A 2003 Harris Poll estimated that 16% of Americans had one or more tattoos. With a population of roughly 300 million, that would be about 48 million people.

According to a 2006 Pew Research Center study, 36% of Americans between 18 and 25, and 40% between 26 and 40, had at least one tattoo.

Pollster Mark Penn, in his 2007 book   Mirotrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, came up with a figure of  30-million tattooed Americans, adding that one in three of those living in the country between the ages of 25 and 29 has a tattoo.

Compare the above figures with the number of tattooed Hebrews comprising the 12 tribes at Mount Sinai: zero. Moses was quite clear on the matter. In the Book of Leviticus 19:28, he wrote: “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you.”

The first of these two body disfigurements referred to a mourning ritual found among pagans of the day. The prohibition against tattooing is clearly worded in the second half of the Leviticus quote.

God took a long time bringing  our species, Homo sapiens,  into being, and He did not intend to have us disfigure the body He had in mind. Paul makes the divine point in 2 Corinthians 6:16: “We are a temple of the living God.” One does not defile a temple.

We can deduce that something on the order of 48-million Americans are either ignorant of or indifferent to the tattooing proscription in Leviticus.

Regardless of whether the ballpark figure is 30 million or 40 million, Mark Penn’s point about microtrends should not be ignored: 1%, or 3 million of the nation’s population, can start a trend, and a trend can lead to a movement.

Tattooing is well beyond the  microtrend level. Where it is going, no one can say. Perhaps it will turn out to be a fad, reminiscent of the goldfish swallowing craze of 1939 and the telephone booth packing of the 1950s.

Psychologists say that body modification, that is, tattooing and piercing, is for many of today’s young adults a form of self-expression, and who they are is locked up in the designs they choose.

In our culture of heterodoxy, we are prey to secular microtrends and their consequences.

Since there always are statistics gatherers, perhaps one of them will find out for us how many of the tattooed attend a place of worship regularly or irregularly.  It would be safe to hazard a guess: the figure will be close to zero. And if there should be any such individuals, they would be advised to consult Leviticus 19:28.

PostScript: We get the term “saint” from the Latin sanctus [and Greek hagios] meaning “holy.” In 1 Peter 1:16, God says: “Be ye holy, because I am holy.” Mother Angelica, who founded the Eternal Word Television Network, has said: “We are called to be saints. Don’t miss the opportunity.”

In the 1981 Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire, Scottish track star Eric Liddell [pronounced liddle, as in fiddle], a  devout Christian, refused to compete in a 100 meter qualifying heat scheduled for a Sunday at the 1924 Paris Olympics.

A teammate would swap his 400 meter slot with Liddell, and Liddell, known as “the Flying Scotsman,” would go on to win the gold in record-breaking time.

The movie ended there, with a graphic stating that he then had a career as a missionary in China. 

Liddell had been born in Tietsin in North China to Protestant missionary parents. At the age of five, he, along with his older brother, was sent to England for schooling, and in due course he attended the University of Edinburgh. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree the year following the Olympics, he began his life’s work as a missionary teacher in the north of China.

In 1943, Japanese forces occupied  the rural mission station in Shaochang where he was working, and he was interned at the Weihsien Internment Camp in Weifang. Death came early to him: he died of a brain tumor in February 1945.

During his time as a track star, he had said, “I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. When I run, I feel His pleasure.”

His chief competition in the ‘24 Olympics was another fleet-footed runner, Harold Abrahams, who wasn’t quite the Jewish outsider as portrayed in the film.

He was the younger brother of Olympic long jumper Sir Sidney Abrahams and Sir Adolphe Abrahams, a gastroenterologist, considered the founder of British sports medicine.

Harold Abrahams was a long jumper as well as a sprinter. Prior to the ‘24 Olympics, he had set the English record in the long jump (24 feet, 2-1/2 inches).

It was Liddell who introduced Abrahams to professional coach Scipio Africanus “Sam” Mussabini. With Mussabini’s coaching, Abrahams went on to win the 100 meter dash, the center-of-attraction race in Chariots of Fire.

Arthur Porritt finished third in that event, which took place at 7 p.m. on July 7, 1924. (July, remember, is the 7th month.) The two would dine together at 7 p.m. on July 7th every year until Abrahams death 53 years later.

Mussabini had said to Abrahams: “Only think of two things: the gun and the tape. When you hear the one, just run like hell until you break the other.”

