JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

fable
unity – these will be the priorities of my government,” stated
Fabius when taking office.
In 1986 the Socialists were ousted by a right-wing government
and Fabius ceased to be prime minister. When the
Socialists returned to power in 1988, Fabius was elected president
of the National Assembly, a position he held until he became
first secretary of the Socialist party in 1992. He had the
difficult task of pulling the party out of a slump but support
for the Socialists continued to plummet. At the end of 1992,
the party agreed to send him and two former health ministers
to trial for their ministerial responsibility for a 1985 scandal
when HIV-contaminated blood had been knowingly distributed
by high officials; over 1,000 people had acquired the HIV
virus and 200 died. The National Assembly and the Senate endorsed
the decision to send the three to trial. Fabius had asked
to be brought to trial, saying to the Senate “Innocent and recognized
as such, I come before you to ask you to charge me
with errors I did not commit,” and was eventually found not
guilty. Reelected a member of the National Assembly in 1993,
he became, its president for the second time two years later
when the left came back to power. In 2000 he was appointed
minister of economy, finances and industry in the government
led by Socialist premier Lionel Jospin, but the electoral defeat
of the left in the 2002 general elections sent him back to the
opposition benches of the National Assembly. In 2004 Fabius
took a strong stand against the European constitutional treaty,
a rather unexpected move that surprised political commentators,
who viewed him as a moderate, center-to-left politician.
Defying the leadership of the Socialist Party, which endorsed
the constitutional treaty, Fabius followed the mood of
the public, which overwhelmingly dismissed the treaty in the
referendum of May 2005, thereby conceivably improving his
chances in the presidential elections of 2007.
Fabius wrote La France inégale (1975), Le cœur du futur
(1985), C’est en allant vers la mer (1990), Les blessures de la vérité
(1995), Cela commence par une ballade (2003), and Une
certaine idée de l’Europe (2004).
Bibliography: J.-G. Fredet, Fabius, les brûlures d’une ambition
(2001).
[Gideon Kouts / Dror Franck Sullaper (2nd ed.)]
FABLE, an animal tale (according to the most general and
hence most widely accepted definition), i.e., a tale in which
the characters are animals, and which contains a moral lesson.
The genre also includes tales in which plants or inanimate
objects act and talk.
Introduction
Definitions vary according to the importance ascribed to
the thematic factor (the animal story) or the functional factor
(its didactic tendency). As a literary creation, the fable developed
out of oral folklore, and it can thus be asserted that
the thematic element is closely related to those popular origins,
while the didactic quality is the product of a more sophisticated
cultural level, usually of an individual whose specific
aim is to educate (e.g., the Greek pedagogues, the rabbis of
the Mishnah and the Talmud, the darshanim, and the priests
of the various churches during the Middle Ages). Because
the earliest sources of the European literary fable and the
oldest known collection are connected with the name of the
Greek Aesop, the animal fable has often been called the Aesopian
fable.
While the animal society of the fable operates very similarly
to its human analogue, the activity, in general, remains
exclusively within the realm of the animal world. Some fables,
however, do depict interaction between humans and animals.
A similarity between the fable and the fairy tale (maerchen,
Heb. ma’asiyyah) is seen in this fanciful conception of animals
functioning as human beings. Yet within the fable itself, the
plot is usually realistic and seldom contains magical elements,
such as metamorphoses, revivals of the dead, and ghosts. The
fable further differs from the fairy tale in its being mono-episodic.
A series of episodes related or written together have
developed into the beast epic, but each of those episodes can
be isolated from its wider context. Like the fairy tale, though,
the fable too uses universal motifs and stock characters. The
latter are either stereotyped or endowed with conventional
functions within the animal society.
The source of the fable lies in the observation of animals
in their natural setting, and the tale often remains etiological.
More sophisticated plots and the didactic application of the
concrete story to the realm of ethics result from the tendency
to draw obvious parallels and to develop potential analogies.
In these cases, the two possible narrative forms are the metaphorical
and generalizing fables.
Among various conjectures as to the origin of the fable,
the 19th-century scholar, Julius Landsberger, maintained that
the fable originated with the Jews (Hebraeer), pointing out the
similarity between the names Aesop and Asaph. While this
theory has been contradicted (by Joseph *Jacobs and others),
some of the Hebrew fables are nevertheless among the most
ancient that are extant in literary form. These are traced back
to the 15th–14th centuries B.C.E., and a still earlier oral tradition
can be assumed.
The Hebrew term for fable, mashal (לָׁ שָמ), is linked, in
popular etymology, to the two homonymic roots mshl, meaning
respectively “to liken,” and “to rule.” This is explained by
the fact that meshalim were narrated by rulers or related to
future rulers in order to instruct them in just ways.
In the Bible
The biblical term refers to the proverb, aphorism, and to allegorical
prophecy. Later interpretation applied the term to
allegory (Ezek. 17:3–12), to the parable (II Sam. 12:1–4), and
to the fable. Of the latter there are two prime examples: Jotham’s
fable told to the citizens of Shechem on Mount Gerizim
(Judg. 9:8–15), in which he likens their king, Abimelech,
to the bramble which became the king of the trees; and the
fable of the thistle and the cedar of Lebanon in the answer
given by Jehoash, the king of Israel, to Amaziah, the king of
666 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6