The Sentry

Three airplane stories: the failed Nigerian suicide bomber whose flight, thank heaven, made it to Detroit; the Chinese doctoral student who evacuated Newark's airport when he breached security to give his girlfriend an extra kiss; and the fifty six year old Gilligan's Island fan whose adolescent humor resulted in his Hawaii flight turning back to Portland.

We are so easily distracted, so in want of stimulation, so repelled by repetition. Passengers and transportation personnel suffer alike. Who would want to watch an x-ray monitor for hours and hours, days on end, to see what's stashed in passengers' carry-ons? Who wouldn't want to stretch his legs after being posted at an exit with nothing to do but watch for people walking in the wrong direction?

We haven't yet learned why the Nigerian terrorist was not intercepted, but I suspect that part of the reason was boredom. The sleepy bureaucrat first entrusted with this intelligence probably looked around for someone else to pass it off to. Perhaps the file sat in a second bureaucrat's inbox while he fumed about having too much work. Maybe he left it on the desk of a third, as a surprise, for when she came back from Starbucks. Thirty five days passed, but Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to board his flight unhindered.

The enemy of vigilance is tedium. While on one hour of guard duty in the jungle of Viet Nam, on an especially dark and quiet night, I let two hours slip by. Was I asleep? I will never know.


The Sentry by Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt, 1654. The artist was killed in "The Delft Thunderclap" when kegs of gunpowder stored nearby suddenly exploded. Click on the picture for a closer look.

Young Jew as Christ

Or, Christ as a young Jew, if you prefer. Rembrandt lived in the Jodenbreestraat, a part of Amsterdam where Jews were settling. He befriended his neighbors and, despite the Jewish injunction against the making of graven images, he got them to sit for him. Perhaps he thought the Jews were physionomically closer than the Dutch to the people of the Bible.



For example, his rendering of Jacob on his death bed looks much like an elderly Chasid we might see walking to shul in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles: long beard, aquiline nose, papery skin, tired eyes.

Did the young Jew who sat for this portrait know that he was modeling for Christ? I have no idea. But I think it's fair to say that this Jesus is less ethereal and more incisive than most that we see hanging in churches--a teller of parables and a turner-over-of-money-changers'-tables. But who was this man really? A laborer with a young wife? An apprentice diamond cutter? A student who tutored rich men's children to make ends meet? A poet? We'll never know him for himself, but he brings to the role of Jesus a vibrancy, even an athleticism, that we seldom see in religious art. Rembrandt, the lover-of-women and spender-of-money, is telling us that if God did become flesh, he must have been a most engaging man.
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