Abrahams studied law after the ‘24 Games, but spent the greater part of his adult life as a sports broadcaster. He was the timekeeper on May 6, 1954, when Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4 minute mile — 3 minutes 59.4 seconds.

Abrahams ran for glory, which is fine. But how I admire Eric Liddell, who ran for the glory of God…and died in His service!

Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.

I begin with a statement that will raise, perhaps even sear, eyebrows among my Jewish co-religionists: Jesus of Nazareth, the 1st-century rabbi from Galilee, was the noblest example of someone devoted to “social justice,” tzedakah in Hebrew.

How many really dare to emulate him in this role? A few have. Francis of Assisi, for example. Like Rabbi Jesus, he gave himself completely to God — and to a suffering humanity.

Unlike the Galilean rabbi, Francis came from great wealth and in his youth lived the life of a wastrel. But he had a spiritual awakening.  He gave all he had to the poor; and when he had parted with his last shirt, he turned to a friend and exclaimed gleefully, “Today I am married!” “To whom?” asked his companion. “To Lady Poverty” [an abstract personification, the "bride of Jesus," husbandless for eleven hundred years until wooed by Francis; described in Dante's Divine Comedy, Canto XI].

Francis then began an extraordinary life of service to the needy. (After the Wikipedia biography of St. Francis, read G.K. Chesterton’s Saint Francis of Assisi.) Less than two years after his death in 1226, Pope Gregory IX proclaimed him a saint.

He knew the meaning of tzedakah even if he didn’t know the word. Mother Teresa of Calcutta was another magnificent practitioner of tzedakah.

As Lawrence H. Fuchs pointed out in The Political Behavior of American Jews (1956), tzedakah, translated as “charity,” derives from the same root as the word for “justice” and also signifies “righteousness.” Integrating these, tzedakah has come to mean ”social justice.”

Jews have always known its meaning and have adhered to it throughout their long and difficult history.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews, beginning with Rome’s death blow to Jerusalem in 70 CE  followed by centuries of being a people without a country, have had to pay the price for being powerless.

Whenever relief or help did come, it came from what we would consider the Left. But since 1967, the time of the Six-Day War, support has been coming not from the Left but from the Right. Sad to say, but most American Jews do not see the change.

In a 1999 Azure magazine essay, “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews,”  an exasperated Irving Kristol wondered how Jews manage “to combine an almost pathologically intense concern for politics with a seemingly equally intense inclination toward political foolishness, often crossing over  into the realm of the politically suicidal…”

Kristol, the original godfather of neoconservatism, gave us the memorable definition of a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”

Another founding father of neoconservatism is Norman Podhoretz, for 35 years the editor of the liberal magazine Commentary, until he underwent a gradual political conversion of his own.

He, too, scratches his cranium as he ponders that, despite the obvious changing socio-political milieu, American Jews continue to adhere to liberalism and remain glued to the Democratic Party.

Podhoretz  concurs with Irving Howe, who labeled liberalism the “secular religion of many American Jews” (Commentary, January 1980).

In Why Are Jews Liberals?  Podhoretz lays it on thick: “To most American Jews, then, liberalism is not… merely a necessary component of Jewishness: it is the very essence of being a Jew…it is a religion in its own right…”

Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, founder of the Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, like so many voices from intellectual Jewry, stresses social justice: “…social justice is the primary mandate of Judaism” (quoted from Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice).

I am not at odds with the rabbi’s call for social justice, but I am uneasy with his use of the word  “mandate” (from L. mandare, to put into one’s hand; manus, hand).

Let me turn to what those who gave us the Faith consider the essence of  our religion: Judaism is the mystery of Mt. Sinai, where God put into Moses’ hands His Ten Commandments.

The Hand of God cannot be overlooked, or ignored, in human events. Jewish liberalism manages to do just that. We either believe in salvation history or we do not. We are either living in God’s time or we are not. Judaism says we are.

The 11th-century wasn’t such a bad time, if you asked Anselmo de Candia Ginevra (1033-1109), more familiar to us as (Archbishop) Anselm of Canterbury.

Anselm, as prelate and philosopher, played a dominant role  in helping  lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the second phase of the Middle Ages. (See the Addendum for definitions of these terms.)

He is best known for his ontological [from Gk. ontos, being + logia, writing about, study of] argument for the existence of God.

Anselm’s starting point was the premise that God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Or, the idea of God’s existence is greater than the idea of God’s non-existence. He then built on his premise using logic: he reasoned his way to his “proof.”

