For
#YomHaShoah: the despair of David Djenciarski’s scene commemorating
deportation in Lodz juxtaposed against the hope expressed by the first
post-Holocaust printing of Nedarim by Vaad Hatzala, part of the series
known as the Survivors’ Talmud
Be
very careful if you make a woman cry, because God counts her tears. The
woman came out of a man’s rib. Not from his feet to be walked on. Not
from his head to be superior, but from the side to be equal. Under the
arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved.
In
the Mishnaic period there were scholars who permitted the use of
scrolls written in Greek. On this the Rabbis of Eretz Israel commented:
Different languages are good for different things – Hebrew for speech,
Aramaic for lamentation, Greek for song, Latin for military matters.
Today’s
Daf from the Talmud tells the story of Hillel who was too poor to study
Torah, so he climbed on a snowy roof in Tevet (our month) to hear the
words of the living G-d in the study hall below.
And two millennia later, snow has blanketed Jerusalem to remind of
his merit. May we all pursue Torah with such devotion in Hillel’s
honor!
The
Talmud is a formidable body of work: 63 volumes of rabbinical discourse
and disputation that form Judaism’s central scripture after the Torah.
It has been around for 1,500 years and is studied every day by tens of
thousands of Jews. But trying to navigate through its coiling labyrinth
can be enormously difficult because the one thing this monumental work
lacks is a widely accepted and accessible index.
But now that breach has been filled, or so claims the publisher of
HaMafteach, or the Key, a guide to the Talmud, available in English and
Hebrew. It was compiled not by a white-bearded sage, but by a courtly,
clean-shaven, tennis-playing immigration lawyer from the Bronx.
The index’s publisher, Feldheim Publishers, predicts it will be
snatched up by yeshivas and libraries, but more important, it will be a
tool for inveterate Talmud students — and there are plenty of those.
Feldheim’s president, Yitzchak Feldheim, said the first printing of
2,000 books — a market test — sold out in a few days here and in Israel.
More printings have been ordered.
Another
important qualification related to acceptability of the confession of
the accused. If the defendant in a civil case admits the charge, there
is no need of further clarification, and sentence is passed accordingly.
The basis for this procedure is not the assumption that the defendant
is telling the truth, but the belief that every man is entitled to give
away his money as a gift. Therefore, if he decides to state that the
charge against him is a just one, it is not the concern of the court to
seek further facts. This is not so where criminal law is concerned. The
basic assumption in halakha is that a man does not belong only to
himself; just as he has no right to cause physical harm to others, so he
has no right to inflict injury on himself. This is why it was
determined that the confession of the defendant had no legal validity
and should not be taken into consideration. This rule, which has its own
formal substantiation, served courts for centuries as a powerful weapon
against attempts to extract confessions by force or persuasion. Not
only can no man be forced to incriminate himself through his own
testimony, but self-incrimination has no significance and is
unacceptable as evidence in court.
The
sages believed that it was the oral law – the Mishna and the Talmud –
that rendered the Jewish people unique. It was said in one of the
midrashim that at some time in the future all the nations would claim
that they too were Jewish: “Then the Holy One, Blessed be He, will say:
he who holds My mystery in his hand, he is truly Israel. And what is
this mystery – it is the Mishna.” In this, and many similar stories, the
sages emphasized the importance of the oral law as proof of Israel’s
singularity, as the definition of true Judaism.
I
got to read/hold a Torah scroll for the very first time today in
Judaism class. As I ran my hand over the scroll’s texture, my professor
said it belonged to someone who perished in the Holocaust.
The second he said that, I felt tears coming to my eyes. I don’t cry very often either.
Whether you are a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu or a Sikh, you
have different ways of reaching God, however, the final destination is
the same. So, we are focusing on the final destination. We should fully
concentrate on the acquisition of spirituality and learning of Divine
Love, God’s love.
No matter how great a prophet or how sophisticated his prophecy was,
still, a messenger is just a medium to God. We are not in the business
of connecting people with the medium, we are in the business of
connecting people with the destiny. The final destiny, which of course
to all religions is God.
