Rabbie Burns Quotes

Here's to us, who's like us Damn few, and they're all dead.

My forebears played a significant part in making me who I am. I honor their legacy. I will never forget what they gave me. I will love them until the day I die. And no one can take them away from me.

A society that has no respect, no regard for its bards, its historians, its storytellers, is a society in steep decline, a society that has lost its very soul and may never find its way.

Love is a powerful thing. It transcends time and place. If you're looking for immortality, love long and love well. The rest will take care of itself.

I have embraced Robert Burns and his beloved Scotland. I have heard the music of the authentic mother tongue. I have walked where he walked, lived where he lived, if only for a brief time, and seen where he died and where he was finally laid to rest. The ghost of Rabbie Burns will continue to walk beside me. And when I am gone, I will walk beside others who fight for the cause of truth.

When you trace your genealogy, you find connections to many of the people and events that shaped history. History is not the story of some old irrelevant strangers. No. History is your story. Your family was there - your grandmothers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. If not for them, you wouldn't even be here.

Fantasy, myth, legend, truth - all are intertwined in the story that is Scotland.

Every creature has a right to be on this Earth. Who am I to disrupt the natural order? "Respect" is a good word worth handing down to our children.

Doing the right thing, surrendering our short-term self-interest to serve the needs of the whole, has never been easy for humankind, but now, more than ever, that is exactly what we must do. Future generations are counting on us.

As a genealogist, I have seen the Big Picture as very few have. Most people now living have no clue who they are or where they come from. We are all descended from the ancient kings of our various cultures. There is nothing unique about it. And let's be honest, most of those kings were pretty ruthless individuals. What's important for us today is that we wake up to the fact that we are all literally cousins. How would our world change if we honored that relationship and started treating one another as family?

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

While most of our major religions acknowledge the truth of universal brotherhood, too many human beings are still hanging on to their hate and fear of "the other." We have created our own misery. We can also heal ourselves through kindness, cooperation, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, honesty, understanding and sacrifice. The choice is ours.

Robert Burns was never called Rabbie or Robbie—though he did occasionally call himself Spunkie.

Despite the pressing insistence of the ordinary and the mundane, we must make the best time of the time we have before the tick tick ticking ends.

Life is much more than the evanescent present. We should do all we can to preserve our antiquities, lest we forget who we are.

Freedom is an idea that no tyrant will ever crush.

Wisdom is finding the path that is best for all - considering the options, the positives and the negatives - and having the courage to change what must be changed for the sake of the entire world.

There are moments of faith, interspersed with times when the smoke & flames of burning children blot out our faith...although it flickers again. The difference between the skeptic & the believer is the frequency of faith & not the certitude of one's position.

You know that your church has always taken a view on these matters very different from ours, from the day that the first printing press was assembled. Your church did not want your holy scriptures in the hands of ordinary people. We felt differently. To us, printing was an avokat ha kodesh, a holy work. Some rabbis even likened the press to an altar. We call it 'writing with many pens' and saw it as furthering the spread of the word that began with Moses on Mount Sinai. So, my good father, you go and write the order to burn that book, as your church requires of you. And I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscience requires of me. Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you.

A BASIC TENET OF QUAKERISM WAS THAT IF A MAN or woman tended the divine fire that burned within each human breast, one could establish direct relationship to God without the intercession of priest or rabbi. Songs and shouted prayers were not necessary to attract God’s attention, for He dwelt within and could be summoned by a whisper. Nevertheless

— Aye, Charlene's fucked off. She's goat this boyfriend. He's just gittin back oot the jail. Renton taps up a vein in his wrist. — Well that ain't gonna help. — It isnae aboot helping, it's aboot being. If being Scottish is about one thing, it's aboot gittin fucked up, Renton explains, working the needle slowly into his flesh. — Tae us intoxication isnae just a huge laugh, or even a basic human right. It's a way ay life, a political philosophy. Rabbie burns said it: whisky and freedom gang thegither. Whatever happens in the future tae the economy, whatever fucking government's in power, rest assured we'll still be pissin it up and shootin shit intae ourselves, he announces, pulsing with glorious anticipation as he sucks his dark blood back into the barrel, then lets his ravenous veins drink the concoction.

To those who would crush religious freedom, our message is plain: You may jail your believers. You may close their churches, confiscate their Bibles, and harass their rabbis and priests, but you will never destroy the love of God and freedom that burns in their hearts. They will triumph over you... [The Soviets have] the most awesome military machine in history, but it is no match for that one single man, hero, strong yet tender, Prince of Peace... Jesus.

that a new word was being used in private Jewish circles in Berlin to describe the attacks on the Jews on November 9 and 10—Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The rabbi said Siegen’s synagogue hadn’t been the only one burned to the ground. A total of some 265 synagogues had been burned, and an estimated 7,500 Jewish businesses had been ransacked. “Der Führer even ordered his Brownshirts to desecrate Jewish cemeteries all over the country,” the rabbi said. “You should pack up your things and take your family out of Germany before it’s too late.

