A Soulful Journey

Harold J. Morowitz, a biochemist as Yale received a humorous birthday card form his daughter.   It read, “The materials that make up the human body are worth only 98 cents.”   Surprised, he reached for a supply company’s catalogue to look up prices. It turned out that the human body was more like the Six Million Dollar Man.   Among the body’s constituents, enzymes, acids etc., was a follicle-stimulating hormone worth $8 million a gram.   Then came the hormone that stimulated milk production in the breast glands, $17.5 million a gram. Calculating the percentage of each chemical in the composition of a human body, Morowitz arrived at $245.54 as the average value per gram in the human being. He then weighed himself, 168 pounds or 79.364 grams.   Since a man is 68% water, his dry weight was 24,436 grams.   Multiplying that by $245.54 came to $6,000,015.44.   An enormous upgrade from the 98 cent valuation! “I will praise You; f...

What, or as he preferred to say, who was a human being?   How shall we understand ourselves?   Heschel was profoundly shocked in pre-Nazi Germany when he found biology textbooks that defined a human being as a collection of iron and phosphorous and other chemicals that were worth so and so many dollars on the market.   He felt that the road to Nazism began in those books, that one could draw a straight line between teachings like that and what the Nazis ended up doing to human beings.   People were dehumanized first in theory and then in fact, first in the classroom and then on the streets.   If man is only this, why revere him, why not use him, why not abuse him?   -Rabbi Jack Reimer The moment anyone becomes “little less than Divine” in our world any atrocity is possible.

"In a place where there is no humanity, be a human."  --Pirkei Avot

"The dog has got more fun out of Man Than Man has got out of the dog, For the clearly, demonstrable reason that Man Is the most laughable of the two animals.” -James Thurber, Thurber’s Dogs We need to go a a long way before humans can be called humane .