- An excerpt from His Holiness Younus AlGohar upcoming speech, stay tuned! Subscribe to the YouTube Channel to stay updated!
Fais attention à tes pensées, car elles deviendront des paroles. Fais attention à tes paroles, car elles deviendront des actes. Fais attention à tes actes, car ils deviendront des habitudes. Fais attention à tes habitudes, car elles deviendront ton caractère. Fais attention à ton caractère, car il est ton destin.
In
medieval times, a time when Jews were often oppressed and persecuted by
the Christians of their adopted nations a book called theToledot Yeshu was
written. In it Jesus was said to be a bastard born of Miriam who was an
adulteress. In this book she was married to a pious Jew named Joseph
and conceived Jesus with a man named “Panther” who was either a criminal
or a Roman soldier. These lies were contained in the Jewish Talmud and
expanded on in the Toledot Yeshu.
As the story goes Jesus grew
up and as a thief crept into the Temple and stole the sacred name of
YHWH which he used to perform his miracles. Oddly, this thief and
blasphemer, as the story goes, used this power to heal and raise the
dead. He awed the people and pretended to be a messiah. Somehow
he “lost” the magic name of YHWH and was stoned to death by the
Pharisees.
The Jewish Talmud and the slanderous stories which were
later included in the Toledot Yeshu were written in Hebrew no Christian
was aware of them. Later Christians became aware of it and forced the
burning or editing of the various copies of the Talmud which contained
it. One can only imagine the fury of those medieval Christians who
discovered that in the Talmud was a story which called Mary a whore and
Jesus an evil sorcerer.
One wonders how many innocent Jews were
burned at the stake or tortured in damp medieval cellars for these
slanders which found its way into the Talmud and thence to the Toledot
Yeshu. It is to the Christians what the later slander against the Jews
the “Protocols of Zion” were to Jews. A series of base lies written as
slander against a people. Many modern Jews like to pretend that these
horrible slanders do not exist or were “satire”. However, this is modern
revisionism which adds new lies to the old. One can be labeled an anti
semite for even mentioning these medieval works. Imagine that.
Continuing
with the tree theme for Tu B'shevat: the Tree of Life wraps itself
around the mishnah from Pirke Avot, “Find yourself a teacher, make
yourself a friend.” Original papercut art at www.hebrica.com
Abū
ʿImrān Mūsā bin Maimūn bin ʿUbaidallāh al-Qurṭubī or “Maimonides” was a
leading Ummayad Jewish Scholar that specialized in Talmudic Law which
inspired Jews from Spain to Yemen.
His works codified Talmudic law through his Fourteen-Volume
book “Mishneh Torah”. He was born in the AlMoravid Empire which was the
Golden Age of Jewish Culture and Intellectualism in Cordoba, Spain. At
the time leading Muslim and Jewish Scholars had led the world in terms
of Medicine, Law and Science and that eventually lead to the Renaissance
of Europe.
The
Talmud treats abstract and totally unrealistic problems in the same
manner in which it refers to the most prosaic facts of everyday life,
yet succeeds in avoiding abstract terminology.
In
the case of one who establishes his sukkah at the top of a tree or atop
a camel, the sukkah is valid, but one may not ascend and enter it on
the first Festival day because the Sages prohibit climbing or using
trees or animals on the Festival.
The
Talmud is a very hard book to define. From content to style, every
definition is incomplete or contradictory. The Talmud is completely
unique – a book that has no parallel anywhere. By way of an oxymoron and
paradox, the Talmud may be called a book of holy intellectualism.
On
another occasion it happened that a certain non-Jew came before Shammai
and said to him, “I will convert to Judaism, on condition that you
teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shammai chased him
away with the builder’s tool that was in his hand.
He came before Hillel and said to him, “Convert me.” Hillel said to
him, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the
whole Torah. The rest is commentary; go and learn it.”
This
analogy between the natural world and Torah is ancient and was
developed at length by the sages. One of its earliest expressions is the
theory that just as an architect builds a house according to a
blueprint, so the Holy One, Blessed be He, scanned His Torah in creating
the world. According to this viewpoint, it follows that there must be a
certain correlation between the world and Torah, the latter forming
part of the essence of the natural world and not merely constituting
external speculation on it. This way of thinking also engendered the
view that no subject is too strange, remote, or bizarre to be studied.