One might think that Protestants, who had been persecuted so viciously for their heresies against Catholic doctrines, would take a dim view of the idea of persecuting heretics, but no. In his 65,000-word treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, Martin Luther offered the following advice on what Christians should do with this “rejected and condemned people”: First, . . . set fire to their synagogues or schools and . . . bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.... Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.... Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.... Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.... Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews.... Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen. 3[:19]). For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. Let us emulate the common sense of other nations . . . [and] eject them forever from the country.35 At

Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America in 1967, including many persons of goodwill, proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap—essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it. Most of the abrasions between Negroes and white liberals arise from this fact. White America is uneasy with injustice and for ten years it believed it was righting wrongs. The struggles were often bravely fought by fine people. The conscience of man flamed high in hours of peril. The days can never be forgotten when the brutalities at Selma caused thousands all over the land to rush to our side, heedless of danger and of differences in race, class and religion. After the march to Montgomery, there was a delay at the airport and several thousand demonstrators waited more than five hours, crowding together on the seats, the floors and the stairways of the terminal building. As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood. But these were the best of America, not all of America. Elsewhere the commitment was shallower. Conscience burned only dimly, and when atrocious behavior was curbed, the spirit settled easily into well-padded pockets of complacency. Justice at the deepest level had but few stalwart champions. A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.

It is no coincidence that the two primary terms for heaven and hell in Judaism are “Gan Eden” and “Gehinnom.” Gan Eden, as explained above, refers to the four-leveled realm of the intellect, in all its depth and beauty. Gehinnom, on the other hand, takes its name from an infamous valley just outside Jerusalem, a portmanteau of Gei Ben-Hinnom (literally “Valley of the Son of Hinnom”). In this valley, King Ahaz would burn incense to idols, practice witchcraft, and sacrifice his children in fire (II Divrei HaYamim 28:3, 33:6). Putting aside the hokey connotations with which we have saddled these two terms, neither Gan Eden nor Gehinnom bear any connection to the supernatural. On the contrary, they pertain exclusively to this world. Gan Eden—or rather Pardes—is the highest high to which the human intellect may soar, while Gehinnom is the lowest low to which we may fall. But both exist in this world. Elisha ben-Abuya even uses these terms in this very sugya when teaching his disciple Rabbi Meir, “HaShem created righteous, and he created wicked; he created the Gan Eden, and he created Gehinnom” (15a).

No babies or children were devoured—though the televangelists claimed, and still claim, otherwise. However, more than six thousand husbands did find themselves swallowed, and another eighteen thousand or so suffered severe burns after their office buildings burned down. Also among the dead: 552 obstetricians; more than six thousand pastors, ministers, rabbis, imams, and priests of various denominations; several score of youth workers; twenty-seven entire parent-teacher associations across nine states; and dozens of office managers, factory foremen, politicians, and police detectives (this is how it became obvious that dragons are bulletproof), not to mention a goodly sum of retired teachers and school counselors.

To reach higher levels of spiritual evolution there must be another level of purification, which in this case is exactly what is happening. Even though it may not be comfortable, we should appreciate the opportunity to burn up negative actions from the past in order to increase our spiritual evolutionary energy. It is important to see God in all that happens and not to become polarized by the drama occurring around us.

Rabbi Greenberg put forward the following proposition: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”23

If you thought “Rabbie Burns” wrote “Auld Lang Syne,” you’d be doubly wrong. Burns never signed his name “Rabbie” or “Robbie” (or, indeed, “Bobbie” Burns, as some North Americans insist on calling him). His signatures included “Robert,” “Robin,” “Rab”—and, on at least one occasion, “Spunkie.

It's easy to feel like the bunny rabbi frozen in terror. And it's easy to feel like one of the fire balloons, at the whim of the wind, either rising up out of sight or burning down. Blow one direction or another.

41 Mishnah Avot 3.23. 4 The compilation of the Talmud Rabbi Tarfon said, The day is short and there is much work, the workman are lazy but the wages are high, and the master of the house is pressing.1 The academies in Babylon

Yet once in a while the soldiers would hit the older men when they could not work fast enough. Yuda told me how his uncle was beaten in front of his son and his nephew. The pain and the shame of the father beaten and the son who could not protect him. A few days after the German-Romanian occupation they burned our beautiful Temple. During that night, they summoned the rabbi, Dr. Mark and the cantor Perlstein, forced them to open the Temple, then the Germans set fire to the Temple.

