Did the Hebrew language help facilitate the "thought experiment" that led to the Theory of Relativity?  Interesting question...)

In Greek, however, there are two separate words for these two ideas:  kosmos for the physical world, and aeon for a period of time or age.   So already we have a major difference between Jewish thought and Greco-Roman thought when it comes to talking about "the end times."  During the period when Christianity split off from Judaism, it was common in both groups to try and calculate the End of the World.  But were the early Christians talking about the end of the physical kosmos, or the end of an age?

Jesus and his disciples were speaking Aramaic, a derivative of Hebrew, so most likely they were using olam.  But the Gospels are written in Greek, not Hebrew, and, as far as I know, Greek does not have a single word that includes both time and space.  So the Christian authors had to choose between kosmos and aeon.  I'm no expert in this, but I do know that Judaism has tended to lean toward the "end of an age" rather than a literal destruction of the planet.

In fact, there is a famous quote in Avot de Rabbi Nathan (a classical Jewish commentary) that says, "If you are planting a tree and you hear the messiah has come, first finish planting your tree, then go to meet him."  In other words, don't drop everything just because you hear rumors about the end of the world.

By and large, modern Judaism discourages calculating a specific date for "the end times."  Why?  Because setting a specific date tends to become a form of escapism.  If you think the world is ending soon, and that a deity is going to appear and miraculously solve all your problems, then why bother to do anything to improve the world?  Many, many times I have been told by Christians that there is no point in trying to make peace in the Middle East, because there will always be "wars and rumors of wars" until Jesus returns.  Somehow, this seems defeatist and, frankly, rather callous.  In contrast, Jews are commanded to actively "seek peace and pursue it " (Psalm 34:14).

Jesus appearing in the clouds
from the Macklin Bible 1798

In Greek drama, there is a concept called deus ex machina, literally "god from a machine."  At the end of a play, an actor playing a god would be lowered on a rope (the machine) to "descend" and straighten out everything in the story.  We also see a form of this in the Book of Job, where, after Job and his friends debate the question of "why bad things happen to good people," God speaks to Job and answers the question on a cosmic scale.  (In fact, some scholars believe that the author of Job might have been a Greek convert to Judaism.  The book certainly follows the format of a Greek play.)  In Christian imagery, Jesus will descend from heaven on a cloud when he returns and sets the world right.  And in modern New Age circles, the "gods" are extraterrestrials who will descend in UFOs.

The problem with deus ex machina is that it doesn't work very well in real life.  If we sit around waiting for a messiah to fix everything for us, then nothing ever gets fixed.  This is why Jews are not "waiting for" the messiah.  Rather, we are working to bring the messianic age, to beat swords into plowshares as promised by Isaiah.  Each mitzvah we do brings us one step closer.  Some Jews do believe there will be an actual person who is the messiah, others see "bringing messiah" as a process.  But most of us would agree that it is not enough to just sit around and wait for a deus ex machina to appear and solve all our problems.   We are each responsible to help make the world a better place to live in.

(If you are still worried about a literal end of the world, check out this page on the NASA website.  NASA received so many inquiries about this "event," they actually posted a Q and A!)

Celebrating Thoreau's 150th Yahrzeit



Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862

Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of American writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau (after whom this blog is named).  In Jewish tradition, the anniversary of a death is called the Yahrzeit, and it is traditional to honor the life of a person whose Yahrzeit you are observing.  So, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about why this blog is called "Notes from a Jewish Thoreau,"  and what effect the life of Thoreau has had on me.  (For my nature-loving readers, that should be obvious.  Unfortunately, it might not be so obvious to my Orthodox Jewish readers, who may or may not have read Thoreau in yeshiva.)

As I have written on this blog and elsewhere, I grew up as an outlier in the Jewish community.  As a [then undiagnosed] person on the autism spectrum, I was always a loner who preferred being in nature to being with people.   When, in high school (during the early 1960s), we read Thoreau's Walden as part of the curriculum, a whole new world opened up for me. Here was a rugged individualist much like myself, who "marched to a different drummer" and found joy in the beauty of the natural world. He also understood solitude. "What sort of space is that," Thoreau asked, "which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another." Well said!  Reading Thoreau made it OK to be different.


Walden Pond, Massachussetts,  in 2010
(Photo by Ekhabishek, courtesy of Wikimedia)

I embraced Thoreau's philosophy of voluntary simplicity (to this day I have little regard for society's status symbols), and longed to live in the woods as he had done. Part of that fantasy was fulfilled through hiking, campcraft and nature study.  Today, it is even more fulfilled by my wife and I living on a 15-acre hobby farm in Minnesota.   We have a lot more amenities than Thoreau did, but his message to "simplify, simplify, simplify!" still affects our lifestyle.

Appended to my copy of Walden was Thoreau's famous essay, "Civil Disobedience." That laid the groundwork for my involvement in the anti-war movement. In the fall of 1966, I went to college and jumped head first into political activism. The local YMCA had a basement coffeehouse, where I read my protest poetry, listened to local folksingers, and met interesting people from across the country. I missed out on Woodstock, but did ride a bus to Washington D.C., where I held hands and sang "give peace a chance" with a quarter of a million flower children. Those were idealistic times, when we all believed that a new age of peace and love was just around the corner. Although it has been a struggle sometimes to keep my idealism, I have never given up hope for a better world. To this day, I remain a peacemonger and a pacifist.

Thoreau was primarily a writer, not an activist per se, but that one night of protest he spent in jail -- and what he wrote about it -- eventually sparked a whole resistance movement that continues today. Single acts of heroism have a way of reverberating down through the years. Who knows what the ripple effect will be, and how many lives will eventually be touched, through one person's willingness to break ranks and heed the voice of conscience? And would you be willing to do it?

*  *  *

December 30, 2014: I recently ran across this interesting article, Torah and Thoreau, by Joseph Bornstein, who describes it as his "enthralling discovery that Henry David Thoreau’s ideas have their roots in Jewish consciousness."  Thoreau was not Jewish, of course.  He was a Transcendentalist.  But Bornstein does provide a lot of parallels between Thoreau's life and philosophy and Jewish thought.  A good read.