Y-Love in a comment on an op-ed in the Jewish Journal
from a Modern Orthodox rabbi explaining how big a deal it is–“a
paradigm shift”–that the RCA (Rabbinical Council of America, the Modern
Orthodox rabbinical professional organization) recently withdrew support
for a reparative therapy organization and acknowledged that reparative
therapy is not scientifically supported:
I find it likewise amazing how people find it so simple to tell gay people “what you’re doing is assur”.
With EVERY other mitzvah, halacha goes through painstaking analysis
to determine exactly what is assur, and then prescribes ways to live up
until that line. Which is why 4 amot (the point at which “carrying in
public” is forbidden on Sabbath) is *exactly* 87.2 inches and no less
and no more (or 96 inches ע”פ חזו”א).
But for gay people it’s just, “I don’t want to hear it! It’s all assur!” ?
To call this logical analysis is disingenuous at best and a
hallucination at worst. This shutting down of all cognition simply is
not the way halacha works—it’s the way homophobia works.
This is a really, really excellent point. Another great example,
since I’m not familiar with the halakhic analysis on carrying on
Shabbas, is that of the ben sorer u'moreh, the stubborn and
rebellious son (Deut. 21:18) whose punishment is death. The Talmud
literally goes on for pages and pages defining terms like “stubborn,”
“rebellious,” and for pete’s sake, even “son” (literally there is a
discussion of how many pubic hairs he has to have to make him a “son” - Sanhedrin 69a [English PDF])
to make so that there is so infinitesimally little probability for
anyone to be even liable for this rule. Why shouldn’t we do this with
with Lev. 18:22 as well? This kind of discourse is such an integral part
of our heritage. It shouldn’t have stopped when the gemara was
closed–we should keep it going.
Maranzano’s desire to emulate Marcus Aurelius always inspires a
chuckle in me. You see, if you study the Talmud, you’ll constantly find
stories of one of the great rabbis, Judah the Prince, and his
friendship with a Roman emperor called Antoninus. (Long story short, as
infants, their mothers had swapped them for one night to spare the
Jewish baby from the current Roman emperor’s decree against circumcision
and they were friends from that moment onward.) This Antoninus would
often ask his friend Judah for advice in matters of ruling or
philosophy, and their friendship provided for one of the only reprieves
in the Roman persecution of Judea.
So who was this Antoninus? Tradition identifies him either as the
emperor Antoninus Pius, or, more probably, that’s right, Marcus
Aurelius.
Look at that, Maranzano. Italians and Jews, building friendships, building empires.
Man, this site, “Pork Memoirs”, is awesome, and this article about it is too, and I am actually eating pork right now! Perfection.
However,
I am sick and tired of hearing stories about Jews who, when the shit
hit the fan, still wouldn’t eat treyf. The guy who runs “Pork Memoirs”
says how he keeps kosher because his grandparents, who were slave
laborers in Siberia, did the same while they were in the camps. The same story happened to Safran Foer’s bubbe as recounted in his latest book, Why I Think I am Better than You.
Got news for you morons: “Live by the commandments; do not die by them” –Sanhedrin 74a
Not only are you all stupid as fuck, but in thinking that you’re keeping a commandment, you’re actually ignoring some pretty good advice from a rabbinical sage who organized and contributed to the motherfucking Talmud. That shit is part of the oral Torah.
I could rant about how tales of Jewish martyrdom are Althusserian
tools used to perpetuate the cultural status quo (even though these
tales are flippin’ excellent)…but I’ll save the you the time and just
say that they’re not real. It pains me to see the repetition of this crap.
The Golem: Talmudic Legend of a Clay Beast Created to Protect the Jews
According to Talmudic legend, the
Golem is a mythical creature created out of clay that is brought to life. The
most famous version of the legend is set in late 16th century Prague. The High
Rabbi Lowe, a man learned in kabalistic lore, forms a man-like creature out of
clay and then bring it to life to protect the Jewish quarter.
