No More Exceptionalism!

A friend sent me a very good article by a Jew offering some self-critique of certain attitudes in the Jewish community in light of the recent fiasco:

June 4, 2010

Chosen, but Not Special

By MICHAEL CHABON

Berkeley--“Gaza Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity” declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis — and, indeed, for Jews everywhere — this felt like headline news.

Regardless of whether we chose in the end to condemn or to defend the botched raid on the Mavi Marmara, for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic cast his startled regard back along the length of Jewish history looking for a parallel example of arrant stupidity and found, instead, what Jews around the world have long been accustomed to find in contemplating ourselves and that history: an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power.

“There is a word in Yiddish, seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance,” Mr. Goldberg wrote. “Jews have always needed seichel to survive in this world; a person in possession of a yiddishe kop, a ‘Jewish head,’ is someone who has seichel, someone who looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way — blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.”

This is nonsense, of course — nonsense to which, I hasten to assure Mr. Goldberg, I have always avidly subscribed. In the aggregate, Jews may or may not be smarter than other groups, but the evidence in favor of granting some kind of inherent or culturally determined supernatural abilities of seichel to the yiddishe kop certainly cannot be found in our history, which is littered as thickly with the individual and collective acts of blockheads as that of any other nation or people or tribe.

An honest assessment of Jewish history must conclude that even the collective act that might seem most tellingly to argue in favor of Jewish intelligence — our survival across millenniums in spite of constant hatred, war, persecution, intolerance and genocide — is ultimately just the same trick performed by our species as a whole (at least so far).

The presence of Jews among the not-yet-extinct peoples of the world can no more be credited to any kind of special trait or behavior than the Tasmanians or the Taino ought to be blamed for their own eradication. In the end human survival is a matter of luck — or destiny, if you prefer — of decisions taken in distant capitals in vanished eras that bore unforeseeable fruit 200 years on, of chaotically intersecting systems of weather, metaphysics and pandemic, of the failures and weaknesses and limitations of our would-be destroyers.

We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes. To imagine a Chelm — the town inhabited, according to Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, entirely by fools — requires a presumption of general wisdom elsewhere, as the proper imagining of Heaven requires an earthly realm of sorrow.

As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.

This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.

It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people — stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel — that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

This sense of widespread shock at Israel’s blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid seemed not to be confined, in fact, to Jews. Even Israel’s sternest critics will concede that the Jewish state knows how to go about the business of survival in a hostile world with intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, flexibility and preternatural control over the levers of chance and diplomacy (not to mention the global economic system and the news media). Indeed anti-Semites and the enemies of Israel have often been found among the most devout believers in the myth of seichel, of a special — O.K., a diabolical — Jewish intelligence.

For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. These include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an influential essay titled “Jewish Genius,” or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile.

Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your destruction.

This is, of course, the foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.

This is the ambiguity that cites the dispensation of God and history, of covenant and Holocaust, to lay claim to a special relationship between Jews and the Land of Israel, then protests when the world — cynically or sincerely — holds Israel to a different, higher standard as beneficiaries of that dispensation.

This is the ambiguity that proudly asserts the will and the obligation of Israel to be a light unto the nations, then points to the utterly evil, utterly bankrupt, utterly degraded, utterly stupid misdeeds of ship-sinking, sailor-massacring North Korea — North Korea! — in an attempt to give context to its own relatively less-evil, bankrupt, degraded and stupid behavior.

Now, with the memory of the Mavi Marmara fresh in our minds, is the time for Jews to confront, at long last, the eternal truth of our stupidity as a people, which I will stack, blunder for blunder, against that of any other nation now or at any time living on this planet of folly, in this world of Chelm. Now is the moment to acknowledge that the 62-year history of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime.

The past two decades in particular have illustrated to Jews and to the world a painful premise, but one that was implicit in the Zionist idea from the beginning: If, in the words of the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people have a natural right “to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,” then the inescapable codicil of this natural inheritance is that the Jewish people, “like all other nations,” are every bit as capable of barbarism and stupidity.

