Sigh. Our son Ezra, age 7, fears the Jackal god. That would be Ezra who attends an Orthodox Jewish (actually, Chabad) elementary school and studies the weekly Torah portion. I gave him a copy of a book I liked when I was a kid, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, an Alfred Hitchcock “Three Investigators” mystery, in which the scary figure of the Jackal god figures. Did you ever hear of that series?
Now Ezzie won’t go to sleep without the lights on. “The Jackal god is coming!” he explained to my wife.
But I guess it’s better than fearing apocalypse from global warming. A new survey shows a third of kids have been terrified into thinking
the world will be destroyed in their lifetime by some environmental disaster like “climate change.” This reminds me of the liberal Jewish summer camp in Malibu that I attended and which, some time after I was there, was trying to whip the kids into a frenzy of terror about the U.S.-Soviet arms race. One day the counselors told the whole camp that nuclear war had been declared, missiles were already in flight, and they would never see their moms and dads again. Quite the teaching moment.
There’s something almost evil about scaring kids with this stuff. Then you consider that the Hebrew Bible itself assures us that the weather is not how civilization will end. After Noah survived the Flood, God assured him so (Genesis 8:21-22):
And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
Do you see how minutely attuned secularism is to the Bible, how it finds every opportunity to take a stance opposite to that of Scripture?
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