Happy New Year... Again

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

We’ve been talking about the Old Testament calendar, and today we’re going to look specifically at Rosh Hashanah, the New Year celebration with the trumpets and the seventh month and the first month and why that’s so weird and confusing, etc, etc. So why is it so weird and confusing, Greg?

I don’t know if it’s all that weird and confusing. As you said last time, we are used to having a calendar year and a fiscal year and a school year and who knows what all else – anniversaries, birthdays. We count years from all sorts of starting points.

The original Hebrew calendar began with the day of creation, which appears to have been the autumnal equinox some 4,000 years before Christ was born, and stayed like that. That first New Year’s Day, which was really the birth of the world, was also the same day that Noah opened up the ark and looked out on his new world, so we’re building some momentum here.

What threw it askew, or perfected it and unfolded it, depending on your perspective, was Passover. God comes to Moses and says, “This month will be the beginning of months to you.” It was the seventh month, which is to say the month that begins with the vernal equinox, so the whole calendar got shifted seven months.

On top of that, all of the liturgical feasts started from Passover, so we have Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which runs contemporaneously with it, we have the waving of the First Fruits sheaf which also takes place at the same time, and then 50 days later Pentecost or First Fruits.

Then in what has now become the seventh month because of this huge shift, we have the original New Year’s Day, which was celebrated as Trumpets, what the Jews today call Rosh Hashanah, the first of the days or the chief of the days. This was followed quickly by the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and by Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles or Ingathering.

God, in order to elaborate on the Sabbath theme and draw some things together, restructured the calendar so it would begin with Passover, with redemption rather than creation, so there’s a lesson there, and that it would all fit into seven months, and the seventh month would get three feasts to emphasize, “Wow, the seventh month is really a liturgical month. Lots of good stuff is happening here.”

Now we come to the idea of new moons. I said something last time, and at the time I thought it was right, but then you asked the obvious question that made me say, “Wait,” and that had to do with how do you recognize a new moon, since there’s nothing there? It turns out that there is something there. A new moon is defined as the first slightest sliver of the crescent. I had to go look this up.

So it is looking for a new beginning of something. It’s not looking for the absence of something.

Right. I don’t know where I read this, but someplace having to do with such things. They would watch very diligently in and around Jerusalem, from hilltops and such to see when somebody could actually see the moon, because if it’s cloudy that’s kind of a problem. As soon as someone saw it, they would light the Lord of the Rings-style torch on the top of the mountain.

“The beacons are lit!”

The beacons are lit and the new moon has in fact been announced. Passover and the cutting of the First Fruits sheath and all of that goes forward from there. It’s all packaged into seven months. Nobody put any feasts in the other months until we get to the book of Esther and the feast of Purim, which is outside of what I’m prepared to talk about, but it was not part of the original plan and it was coming near the time of the Gentiles that that even happens. In fact, it’s a Gentile emperor who kind of imposes it.

Some things we can talk about just briefly, and you don’t know how much you’re insulting your audience by pointing out some obvious things like days. It’s the time the earth turns on its axis. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, but for all practical purposes that’s what it is.

A year is the movement of the earth round about the sun, but visually if you’re an agrarian society and you’re out there farming or watching the sheep day after day, month after month, year after year, you’ll note that at some point – and we still do this when we’re driving to work. Sometimes you’re driving down that street and everything is fine, and like a month later suddenly the sun is in your eyes and it’s the same time. “Where did that sun come from?” because the sun is rising a little bit different every day. There will be a point when it will be right where you don’t want it to be, and then it will move on, and then it will come back later on.

It will go from an extreme northern point on the horizon to an extreme southern, and then come back again, so if you wanted to mark the year, that would be it. So it is possible for human beings, without having to step outside of planet Earth, to have a good conception of what the year looked like.

The question I’ve gotten from teenagers over and over again is, “But what about the week?”

“God made the week in Genesis 1.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how did we get it?”

“God made it in Genesis 1.”