IF Israel was, as the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann put it, to “become as Jewish as England is English and America is American,” then, like England and America and every other modern polity, Israel must slog along through history, purblind and panicky, from its founding to its ultimate fate, prey at every moment to — and, God willing, on guard against — its rich, inglorious human heritage of blockheadedness.

After my initial shock at this fresh display of foolery by the Chelmites of Jerusalem had subsided, I felt an abstract pity for the wasted dead with their cargo of lumber and delusions, for the ill-equipped, poorly led soldiers who had killed them and, running true and clear like a subterranean stream, pity for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas the past four years, and his family. But I also felt a kind of grim relief, even resolve.

Let us shed our illusions, starting with ourselves, whoever we are and however august our inheritance of stupidity. Let us not forget the eternal hole in our human pocket. Let us not, henceforward, judge Israel or seek to have it judged for its intelligence, for its prowess, for its righteousness or for its moral authority, by any standard other than the pathetic, debased and rickety one that we apply, so inconsistently and self-servingly, to ourselves and to everybody else. And let us not forgive ourselves — any more than we forgive Israel, or than Israel can forgive itself — for that terrible inconsistency.

Michael Chabon is the author of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”

We Have Not Been Happy

From The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton:

“You! ” he cried. “You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last—you are the people in power! You are the police—the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I—”

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

“I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’

“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least—”

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.­

“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

Pope Bubbles

Did this occur to anyone else when they saw this picture?:

Perfect Courage

Exclamation Point!

Here's a rather surprising little fatwa (but wonderful if it's true) from Fr. Z, allegedly based on Sacrosanctum Consilium, one that I would love to see vindicated:

I suppose… suppose that a cleric today with permission to fulfill his obligation using the vernacular (which I think is all clerics these days) could also fulfill his obligation with the English version of the older office. Odiosa restringenda and all that.

I would love this to be true, though I'm hesitant to believe it. I mean, the Mass has also been allowed in the vernacular now...but that applies to the New Mass. I doubt someone without explicit Vatican permission (I'm hoping some of the Anglican Ordinariates get this) would be allowed to use even approved translations for the Old Mass (Summorum Pontificum made specific provision only for the Lessons to be in the vernacular).

But...I have heard that permission for vernacular in the Office was allowed even before the Council. Though if we're going to invoke past practice like that, why couldn't a priest also use the 1967 Ferial Lectionary at the Old Mass?

I guess the difference is that the exceptional Office permissions were/are for private recitation only (public celebration would still have to be in Latin).

It also is a bit odd that Fr. Z is invoking the near-universal permission for vernacular Liturgy of the Hours and applying it to the Old Rite. I'm not sure how the law overlaps here.

If I were a priest, I'd ask my bishop or superior first. But I wouldn't have any qualms once my bishop or other superior said it was okay.

I wonder, would it have to be a translation only of 1962? Or could a bishop give permission (in private recitation) even for older books? What about older Latin forms? I have heard cases of traditionalist priests being given permission to use even the Breviary of Trent, so...maybe. I hope, I hope, I hope.

Voyeurism

"Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television."-Andy Warhol

The Rhythm of Life

Well, naively idealistic Catholics obsessed with the "theoretical" rules of sex should love this:

Attitudes among American teens about birth control, sexual activity and pregnancy have remained largely unchanged since 2002, according to a new federal report.

Stalled progress is bad enough, but some subtle changes also have experts concerned.

Most notably, more teens than ever are using the "rhythm method" to prevent pregnancy, and a growing number of teen girls approve of underage childbirth.

At least they're not "compounding their sin" through artificial contraception (rolls eyes). Even though, as the article goes on to point out, among these teens, "it only works about 25 percent of the time, according to the study's authors."

But, hey, at least they're starting to have a more "natural" attitude towards sex vis a vis procreation:

Attitudes about pregnancy are also changing. Nearly 64 percent of teenage boys think it's acceptable for a teen to have a baby, compared with 50 percent in 2002. Among girls, more than 70 percent now approve, compared with 65 percent in 2002.

