The Nutrition of Abraham and Sarah on The Way To Canaan

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

Speaking of threshing floors used in the baking of bread;  we only have to walk or drive down to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread. What kind of food did Abraham and Sarah eat 3,000 years ago,  especially on their trek from Ur on the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia to Canaan?  

From Ur, Abraham traveled 700 miles to the borders of present-day Iraq, another 700 miles into Syria, another 800 down to Egypt by the inland road, and then back into Canaan - which is now Israel.  It is a journey that today's pilgrim, for reasons of international polity, cannot easily replicate. But even though much of the route is difficult of access, and although many of the cities Abraham knew are now only ruins, there are nonetheless rewards for today's traveler, spiritual monuments to the man and his faith. Begin, then, in the Ur of history and imagination, and end at Hebron, where, under Israeli protection, the faiths, however briefly, meet.

They might have traveled by camels.  It's a very long trek.  That would have made carrying food much easier.  

When Abraham strode upon the stage at Ur, he was by Semitic reckoning already a man of 75. And Ur was then a capital city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, a place of beauty, graced with towers, palaces, temples, law courts, market squares, statues, shrines, gardens, mosaics, friezes, reliefs and monuments. 

Abraham is one of the early homo sapiens that we know about, making an entrance of our history after Adam and Eve of the year 5783 BCE Jewish time. Abraham was born in about  1948 BCE.   They were the updated models after Neandertals, the homo sapiens who have been around for a long time, now.   I went back 9 generations starting with Abraham's father, Terah, to get to Shem, one of Noah's sons. 4 more generations back and one arrives at Enoch.                                 

Our babies can nurse their mothers for the first 2 years of their lives.  Then mothers found food for themselves in nature, such as berries and nuts, fruit on trees such as dates, apples, and seeds and grasses to munch on.  They would chew it, and then spit it into the mouths of their babies.    It looked rather like baby food our babies are fed from cans and bottles created by Gerbers.    

The human lineage going way back was of Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.  It took thousands of years being at each stage to develop the mind and body which happened by genes mutating to go along with adapting to their environment. 

The question is, when did homo sapiens start eating animals?  The answer is 2.6 million years ago.  The first major evolutionary change in the human diet was the incorporation of meat and marrow from large animals, which occurred by at least 2.6 million years ago.  That was way before Abraham's day.                                    

I bet they would have loved to come upon a hamburger stand when on their trek, but none existed back then  Abraham and Sarah lived during the 2nd millennium or was born about the year 1948 BCE, only about 4,000 years ago.  Ur, connected to Babylon, was like the New York City of that day.  3,000 more years and they would see lots of hamburger stands in the year 1948 after World War II.  

He left it for the hinterland of Canaan to start a new life out in less populated countryside. They may have had dried meat in their backpacks, and some form of pita or even matzo made from wheat.  They walked near the river so may have eaten fish along the way to Haran.  They needed to walk even if they came with camels as walking is good for the heart, and they must have walked a lot more than today's humans.    

One wonders how that came to be that humans started eating animals.    Could it have happened that they came upon a carcass of one hit by lightning so there was one cooked, so to speak, and they smelled it and tasted it as it made them salivate and become hungrier and they were then sated?  That would have opened their eyes to a new source of food.                  

  Also, they might have studied other animals in their purview and saw that they ate other animals, so besides staying out of the limelight of being the next meal, thought of their own tummy growling and what might they include in their own diet.   

Those who became meat eaters found they were stronger than others.  I know a boxer who ate a good beef dinner before a boxing match and found he had more energy so won his bouts.  These meat eaters would have become a more dominant group, multiplying.   

Animal-based foods (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dairy foods) tend to be good sources of complete protein, while plant-based foods (fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and seeds) often lack one or more essential amino acid.

Today, vegans are the thing.  More and more people are turning to a vegan diet.  Well, we do have 7.98 billion people on planet earth and its getting harder and harder to feed and water that many.  Here, Russians are leaving their country, worried about not having the necessities of life under this regime by being forced into serving the army in an unwanted war.  Other Europeans worry about keeping warm during the winter and needing fuel.  

No such worries for Abraham.  He just worried about producing more of his own children and had to work on that.  Those were the days of very low population of the world.  

Resource:

https://www.history.com/news/humans-evolution-neanderthals-denisovans#:~:text=The%20human%20lineage%20of%20Australopithecus,erectus%2C%20Neanderthals%20and%20Homo%20sapiens. 

