Re: A goodnight song for children?

"Tasha Miller" <tashamillDELETE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

"R H Draney" <dadoctah@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:invmrd02cn2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
David Hatunen filted:

On Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:24:55 +0200, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:

Hush little baby. Don't you cry.
You'll be an angle by and by.

Telling a little baby that he'll soon be an angel doesn't seem much
of a goodnight song to me.

"By and by" doesn't mean soon, it means eventually....r

Yes.

Also, I don't think it's any worse than the standard bedtime prayer
I said as a young child. I don't know what bedtime prayers religious
folk have their children recite these days but looking at this one
now it does seem a tad tactless to remind children of their
mortality just as they are settling down to sleep. I suppose we all
have higher expectations or hopes of making it out of childhood
alive than our ancestors.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

The Jewish version (from the Babylonian Talmud, B'rachot 60b) just
says that the person hopes that God intends to let him wake up and not
die:

Praised are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the universe, who
closes my eyes in sleep, my eyelids in slumber.

May it be Your will, Adonai, My God and the God of my ancestors,
to lie me down in peace and then to raise me up in peace.

Let no disturbing thoughts upset me, no evil dreams nor troubling
fantasies.

May my bed be complete and whole in Your sight.

Grant me light so that I do not sleep the sleep of death, for it
is You who illumines and enlightens.

Praised are You, Adonai, whose majesty gives light to the
universe.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/bedtime.html

(In Hebrew, of course.) Nothing at bedtime about holding onto the
soul for you (much less, of course, the notion of taking it if you
die--a very non-Jewish notion), but in the morning, the first thing
you're supposed to do on waking is say the "Modeh ani", roughly
thanking God "for restoring my soul to me", so presumably he had it to
give back.

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
Still with HP Labs |In the beginning, there were no
SF Bay Area (1982-) |reasons, there were only causes.
Chicago (1964-1982) | Daniel Dennet

evan.kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxx

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/


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