Only 12 percent of boys who weren't sexually active said they opted out of sex because they feared impregnating their partner.

Combined, the two worrisome trends might help explain a related issue: the uptick in teen pregnancies, which occurred around the same time as this survey.

After dropping steadily for more than a decade, the teen birth rate in the U.S. rose between 2005 and 2007. Compared with other developed countries, the U.S. posted the remarkably high rate in 2007 of 42 babies per 1,000 teen girls. In Canada, by contrast, only 13 babies are born per 1,000 teen girls.

"We've known the decline in childbearing stalled out. This report kind of fills in the why," Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, told The Associated Press.

Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, speculates that the growing number of glamorous celebrities bearing children -- especially as single mothers -- is having an impact on the attitudes of America's youth."

This is all great news, I'm sure. It probably means fewer abortions, after all. That must be part of it. And hey, at least their sex is now technically mechanically "natural." It's not a perfect situation, to be sure, but how can any "good Catholic" take this as anything but an improvement?? (I'm being sarcastic, of course).

More Resignations

The Prime Minister of Japan is resigning because he couldn't get a US Marine base off one of the islands.

Note: he broke a campaign promise; that's serious stuff! You don't just get away with that! I mean, this would obviously be less of an issue if he were blamed for, oh, I dunno...child molestation happening on his watch or some minor pecadillo like that, I'm sure. But not being able to relocate an ally's Marine base? That's huge and demands resignation.

Embattled Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said Wednesday he was resigning over his broken campaign promise to move a U.S. Marine base off the southern island of Okinawa.

The prime minister faced growing pressure from within his own party to resign ahead of July's upper house elections. His approval ratings had plummeted over his bungled handling of the relocation of the Marine Air Station Futenma, which reinforced his public image as an indecisive leader.

Hatoyama is the fourth Japanese prime minister to resign in four years.

Now If Only We Could Combine the Two...

I've expressed my preference before for Gospel music and more charismatic preaching. New Liturgical Movement featured this article today by Msgr. Charles Pope:

Some of you know that I am pastor in an African American Parish. Our liturgies are dynamic and very celebratory. We don’t rush the Holy Spirit and so the masses often go well beyond an hour and our principle liturgy is often two hours. People respond during the homily with “Amen” and “Yes Lord!” They often clap hands during many of the songs. Over all it is a very charismatic experience.

I also celebrate the Old Latin Mass on a monthly basis, usually in the Solemn High Form where in there is a Priest, Deacon and subdeacon, six torch bearers, incense Gregorian Chant and a polyphonic choir that usually sings a Mass from the Renaissance period by Palestrina, Victoria, Viadonna et al.

Now both communities wonder about me. “How can you celebrate Mass THAT WAY?!” they both say. The attendants at the Gospel Mass think the Latin Mass to be a bit stuffy. The Latin Mass folks think the Gospel Mass is off the hook, far too exuberant and some even think irreverent.

But having lived in both worlds as a priest for over twenty years I see more similarities that you might at first imagine. “Similarities?!?!” you might say, “Impossible. These forms of the Mass are worlds apart!” Not really. Let me explain.

The Latin Mass became very formalized over the centuries. What I am about to explain really has to be done in a spoken format. You can’t actually just read it. So I hope you might view the video I have made at the bottom of this post. But here is my point: the origins of the Old Latin Mass show forth a very exuberant and charismatic quality. Consider the following:

1. Gregorian Chant has an ecstatic quality. Long melismas extend syllables sometimes for more than an page. Al-Le……….Lu……….ia………….. Some have likened Gregorian Chant to singing in tongues. While it is true that these sung texts were eventually written and formalized it seems clear that their origin emerged from an ad libitum (free) improvisation by the cantor who was (ideally) moved by the Holy Spirit. It is a kind of ecstatic praying, a yielding to the Holy Spirit who, although we do not know how to pray as we ought makes but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings. (Rom 8:26).