Our Awesome Holy Torah-A Socialogical Study of Mankind

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                    

This is the year of 5782, which means that we figure that mankind has been calculated to have begun 5 thousand, 7 hundred and 82 years ago with the first humans like us, named Adam and Eve, male and female, carrying hormones and most importantly, genes to carry on a special form of life and with a life force within us determined to be a soul.   This is thought to separate us from the animals. We really didn't come from apes;  they're  not our original parents, but mankind has gone through cycles of development, and we came from one called Neanderthals of which some of us still carry a few of their genes.  I do, They were close to being like us, so close.  The Neanderthal  has been found to have a hyoid bone. Its similarity to those of modern humans was seen as evidence by some scientists that Neanderthals possessed a modern vocal tract and were therefore capable of fully modern speech.

                                                                                                                                                           

How our stories developed is too awesome, as it starts so cleverly with 2 people and carries on with their impulses and mistakes in life, leaving nothing out.  The development is what's so awesome about this writing.  Surely it came from a power beyond ours.  Moses couldn't have done this alone from 1311 to 1271 BCE.  The thinking to create it is overwhelming.    

We've gone from eating each other to eating animals and finally to think that cannibalism is detestable. We've even gone from plant only eating to animal only eating and back again.  We've eaten meat raw and then discovered cooking.  All these additional ideas have expanded our brains, and the more that brain is used, the stronger it gets.                       

We have lived long enough to see a pig's heart, (and I remind you that we were told not to eat pigs), inserted in a man, and is working and keeping him alive, maybe for hours, weeks or days, undetermined as yet.  The thought that it is still beating tells us something; pigs are  a life form made of the same material as us; blood, flesh, bones, etc.  They're supposed to be very intelligent animals.  People have had small ones for pets.  Life;  animal and human,  are made of nucleotide bases and 99.9% are exactly the same in all people, with 97% being the same as the chimpanzee's.                                                         

Animals such as wolves have intellect.  They feel for their young, they fight for territory, they solve problems they are faced with.  I feel they have an animal-type of soul;  that spark of life force that leaves us all when                                                           

                    Elephants mourning over their dead
                                                                                                           we die, that changes a human to something shocking, something very still.  What is that force, that seemingly spark of electricity that keeps us going like a battery?  Where does it go when it leaves us?  Do we know where gravity goes?  There are forces that keep planets going, too, and  even stars die, things our intellect has played with from the time of the Egyptians who spent their energy and creativity in building pyramids to house their bodies during death.

                                    

                            Delta variant brings new pandemic

Diseases that make us sick, even kill us, have gone through cycles.  Measles, mumps, chicken pox, small pox, cholera, typhoid,                      flu epidemics with the 1917 turning into a pandemic, now  Covid 19 that has become a pandemic  and hasn't left but is continually mutating. 

         Deoxyribonucleic acid-- DNA-- Ribonucleic acid,-- RNA

Unlike cells (e.g. bacteria, plant and animal cells), viruses contain either DNA or RNA, never both; the viral nucleic acid is either single or double stranded. Viruses with a DNA core are capable of surviving in the nucleus of the cell they infect, using the host's biochemical machinery to replicate their DNA. In other words, they are living off of us as they kill us.  How nice.  Does Omicron have a DNA core? Evidently, it does. There are only 4 nucleotides present in our DNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine.   

• Researchers sequence DNA to determine the order of the four chemical building blocks that make it up: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine.
• An early method scientists used was Sanger sequencing, which involves cutting up DNA into fragments and adding radioactive or fluorescent tags to identify each nucleotide.  
• Ribonucleic acid, a nucleic acid present in all living cells. Its principal role is to act as a messenger carrying instructions from DNA for controlling the synthesis of proteins, although in some viruses RNA rather than DNA carries the genetic information.                                                    

                     Roman Army
                                                     

                              Russian Army-waiting                                                                      

Have you noticed how mankind is a fighting kind of homo sapien?  Hormones have a lot to do with that.  The Torah  has shown us how our hormones and genes have come together in the tendency to fight all the time?   Adam and Eve's sons, Cain and Abel,  had disagreements, the only men on earth and Cain  kills Abel. They were too busy fighting with no time to create anything.  They died in battle, so many of them.  

                                             

 From then on, whatever men are alive come in contact with those attacking them.  For these 5,782 years, man has been fighting man, using armies, even in ancient days with ancient arms.  To this very day, it is still happening.  The army of Russia is lined up facing Ukraine at its border, threatening.  Knowing they may have to fight at any moment, how do you think their body isn't stoked up to the almost maximum, tense, ready to fight, nerves on edge.  That's been the situation all through the years with so many of our men.  