Because
there is nothing quite like the Talmud, it is helpful to have not just
one perspective, but two or three, so that one can have a sense of the
multifaceted and often contradictory sides of this large, very complex
work.
Shabbat
Parah is the third of the four special Shabbatot between Rosh Chodesh
Adar and Roch Chodesh Nissan, a time of preparation for the Passover
season. At the time of the Temple, Passover included an actual sacrifice
that was brought and then eaten at the Seder, and in order to
participate, one had to be ritually pure. Hence the custom to read
Parshat Parah, which describes some of the laws of ritual purity,
several weeks before Passover.
In addition to the connection to Passover, the date of Shabbat Parah is related also to Purim. The Gemara says,
ואי זו היא שבת שלישית – כל שסמוכה לפורים מאחריה
“Which is the third week? The one right after Purim.” (Megilla 30a).
It
could just as easily have said, “the week before Shabbat Hachodesh”,
which is how it actually comes out on the calendar. Phrasing it as
“after Purim” implies that Shabbat Parah is connected to the events that
happened after Purim, and not only to the upcoming Passover.
The Haftarah of Parshat Parah begins by describing the shame of exile:
They
came to the nations to which they had come, and they desecrated the
Name of My holiness, when it was said about them, “This is the people of
Hashem, and they have left His land.” (Yechezkel 36:20)
The
prophet Yechezkel says explicitly that when the Jewish People are in
exile, it is a “Chillul Hashem”, a desecration of G-d’s Name. It shows
that we failed in our mission to further G-d’s plan for the world, and
is an embarrassment to the Jewish People and to G-d Himself.
Why
do we need to read this “after Purim”? Purim was a great miracle; the
Jewish People narrowly escaped destruction. But when it was all over,
they were still in exile. The Haftarah of Parah tells us that this is
not good enough. We must not for a moment think that our salvation on
Purim shows that living “spread out among the nations” is an acceptable
state for the Nation of G-d.
On the other hand, if even Mordechai
and Esther, with all the power that they wielded, were unable to end the
exile, then perhaps it was just too hard. We know from the Books of
Ezra and Nechemiah that life in the Land of Israel at that time was
barely tolerable. The state of the economy, security, even religion
itself, were all sub-par, certainly relative to the strong and vital
community inShushan. Given the problems that they were facing, they
must have wondered if G-d was actually interested in them coming back.
Perhaps they did not deserve to be redeemed.
The Haftarah of Parah
tells us that G-d will not tolerate the shame of exile indefinitely,
regardless of the relative merit of the Jewish People:
… It is not for your sake that I do this,
House of Israel, but for the sake of the Name of My holiness that you
desecrated among the nations to which you had come. … I will take you
from the nations, and I will gather you from all the lands, and I will
bring you to your land… I will sprinkle you with pure water and you will
be purified (Yechezkel 36: 22-25)
When G-d chooses
to do so, He will take the Jewish People out of exile and back to the
Land of Israel. Once they are there, He will take steps to “purify”
them, to make sure that they deserve to live in the Holy Land.
This
appears to be illogical, out of order. It would make much more sense if
the Haftarah first said, “I will purify you”, and then, “I will bring
you to your land.”
This paradox is one of the lessons of Shabbat
Parah. The section in the Torahthat we read on this Shabbat describes
the ritual of “Parah Adumah”: an unblemished red cow is slaughtered and
burned, and its ashes are mixed with water to create a solution that is
called “purifying water”. This solution is the only way to remove the
ritual impurity caused by direct contact with death. Paradoxically,
every person involved in the preparation of this “purifying water”
becomes impure himself[1].
This law is not meant to be logical or understandable to human beings.
