Pastoral Bible Institute News

www.heraldmag.org

Do you want to connect to a Bible Student web site but can’t remember its address? Just remember www.heraldmag.org Prominently displayed on the opening page is a "links" button that leads to selected Bible Student web sites. A click on a listed site will take you directly to it.

The Herald on Tape

Each issue of the Herald magazine continues to be recorded on audio tape and sent to subscribers around the world. The tapes are sent free to those who are legally blind and who renew their request for them once each year. Others may subscribe for just $24 for six issues. Use the form inserted into this issue to start your subscription. Those with audio tape players in their automobiles may find that listening to the magazine is one way to reduce the stress of a daily commute.

Around the World

Last week the world quietly passed a new milestone: For the first time, we now have two nations with populations of more than 1 billion each. On Thursday, India officially reached the 1-billion figure. China passed the billion mark about two decades ago and now has 1.3 billion people. No other country comes close to these two. The United States ranks third with 270 million; Indonesia is fourth with 210 million.

—Los Angeles Times, 5/17/2000

Israel

According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), 230,000 survivors of the Nazi Holocaust are currently living in Israel, 130,000 of whom survived the ghettos and concentration camps. The newly released data was compiled by the CBS at the end of 1997 and the start of 1998. Most of the survivors, 205,000, live in municipal settings. Of this group, 17,000 men and 21,000 women escaped the Nazis by hiding; 25,000 men and 33,000 women lived in the ghettos; 29,000 men and 20,000 women were in forced labor camps; and 17,000 men and 24,000 women survived concentration camps. The survivors comprise over 30% of Israel’s over 60-year-old population, and 40% of the over 75-year-old category.

—Israel Wire, 5/1/2000

There is a possibility of shortages of drinking water by the end of autumn, former water commissioner Dan Zaslavsky told The Jerusalem Post. Zaslavsky, professor of soil and water engineering at the Technion in Haifa said the general public is not aware of the seriousness of the severely depleted state of Lake Kinneret and the country’s underground reservoirs, which he maintained is nothing short of catastrophic. [He is] convinced that desalination of sea-water would cost about the same [as importing water in tankers] and would be less risky and more beneficial in the long-run. It is expected that the cost of establishing a sea-water desalination plant alongside one of the existing Israel Electricity Corp. power stations would be $80m. to $100m. The plant would be capable, at the outset, of producing 50 million cu.m. of water a year. Production would cost around 70 cents a cu.m and capacity could be increased relatively easily

—Jerusalem Post, 6/20/2000

Contrary to previous estimates which spoke of a constant decrease in the [number] of the Jewish people, the past two years have actually seen a small increase of about 100,000, from 13.1 to 13.2 million Jews in the world, according to Professor Sergio DellaPergola, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is an expert on Jewish demography. In a conversation with Ha’Aretz, DellaPergola said the new figure was due primarily to developments in the former Soviet Union, where many individuals who were not recognized as Jews are now asserting their true identity. However, in the rest of the world (apart from Israel), the Jewish population is declining steadily by a rate of some 30,000 a year. Assimilation also continues to rise sharply, reaching a peak of 75 percent in Germany and Ukraine. The Jewish world, the demographic expert said, is rapidly approaching a situation of zero natural growth (an identical number of births and deaths), and a negative growth is only being averted by the natural growth of the Jewish population in Israel. In addition, DellaPergola said, only 25 percent of the children of mixed marriages in the United States define themselves as Jews, and the situation is no different in many other countries. Of the 13.2 million Jews worldwide, 8.3 million (63%) reside in the Diaspora and 4.9 million (37%) in Israel. In the former Soviet Union there are fewer than half a million Jews, (about 468,000), due mainly to the large-scale emigration of Jews to Israel as well as to the United States and Germany.

—Ha’Aretz, 6/22/2000

Editor’s note: Prof. Yirmiyahu Branover, chief editor of a new encyclopedia on the topic of 1,000 years of Russian Jewry, says, "Until now, the Jewish Agency, Hebrew University and other groups have assumed that 1 to 1.5 million Jews live [in Russia]. Our studies indicate that some 5 million Jews still live [there]." Branover’s researchers were instructed to consider as Jews only those who fit the criteria for Jewishness under Jewish law.