2. Many of the Prayer of the Latin Mass are quite exuberant, almost flowery and exhibit a kind of charismatic enthusiasm:hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam, Panem sanctam vitae aeternae et Calicem salutis perpetuae.(!) (this pure sacrifice, this holy sacrifice, this spotless sacrifice! The holy bread of eternal life and the Chalice of perpetual salvation! An exuberant and almost charismatic sense of joy at what lies upon the Altar. Earlier the priest said: Te igitur, clementissime Pater, per Iesum Christum, Filium tuum, Dominum nostrum, supplices rogamus ac petimus, uti accepta habeas et benedicas + haec dona haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata (You therefore most loving Father, through Jesus Christ you Son, Our Lord, we humbly ask and beg that you might have as acceptable and bless these gifts, these offerings, these holy and unspotted sacrifices(!)) There is a vigorous enthusiasm and ecstatic joy in these prayers. Where five words might have sufficed 25 words are use. Surely these prayers emerged from a very enthusiastic and charismatic experience.

3. One of my favorite forms of music is Renaissance Polyphony and it is often quite exuberant and written in dance time. I’ve posted an example of it in the videos below. And don’t tell me that the Church music from the Baroque period isn’t toe-tapping. Mozart’s several Regina Caeli’s, his Church Sonatas, A Scarlatti Mass, Beethoven’s Mass in C….all wondrous and exuberant in their way.

Over the Centuries the Latin Mass came to be very strictly regulated and some of the spontaneous and charismatic qualities were codified and formalized. But such was not always the case. In each era the Church showed forth joy and exuberance in ways often subtle to us now. But when they were first experienced, before they were formalized there was a kind of charismatic quality to it all.

To those who think the Latin Mass dull, I tell these things. To those who think the Gospel liturgies too exuberant I tell these things. I hope to build bridges. There are more similarities in the roots than we might think. One of the fruits of the Spirit is Joy. And when God is truly encountered in the sacred liturgy, joy can’t be far behind.

St Guinefort and the Sorceress

A few months ago I watched a movie with some friends based around the medieval French cult of St. Guinefort the greyhound, which was known to last in some form up until 1930!

The legend of the dog saint is that once a snake crawled into the cradle of a nobleman's son. The dog bit the snake and killed it so that it wouldn't kill the baby, and in the process knocked over the cradle and the baby started crying. When the nobleman came in, he saw the cradle tipped-over and empty and the dog with blood on his mouth and thought he had hurt the child. He immediately killed the loyal greyhound, only to then discover the snake and realize his mistake. The dog was buried in an old well in the forest, and peasants started to venerate him as a a saint, conflating the dog with a human Saint of the same name venerated at a monastery somewhere else in France.

Anyway, during the High Middle Ages, the Dominican Etienne de Bourbon came around working for the Inquisition looking for heresy. In the village he found out about St. Guinefort and also found out about a potentially infanticidal ritual associated with the dog-saint. Mothers would go with an medicine-woman and preform rites with the sick baby at the tomb of Guinefort, since they believed the sick baby was a changeling. Then they would leave the child alone on a pile of straw while two candles burned down. They had to walk away from the child so that they could no longer see nor hear it, and then return once the candles had burned out. If the child was still there, it meant the forest creatures had returned the real baby. If the baby died or was burnt up when the candles reached the straw, or was taken away by wolves...well, that meant the baby was a changeling and that God didn't mean the mother to ever the "real" baby back.

The movie I watched based on this story is a 1987 French film known as Le Moine et la Sorciere, marketed with English sub-titles as The Sorceress.

I would recommend the film if only because the director, Suzanne Schiffman, scrupulously researched every aspect of the medieval world when it came to costuming, set, and props. It is certainly a grittier vision of the Middle Ages than the romanticized technicolor fantasy world of flowing banners and majestic ramparts depicted in films from the 1960's like Becket (as wonderful a movie as that is).