“No, I know that, but how do we have it?”

It hasn’t stopped.

It hasn’t stopped. Jews celebrated it. Christians picked it up. The Christian West carried it on, and it’s going in a straight line from then to then. It is the one thing that has no astronomical reference point. It has a historical reference point. God did it. God set the pattern. So we have the seventh day and we have the new moons.

I got off track so let’s come back to this. Each new moon was announced by the blowing of a trumpet. This is paralleled or developed or whatever the literary word should be when in the book of Revelation, after the opening of the sealed document, we come to seven trumpets. We’re to recognize – seven trumpets, seven festival months, each announced by the blowing of a trumpet.

Again, Revelation is a liturgy. It’s a worship service unfolding, where the pastors are the angels blowing the trumpets. Not that the church is supposed to keep the Old Testament festivals, but using Old Testament language it shows what the pastors are doing, which is to call for God’s victory and God’s judgment in their prayers and preaching.

Then we come down to the seventh trumpet, and I will read that one. This is from Revelation chapter 11:

And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.

Now the Hallelujah chorus is playing in the background.

And the four and twenty elders, which sat before God on their seats, fell upon their faces, and worshipped God,

Saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come; because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned.

And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.

And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.

This is the last biblical reference, that I’m aware of at least, to Rosh Hashanah. It’s the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the first century as God smacks down apostate Israel and smacks down Rome and reveals the kingdom of Christ in all of its glory. It’s all about Rosh Hashanah imagery – the seventh trumpet, the covenant-making language of lightning and voices of thundering that we saw originally at Mount Sinai, the ark of the covenant appearing, the praise to God and the call for judgment.

This can help give us some ideas of what Rosh Hashanah was about in the first place, because the Bible doesn’t do a whole lot with it. It just says, “Okay, this was the day the world was made.” Well, ya know, let’s stop and think about that. There was the day the world was made. There was a day the world was made.

Weren’t there six?

There was a day when heaven and earth were created, and then six days that God formed and filled, and then a seventh day in which he rested. But my point is that it’s a short temporal sequence beginning with one particular day, and it’s not a process of millions of years.

I don’t know if the OPC does this at all. In our church we regularly recite the Ten Commandments and it does say something when you get to the fourth commandment. “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.”

When that’s constantly in your face, it’s a lot harder to give up six-day creationism when every week or every other week or every month you’re confessing that this is truth, when your New Year’s Day says it’s not just that this is happening now, but this has been happening for X number of years, which we actually can count without going to scientific notation. It is a relatively small number in the thousands that marks off how history has advanced from that original creation and from the flood. Again, Noah’s escape from the flood is another thing that’s marked here.

So we’re given not process, but this festival teaches us a God who acts into history – a God who initiates history, a God who comes back and acts dramatically in history. We’re not even talking about his daily providence. We’re talking about this is a God whose daily providence does not seal him out of history.

Let me ramble for a second here. I was a teenager when I first heard a sermon by R.J. Rushdoony on the providence of God, and for me it was life-shaping because I had always been taught predestination and all that, and I believed it all. I don’t know if I’d always been taught it, but I’d been taught it long enough that I believed it and understood it, but I think had fallen into the same trap that I think a lot of Calvinists do.

God predestined everything in the beginning. He sort of planned it and wound it up like a clock and then he just lets it tick because his plan is perfect. Yes, of course he programs in his miracles but, aside from that, laws of Newtonian mechanics take over and, because of that, there are some things you really shouldn’t pray for.

For instance, you can pray that somebody can get over a cold because we know that can happen, but that someone could recover from cancer? No, you don’t pray for that, really. You just pray that they’ll be comfortable. You don’t pray for things that seem miraculous or such, because we’re past the time of sign gifts and sign miracles, and we get the idea that God is locked out.

This is certainly not what the Westminster Confession teaches – that God is able to act through means, beyond means, without means – and the verb tense there is in the present. He is able to act. He does act.