Islam

The Islamic Movement in Israel has a master plan to build a fourth mosque on the eastern side of the Temple Mount, according to a detailed report prepared by security officials concerning how the Waqf (Islamic religious trust) and the Islamic Movement envision the holy site. The construction of the mosque is a long-term plan, which is currently only in the discussion stage, unlike the other plans outlined in the report. Raid Salah, one of the heads of the Islamic Movement, told Ha’aretz that the entire area of the Temple Mount is an inseparable and integral part of the Al Aqsa Mosque. The Committee for the Prevention of Damage to Antiquities on the Temple Mount —a non-partisan body comprised of members representing a range of political views—is calling on the Prime Minister to order the Waqf and heads of the Muslim community to declare a freeze on the current situation of the Temple Mount and define a new status quo. Jerusalem police commander, Yair Yitzhaki, told the Knesset Education Committee a few months back that the Waqf has six separate building plans prepared for the Temple Mount, but refused to go into details. An appeal to the District Court by Yehuda Etzion of the Hai Vekayam Movement that demanded the Waqf reveal their plans for the site on the basis of the Freedom of Information Act met with the state’s refusal since the information was considered secret.

—Ha’aretz, 6/18/2000

Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s Prime Minister, attacked Islamic fundamentalists for opposing technological change. He urged Muslim countries to embrace modern science to prevent rich Western nations from ganging up to use technology to turn them into banana republics. Dr. Mahathir was speaking to the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur of foreign ministers from Muslim nations. He said opposition Islamic conservatives had condemned the modernization program. The 74-year-old leader said that centuries ago Muslims had the world’s most highly developed culture and knowledge of science." Islam enjoins us to seek knowledge. Enough of us must be assigned to the acquisition of the necessary knowledge and skills of the Information Age so as to enable us to catch up with our detractors and our enemies," he concluded.

—Financial Times, 6/28/00

Christendom

Premier Costas Simitis has set his government on a collision course with the powerful Greek Orthodox Church by abolishing religious affiliation from national identity cards. Demanding to know people’s beliefs no longer concerns the state "as unfortunately it did in past times," Simitis said in announcing adherence to a 1997 law dropping the religion category. "Recording religion on ID cards restricts and insults, directly or indirectly, the religious freedom of the citizen," he said. The move was backed by human rights groups and minorities such as Muslims, Jews, and Roman Catholics, who claim the religion entry breeds exclusionary nationalism and allows for discrimination. The church, however, is seething. Church leader Archbishop Christodoulos has demanded religion remain an optional entry on the ID cards required for all Greeks over age 14. Church leaders consider the reforms a direct blow to Greek Orthodox heritage. More than 90 percent of Greeks are baptized into the Orthodox faith. They also worry the ID issue could advance efforts to formally separate church and state similar to other European Union nations. Greece is the only EU nation that requires citizens to declare their religious beliefs and one of the few with state identity cards.

—Associated Press, 5/25/2000

Bankruptcy is looking more inevitable for the Anglican Church of Canada. Canada’s third-largest denomination, with 800,000 members, is facing 1,600 claims from native Indians who are demanding to be compensated for physical and sexual abuse they endured at residential schools run by the church from 1800 to the 1970s, news reports said. The lawsuits amount to $1 billion and the church’s parent organization, the National Synod, has less than $7 million in assets and is expected to run out of money in 12 to 18 months, church spokesmen told MSNBC. "If bankruptcy becomes inevitable, we really are called to be the body of Christ. Dead. Absolutely dead. And just as absolutely destined to rise," Anglican Archbishop Michael Peers said. The residential schools began as a way of crushing Indian culture and assimilating Indians into white society, MSNBC said. Children were forcibly taken from their homes and beaten if they spoke their native language, it said. They often were poorly fed and clothed. Four churches that ran the schools—the Anglican, Roman Catholic, United Church, and Presbyterian—along with the government of Canada, are being sued by about 7,000 survivors of the schools.

—MSNBC, 5/22/2000

Economics

Globalization is on trial at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly in Geneva, called to review progress since the UN social summit in Copenhagen five years ago. Since then, says the UN, global poverty, inequality and insecurity have increased, with one in five of the world’s population living on less than $1 a day. The US is opposing a proposal by Canada, backed by the European Union and developing countries, to study the feasibility of a "Tobin tax"—a levy on currency transactions first suggested by James Tobin, the Nobel prize-winning economist. Proponents claim such a tax could raise as much as $250 billion a year for development. The UN secretary general called for more commitment to combating poverty and exclusion. The report issued by the UN, IMF, World Bank and OECD, called for more commitment from both rich and poor countries to combating poverty and exclusion. The report sets out seven goals for achievement by 2015. These include halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, universal primary education, reducing child mortality rates and promoting environment-friendly development.

