There is a certain delicious aroma floating among the obituaries of the past year. It is of Zabar’s special blend, personally selected by Saul Zabar, co founder One of the best tasting dishes in New York. His shop at 80th and Broadway was and is a storehouse of delicious Jewish food beyond imagination. Forget 800 different types of cheese and boxes of green olives; During my visits I was after chocolate babka or, more specifically, Nova salmon. Mr. Zabar discovered it every Wednesday in the smokehouses of Brooklyn and Queens, in the cold stores of various fish markets, sampling the juicy smoked meat with a bent paper-clip. He was strict in every way about coffee, insisting that it should be like a symphony, with no instrument played too loudly. Nobody did.
The substance boiling on the hotplate in Patrick McGovern’s laboratory also looked like coffee, but it was not. In fact it was a methanol and chloroform solvent mixed with ceramic powder extracted from the bottom of a vessel thousands of years old. The purpose of this process was to free the powder from any organic compounds—barley, honey, herbs—that might indicate what was previously in the pot. For Mr. McGovern’s purpose Studying the history of wine, ancient Egypt, the Neolithic period and King Midas’s reconstruction of Anatolia. Once ripe, he served them at feasts and even in the open market.
Tom Lehrer loved to stir up the fun in even more titillating ways. very title of his songs were irresistible (“Poisoning the pigeons in the park”, or “When we go we’ll all go together”), as were his descriptions of Catholic confession (“There’s the man who’s received religion/Will tell you if your sin is original”) and Arizona, “where the views are charming/And the air is radioactive”. But his time there was brief. He was revered as a wickedly acidic observer of the American landscape in the 1960s and 1970s and then, when the Vietnam War made comedy difficult, he simply went back to his real career, his old thesis on mathematics and the concept of genre.
The tears shed by Jimmy Swaggart were not of laughter, but of remorse. he would dance and shoutAnd sing and cry for salvation to the thousands of souls who gathered at his church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in stadiums across the country. In the great war between good and evil he battled the devil in the form of a bear-man, save himself completely in the name of Jesus. He defeated that bear, but unfortunately he also partook of the sin nature of all men and women, and especially sinned with a beautiful woman who posed for him at a hot-sheet motel just outside New Orleans. However, this was the end of his ministry, having brought salvation to so many people, he was confident that in the end they too would be bathed in the blood of the Lamb.
Mr. Swaggart did the work of rescue and destruction; Peter Gurney did the same, a bomb disposal expert Who worked in the Middle East and particularly Britain during the IRA terrorist campaign of the 1980s and 1990s. He was often asked what his thoughts were as he made “the longest journey in the world” towards the bomb that was meant to kill him. (Most were, although some were fake.) At first, he said, he was concerned about the ratio of distances and potential injuries. But as soon as he reached the device, and even began to destroy it, it was just him and the bomb, equal: kill or be killed. Nothing else existed. People admired his courage, but he insisted that it was more important to not be afraid. The men without any fear were extremely foolish and they deserved to die.
Jane Goodall was the first to go through a similar process when, firstly, she studied with wild chimpanzees in Tanganyika. He needed to get over his fear of them; They had to wash their hands of it. Bananas were a great attraction that encouraged contact and understanding. Soon she can get close enough to make the most of her unprecedented observationThat chimpanzees used grass stalks to remove termites from their nests. Therefore the use of tools was not merely a human trait. By the end, he was so accepted that one of the older men would take the palm-nut from his hand. She herself became an expert in the pant-hooting language of chimpanzees, as well as an outspoken voice for conservation and the general well-being of the world.
Other preachers also attracted my attention. One of them was Razia Jan, a Harvard-educated Afghan native who, despite adverse circumstances, managed to establish a school for girls in rural Afghanistan and, remarkably, continued it. He did this very cleverly, getting the men from seven rural villages on his side as custodians of the project, even making them believe that he was in charge of it. till 2016 he had 800 disciples There he established an institute to train 12th grade graduates, most of whom were trained as midwives. Then, in 2021, the Taliban returned to power and banned all education for girls after the sixth grade. Faced with this, Ms Jan involved more young pupils, and kept in touch with older girls living at home by setting up a mobile library. The world may have been disappointed with Afghanistan, but she believed in hope and change.
World’s first player Muhsin Hendricks also did the same openly gay imamHe defied both ridicule at school and the hostility of his local Muslim Judicial Council in Cape Town to preach that Islam was also an inclusive faith, During his theological studies in Pakistan he found, as he had suspected, that neither Muhammad nor the Quran condemned homosexuality, In fact, since it was part of creation, it was clearly ordained by God, This led to them being fired from their teaching jobs and having to establish their own mosques, meeting places, and human rights foundations to provide spiritual care to people torn between their faith and their sexuality, For doing so he was murdered,
Two other men shaped their lives as apparent atonements for deeds committed in their youth. One of these was Sen Genshitsu, who was an expert in japanese tea ceremonyHis family had long followed that calling, but in the Second World War he trained as a kamikaze pilot, but was saved from certain death only because, by a stroke, he was struck off the flying list, In gratitude, and haunted by his military past, he decided to travel the world, performing the tea ceremony to immaculate perfection as an act of reconciliation, meditation and peace,
In completely different circumstances Athol Fugard, a South African playwrightIn his actions he tried to explain and erase the moment when, as a white boy of ten or eleven, he spat in the face of Sam, one of his family’s black servants. In adulthood he wandered the corrugated-iron pondokies, or black slums, of Johannesburg, gradually becoming a voice for the poor and a staunch opponent of the apartheid regime. The regime silenced it as far as possible, but the defiant voices of its characters still echoed.
His rawness provided a striking contrast to the intelligent intellect of Britain’s greatest contemporary playwrightTom Stoppard, whose works mixed moral philosophy with acrobatics, Latin literature with gay love, and rock ‘n’ roll with the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. He claimed to be writing not for the present day, but for posterity, and challenged his audience at every turn to put up with his dazzling conceit. Yet the play that made him famous, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” was the story of two very ordinary men, minor characters in “Hamlet,” pitted against harsh fate.
Fate also raised to positions of world power two men of admirable simplicity who died last year. The first was Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis, a man of amazing humility and kindness, who preferred to live in guest houses rather than palaces, who welcomed refugees, and who washed the feet of prisoners on Maundy Thursday. He thought nothing of being like St. Francis himself, carrying a lamb on his shoulders, or welcoming winged Amazonians into St. Peter’s. His flexibility on principle aroused considerable hostility from conservatives, but his tendency Jesuit SteelThe prestige conferred during his years as Archbishop of Buenos Aires enabled him to gradually promote the reformers he wanted and those the Church needed.
The other man was Jimmy Carter, 39th president Of the United States. Despite being successful in business, he was originally a Georgian peanut farmer. His tenure was marked by stagflation, unemployment and an energy crisis; He was remembered for being vague and ineffective. But, as a born-again Christian, he believed in the power of human kindness. The closest the world has come to peace in the Middle East was engineered by him when he and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared photos of their grandchildren on the White House veranda. In retirement he monitored elections around the world and helped build housing for the poor. He was, perhaps, a bad president; But he was something much rarer and better than that, a truly good man.
