Proverbs is the name of the ancient book of Wisdom in the Bible. It is a collection of sayings that shed light on how to live with wisdom and discernment in the world. The ancients were preoccupied with wisdom; in fact, a whole section of the Old Testament was devoted to looking for what is true.

A large number of those proverbial sayings concern truth versus falsehood. Says the Proverbs, “A reliable witness ALWAYS tells the truth, but an unreliable one tells nothing but lies,” Proverbs 14:5. In other words, people do not tend to believe someone who lies.

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No one believed Moishe the Beadle (fictional character).  He was the keeper of the synagogue in Sighet, Hungary in Elie Wiesel’s famous book Night.  Sighet was Wiesel’s hometown.

In the summer of 1941, Hungarian authorities rounded up approximately 20,000 Jews who had not been able to acquire Hungarian citizenship, and deported them to German-occupied Poland.

The Germans massacred approximately 23,000 Jews from August 27-28, 1941 in the first large-scale massacre of the Final Solution.  Moishe the Beadle was an archetype of one of these illegal aliens who was swept up in the deportation. Continue reading →

I was a middle-aged lady, set in my ways, when I decided to be baptized.  And when that water poured over my head, I realized the big problem with my new religion:  God actually lives in other people.  I couldn’t be a Christian by myself.  I couldn’t choose who else was my brother and sister.

That’s a really different story from the one that’s sold to us every day, which insists each one of us is individually responsible for managing our own economic and political salvation.

–Sara Miles

Sara Miles is an author whose books include Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion; Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead, and City of God: Faith in the Streets.  She served as Director of Ministry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco for ten years, and is the founder and director of The Food Pantry.