This is something that the calendar is pointing us to. God continues not only to govern the world, but he can stop everything and do something so dramatic that we stand back and say, “Whoa!” He can get our attention.

So by tying it up to the book of Revelation, the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the first century, and then ultimately the coming of Christ at the end of history, these are all things that this festival is pointing us to – the God who comes in glory and judgment to rescue his people, to set things right, to intervene in their mundanity, and to change the world and shake it up. So God let people go around and blow horns that day.

This reminds me of something that my pastor was preaching on a couple months ago now. God sets up this regularity in nature and it’s something that he upholds moment by moment, and he delights to do this. But that same regularity is often what scoffers look at to say, “Well, look, everything continues as it has been since the fathers. You think that the world’s going to end?”

“Well, there was this one very dramatic event called the Flood, where God did that.”

And after he did that, he re-shaped the world and even the calendar, like you said. There’s the new year day that is now recognized as when Noah came out of the ark, and everything shifts. He then promises, “I will not destroy the earth with a flood,” but that same God still says the earth will be rolled up like a scroll, and the heavens shall be consumed with fire. He promises that everything will remain the same, until the end.

It will remain the same, until it won’t, because it’s all in his hand. It’s not something where God pushed Play on the program key and then has to come back later and say, “Ooops, interrupt. We’re done here.” I like the way you said it. He’s constantly upholding personally – I don’t remember the exact words you said.

Moment by moment.

Moment by moment. I think too often that Calvinists miss this. In fact, I remember doing a Bible study like this in a church one day, and I got an elder kind of in my face saying, “Now, wait a minute. What are you saying?” and I backed up and said it again more slowly and clearly and succinctly, and he said, “Oh, okay.” But it’s also been a paradigm shift for a lot of people.

I remember doing that same kind of lecture at an ACSI conference. This was a lecture I called Faeries and Photons. It was fairly early in the morning and I got a lot of young people there, probably 20-30 people, and I asked them, “How many of you came because I spelled faerie this way?” and like 2/3 of the hands went up.

As I taught through this, again I got confusion on both sides. There were those there who understood that God controls everything, but they had let it wander into kind of a deistic Newtonian mechanical approach. Then there were others who said, “God controls everything? I mean death and sin and all that?” I remember one young man who just really – that was revolutionary to him. He wasn’t hostile. It was just, “So how does this work and what does this mean?” so I had to go back to basic principles, quoting scripture off the top of my head.

We’re not even getting into pre-destination here. We’re just talking about God’s sovereign rule of the universe, from which of course predestination is just a step, but I wasn’t trying to even do that. It was just, “You need to have confidence that God’s in control, especially as science teachers.” This was for science teachers.

We don’t want the impersonalism of Baal worship, where nature is just this series of interrelated forces that we try to placate or manipulate or maneuver with our magic, but neither is God flipping a coin from time to time, just trying to figure out what he’s going to do next while he wrestles with the universe. God is telling the story.

Something else you said reminded me of G.K. Chesterton. In the book Orthodoxy, “The Ethics of Elfland” I believe is the chapter where he says that children have an infinite taste for anything fun. “Do it again! Do it again! Do it again!” He says our father is younger than we are. He does not grow weary. He watches the sunrise and says, “Wow, that is so cool! Do it again!” for 6,000 years because he delights in it. It’s not automation, but an encore that gets repeated thousands of times because God delights.

You can see the temptation, especially for scientists, to get the cart before the horse, because their daily work depends on the assumption that tomorrow is going to work like today worked, that everything is going to be the same, to an extent.

I’ve talked to a number of professional scientists who are Christians – not Christian Scientists, but scientists who are Christians – who maybe aren’t quite on-board with six-day creation, and it’s because things look really old according to the assumptions that they’re working with.

It’s like, “Yeah, I could see why you would think that, because every single day you go in and assume that the tools you have are going to be sufficient for the task at hand.” That forgets that there was a day when it had to start and it had to be different, and there’s going to be another day that’s going to be different.

