Non Sequitur Award
From The yada, yada, yada blog:
Rabbi Steven Z. Leder, a Los Angeles pulpit rabbi, offers up this advice for the Martha Stewart: ‘To me as a rabbi, the real healing, what Jews call teshuva, repentance, comes first from accepting what you’ve done and taking steps to assure that it’s never repeated, and then changing your life in a way that supports better values. So far so good.
Then he continues:
I haven’t heard her say, ‘I’m going to give 100 times that amount to charity.’ …
Huh. I’m a little lost here. Why is she supposed to be giving 100 times her takings to charity? Did she steal from charity’s till?
P.S. Rabbi Steven Leder is the author of “More Money Than God : Living a Rich Life Without Losing Your Soul” so perhaps he thinks in these terms more often than us plain folk.
Stolen gains, if they can’t be returned, should be given to charity.
I’m relatively new here, so please tell me if you are a real Rabbi, or talmid hacham?
If there’s one lesson that we’ve learnt especially hard since the ‘intifada’ of the late 80s and the current Oslo war approaching 4years, is that the media usually fails to explain the full context of stories, and especially how it excels at taking Rabbis’ words out of context when the background is especially important and relevant.
Why this Rabbi is giving advice to Martha Stewart is beyond me. I suppose that with all this acceptance of Cabbalah, and Michael Jackson, LA rabbis feel they can appear on Oprah and talk shop.
A friend of mine had to talk to a Rabbi after he got himself some stolen property and wanted to do good, but was unable to return it.
The funny thing about it is that the stock is now selling for more than when she sold it, so she actually lost money.