The Torah is the Old Testament. The Talmud is a long, multi-volume series of rabbinic commentaries and applications of the Torah, as well as general discussions of philosophy, ethics, etc. Think of it as THE Jewish blog, with lots of manual links and comments spaced over a couple thousand years, plus unnoted commentary and arguments by all who study it. "The Essence of Judaism: On Teaching Judaism to Seventh Graders" is an entertaining explanation of how this process goes. Pirkei Avot (loosely, "The Wisdom of the Fathers") is the most frequently read and translated Talmud volume, since it deals only with general morals, ethics, and philosophy, and spends little to no time on halacha (Jewish law). That reach gives it an arguable place among the Great Books of civilization.
As a surprising demonstration of that reach, it turns out that the Talmud (I strongly suspect it's mostly Pirkei Avot) enjoys near-universal distribution in South Korea, of all places:
"Almost every house in South Korea has a translated Talmud. But unlike Israel, even Korean mothers study it and read from it to their young children. Yes, in a country of almost 49 million people, many of whom believe in Buddhism and Christianity, there are more people who read the Talmud - or at least have a copy of it at home - than in the Jewish state."
Turns out there's a reason for this...
As the BBC puts it: "They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones." They also have a tribal artefact called the "ngoma lungundu," which seems to be a replica of the Ark of the Covenant.
No replica of a melted Nazi by the Ark, though. Guess Hollywood's influence is limited.
Many Lemba are now Christians or Muslims, but DNA testing has confirmed that the Jewish practices and symbols, and Lemba oral history, are no coincidence. Members of the Lemba's priestly clan (the Buba) even have a genetic element also found among the Jewish priestly clan, the Kohanim.
Far out.
Well, this is the first Winds Guest Blog to come via Facebook. Hillary Levin talks about her murdered friends Rivky and Gabi Hholtzberg, who ran the Chabad Lubavitch house in Mumbai ("Nariman House"). It was freed by India's National Security Guard "Black Cat" commandos via helicopter assault, but not before several of its inhabitants were tortured and murdered. This is her memory of her remarkable friends, and what they brought to the world.
Guest blog by Hillary Lewin
Many of you first heard of the Holtzberg family four days ago when news of the Mumbai hostage situation emerged. I feel compelled to write this letter, because I want the world to know who Rivky and Gabi Holtzberg were in life and to tell you what I witnessed of their accomplishments in their brief 28 years on earth. While I am devastated by their death, I am thankful that my life and so many others were touched by their purity, friendship and spirit.
Before I entered the Chabad house in Mumbai, I thought, "What kind of people would leave a comfortable and secure life in a religious community to live in the middle of Mumbai; a dirty, difficult, crowded city?" As I got to know Rivky and Gabi over the course of this past summer, I understood that G-d creates some truly special people willing to devote their lives to bettering the world.
The Jewish New Year is not like the secular New Year, though it does share one element. It's about examining the life lived over the past year, individually and in community. Here's one translation of a prayer called the U'Netanah Tokef, attributed to a Jewish martyr Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, recited in the synagogue just before his death, after his hands and feet had been cut off for refusing to convert to Christianity. Part of it has been translated as follows:
"All mankind will pass before You like members of the flock. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall You cause to pass, count, calculate, and consider the soul of all the living; and You shall apportion the fixed needs of all Your creatures and inscribe their verdict.
On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.
But REPENTANCE, PRAYER and CHARITY avert the severe decree!"
This is not a comfortable prayer. Quite a few people have hated it, actually, including more than one rabbi. Jewish TV Network offers a video (click on the Torah scroll) from "Torah Slam 2008" in Los Angeles, where a very talented cross-denominational group of rabbis discuss/ explain/ struggle with/ curse at this prayer, its translations (plural), and its meaning. The video is alternately funny, deep, moving, and angry; always impassioned, and ultimately very enlightening. No matter what religion you are.
Shana Tovah.
Prof. Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish woman who attends an orthodox synagogue in Nashville and who occupies an endowed chair of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. If you make a habit of watching the various Jesus TV shows that appear around Christmastime and Easter, you've probably seen her on camera. A-J, as her students call her (I was her student, and still consider myself such) is an engaging lecturer with an appealing sense of humor and a simply awesome command of the various themes, facts and passages of the New Testament. And she treats the New Testament a lot better than many Christian professors, clergy and laity treat the Old Testament.