Yeah, it’s that discontinuity that is essential to the Christian faith. If we only have continuity, we’re stuck with Baal worship and there’s no way out of the machine. But at the same time, we need God to deal in regularity or we can’t even go plow a field or plant a garden. Who knows what will happen, what the weather will do, what the rain will do? What if rain is actually poison one day and health-giving the next? If we don’t know these things, we don’t have a degree of certainty that seasons will come and that gravity will pull things down and that thermodynamics works.

These are the very things that God guaranteed to Noah after the flood. “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” As you look at the list, it basically has to do with cold and heat (thermodynamics, which is the foundation of physics and chemistry), and all the astronomical things (the earth spinning on its axis and spinning around the sun), and the growing season and how the biological processes are tied into all that.

God says, “I’m going to keep doing this. That doesn’t mean I might not tweak it now and then, because it’s fun and I have a point to make, but that’s not going to interfere normally with your ability to exercise dominion in this world.”

So we need the regularity, but if all we have is regularity then we have meaninglessness. We are stuck in a machine.

And even when God does subvert the regular acts and order of providence, the message that we should take from that is not, “Wow, God is so Herculean that even he can wrestle against the forces of the universe and come out on top.” It’s more like, “Yeah, God is so great that it doesn’t take any effort.” He’s just like, “Yeah, that happened now.”

So many of the liberal scholars of past generations tried to read Genesis in terms of the Tiamat myth, wrestling with the chaos monster to bring order. “So that’s what we see in Genesis 1. It’s a memory of the Babylonian legends of God, now transformed out of being Marduk or some polytheistic pantheon, into being this one lone God who has struggled with chaos, and there’s just this little reference left to it about the earth being without form and void. Now God has successfully brought order.” No, not remotely. That’s not who God is.

Even if you acknowledge that there’s some chaos after the creation moment, where he speaks and the heavens and the earth are there, even then there’s no struggle involved. Yeah, the Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters, and then he goes, “Umm, I want land there,” and the land comes up out of the water and that’s it. There’s no God going, “Ah, I’ve got to really fight for this.” It’s just, “Land, be.”

Yeah, you can squint your eyes and turn down the lights and creation still doesn’t sound like the Tiamat myth.

For one, it’s written better.

That’s the thing that gets me about all the pagan myths. It’s like, “This isn’t even enjoyable.” I have met one person who really genuinely enjoyed the Epic of Gilgamesh and it’s like their favorite thing to read. I’m like, “I don’t understand that, but okay. No accounting for taste.”

It’s something good, I guess, that the only really enjoyable pagan myths to me are the Norse myths, which more than likely were influenced by Christianity breaking into the region. All the extant manuscripts – the Norse Edda, the Prose Edda – are all from a century 300 years after missionaries made it into the Nordic tribes.

How did we get here?

Tiamat myth.

You were talking about Gilgamesh. The one exception, the one time I do enjoy Gilgamesh is when Patrick Stewart, Jean Luc Picard, tells the story in the midst of Darmok. For people out there who don’t know what that’s all about, see if you can find it. It’s actually kind of hard to find anymore unless you buy the whole set.

So I should not put it in the show notes and spoil it for everyone? Because if I put it in the show notes, then they’ll know exactly where to find it.

Well, if you can find it. It’s not easy all the time.

Let’s move toward a point. As I told you all earlier, this was originally an essay for New Year’s, and we’re pretty close to New Year’s right now. We’ve been at this for not quite a year?

Just over a year.

Over a year? Okay. So this brings up the question of January 1. What good is that? Not much. It’s purely arbitrary. It has no astronomical connotation and very few cultural ones, except that we’ve been doing it for a long time. New Year’s Day has slid back and forth across the Roman and Roman Catholic calendar a good deal, too. But there does seem to be something instinctive to realize that there’s something about the completion of a year that calls for thought, meditation, self-searching.