                                                 

A building cycle has been going from caves to outdoor living in tent-style protection from the elements. This has led to using stones, wood, materials even from animals to create living space for family groups.  This led to stronger and bigger homes, castles, apartment living.  The need for warmth and privacy spurred the brain into creativity in these challenges.  No telling where people will be living in the future.  

                                                

Events come in cycles.  Music goes through a creative period where men are popping up creating classical music all over the world, especially in a well-evolved Europe.  We had:  Bach, b: 1685, Mozart  b: 1756, Beethoven b: 1770, Chopin b: 1810,  Wagner b: 1813, Brahms b: 1833,  Tchaikovsky b: 1840, and Debussy b: 1862.  This has been the peak of musical genius, It comes from a timing of minds' developing along with the ability to  communicate ideas with each other and the ability to catch on. Music continues.  The Swing Era was great. Music comes with evolution of war, political situations, as that has affected everything.                                                                                           
We've had transportation cycles, from walking to  donkeys and horses, to wheels to wagons to various types, to chariots, covered wagons, bikes, trains, cars, airplanes, jets, and now space ships and complaints that there's others, UFO's watching us all during our 5,782 years of development.  So be it, maybe we're not alone, after all.

 You see so much of this right in the Torah, the explanation of life, written in simple terms that even children can understand, why man does the things he does, where our impulses all come from.  Rabbis have spent their life-times learning more from these words.  It's our time capsule.  We can go back and see what life was like, how man thought and puzzled out problems, the development of our thinking processes.

                                               

 We know that 98% of all people of Western Europe descend from only 7 women who lived in Europe within the last 50,000 years.  They evolved way before Adam and Eve.  That's what I'm saying-our ancestors  were born in the time period of Homo Sapiens, people just like us but without all our experiences. Their minds were pretty much a clean slate.

                                                

Our 7 women were Clan mothers, themselves descended from a common ancestor we'll call "Mitochondrial Eve" who lived in Africa about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.  The Torah is a pretty modern story about life and how to live it.     

Resource;

Tanach/The Stone Edition, ArtScroll series of Mesorah Heritage Foundation

DNA & Genealogy by Colleen Fitzpatrick & Andrew Yeiser

https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/genome-sequencing-how-researchers-identify-omicron-and-other-cov-variants/

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Nazis Cried that Darwin Made Them Do It

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                      

Charles Darwin born in Shrewsbury, England on February 12, 1809, died in London on April 19, 1882 at age 73.  He was a biologist who couldn't stand the sight of blood.That's what kept him from becoming a doctor.   He published his Origins of Species in 1859.
                                                                             

               Adolf Hitler,b: Austria 1889, d: Germany 1945 at age 56

Leading Nazis were trying to say that it was all Darwin's fault that Hitler insisted on killing off all the Jews of the world.  He almost succeeded by managing to kill 6 million of us.  Now, where does Darwin fit in with all this horror and hatred?
                                                                             

Conspiring to kill off all the Jews.  You'd think Hitler was Haman of ancient Persia who tried                                                          to do the same thing.  

Hitler struck onto the idea of Darwin's "Theory of Evolution" and ran with the concept of  superior races and the survival of the fittest.  He must have been very jealous of the intelligence of the Jews and though he certainly was a non-practicing Catholic, did grow up in that environment of dislike of Jews.  So, taking the 2 factors, jealousy and dislike of these people, and mix in Darwin's survival of the fittest along with the superiority of races, and Hitler came up with a brand new philosophy which his whole country bought into.

 Why?  Was it because of his speaking ability that curls my toes when I hear him rant and rave?  Was that the proper style of the day?  He was a broken down unaccepted painter who couldn't paint pictures for a living and had to paint houses instead, bitterly.  He didn't have success as a starter to be heard.  Why did people ever listen to him?

When he came along, there weren't many successful Germans to be found.  They were all suffering from economic loss of money and jobs, so they must have identified with this man.  In doing so, and being a group that was used to following a leader and not being allowed to be individuals, they followed him, of all people because he told them to do it.

The German scientists should have called out -foul play on what he was preaching.  He was telling people that selective breeding, like farmers did with pigs and cows, were what they had to do with humanity, and they had to cull out the weak.  In his theory, the weak were the Jews because they were quiet and kept to themselves more than others.  They didn't cause trouble, but to Hitler, they were bad because they were the small businessmen and still had jobs and were not Catholics.  They still clung to their ancient religion of Judaism.   In reality, the Jews, an ancient line of people, had been studying and writing long before the Germans had left their barbaric ways.  They were part of the ancient Empires that Germans were not.  They had been traders and merchants when Germans were wearing animal skins.  Jews hadn't stopped evolving and thinking and progressing, especially in Germany, anymore than any other people.  They just had a head start on them, which didn't help in figuring the evil that was coming.  After all, Moses was born in1391 BCE and Jews had been following his teachings since about 1300 BCE.  King David was born in 1010 BCE.  Who could believe that humans would want to get rid of a whole race of people?