This movie is very realistic in that regard and spares no detail; the peasants' farms are essentially just dirt plots with sticks and twine, even the church is rather small and earthy and spartan, the priest has a live-in housekeeper who (it is implied) does more than housekeeping. At one point they celebrate a harvest festival wherein they all throw nightcrawlers at an ancient but obviously amateurly-crafted statue of a Saint after a procession which is basically just a few dozen peasants walking from the church to the fields with the statue. This was not at all like the baroque urban processions some people like to imagine; this was rustic to to the core.

Spoilers ahead. The film takes the account of Etienne de Bourbon and portrays it from the angle of watching him as he investigates the village and interrogates the villagers. The local pastor, an older man, tries to persuade him that, while there may be some harmless superstition here or there, there is no heresy or witchcraft or anything grave, and the friar is initially inclined to agree, underwhelmed by the mundane confessions of the frightened villagers.

However, he finds out about and soon grows suspicious of the local medicine-woman who lives in the forest alone after arriving mysteriously in the village as a girl. He becomes convinced that her medicine is more than just natural, while it is implied to the audience that his fear of her stems from his own lust for her. The tension and banter between the two of them is explored, while in the meantime, there is a subplot about the local lord oppressing the villagers by flooding fields for a fishpond; the villagers try to subvert him by damming up the water. One even gets arrested and sentenced to starvation (he is put in a tower and breastfed by his visiting wife until he manages to escape at the end).

Finally, Etienne comes across the ritual with the sick baby. He is appalled, denounces the woman for witchcraft, and she is locked up. He also stirs the peasants up into a mob, torches and all, and they destroy the site of St. Guinefort's tomb. He visits the medicine-woman in prison where she explains (portrayed in a light sympathetic to the audience) that she treats the babies with medicine but needs to distract the women to give enough time for the herbs to work. She claims to have taken all precautions to make sure there is never really any danger to the baby. She also explains how, by preforming the ritual, the feeling of responsibility is removed from the mother if the baby does not, in fact, get better, because then the mother can be convinced that it was the fault of demons instead of blaming herself over it.

Etienne is at first uncompromising and unconvinced. However, a visitor arrives from the estate of Etienne's father, the duke of Bourbon, with news that his father has died (Etienne stands by his vow of poverty and says that means the estate now belongs to the Dominicans), and also with a young girl. It is revealed that Etienne once raped a peasant girl who tripped and was knocked unconscious in the woods, while Etienne was out hunting with his bullying father. The girl died in childbirth, Etienne felt guilty and entered the Dominicans to atone for his sin, and this girl is his daughter. He is again overcome with guilt and self-doubt, and it falls on the local pastor, more wise towards human frailty, to comfort Etienne and tell him that what he really needs to do is get the medicine-woman released because his anger towards her was really anger towards his own lust.

Etienne agrees. However, the local lord says she is in his hands now, and he wants to kill her. The local pastor then gives Etienne a stone from the floor of the Church, which Etienne then presents to the lord as "a relic of one of the stones from the stoning of Saint Stephen" for the burial chapel the lord is building. He agrees, in exchange, to release the medicine woman, who agrees also to take Etienne's daughter on as her apprentice, and Etienne goes off humbled and less rigid, suggesting merely that a shrine to the human St. Guinefort be built at the original site of the dog's tomb "with a picture of a greyhound at his feet."

Of course, none of that ever happened to Etienne of Bourbon, as far as we know, so the rape thing could be taken as a little bit slanderous. But I don't think the character in the movie is really to be taken as an accurate depiction of the historical character (the effort of realism put into the environment notwithstanding). Also, evidence suggests that the rituals surrounding the greyhound lasted into the 19th-century, when the village was investigated by anthropologists, and even as late as 1930 an annual celebration occurred. Either way, though, the characterizations were nuanced and advanced the plot, and the story ultimately had a great message about hot-headed zeal vs. pastoral leniency due to human frailty.