In Israel, Rosh Hashanah fell just before the Day of Atonement, so the celebration that God is coming and he’s knocking hard was to summon God’s people to fast and to pray and to repent and to prepare their hearts for God’s judgment upon them.

We have a vague sense of this, but very vague. Mostly New Year’s is for new starts and making good resolutions and changing patterns and habits and losing some pounds and buying a gym membership.

That will last for 12 days.

Yeah, the gyms love this because they can give you all kinds of deals, knowing that they will never have to come across with any of it because you won’t either. But this is all largely Pelagianism. Man can remake himself by his efforts, by his choices, by his self-pledging to do good. The newness is itself regeneration, whereas the Bible points to God as the one who regenerates, God who brings in a new kingdom from outside of history, from outside of creation. It’s the kingdom of heaven. It comes from heaven and from the throne of God and comes in the person of the son of God, who is not merely a creature, although he became a creature in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

God invaded our history. God came to save us and to turn our history around, and now he reigns from heaven to save his people and to advance his kingdom, and the power to change is his. He pours forth his Spirit through his Word, through his gospel, and our job is to respond with obedience and with worship, and to call for the coming of his kingdom. “Your kingdom come. Your will be done.”

So resolutions – meh. But a time to search one’s heart, to search and try our ways and to return to the Lord, to lift up our hearts with our hands to the God of heaven – this is as good a time as any to do such things.

Any experience with New Year’s resolutions, either of your own or people you know?

Yeah. I actually love New Year’s and love being intentional about how the new year is going to go, or how I want to grow in the next year. I mean obviously I have no control over how the year actually goes, but I have control over me; and so I want to be intentional and always growing in intentionality in what I’m doing, so I have lots of different resolutions.

Last year I did actually finish the Bible in a year for the first time, and I’m doing that again, and I took Bryan’s suggestion of doing the 5-year plan at the same time. I was listening to an interview on the Art of Manliness podcast where he talked about somebody had written a book about the power of starting at auspicious moments. If you’re going to try something new, there is actually some statistical correlation between starting on the first of a month or the first of a year or even the first of a week that you’re more likely to stick to it, which I think is really interesting. The point of the book was sort of to take advantage of this. Know that there’s this momentum that you can build because of this.

That’s my thoughts. I have lots of New Year’s resolutions. They’re still going.

For me similarly, what I think is so useful with doing a year plan and a 5-year more in-depth study plan is in addition to having resolutions for a year, really I do think that the biggest problem with New Year’s resolutions is that we all go too big. We’re all like, “I want to learn 47 new languages and weigh 40 pounds less and go to the moon and wrestle a bear,” and all this stuff.

You’re never going to do all of that in one year. You start off with some really good momentum, and once you get a little bit into that the slog hits and you realize, “Oh no, I’m making horrible progress on this for the year and there’s no way I can make it up.”

It’s not fun anymore.

It’s not fun, it’s not exciting, it’s not personal development. You should have some realistic year-long goals, I think. For instance, read the whole Bible in a year if you haven’t. Or for me, for instance, be moved out of California. But in the short term you should have monthly goals, whether that’s something that feeds into the overarching year goal or something else that you want to develop.

I don’t think it was on Art of Manliness, it was on some other kind of platform like it, though, where they were talking about this. It was like you should have goals for the month so that you can go, “Okay, you know what? That deadline’s coming up quick. It’s a lot quicker than 365 days. That means I’ve got to get on it,” so you can get on it and that’s what builds the real momentum, is a month-by-month stepwise motion. That was my music major coming out with that term.

Stepwise motion. I can sight-read that.

But really, just doing minimal steps first really helps you build momentum. It’s the same thing on a daily scale. The best thing you can do is tackle the smallest stuff first, because then you start feeling, “Hey, I’m actually getting stuff done.”

If you tackle the biggest thing first, in your mind you’re going to be like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going so slow. I’m never going to get through the eight things on my list because this first one’s taken four hours already,” even though the other seven will only take the other four hours total. But if you do the last seven first in four hours, then you’re like, “Wow, I’ve been doing so great! I can tackle this big thing now.”