In Darwin's theory, natural selection was just that.  Nature took care of who survived and who didn't, but Hitler wanted to play G-d and do the selecting himself and nobody stopped him.  Nobody preached to the choir that this was wrong.  The religious view, from the Jewish Torah of Genesis, was that humanity started with an Adam and an Eve, and that we all came from this one source.

That was ignored by this group of people completely, so eager to follow a scientist named Darwin-or rather Hitler who interpreted it all for them.  .

As an aside, geneticists who work with DNA today have found an Eve and most recently an Adam.  It looks like we did all come from one source and just spread out all over on the face of this Earth.  Some of us hit the jackpot by ending up in nice warm places and others wound up on the edges of ice, making life more difficult, trying to survive the several ice ages that this Earth has experienced.

It was Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton,  who created the idea .of modern eugenics, a product of the 19th Century.  He says it came from the theory of Darwin's Evolution.

The Nazi movement had many scientist supporters, sadly.  Some scientists they were!   They concluded that the  Nazi treatment of Jews and other "races" like the Gypsies, then believed by them to be 'inferior,' was the result of Darwin's findings that could be used to improve mankind.    This is false.  Why would they want to improve others besides themselves?  It would just mean having more competition in the economic world.  No, they wanted to get rid of the competition.  This was their crutch, their excuse that nobody questioned. Empire builders from the very beginning of time never tried to do such things.  It was inhuman!  You could even say that only sub-humans would think of doing such things.

The theory of evolution comes from the idea that life forms acquire unique traits that enable those who also have new traits to survive better in adverse conditions compared to those who don't have these new traits.  The life forms with such traits were considered as 'superior.'  They took the basic teaching of Darwin of evolution and how animals evolved from one to another type, such as monkeys to people and emphasized an aspect of it, which was 'selection.'

Hitler said that they were Aryans and that this race was superior to all others and it was the people's duty to subjugate all other peoples.  The Master Race was born.  He said the Aryans were a Nordic race, coming from people of the Lost Continent of Atlantis.  This is why he liked blondes so much.  He thought them to be a pure race, not mixed with other groups at all.  Race placed the major role in the Nazi philosophy.  Hitler took a scientific new discovery, something not thought of before, and twisted it around for his own use.  There were actually a few people who stood up to him but were killed.  The rest didn't raise a finger against him.

So thanks, Dr. Darwin, for the trouble your research caused.  Certainly you couldn't have foreseen what some idiots would make out of it.  As for monkeys turning into humans, science today has found that nature has caused many types of 'people' and they didn't all make it to this period of time.  They just died out.  Natural selection, not their own, caused it to happen.  So monkeys did not turn into people after all.  That's just one line that did make it besides us.  We just haven't tried to kill them all off, thank goodness, nor they us.  As far as that goes, we find that Europeans all carry a certain % of Neanderthal in their genes, and some have some Denisovan genes.  Some have more of a % than others.  They are  branches of the tree who managed to mate successfully.  Notice, though;   no more Neanderthal or Denisovan gentlemen or ladies around.  Darwin would have been excited about this.  Today, the science ruling is DNA studies.  According to these scientists today, mankind started about 135,000 years ago.

Be thankful for the people in the USA who have a natural gift, perhaps their own DNA, coming from all the nations of the world, of questioning people.  Be thankful that we have Republicans and  Democrats who question each other's goals and motives.  It will be a sad day for everyone if we become sheep and just follow someone without questioning them if something doesn't seem right.  Americans have never been under a king or a Tsar and question, knowing they could have another leader with another thought in the next 4 years.  The insurance of this is to have an educational system where children are taught to question and do not fear doing so or challenging their teachers.  Also, another insurance against such arrogance is to have parents who teach their children to ask and to think for themselves without fear.

Resource:  http://creation.com/darwinism-and-the-nazi-race-holocaust
http://www.biography.com/people/charles-darwin-9266433
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2014/01/when-was-adam-eves-mate-born.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitler.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_race
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley-novel about eugenics.  

Evolution and Our Jewish Beliefs

Nadene Goldfoot
The Oregonian newspaper had a front page headline this morning "Human family tree has many branches."  It went on to explain that in the past 40 years, scientists have suspected that our human family tree has not been happening in a straight line.  Discoveries of 3 fossils show multiple lines of evolution in our own genus, Homo.  there were at least 2 contemporary Homo species in addition to Homo erectus living in East Africca as early as 2 million years ago.