His approach is laid out in Proslogion (Discourse on the Existence of God). Proslogion wasn’t written to convince the non-believer of God’s existence, but rather to bolster the faith of the believing Christian. The original title of the work was to have been Faith Seeking Understanding.

We all know that if you let go of an apple in your hand, it falls to the ground. We have faith [from L. fidere, to trust] that it will do just that.  Newton, the great scientist-theologian, discovered why the apple falls. The law of gravity provides the understanding to justify our faith.

I have slipped into the God argument. Whether or not God exists is one issue. Whether we need God to sustain us in this life is another.

The celebrated English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, an evolutionary atheist, or someone we might consider a religious atheist, finds God in the natural laws that run the universe. So did Einstein. They speak for perhaps 0.0001 percent (600,000 people) — is that too high an estimate? —  of the world’s population of 6 billion, while the bulk of humanity lives at another intellectual-spiritual level.

Anselm considered atheists to be fools, fondly quoting Scripture: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 53:1).

For Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), the fools are those who, in this scientific age of ours, seek to prove God ’s existence using primitive and outdated methodologies.

Anselm did the best he could within the confines of his time, and history has good reason to remember him. He was the force behind scholasticism, the teaching that aimed at uniting Greek philosophy with medieval Christian doctrine.

Scholasticism was a method of learning which emphasized dialectical reasoning to resolve contradictions. Anselm’s heirs — Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas — helped prepare Europe for the modern age.

Addendum: The Middle Ages are generally considered the period in European history between classical antiquity and the Italiam Renaissance, usually dated from 476 to 1453.  In 476, the Western Roman Empire collapsed when Romulus Augustus was forced from his throne by the Germanic general Odoacer. The Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire came to an end in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople to to the Ottoman Turks under Fatih Sultan Mehmet.

The Dark Ages refers to the earlier part of the Middle Ages, from 476 to  about the end of the 10th century, a time characterized by widespread stagnation.

Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.

Glenn Beck, stalwart champion of self-empowerment and the entrepreneurial spirit, considers “social justice” and “helping the poor” code language for the redistribution of wealth: “If you have more than I do, share!”

The 46-year-old Beck, a hyper-mobile, fast-thinking, word spouting radio/TV “performer,” as the trade magazine Talkers refers to him, is the ultimate capitalist. According to Forbes (April 26), his various enterprises, which are constantly expanding like the universe itself, bring in more than $30 million a year, which he shares, not necessarily equally, with his staff of 34.

He sees President Obama salivating at the thought of biting ino a larger slice of his income, as well as the average working American’s, to satisfy his redistributionist hunger.

Karl Marx should be amoulding in his grave by now, along with his failed economic theories, but in the eyes of the Beckmeister, Barack “Robbin’ Hood” Obama, still believes it’s okay to take from those who have to give to those who don’t have.

The struggle to eliminate the Unterklasse and create a truly egalitarian society is the favorite theme of liberal social theorists. It’s not so difficlt to do, that is, on paper and in college schtuss (Yiddish, “bull”) sessions. Utopians, with all sorts of well-meaning schemes, have had their go at it for centuries, but poverty remains a part of the human scene.

The 1st-century Galilean rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, understood the human drama well enough to say: “The poor you will always have with you…” (Matthew 26:11; John 12:8). Some Christian apologists try to say that’s not what Rabbi Jesus really meant. But he said what he said.

He was on his way to a death he dreaded, and anxiety had crept into his marrow. Perhaps he did speak from out of his desperation. Nevertheless, we have his words. Two thousand years have passed and the poor are still with us, as he knew they would be.

Jesus had a respect for money (see Matthew 18:23-34; 20:1-16; 25:14-30). He came from poverty and never rose above it. His apostles were no better off, save for Judas Iscariot, the group’s treasurer, the sly one who knew how to misappropriate what funds they had.

On today’s political front, we have the Left and the Right, and the Left lives with the dream of finally overcoming poverty. This is the moment for them to have their glory, for now there is a postmodern utopian at the nation’s helm who is determined to make the dream of his fellow Leftists a reality — in the name of social justice, Glenn Beck’s bete noire. (Beck speaks of it as “collective redemption through the government.”)

The redistributionists Beck opposes are bull-dozing their way ahead in their campaign  to “transform” America. Undermining faith and religion, it should be noted, is part of  the process.

Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.