It’s Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball.

The point of all this is people talk about New Year’s resolutions, and I always hear a little bit more murmuring about Jonathan Edwards’s resolutions around New Year’s Day and I’m like, “Oh, please no,” just because the point of the resolution isn’t to sanctify ourselves except insofar as we are again being intentional about how we want to serve God.

It’s not about making ourselves more perfect. God does that. It’s not about winning more favor day-by-day with God, making progress and gaining momentum in how holy we are. It’s about increasing in faithfulness and being intentional about serving God, and it’s because of Christ. It’s serving Christ, who has already sanctified us and who will perfect us at the last day.

The thing that you’re both describing is basically a schedule.

Yes, exactly. That’s the word.

People hear that and they’re not happy, because ‘schedule’ seems burdensome, but you talked about learning a foreign language. If you’re in a class that has a schedule that meets X number of days a week for X number of months, there’s a good chance after two or three years you might actually know another language. But if you leave it to yourself to read a little bit here and there and do Duolingo whenever you can, probably not.

I have been using Duolingo, except that I do it every day so it actually has helped, but that’s because it’s every day.

You’ve got it scheduled, yeah. A lot of these things are just committing yourself to a schedule. Schedule Bible reading or a prayer time or developing some gift that you think God has given you and that you could be using more effectively if you knew more or practiced more or whatever.

And we’re making the schedule. We could make it as repetitive or as strung-out or as hard-nosed or as blasé as we want, but if we have some kind of schedule – and again, we don’t have to take an oath before God, “I will do all of these things on schedule.” We can change our minds later, but it is helpful.

You mentioned starting points. I got a new Bible when I turned 16. My parents bought it for me and our friend Vic Lockman, who was a Christian cartoonist, did the engraving in the front, so it was very special. I was 16 and the next day I started reading the Bible. I had tried – I do not know how many times – before to read the Bible, and I had never made it past the first several chapters of Genesis, but that was the first time I kept going, and I made it through one year. Once I had done it one year and had disciplined myself to one year, then I could do it again and I kept on going.

I got interrupted a little bit when I got married because I did not discipline myself, but then by my wife’s example I came back and got back on top of it, and still read basically two chapters a day. It’s not all the Bible study I do, but it is a good habit that God can use. It certainly doesn’t earn any Brownie points with God, but it might be something that God will be pleased to use now and then. If nothing else, it’s better than the alternatives of wasting time.

You mentioned earlier in the episode that God uses means and goes beyond means and goes without means, but he’s promised to bless the use of his Word. It’s not a good habit in pretty much any sphere that you’d care to name to rely on the extraordinary as your example.

Yeah. There’s a chapter coming up, I think it’s in Joshua so it’s after we leave the Torah, but I think I titled it, “Analog vs Digital” with regard to covenant living. The digital is “1..2..3..BANG! God did something!” or “5..6..7..BANG! God did something!” whereas the analog is, “God is constantly at work here. You may not notice it because it’s so smooth, and oh wow, look. That was real. Okay, we’re going back here and…”

When you live with the fact that God is always at work, the spikes come and we should certainly never despise them. There are reformations. There are Whitfield revivals, Welsh revivals. But mostly God works in us in small ways day by day as we establish within our home life for our family patterns of obedience that are productive, not superstitious. There’s a danger in the superstitious. It can easily become legalistic and moralistic. But we can still see, “Okay, there’s a point here.”

You’ve probably both heard of the lady who is showing her daughter how to cook a ham. She cuts off both ends and the daughter says, “Why do you do that?”

“Because my mom always did that. Mom, why did you always do that?”

“That’s because your grandma always did that.”

“Great-grandma, why did you always do this?”

“Because when we were first married, all I had was a pan that was this big, so we had to cut off the ham to make it fit.”

Some habits and customs need explanation and need to be gotten rid of.

That one makes me extra sad because the end of the ham is the best part. Why would anyone cut it off?

