The thread then rather weirdly turned to the question (seldom asked!) of whether eating tart cherries was a sin -- apparently because they contain the hormone melatonin. As one post said,
Taking melatonin would be a sin regardless of if we produce it. Actually this is a really good example,>naturally producing melatonin = good>artificial increasing melatonin levels = sinGet it?
This led me to read up a bit on melatonin, which I hadn't really known anything about. I recognized it as the name of a hormone but prior to the reading inspired by this thread I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about its effects. One of the things I learned is that melatonin pills are sometimes used to treat insomnia, jet lag, and other sleep issues. (I never suffer from insomnia or jet lag and am certainly not deficient in the "most absurd dreams" department, so my reading was just out of disinterested curiosity.)
This morning, I started reading a free sample of Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Rabbi Shaul Behr, the religious Jewish young adult sci-fi novel whose accompanying music video (how many novels have that?) was the subject of my last post, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger." I found this on p. 24. Ari Barak, the young protagonist, is on a plane to Israel and has just scared his elderly seatmate into business class by talking too much.
Ari had been disappointed, but it did come with the upside of having two seats to himself. So he had davened Maariv in his seat, popped some melatonin pills, and curled up to sleep with his legs stretched out, appreciating one of the advantages of being shorter than average.
How shockingly sinful! And just after davening Maariv, too! (Praying the evening prayer service. Footnotes explain all the Jewish lingo)
The cover art on the free sample pdf is different from that in the music video. Since the cover art was synchronistically important, I checked Amazon to see what cover art the published version had. (It's the music-video version.) While there, I noticed this:
The photos on Rabbi Behr's website, where I got the free sample, show him wearing a yarmulke, but his Amazon bio not only shows him in a black fedora but highlights it in the very first sentence. My sync post about the "Free Will Paradox" music video included a pulp-cover picture of the Shadow, whose big nose and black fedora I said made him look "something like a stereotypical Jew."
Incidentally, Lewis Carroll never specifies what kind of tarts the Knave of Hearts stole (theories include pepper and treacle), but artists usually portray them as red and thus possibly cherry. Eating tart cherries may or may not be a sin, but eating stolen cherry tarts certainly is!
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