“You know what Cosmo was doing
this morning?” I looked around the
dinner table to see if any of my family knew the answer to my question.
“Probably nothing,” Elliot
guessed. “He just lies around and sighs
every so often.”
“Wrong,” I said. It is true that Cosmo sighs a lot. I’ve never figured it out why. Dogs have the nicest lives and yet, they do sigh
as though they are longing for Dog-topia.
“He probably had the zoomies
and was tearing around the downstairs,” Victoria guessed.
“No, not that either,” I said.
“I give up,” said Vincent.
“He was studying Elise’s first
grade, “Learning to Read” book,” I said.
“He really seemed like he was making good progress on it.”
“Cosmo’s a smart dog,” Victoria
said contentedly.
“He’s smarter than Elise,” Elliot
said. “But that’s not saying much.”
“I think he’s trying to fit in,”
I said. “He knows the rest of his family
reads and so he wants to be able to do so as well. I’m going to get him his own special copy of ‘Go,
Dog, Go!’ and maybe some of the Clifford books too. I’m sure he’ll enjoy them.”
“Maybe if you get him ‘Call of
the Wild,’ he’ll run away and join a wolf pack,” Elliot said. That, I must confess, seems unlikely. The chance of a wolf pack letting in a Golden
Doodle, much less letting him lead the pack seems slim to none.
Reading is an amazing
thing. You can do it for the enjoyment
factor and you can do to learn things and often for both of those things. It saddens me to realize that about fifty
percent of Americans hadn’t read a single book over the last year.
I suppose I fall in the
minority, because I read 114 books last year and 82 books so far this
year.
Of course, in another era, the
majority of people in society couldn’t read.
It is estimated that probably around 5 percent of the citizens in
ancient Israel could read. Quite simply,
when you are expending all of your energy simply to scratch a living out of the
desert soil, sitting down with a mystery novel or a biography was furthest from
any of their minds. Beyond which, there weren’t scrolls to be
found most places other than the temple.
Copies had to be made by hand and were very few and very expensive.
Even in that time, they
understood the importance of internalizing the Torah. Moses told the people, “And thou shalt teach
them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in
thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and
when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a
sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And
thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.”
(Deuteronomy 6:7-9)
The pages of the Bible are full
of wisdom. There are stories there for
learning and most of all to know and understand how we can approach God.
It is said that Martin Luther
had one of the greatest impacts on the worldwide education level. It wasn’t because of his break with the
Catholic church, but because he translated the Bible into German and desired
that those who spoke the German language would be able to pick it up and read
it for themselves.
Perhaps it is dangerous to
think of people reading the Bible for themselves. Maybe they will twist its meaning and come up
with ideas that aren’t orthodox. Then
again, maybe they will read and understand a little better who they are and who
God is.
If my dog can learn to read and
better himself, then so can you!
