Dickson David Quotes

I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds, and cast them … in a heap before the Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace!

Rabbi Zimmerman is away this Shabbat morning, so Rabbi David Stern leads Chever Torah in his place. Rabbi Stern is young, handsome, and possessed of a lightning quick wit. He wears his hair in the style made famous by J.F.K. His energy is contagious. The morning's discussion accelerates as he asks a question worthy of Rashi, then paces back and forth in front of the hall grinning with delight as we answer and respond with questions of our own. But a few minutes later the rhythm flags inexplicably and we sit silently, staring at our Torahs. Rabbi Stern fires off another question. No one answers. He offers a provocative observation - something controversial to stir the pot. Still, we are silent. Finally, in frustration, he exclaims, "Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" We laugh. But it occurs to me that Rabbi Stern has offered the most profound observation of the day, and it is a very Jewish idea. Unfortunately, most theological conversations I have had in church have been the self-reinforcing kind: a group of people sitting around telling each other what everyone already believes. If some brave soul interjects a radical new idea or questions one of the group's firmly held views, it is usually an unpleasant experience. We shift in our seats uncomfortably until someone rises to the bait. The discussion remains civil, but it seems that any challenge to the groups' theology must be corrected, so all comments are solidly aimed at that one goal: arriving at a preconceived answer. Chever Torah has no such agenda. Or perhaps I should say all discussions have the same agenda: to explore the possibilities - all the possibilities.

David Dickson, whose commentary on the Psalms has been reissued by Banner of Truth and is worth owning.

The usefulness of an elder will depend in the long run more on his character than on his gifts and knowledge.

The family—how much of a nation’s happiness and prosperity depends on that institution as a nursery, a school, a society, a sanctuary, a little church, and an emblem of the great family—“the whole family,” part of which is in heaven, and part still on earth! There

By such means as the inculcating of parental instruction, the institution of classes for the children and young people of each congregation, the Church of Christ must seek to do the duty which she undertook when she received these little ones into the fold of the visible Church. She is not at liberty to make over her duty into the hands of parents, any more than parents are to throw over their responsibility on the Church. The

As “friends of the Bridegroom,” to be helps and witnesses to the betrothal of sinners to Jesus; to stand by and see the salvation of God; to watch the operations of his hand; to guide and encourage his ransomed ones on their way Zionward; and to see many of them safe home before himself,—this is the privilege of a faithful elder. It

Dublin is a big village and a dirty village where gossip reigns supreme’.

the gregarious intimacy, rare in a town of this size, the vivacious gossip, the cultural fizz, the wit and repartee at every social level . . .

The silent voices, unheard even in the twentieth century–the prisoners, the institutionalised patients, the casually abused–are silent in the historical record because they had very little influence over their personal fate or their city’s shape.

No city exists in the present tense,’ wrote James Stephens, Dublin journalist and poet in 1923, ‘it is the only surviving mass-statement of our ancestors, and it changes inversely to its inhabitants. It is old when they are young, and when they grow old it has become amazingly and shiningly young again.

Thanks to the near total absence of women among early Norse invaders, genetic and probably cultural mixing was taking place from the ninth century onwards, albeit the result initially of slavery and coercion; the gradual shift in focus in religious practice from Thor to the Christian deity was probably achieved through the influence of female partners. But we now have scientific evidence that Norse Dublin had been a hybrid mix, and that despite the huge changes in store it would remain so, a place where Norse and French, Irish, Welsh and the Saxon dialects of England would all be regularly heard on the street.19

As in all pre-industrial mortality crises, it would have been quite normal for large numbers to flee the towns at the onset of an epidemic, and on this occasion such a response would have been entirely rational, for the impact of the plague was far more severe in confined and congested environments where rats (or whatever actually was the vector of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis) could breed and move freely around.

Whatever the muddy reality, the image of Dublin as an undefiled community of Norman/English families who had settled in the twelfth century, married amongst their own and upheld English law, customs and orthodox religion, was a compelling story.

John Clyn, the contemporary Franciscan chronicler based in Kilkenny, claimed that during the four months after the plague pandemic reached Dublin and Drogheda in August 1348, 14,000 died in Dublin alone (‘xiiii milia hominum mortui sunt’), and that ‘ipsas civitates Dubliniam et Drovhda fere destruxit et vastavit incolis et hominibus’ (Dublin and Drogheda were almost destroyed and emptied of inhabitants and men). Both the archbishop and the mayor were among its victims.30

And it was telling that it took forty-three years to rebuild the single bridge across the Liffey after it collapsed in 1385, and that it was the abbot of St Mary’s Abbey, not the justiciar or the merchants, who eventually oversaw the construction of what was the first fully stone bridge.