—www.paris21.org/betterworld, 6/26/2000

Zimbabwe’s general election in June swept away the one-party state that President Robert Mugabe has run since the 1980s. John Makumbe, politics lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, said, "This marks the beginning of democracy in Zimbabwe." The results of the election show that millions of Zimbabweans are eager for change after two decades of uninterrupted Zanu rule and years of corruption and economic mismanagement. "The new legislature assumes office at a time when the entire nation is consumed by romantic and almost terminal levels of expectation—all this unfortunately in the face of an impending economic holocaust," wrote Brian Kagoro, lawyer and proponent of constitutional reform. Zimbabwe problems include a dearth of foreign exchange and an unemployment rate of more than 50 percent. Commercial farmers, the mainstay of vital export industries in tobacco and horticulture, continue to emigrate to Mozambique and Zambia or Australia and Britain. "We are in real danger of being abandoned by most investors and most donor agencies," said Mr. Makumbe.

—Financial Times, 6/29/2000

Science

After more than a decade of dreaming, planning and heroic number crunching, [the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute and Celera Genomics] have deciphered essentially all the 3.1 billion biochemical "letters" of human DNA, the coded instructions for building and operating a fully functional human. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this achievement. Armed with the genetic code, scientists can now start teasing out the secrets of human health and disease at the molecular level—secrets that will lead at the very least to a revolution in diagnosing and treating everything from Alzheimer’s to heart disease to cancer, and more. In a matter of decades, the world of medicine will be utterly transformed, and history books will mark this week as the ceremonial start of the genomic era.

—Time, 7/3/2000

Hebrew University researchers have worked out a method of growing bright red tomatoes with exceptional amounts of vitamins and minerals using genetic engineering. Material resisting oxidation is the secret, with large quantities of Beta-Korten which turns into Vitamin A in the body. The researchers checked the various strains of tomatoes in the country to determine those with the strongest red color. The "Kaye" Prize of the Hebrew University has been awarded to the doctoral student, Gil Ronen, for the discovery.

—Israel Wire, 6/12/2000

An innovative operation of the inner ear has resulted in restoring hearing to deaf people as well as children born deaf. The revolutionary technique involves implanting the shell-shaped Cochlea in a manner bypassing the sound-relaying factor in the inner ear and connecting it by an electrode directly to the brain. The system was invented by Professor Yona Kronenberg at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer and will be displayed for the first time at an all-European scientific congress in Berlin and later in Antwerp with emphasis on using it for children. Prof. Kronenberg said the electrodes are introduced into the inner ear and connected to the auditory nerve which, in deaf patients, may not be deteriorated but essentially disconnected.

—Israel Wire, 4/27/2000

Book Review

The Servant, James C. Hunter, Prima Publishing, 1998, 187 pages.

It is unusual to find a book ostensibly about managing people and relationships dedicated "To the Glory of God." Yet after reading James Hunter’s one-week step-by-step journey along the road to discovery, one understands why he did this: his "journey" occurred in a Michigan monastery.

Hunter was a general manager of a large manufacturing facility. He appeared to be a successful executive as the world measures success, but he knew his world was falling apart. His wife was unhappy, his son was becoming increasingly rebellious, and the hourly employees at the factory had nearly succeeded in getting a union to represent them because of their discontent.

Hunter turned to his pastor for advice and was told about a retreat at a monastery, something he would never have ordinarily consented to attend except for one thing: one of the monks at that monastery was a former Fortune 500 executive he knew by reputation.

As Hunter learned at this retreat, successful leadership—whether it be of a family, church, little league team, or business organization—depends upon following certain principles, principles that were articulated by Jesus Christ: "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant" (Matthew 23:11). Authority to lead is most effective and powerful when it is the result of service and sacrifice on behalf of others.

Hunter’s first day in class was humiliating. As each student introduced him or herself, he was thinking about what he would say. When it was his turn, the instructor asked him to summarize what the preceding student had said. He had no idea. Listening, he was to learn, is a fundamental attribute of a good leader, and he didn’t listen. No surprise there. Few do. Reading and writing are taught, and sometimes speaking. But few have had any training in listening even though much more of our time is spent in this activity than in the other three.

Hunter learns that service and sacrifice come from love, a concept that makes him uncomfortable until he is shown that this kind of love describes actions, not feelings. Again it is Jesus who, when summarizing the commandments, subsumes them all by invoking love (of God and one’s neighbor—Matthew 22:37-40). A surprising concept is that love in action does not require one to like its object. Vince Lombardi said, "I don’t necessarily have to like my players and associates but as the leader, I must love them. Love is loyalty, love is teamwork, love respects the dignity of the individual. This is the strength of any organization."

This book allows us to see into Hunter’s mind—a man who does not consider himself to be religious—as he gradually comes to the realization that he must follow Christian principles if he is to turn his life around. Although he tries to resist this "message," at the end of the week it appears he really has learned this lesson.

—Michael Nekora