Words & Works

P: Israel's Knesset (Parliament) passed a bill which makes the rabbinate the sole body authorized to officiate at marriages or divorces in Israel. This means that all the ancient restrictions of the Torah are the law of the land: no Jew may marry a gentile, no woman may sue for divorce (though the new law provides that if a rabbi decides that a woman has ground for divorce and her husband refuses her one, civil authorities may arrest him and "hold him in gaol until he complies").

P: Checking over the translation of the Bible in common use in Liberia, Dr. Eugene A. Nida of the American Bible Society discovered a jolting fact. Instead of "Lead us not into temptation" in the Lord's Prayer, a misplaced inflection has long had Liberian Christians praying: "Do not catch us when we sin."

P: Man's character is largely built on a relationship with "some exalted power lying outside himself," writes Chief Psychologist John A. Blake of the Central State Hospital at Petersburg, Va. in the current issue of Mental Hygiene. "Psychologists have observed that when such a relationship, early acquired and strongly rooted in the depths of man's personality in infancy and childhood, is either lost or seriously disturbed in later life, a conflict results, manifesting itself in some form and degree of personality disorder ... In such cases, one might rightly say that [a] man became literally 'sick in the spirit.' "

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