We are classified as Homo sapiens by the scientists.  Our Judaism says that G-d created us.  In fact, the world was created in 6 days less than 6,000 years ago. A question arises.  Was Adam created with a navel?   Abraham lived about 4,000 years ago.  What gives?  How do we handle evolution and our biblical Gensis history?

We do have orthodox rabbis who are excited about evolution and find no problem.  Rabbi A.I. Kook (1865-1935) was an enthusiastic Orthodox evolutionist.  He wrote Orot ha-Kodesh where he explained that the theory of evolution is in full accordance with the Kabbalah, which he believed in, in that it sees the whole of creation as striving to express itself in ever higher forms leading eventually to G-d.

I get this.  When you think of a homo 2 million years ago, you realize, just from working with computers, that that life form had not been programmed with all that we have developed in our brain.  Simple systems such as bodily functions may have formed, but certainly not the brain.  I'd hate to meet a former 2 million year old grandma and hug her.  She wouldn't be really recognizable to me in human form, I would think.  I love Jean M. Auel's Cave man books such as "The Clan of the Cave Bear" with heroines like Ayla.  Jean says that Ayla began at the dawn of man, but I'm sure she didn't go back 2 million years.  She was like us;  tall, blonde and slender a well as smart, smarter even than her mate.  Her story took place from 35,000 to 25,000 years before our present day.

Even going back to Abraham's day shows evolution in the making.  It dawns on Abraham that the idols his dad was manufacturing were not gods, and that there was but a single unseen god in the universe in charge of  it.  He had that Eureka moment when G-d spoke to him and told him to get out of town and go on his own or forever be violated by his environment.  I bet those dendrites in his brain were pulsing and growing at that moment-evolution on the march.

Rabbi Kook's view of man's moral nature goes along with evolution as well.  In his view man's nature has improved and evolved so that today the conflict is far less marked than in former times between ethical demands we see in the Torah and man's natural strivings and desires.  He wrote before the Nazi regime, of course.  I wonder what he would have thought of that.

A British rabbi, Dr. J.H. Hertz (1872-1946) also was an evolutionist. He said there is nothing inherently un-Jewish in the evolutionary view of the origin and growth of forms of existence from the simple to the complex, and from the lowest to the highest.  .  He said the Torah's purpose is not to serve as a textbook of astronomy, geology or anthropology but to proclaim highest religious truths respecting God, Man and the Universe.  There is no conflict.  Religion and Science must each recognize the true border of their dominion.

The Rabbi of Lubavitch in Brooklyn teaches the belief of the literal meaning of Genesis.  He feels that fossils in the earth were there when he created the world.  It was created bearing marks of gradual growth in a spontaneous creation.  Rabbi Israel Lipschutz (1782-1860)  wrote Tiferet Yisrael also relied on theories found among Kabbalists that there are cycles of creation in that the creation of our world descibed in Genesis was not the first creation but the beginning of a new cycle.  The dinosaurs and skeletons of primitive men as were just found in East Africa are the remains of creatures which existed in a previous cycle.

"A Midrashic homily, Leviticus Rabbah 14:1)  says that man was created after all the animals so that if he lives worthily man is the culmination of creation, but if he lives unworthily he is reminded that even the mosquito arrived on the scene before he did."

So, King David wrote the Psalms and in 8: 5-6 puts it wisely:

What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that Thou thinkest of him?
Yet Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels,
And hast crowned him with glory and honor.  

It shouldn't offend the religious mind to discover that G-d performs His wondrous works in one way rather than another.  The man of faith is in no way prevented by new theories about how the physical universe operates from seeing the hand of the Maker in all His works.  The Darwinian theory accounts in a natural way for the emergenece of diverse species, and some atheistic thinkers have seized on this as a colossal blow to the whole theistic idea of a designing Mind.  Darwinism tells us how G-d worked, as it were, in His creative activity.  It is G-d who is responsible for the process as a whole, the arrival as well as the survival of the fittest.  This is the process to become more G-dlike.

Resource:  The Oregonian newspaper, 8/9/12 front page, Human family tree has many branches
http://news.yahoo.com/fossils-hint-distant-cousins-ancestors-181723137.html
Book:  What Does Judaism Say About...?  by Louis Jacobs page 133 Evolution
Book: The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel, first in the Earth's children series, also The Mammoth Hunters, etc. 
http://www.wits.ac.za/newsroom/newsitems/201207/17085/news_item_17085.html culture in Africa 44,000 years ago.