To make this point, this commandment is introduced as an “חוקה”, a
decree. As Rashi puts it:
גזירה היא מלפני ואין לך רשות להרהר אחריה
It is a decree before Me and you have no permission to second-guess it. (Rashi, Bamidbar 19:2)
According
to the following Midrash, this is not only true of decrees that G-d
made in the Torah, it is also true of decrees that He has made in
history:
זאת חקת התורה זש”ה מי יתן טהור מטמא לא אחד
(איוב יד) כגון אברהם מתרח חזקיה מאחז יאשיה מאמון מרדכי משמעי ישראל
מעכו”ם העה”ב מן העה”ז מי עשה כן מי גזר כן מי צוה כן לא אחד לא יחידו של
עולם … תמן תנינן כל העוסקין בפרה מתחלה ועד סוף מטמאין בגדים היא גופה
מטהרת בגדים אלא אמר הקב”ה חקה חקקתי גזרה גזרתי ואין אתה רשאי לעבור על
גזרתי.
As it says, “Who makes pure from the impure, not the one”
(Job 14). E.g.: Avraham from Terach, Hizkiyahu from Ahaz, Yoshiahu from
Amon, Mordechai from Shimi, Israel from pagan nations, the World To Come
from the World As it Is. Who makes this happen, who decreed this, who
commanded this? The One and Only … as we learned, “everyone involved in
the red cow from beginning to end becomes impure, and it itself
purifies.” G-d said, I wrote an edict, I decreed a decree, and you may
not transgress My decree. (Bamidbar Rabba Chukat 19)
It
would make a lot more sense to us humans if pure would come from pure.
Avraham ought to have come directly from the righteous Noach, and not
from ten generations of pagans. Israel ought to have come into being in
purity and isolation in the Holy Land, not in the immoral filth of
Egypt. The World To Come should have been created in the first place,
not as an outcome of the World As Is.
But that is not how G-d
chose to run the world. Just as the laws of Parah Adumah do not make
sense to us, yet we accept is as a decree from Above, so, too, we must
accept G-d’s choices in history as a decree from Above.
We might
have expected the steps toward redemption to proceed in a logical order,
that the Jewish People would first be purified and only then return to
our land. We might have expected that the redemption would be led by the
purest and holiest of the Jewish People. Yet the Haftarah of Shabbat
Parah tells us otherwise. If G-d chooses, the converse can be true:
first we return to our land, and only then we are purified. This might
not make sense to us, it might not be how we would have done it, but it
is a decree from Above, and we do not have the right to second-guess it.
On
the first Shabbat between Purim and Passover, we prepare for national
redemption, an end to the shame of Exile, no matter what form it takes.
Hanan
Al Hroub, a Muslim settler living in the West Bank, in ‘67 Israel,
received the Global Teacher Prize and $1 million bucks that come with
it. She was praised by Bill Clinton and Pope Francis. And she supposedly
teaches non-violence to her students. Aussie Dave at Isreallycool uncovered the grim reality behind the hype.
Hanan
Al-Hroub was born and raised in the alleys of Dheisheh refugee camp and
has experienced first-hand the suffering of its people. The camp is
close to the city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, where she went
to school. She married a Palestinian freedom fighter, Omar Al-Hroub,
who took part in one of the most daring guerrilla operations in the
occupied territories, the Dabboya operation, in Hebron in May 1980. When
the guerrillas were being pursued in the mountains they attacked a
group of settlers going from the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement to the
Dabboya building near the Ibrahimi Mosque. Thirteen settlers were
killed, including their military leader in Hebron, and dozens were
injured. Months after the operation, the guerrillas were captured; Omar
was imprisoned and spent many years in Israeli prisons before being
released. It was then that he met and married his life partner who
became the best teacher in the world.
The actual story is that her husband took part in the brutal terrorist attack on
Jews walking home from synagogue. This was the Beit Hadassah attack.
(Dabboya is the name used by Muslim settlers in '67 Israel to refer to
the Jewish area.)
Six, not thirteen, Jews were murdered. Twenty
others were wounded. There was no pursuit. This was a cold-blooded
ambush. The terrorists set up their position on a rooftop and opened fire on Jews celebrating the Sabbath.
Every
Friday night, following Shabbat worship at Ma'arat HaMachpela, a group
of men would sing and dance their way down the street to Beit Hadassah,
where they continued the festivity, joined by the women and children
living in the building, adding to their Shabbat spirit.
