A delegation of Columbia University professors is planning a trip to Tehran to apologize to Ahmadinejad. The Israel Lobby authors say we need “candid but civil” dialogue about the ME. This could be a fine example of that.
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While in Israel with the Israeli-Palestinian Comedy Tour, fellow comic Ray Hanania and I visited the west bank town of Ramallah. This guy honors his coreligionists as Machsom Watch and B’Tselem honors ours.
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I thought cholent was just the Yiddish word for “leftovers.” I didn’t realize it was a religious fault line.
According to an article in JPost, the Shulchan Aruch instructs us to eat cholent on Shabbat lest we be taken for Karaites, who apparently spurn … cholent.
But my best takeaway was that Karaites reject the divinity of the oral law and, most interestingly, believe we should all read the Torah and decide for ourselves what it means. Karaites are apparently encouraged to “consult with as many people as possible where there is a question of uncertainty. One can take the advice of a hacham (an especially learned member of the community), but that advice is not binding and the hacham has to be able to prove his view from the Torah.”
Isn’t this what Jews mostly do anyway? When rabbis (to our stunned amazement) disagree on interpretation, don’t we just go with whom/whatever makes most sense to us?
The article quotes one learned Karaite as saying: “Rabbinic Judaism has taken the responsibility away from the individual and given it to the rabbis. But you can’t say on Judgment Day that the rabbi told me this or that – the responsibility is on the individual. Every person’s decisions are on his head and that’s why each person should read and try to understand the Torah.”
Isn’t this what all Jews are supposed to do? We all live, more than less, by the Karaite motto “search well in the scripture and do not rely on anyone else’s opinion.”
To me the Karaites are just another bunch of Jews proving Rabbi Friedheim’s adage, ‘There is only one kind of Judaism, Orthodox. There’s only one kind of Jew, Reform.”
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Rudy Giuliani says he’s never heard the claim that the US was attacked on 9/11 because we’d attacked Iraq. Guess he didn’t read Bin Laden’s 1996 “Declaration of War” against the US. Back then old UBL said:
“The youths hold you responsible for all of the killings and evictions of the Muslims and the violation of the sanctities, carried out by your Zionist brothers in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance. More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine and as a result of the unjustifiable aggression (sanction) imposed on Iraq and its nation. The children of Iraq are our children. You, the USA, together with the Saudi regime are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children.
If Muslims did to us what we did/do to them, it would spawn American Mujahideen, like in the Reagan-era flick, Red Dawn.
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This week’s parsha, Naso, includes instructions for dedicating oneself to YHWH as a Nazir. And just to show you how good that can look, straight outa Kingston comes Zahra Redwood, the new, dreadlocked, Rastafarian Miss Jamaica! Betcha Haile Selassie is rising in his grave!
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