Which brings me to her latest book, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. It is precisely, I think, because of A-J's deep appreciation of Jesus as a specifically Jewish man, and the plainly Jewish character of the New Testament, that leads her to describe and rebut Christians' historic and ongoing habit of thinking of Jesus as some kind of "counter-Jew" who had little regard for his own religious traditions and teachings, or whom actually sought to contradict them. Even worse has been the use of the New Testament by Christians over the years to justify anti-Judaism, which is a very short step removed from anti-Jew, a position that is simply not tenable with the identity and life of Jesus.
"I lived in New York City for a decade and a half. We had a saying … NYC is a prison where the inmates are the guards. It was some time after leaving the City that I came to understand how powerful that insight was."
-- Dr. Earl R. Smith II, "The Boundaries of Your Life Are..."
"If you damage the jail, you harm the captive. If you remove the prisoner, you bring the guard along too. If you touch the captor, you imperil the victim."
-- Idries Shah, see Winds "Sufi Wisdom" entry
When you understand those 2 quotes, you'll understand the Jewish Rosh Hashanah holiday.
Last night was Passover's Second Seder, which concludes:
"Ended is the Passover Seder, according to custom, statute and law. As we were worthy to celebrate it this year, so may we perform it in future years. Oh pure one in heaven above, restore the congregation of Israel in your love. Speedily lead your people to Zion in joy. Next year in Jerusalem!"
Cairo columnist Tarek Heggy has been a frequent contributor here at Winds of Change.NET. In the wake of his 2004 Passover greetings, we had an interesting email exchange around the story of Passover, the role of the Egyptians, and one specific part of the Passover Seder: the spilling of 10 drops of wine, as the plagues visited upon the Egyptians are recited.
Why do we do that? The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if perhaps the standard explanations were missing something - something that goes right to the heart of this holiday of freedom.
Continue reading "Drops of Freedom"...
Sunday night's Discovery Channel show, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," has disappeared from serious consideration faster than the Iraq Study Group's report did. If you wish to read my takedown, here a link to my own post at donaldsensing.com:
Archeo-porn! Conspiracy Theory! Hallelujah!
In brief, the entire thesis of the show is a conspiracy theory. And like most such theories, it requires it adherents to dismiss historical facts and replace them with enormous conjecture. In this case, the entire thesis rests on completely dismissing Jesus as a first-century Jewish religious figure and recharacterizing him as an anti-Roman revolutionary. That was a claim made explicity on the show. But there is absolutely no evidence for it and no less a figure than Pontius Pilate himself directly contradicted the notion.
And I'd sure like to know how this scene relates to the rest of the show at all; in fact it is more evidence that this show was a decidedly unserious work.
A study published today shows the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has almost tripled in 10 years, with more than half the attacks last year taking place in London.
The findings prompted the report's authors to warn of a "wave of hatred" against Jews.
The number of incidents increased to 594 last year, up by 31 per cent on the previous year.
Violent assaults soared to 112, up by more than a third on 2005. ...
• An Orthodox Jew punched in the face and almost pushed off a Tube platform by an Arab man who screamed: "Get back to Stamford Hill, I want to kill you all"
• A Jewish man walking to synagogue with his two young sons suffered a broken leg after being punched and kicked by a white man shouting "f***ing Jew"
• Seventy incidents of desecration and damage to synagogues, cemeteries, Jewish schools and private homes with attacks including swastikas daubed on walls
• Savage assault of a 12-year-old Jewish girl Jasmine Kranat, who was beaten unconscious on a north London bus by two teenage girls who asked her first if she was Jewish.
Here is the USA, the number of anti-Semitic incidents actually declined, though slightly, in 2006 from the year before. But 2004 saw the highest number of anti-Jewish incidents since 1994.
At the start of Rosh Ha'shanah (Jewish New Year) I wrote "Blowin' That Crazy Horn" with links that explained this High Holidays custom. I came across this story on Aish.com, and thought it was a nice way to build on that earlier piece:
"Before he showed me the shoes, he recounted how his old cloth "Yom Kippur shoes" -- leather footwear is forbidden on the Jewish Day of Atonement -- had grown uncomfortable. These new "shofar shoes," however, he explained, were much better."
The what?!? Read it and see.
As most of you know, Friday night begins the Jewish High Holy Days, which are inaugurated with Rosh Ha'shanah (New Year) and close a week later with Yom Keypoor (Day of Atonement - hey, it's all a phonetic transcription, may as well spell it like it sounds).
Most people don't know a lot about the holiday, except that the Jews have this crazy horn they blow. The folks at Aish Ha'Torah (lit. Flame of the Torah/Bible) offer one answer to the question: why do they do that?
Aish.com also calls the Shofar "The Sound of Freedom."