Friday
night, May 12, the 17th of Iyar, only one day before the Lag B'Omer
celebrations. The men arrived as usual and began forming a dance
circle…and then it happened. Shots rang out, blasts enveloped the pure
Shabbat air.
Six were killed and about 20 injured. Among the
killed was a young Torah scholar from the United States studying at
Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem, Tzvi Glatt. Another victim was also a
former America, who had fought in Vietnam and converted to Judaism, Eli
HaZe'ev.
Eli
HaZe'ev’s original name was James Eli Mahon Jr. He served in the 101st
Airborne Division, lost a thumb, had his teeth shattered by a grenade,
suffered napalm burns and had a bullet puncture his lung. Then he went
undercover infiltrating Communist groups in the US for the FBI before
moving to Israel.
“We
sang the whole way,” recalled Simcha, “It was lively and spiritual.”
She said that “looking back,” she remembered the Arabs staring at them
as they passed, the hatred for the Jews apparent.
And then
gunshots and explosions split the night. Arabs opened fire from the
rooftops around Beit Hadassah and threw hand grenades down at the young
men and women below. The shooting went on for a minute or two, recalled
Yerachmiel, until someone ran and got a rifle from a nearby booth and
started shooting. The terrorists fled. Yerachmiel, who was in Hesder at
the time, saw the person in front of him was dead and although he
himself was severely wounded, he dragged another person under a nearby
Jeep out of range of the bullets. They didn’t know until later, but Tzvi
died there. The wounded were evacuated. Six died.
“I was in
intensive care for a few days,” recalled Yerachmiel. “I was not at the
funeral. Boruch Hashem we pulled through. I had many visitors. Some of
the visitors ended up marrying each other,” he said, smiling at Simcha.
“It’s somewhat of a happy ending to part of the story.”
This
is the truth behind the lies put out by and about Hanan Al-Hroub and
her husband’s “suffering” at the hands of Israel. Her husband is a
coward and a murderer. And you can easily imagine what she really
teaches her students.
Written for Shabbat Parshat Vayak’heil, כה באדר א’ תשע”ו:
This week’s Parsha begins with Moshe gathering the people to command
them in the construction of the Mishkan. Before he begins, he warns them
first about the Shabbat, and reminds them to be diligent in keeping it.
Our sages teach us that this was a command not to work on the Mishkan
on Shabbat. Even though the building of the Mishkan was of such great
importance, and we would have thought that we could build it even on
Shabbat, we are commanded that no, the building of the Mishkan cannot
occur on Shabbat.
Even though we don’t understand it, and we may come up with our own
logical conclusions for why it should be different, in the end we must
do as Hashem has commanded. Our service of Hashem is incomplete if we
use our own logic to determine the proper way to behave when in fact our
actions or attitudes run contrary to His commandments or to proper
Halachic guidelines.
Unfortunately, such attitudes are somewhat prevalent. People who are
not learned enough will make their own decisions in the proper way to
serve Hashem, and will not study enough to find out what they are doing
is wrong. For example, a Halachah taught in theGemara is that one who is
poor and cannot afford elaborate Shabbat meals, it is better that he
should make simple weekday meals for Shabbat rather than make elaborate
meals and be forced to take charity. If someone is having big, fancy
meals for Shabbat, while at the same time they are taking loans and
charity to pay their basic living expenses, are they serving God
properly? “Oh, but it doesn’t feel like Shabbat that way!”, you may
argue, but that is irrelevant; the Halachah is that you do not make
fancy meals if you need to take charity to do so, and that is it.
So what is a good way to get a basic grasp of Halachah and other
relevant matters to proper observance? That’s what the Oral Tradition is
for. Not everyone has time to study Gemara or even to do Daf Yomi, but
Mishnayot are relatively easy, especially with a good commentary like
Kehati. In just a few weeks, on the 20th of Adar Bet (30th
of march), the Mishnah Yomi cycle is restarting. That cycle takes just
two Mishnayot a day, something easy enough for anyone to do, and even
with commentary it does not take long to get through. The upcoming cycle
is an excellent time to devote oneself to learning more and help build a
better foundation in Halachah and Jewish tradition. Shabbat Shalom.
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