"I will stand in this breach."

Said President Biden, in his speech yesterday. You can encounter the line in context at the end of my previous post. 

This post is to examine the idiom. What are we talking about when we say "stand in the breach"? I think of Shakespeare's "Once more unto the breach." It's about taking up a warlike frame of mind:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man,
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood...

So "the breach" is a broken open place in some fortifying wall, and the idea is to move through that space, into battle. If they don't move forward, the argument is that they will pile up dead until their bodies fill that space — close the wall up.

But that's about using the breach as an entry point into battle, not just standing there, which seems to be a poor military tactic.

From about the same time period, there is the King James Version of the Bible (1611), Psalm 106:23:

23 Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath, lest he should destroy them.

There, "the breach" is the broken connection between God and human beings, and Moses was able to stand in that breach. To say "I will stand in this breach" — as Biden did — is to draw a parallel between yourself and Moses. Does Biden mean that the country is broken open with angry Trumpsters on one side and the rest of the people needing mediation that Biden, like Moses, can bring? It's a funny analogy, because not only is Biden a strange Moses, but because the nefarious insurrectionists are in the God position.

The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for the phrase "to stand in the breach." One definition of "breach" is "The product of breaking... esp. 'A gap in a fortification made by a battery’ (Johnson). Hence to stand in the breach (often figurative)." The only example it gives of standing in the breach that Psalm (in the King James Version).

Searching a bit more, I see that there are some translations of the Bible that have the phrase "stand in the breach" in Ezekiel 22:30: "And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none."

Trumpsters perk up at "a man among them who should build up the wall." 

That's as far as I'll go in this blog post. I have a problem with understanding "the breach" as a break in a wall, because I don't see the effectiveness of simply standing there. I think it ought to mean a division between groups of people and serving as a mediator.

What does a bird symbolize?

Sunrise, captured at its predictable time — it was 5:19 — with the sudden appearance of a bird. Seeing it only now, as I process this morning's photographs, I wonder what does a bird symbolize?

The internet answers most simplistically: Freedom!

Which cues "Ballad in Plain D"...

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?

ADDED: I have made a study of the birds of the Bible, and I have produced a list of 8 quotations, which I've ranked in the order that seemed right to me:

8. Matthew 8:20 — "Jesus replied, 'Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.'"

7. Ezekiel 38:20 — "The fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the beasts of the field, every creature that moves along the ground, and all the people on the face of the earth will tremble at my presence. The mountains will be overturned, the cliffs will crumble and every wall will fall to the ground."

6. Psalm 50:11 — "I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine."

5. Ecclesiastes 9:12 — "Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them."

4. Job 12:7-8 — "But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you."

3. Psalm 102:7  — "I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins. I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof. All day long my enemies taunt me; those who rail against me use my name as a curse."

2. Matthew 6:26 — "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?"

1. Job 41:1-5 —"Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?"

"How can those who do not have faith have hope in days like these?"

A question to the Pope. His answer:

“They are all God's children and are looked upon by Him. Even those who have not yet met God, those who do not have the gift of faith, can find their way through this, in the good things they believe in: they can find strength in love for their children, for their family, for their brothers and sisters. One can say: ‘I cannot pray because I do not believe.’ But at the same time, however, he can believe in the love of the people around him, and thus find hope”.

Plague forces cancellation of play about the plague.

"Madison’s Overture Center for the Arts has cancelled... The Amateurs, Forward Theater Company’s play about a troupe of actors trying to avoid the Black Plague in 14th Century Europe...." (Wisconsin State Journal).

The play ran in NYC in 2018. From the review of the NY performance in the NYT. The play within the play is called "Noah's Ark." In that play, the actor playing God is "a mellifluous blowhard named Larking" who is doubting God's existence because of the Black Plague. The troupe encounters problems filling the roles as actors die.

In a moment of stubborn curiosity that alters the aesthetic history of mankind, [the actress playing Mrs. Noah] asks what would happen if Mrs. Noah just didn’t feel like getting on that ark one day.

What would happen, [the playwright, Jordan Harrison] suggests, is the Renaissance, or very nearly. The beginning of self-consciousness, he argues, is the beginning of enlightenment. If this sounds a bit heady for a rollicking tragicomedy in which pratfalls and death throes are tumbled together, that is part of the play’s unusual scheme....

[I]t really is a thrilling, expansive, world-changing moment in a very sneaky play when [the character playing Mrs. Noah] first asks, What’s my motivation? Which is a question you can only begin to contemplate after asking, What is God’s?