Leopard Wing or Leopard Head? I Hope the Former!

Introducing Yaacov Weinstein. He's a blogger.

Torah from Narnia
https://torahfromnarnia.blogspot.com/

The latest post right now says he is appearing on a C. S. Lewis related podcast called Pints with Jack. And here is that video:

S5E36 – AH – "Jewish Lewis" – After Hours with Dr. Yaakov Weinstein
19th April 2022 | Pints with Jack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLtRkOjzyrI

And, as is usual on this blog, some comments of mine. It's not up to the end of the video, I stopped at where it leaves off of Narnia and goes on to The Screwtape Letters. About half time.

9:45 Ah, ten men in a quorum, not eleven ... thanks.

Now the point I was making in a debate with a Protestant (extreme anti-Nicene) was that Our Lord was not denying institutionality to the Church, just saying that two or three are the minyan He requires. Considering the prophecy in Luke 12, this is practical, since it means a household of five will be able to furnish two separate minyans, which there will sometimes be a need for.

17:39 If I may interpose ... why is CSL so much less traumatising to Jews (at least some of them) than equally Orthodoxy affirming Christians, specifically as a storyteller?

Now, I'll say where I am coming from. I grew up in an erstwhile Christian surrounding with my mother as remaining Christian, and in my first years she was not very free to give me a complete Christian education. This surrounding involves more than one line of Jewish ancestry - not Old Jewish as the Christians of Palestine, but recent Jewish.

My guess is this. In the world we normally live in, Christ's sacrifice is the great turning point, and it also divides the people of God into two separate entities, the Old Testament Jewish Church before (Kaiaphas being the last of its actual High Priests before God, unless there was a time of overlap when legalities had not yet become inextricably joined to rejection of Christ) and the Christian Church (Kephas being the first of its Popes). Judaism of the OT was national, Christianity became international and supranational.

But in Narnia, though the turning point is the same sacrifice seen from an imagined angle, the conjoined division of two communities is not there. The Narnian world is also a world where two other big divides, Flood and Babel, are absent. The Narnian community remains the same, and the enemy community is also nationally defined, no missionaries from Narnia and Archenland to Calormen. This gives a Jewish reader the opportunity to read about the turning point of redemption as such, with no communal passions interfering.

As I just an hour or two ago argued, the Judaism that split off from Christ and therefore from God, is in my view, one of the four leopard heads, if you read Daniel and Apocalypse 13. I'd like to see men like Yaacov being leopard wings - the kind of entities that do not become parts of the final beast.

(Anglicans may note, the lion of Babylon also has wings which will not become parts of it.)

22:13 No, I had not (while actually being a Christian) figured out that the three times of the echo from Exodus pi were a reference to the Trinity.

I can only say that king Solomon hinted at it by making a "sleight of hand" version of pi equal 3.

23:47 Oh sure. In every generation they try to destroy us, like partly Judaism fuelled Communism put several of our bishops and priests either to death or in prisons back under Trotski.

The reading is perfectly correct, you are just applying it to the wrong community. A very good reason to actually read CSL and a narrative where the split in question is not extant.

24:07 I look up dates on wiki.

The Silver Chair : 1953.
CSL met Joy : 1952.

"Davidman first met Lewis in August 1952 when she made a trip to the United Kingdom. She planned to finish her book on the Ten Commandments, which showed influences of Lewis's style of apologetics. After several lunch meetings and walks accompanying Lewis and Davidman, Lewis's brother, Warren Lewis, wrote in his diary that "a rapid friendship" had developed between his younger brother and Davidman, whom he described as "a Christian convert of Jewish race, medium height, good figure, horn rimmed specs, quite extraordinarily uninhibited." She spent Christmas and a fortnight at The Kilns with the brothers. Though Davidman was deeply in love with Lewis, there was no reciprocation on his side."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Davidman

So, yes, before CSL finished the work, he would have been familiar with the Hagada, a more than just 50 % chance.

26:34 I hadn't noted that Abraham fed them unleavened bread, but that's a great point for the liturgic hymn "panis angelorum" and also for the licitness and excellence of the Latin rite use of unleavened bread, against the Caerularian schismatics who call this "Judaising heresy".

While the word is not used, the thing is processually described:

Make haste, temper together three measures of flour, and make cakes upon the hearth.

Sounds more like chapati or matzot than like French rolls, processually.

28:08 Speaking of prefigurement, what do you think a young teen girl would make of being greeted in words that had been directed to Jael and to Judith?

The words "blessed among women" basically mean "you have killed an enemy of Israel bad enough to be treated like the serpent" (both Sisera and Holophernes were killed by the head), and a girl who had spent her life from 3 to puberty in the temple would know that.

What enemy of Israel had she possibly killed?

30:45 And also prefiguring, what parent looked on while the son actually died, and went through joining the will to that of God Who had demanded one?

Are you saying the Isaac story is commemorated Friday evenings (which is when the Sabbath starts)?

31:31 And it would also seem Moriah is the same mount as a certain hill from which the Temple could be seen ...

31:54 I have seen Catholic commenters state that the breaking of the stone table would have been a hatred of the Catholic Mass.

Not the most Lewis friendly, obviously, but still.

(A Catholic altar is not a stone pile, but a stone table)

32:14 Ah, there is obviously a Protestant misreading of

For by one oblation he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified ... Now where there is a remission of these, there is no more an oblation for sin.
Hebrews 10:10-18.

The Reformers abused this to pretend the Sacrifice of the Mass can't happen.

Now read : Habemus altare, de quo edere non habent potestatem, qui tabernaculo deserviunt.
We have an altar, whereof they have no power to eat who serve the tabernacle.
Hebrews 13:10.

In other words, the sacrifice is being perpetually renewed as to its presence on earth.

33:08 You said Teshuva was created or present before the Creation?

And all that dwell upon the earth adored him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb, which was slain from the beginning of the world.
Apocalypse 13:8

Remember, O Lord, thy bowels of compassion; and thy mercies that are from the beginning of the world.
Psalms 24:6

I'd consider that one theologumenon in the heretical Judaism as a very clear non-heresy.

You know, like Anglicans and Calvinists are heretical on lots of things, but Christ rising from the dead is not one of them.

"To fix what is broken is not in the natural world, and therefore had to be created before creation"

Well, if there is one heresy, it's Arianism. Christ has a created humanity, but He is not a created person. It had to be before creation, but not necessarily as creatures are because created, more like God is Who is uncreaed.

Jesus said to her: I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live:
John 11:25

34:49 Calormene poetry says a lot about what I have against Jewish "common sense" and "obviously, this is how you do it, this is how life really is" ... and Calvinist and Mahommedan one as well, not to mention Free masonic. (Jews, Muslims, Calvinists, Freemasons share a thing? Four heads sharing a leopard body, but for Weinstein, I hope it's more like a leopard wing which won't stay on the leopard body too long).

37:40 Leopard wings and lioness wings have in common "searching for truth".

The lion of Babylon and the leopard heads have in common with the real lion of Judah (correct Catholicism) to consider themselves as already having the truth - but only one of them actually has it.

I search for arguments, I search for distinctions, I search for the correct application, but as to truth, I consider I already have it since I became a Catholic.