We count the years in letters, not numbers, and also the days of the month.

Using words as numbers and equations, to verbally hack the operating system of the world...

Heh, I like that - say a sentence that's also an equation. You get the words and the numbers parts at the same time.

something the Old Testament has that the New Testament completely lacks: gorgeous erotic love poetry

Well, it's hardly being taught anywhere at all, because most teachers don't want to even begin to face the challenge of teaching that kind of poetry and imagery to students (we got plenty of stories from the torah skipped, too, for just those reasons). However, as far as I know, this is an influence from Christian approaches, because all the midrash and talmud have no problem at all dealing with this.

Completely unrelated: right after the movie "American Beauty" was out, in one of my Judaism classes we learned a story from the Talmud which uses for imagery of beauty very similar 'visual' aids that the movie did. Not anything to do with any plot or symbolism, just the imagery, but I was thrilled to find that two storytellers, two thousand years and completely different mediums apart, used similar images to describe their ideal of beauty.

I'm sure it surprises nobody here that that is one of the Bible sections I've read multiple times...wow, everyone has given me so much to think about, in terms of "The Fledgling' and in general.

'Bil, did you see Pi?

It was a killer, killer episode. I loved the bit where the Aryan disses Mulder for being Jewish, and of course, Mulder's character purely isn't. But he points out to the Aryan that Christ was a nice Jewish boy...

IIRC, though Mulder's religious background was never explicitly stated, DD often said he played him as if he was a secular Jew.

Scary, the things you retain even after an intentional mindwipe of an obsessive love of a show gone wrong.

OK, gotta go. It was great to visit this thread - wish I had more time to read around here!

Right. Pi touched on some of the same concepts, turning it into a code-hacking tool on the Torah, though the number of possible permutations that the Torah must have, is well, lots. The perfect ratio, the name of God, an infecting uncertainty equation and a virulent meme...

Yeah. Say the wrong casual sentence, that unwittedly matches some universal constant at the same time, and your world goes wild around you...

Take care Nilly.

Plei, nope, never discussed. But the social inference - his family names being extremely not Jewish, the very patrician upbringing, the family home among the moneyed WASPs - his family never came off as Jewish.

The fact that Duchovny played him the way he did? One of those superb dichotomies that had me never missing the show for the first four or five seasons.

Bye, Nilly - come back soon, damnit.

I should start investing in X-Files DVDs, there are so many really, really good eps. FX doesn't show it as often or at the times I like.

I. Do. Not. Need another. Fandom. I mean, I was a fan of the X-files before, but casually, not the sort that would look up Scully's birthdate and junk, you know. I can't afford to have hopeless, cancelled series love again. And, yeah, I know about the Munchkin and the Lone Gunmen(made no sense when I saw it, hardly knew him then...youth is wasted on the young.)