Medical science has discovered that the body’s nervous system that conveys pain to us is designed to save our lives. Scientific research on leprosy has revealed that most of the loss of fingers and toes is not caused by the disease but by the leper himself. Leprosy destroys the ability to sense pain. Hence the leper has no warning when he is in dangerous situations that can cause harm or even death to his body. For example, if one cannot feel pain, then he could be severely or fatally burned without even knowing it. Lesson Two: In order to save us from self-destruction the pain has to be strong enough. In addition, experiments done with lepers demonstrate some of pain’s main purposes. When lepers were equipped with bleeping devices to warn of pain, it was discovered that they did not work. Why? Because a bleep is not painful, it did not divert them from unwitting self-destructive activity. Lesson Three: In order for pain to work it has to be out of our control. Further, doctors learned that hooking up a shock mechanism did not work either. Once the leper learned he would be shocked by a sharp warning pain in certain situations, he would turn the system off so as not to be confronted with it again. Now, it is difficult to imagine a better way to utilize pain for our benefit than the world in which we live. Certainly the pain is strong enough, and it is often beyond our control. Rabbi Harold Kushner admitted this point in When Bad Things Happen to Good People: “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of [my son] Aaron’s life and death than I would have ever been without it” (133). But he added, “If I could choose, I would forgo all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way” (ibid.). And that is the point: None of us will to go through suffering, and yet most of us admit we are better persons for having done so.

Compare Jesus’ treatment of women with the first century rabbi Eliezer, who warned, “The words of the Torah should rather be burned than entrusted to a woman. Whoever teaches his daughter the Torah is like one who teaches her lasciviousness.”[142] As moderns, we might think Jesus was merely kind to women, but he was far more than that—he was revolutionary.

Chad Gadya,” the Passover song he was taught by the rabbis in school, one he would sing to himself in the many nights during which sleep felt like something that only others could enjoy, a nursery rhyme that tells the story of a father who buys a young goat for two farthings, but then the kid—who the wise men said represented Israel in its purest, most innocent state—is killed by a cat, which is bitten by a dog, which is wounded by a stick, which is burned by fire, which is quenched by water, which is drunk by an ox, which is slaughtered by a man, in an unbroken chain of cause and effect, sin and penance, crime and punishment, that reaches all the way to heaven, where the Mighty Lord himself, the Holy One, Blessed be He, smites the angel of death, establishing the Kingdom of God,

By approximately 200 C.E., the men saw they were losing control and took control of what has become known as “orthodoxy,” or the only true church. They ordered all copies of texts they deemed heretical, the so-called Gnostic texts, burned. These documents were burned because they taught that people have access to the deity and need not go through a religious hierarchy headed by a pope, bishop, priest, or rabbi. Access to the divine was available directly through divine knowledge.

It won’t be long now.” Such an odd old holy man, young Scytale thought. Even compared to the smells of disinfectant, medicine, and sickness, he’d always had an odd smell about him. Sounding compassionate, Yueh said, “There isn’t much we can do.” Gasping for air, old Scytale croaked out, “A Tleilaxu Master should not be so weak and decrepit. It is . . . unseemly.” His youthful counterpart tried again to trigger the flow of memories, to squeeze them into his brain by sheer force of will, as he had attempted to do countless times before. The essential past must be in there somewhere, buried deep. But he felt no tickle of possibilities, no glimmer of success. What if they are not there at all? What if something had gone terribly wrong? His pulse pounded as the panic began to rise. Not much time. Never enough time. He tried to cut off the thought. The body provided a wealth of cellular material. They could create more Scytale gholas, try again and again if necessary. But if his own memories had failed to resurface, why should an identical ghola have any better luck without the guidance of the original? I am the only one who knew the Master so intimately. He wanted to shake Yueh, demand to know how he had managed to remember his past. Tears were in full flow now, falling onto the old man’s hand, but Scytale knew they were inadequate. His father’s chest spasmed in an almost imperceptible death rattle. The life-support equipment hummed with more intensity, and the instrument readings fluctuated. “He’s slipped into a coma,” Yueh reported. The Rabbi nodded. Like an executioner announcing his plans, he said, “Too weak. He’s going to die now.” Scytale’s heart sank. “He has given up on me.” His father would never know if he succeeded now; he would perish wondering and worrying. The last great calamity in a long line of disasters that had befallen the Tleilaxu race. He gripped the old man’s hand. So cold, too cold. He felt the life ebbing. I have failed! As if felled by a stunner, Scytale dropped to his knees at the bedside. In his crashing despair, he knew with absolute certainly that he could never resurrect the recalcitrant memories. Not alone. Lost! Forever lost! Everything that comprised the great Tleilaxu race. He could not bear the magnitude of this disaster. The reality of his defeat sliced like shattered glass into his heart. Abruptly, the Tleilaxu youth felt something changing inside, followed by an explosion between his temples. He cried out from the excruciating pain. At first he thought he was dying himself, but instead of being swallowed in blackness, he felt new thoughts burning like wildfire across his consciousness. Memories streamed past in a blur, but Scytale locked onto each one, absorbing it again and reprocessing it into the synapses of his brain. The precious memories returned to where they had always belonged. His father’s death had opened the barriers. At last Scytale retrieved what he was supposed to know, the critical data bank of a Tleilaxu Master, all the ancient secrets of his race. Instilled with pride and a new sense of dignity, he rose to his feet. Wiping away warm tears, he looked down at the discarded copy of himself on the bed. It was nothing more than a withered husk. He no longer needed that old man.