There you go. But there’s a point in the small changes and the small growths. My generation particularly, and probably on into yours – I came at the tail end of the ‘60s when everything was about getting high and being explosive and exciting and changing the world and turning it upside down, even violently, and the music was like that, too. We expected everything to happen big time, lots of lights and special effects and all of that.

We expected the Holy Spirit to just come in dramatic ways, and the idea of, “No, get married and get a job and start raising your children for Christ” just seemed kind of like, “Well, Jesus is coming back any minute. Why would we do those things?” It took awhile for people to figure that one out, and Jesus in fact did not come back.

Shall we wrap up with some recommendations? I’m going to go first because it’s segued from what we just talked about. One of our New Year’s – I’m just going to call them intentions, although that has Catholic connotations – but one of the things we decided to do at the start of this year in our house is David and I decided we wanted to have more fun with dinners.

I’ve mentioned before that I really don’t particularly enjoy cooking. David does, but he doesn’t have the same time flexibility that I do, so I’m the one who cooks, even though I don’t like it. But we decided we wanted to have more fun with meal planning and drink more wine. That was our New Year’s resolution, to drink more wine.

For me it’s a lot of fun because I enjoy beverages of all sorts, coffee especially, but to me adding that element of, “All right, what wine is going to pair with this dinner?” made it so much more fun. So now I set my grocery budget and I set my wine budget and I go into the store and find something that has the right descriptors to go with what I’m going to make for dinner and that’s below the dollar amount that we’ve set, and it’s a lot of fun. So I recommend wine pairings and meal planning.

I’m going to recommend an old – it’s not quite a video game, although it involves a computer, so I guess it’s a computer game. It’s called You Don’t Know Jack. You ever heard of it?

We had it on my family’s first computer. I didn’t know what it was, but I remember it.

I think it’s still accessible. There are multiple variations and extensions that go way beyond it, but having had to play, or watch someone play it recently, I still like this version best. It is, as the intro suggests, where pop culture and high culture clash, and you have to know something of both in order to score.

Oh, that sounds like fun.

This is not one of theirs, this is one I made up along those lines, but if Oedipus Rex were to be written using villains from DC’s Batman, which two villains acting as a team would be appropriate? Which two of Batman’s villains would be appropriate to play the villain in Oedipus Rex? Actually, it’s not Oedipus Rex, it’s the Oedipus myth.

So the whole cycle? Is the Riddler one of them?

Yup. And given who tells the riddle, the other one would have to be…?

Is there a Batman villain named The Sphinx?

[laughing] No.

Cat Woman.

It’s Cat Woman. So it’s that kind of stuff where you have to…

Though really, isn’t the villain in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus?

Yeah, this is true.

I was like, “What villain are we talking about?”

In the grand tradition of Greek theater, everyone is a villain.

Yeah, to be sure.

For my recommendation I’m going to go a bit more bleak, because it’s really the only thing I can think of to recommend that I’ve done recently, and that is All Quiet on the Western Front, which was the first book I’ve read for 2021, which I realized as I was closing in on finishing it and I was like, “Wow, that is not a good sign for the coming year.”

It is a very bleak story from the perspective of a WWI German infantryman. I feel like WWI is not understood, and I would put myself in that camp, generally speaking, even though I’ve done a relatively large amount of studying on WWI.

Nonetheless, it’s good because it gives you the perspective of just a random grunt in the field, and what kind of absolute horrors they had to experience in this conflict. It’s at least worth reading for the historical information of that and the building of this thing called human empathy. There are moments that grow that.

I’m going to add that to my 21 books that I’m planning to read in 2021.

21 books to read in ’21. 88 reasons that Jesus is coming back in 2088.

Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband and cooking buddy. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. If you want to check out any of the resources that we’ve mentioned or movies that we’ve alluded to, they’re in the show notes, which you can find in whatever podcast catcher you’re listening on or at our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.

Send us an email at [email protected]. See you next week.