A Jewish Holiday Worth Borrowing

Wow, many insane statements here. Spock you might have been able to avoid some conflict by expressing "גוים" followed "אדם ".

Also לא אנושי means inhumane, which indirectly means not human. Which is why the direct translation is not human. However saying "not human" would require another word like "Not of human" "לא בן אנוש" perhaps.

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Also I believe the 6 billion is derived at by assuming what the total population of all the offspring would have become. It was meant to express the profound everlasting effect of murdering so many people, and how even a single action effects the world so much more than we believe. Islam use it as a way to portray Jews as either ignorant of liars.

RickyH, I don't know the importance of that quote? It was describing destruction of the second temple.

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Finally; fishfool.
It's not a mitvoth to have sex on Jewish holidays. It's a mitvoth to multiply, and it's acceptible to do on holidays. Also there's a disagreement amongst Rabbis of whether or not Christianity is idol worship. It's currently unacceptable to enter a trinity church, but churches that don't believe in trinity it is okay. Also mosques. Also it's not aramaic, it's hebrew.
Finally, you're not commanded to save a non-Jewish life at the cost of the sabbath. Rather you're prohibited from doing such. In fact if its your life or a non-Jews life at stake you're commanded to save your own. Whereas if it's 2 Jews life at stake then the choice is more difficult.
 
Mr.Spock said:
i still wonder where SAM has gone. i thought she will continue to support chuuush fake quote.---who linked to even more fake quote.
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We all have our failings. Hers is anything that threatens her faith, other than that she's a good scientist. And you gotta admit it takes a lot to threaten her, she takes a fair amount of abuse.

It must be hard to be a religious scholar on a science board.

And she doesn't know anywhere near as much about the West as she thinks she does from having immigrated as an adult.
 
Fraggle, I hope you're kidding. TDI is a libertarian Jew and an American. Spock is an Israeli ex-IDF trooper who "misses" the military and supports the Jews only right of "return".

Which one would you trust to tell you the truth?
 
Let me make a wild wild guess.

Either you're an Israeli or you're a pro-Israel American, who speaks a 2000 year old revived language, believes in the right of "return" on a land that God gave your "grandfather" 4000 years ago [but follows a matrilineal descent] and then questions why people are obsessed with their "origins"?
 
S.A.M. said:
Let me make a wild wild guess.

Either you're an Israeli or you're a pro-Israel American, who speaks a 2000 year old revived language, believes in the right of "return" on a land that God gave your "grandfather" 4000 years ago [but follows a matrilineal descent] and then questions why people are obsessed with their "origins"?
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It never died, so it couldn't be revived.

B647~Dancing-Bears-Posters.jpg


This picture reminds me of you SAM, you're the one on the right.
 
S.A.M. said:
Well I assumed when you said you wern't religious, you meant you were atheist.
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This illustrates my point that your understanding of the West and its people is far less complete than you think it is. (And a large portion of the Israeli population--if not the majority--are "Western," even the Sabras.) Many people who satisfy a scientific definition of "religious," because they believe in a supernatural creature who exerts power over us, do not count themselves as religious because that belief does not play a large role in their life. They rarely talk about it unless someone else brings it up, they don't consciously let it guide their life, it's not a factor in their choice of companions or romantic partners, they don't identify with any sect except perhaps in the most generic sense of "Christian" or "Jewish," and they never attend services except as a near-meaningless family holiday ritual.
Why are there so many divergent opinions among rabbis on the Halacha laws about gentiles?
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Unlike Christianity and Islam, which fairly demand conformity on penalty of ostracism if not death by stoning, Judaism encourages dissent and argument. Jews don't believe in "revealed truth," as the Christians call it. They think the truth can be arrived at by reasoning, much the same thing scientists believe. Remember that rabbis are not priests; the word rabbi means only "teacher," and teachers encourage their students to search for the truth instead of having it handed to them by authority figures.

I guess I didn't quote any of the posts regarding the Talmud, but the Talmud is not regarded as the word of a god to be slavishly honored. It is the record of arguments among wise men, many of whom disagreed with each other. The Talmud is a handbook on the art of arguing. There's even a style of argument called "Talmudic reasoning." So of course it's going to contain contradictory passages, and of course in any era rabbis are going to disagree with each other. If your leaders don't engage in debate, how are you going to be inspired to question authority and discover the truth for yourself?
Fraggle, I hope you're kidding. TDI is a libertarian Jew and an American. Spock is an Israeli ex-IDF trooper who "misses" the military and supports the Jews only right of "return". Which one would you trust to tell you the truth?
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I'm not sure what the juxtaposition of "libertarian" and "Jew" is supposed to connote, since I'm a libertarian and Hitler, at least, would have called me a Jew, even though both the Christian and Jewish sides of my family got disgusted with religion in the 19th century. But I don't trust anyone who identifies himself as religious to tell me the truth about anything that comes slightly close to religion. Humans are famous for cognitive dissonance and can be paragons of rationality and truth until it bumps up against their instinctive preprogrammed genetic need to believe in immortality and a celestial father figure.
CheskiChips said:
It never died, so it couldn't be revived.
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As the Linguistics Moderator I don't quite agree with that. Hebrew was preserved as a liturgical language, only spoken with fluency by religious leaders and scholars, and with horrid accents from the superstratum of the linguistic community each particular Jewish community lived among. If you say Hebrew was not a dead language then you'd be forced to say the same about Latin. Not only is it still a liturgical language in the Catholic church, and used for all official communication from and within the Vatican, but it was the language for communication among secular scholars throughout Europe until a couple of centuries ago. The Jews began adopting Aramaic as their vernacular about 2400 years ago and gave up Hebrew completely as a "living" language 1600 years ago. There is a community of Jews today who believe it is blasphemy to speak Hebrew as an everyday language.
This picture reminds me of you SAM, you're the one on the right.
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* * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATORS' COMMUNITY * * * *

Okay so I'm not the moderator of this particular board but I started this thread so I'm pulling rank.

EVERYBODY: STOP THE DAMN FLAMING!
 
As the Linguistics Moderator I don't quite agree with that. Hebrew was preserved as a liturgical language, only spoken with fluency by religious leaders and scholars, and with horrid accents from the superstratum of the linguistic community each particular Jewish community lived among. If you say Hebrew was not a dead language then you'd be forced to say the same about Latin. Not only is it still a liturgical language in the Catholic church, and used for all official communication from and within the Vatican, but it was the language for communication among secular scholars throughout Europe until a couple of centuries ago. The Jews began adopting Aramaic as their vernacular about 2400 years ago and gave up Hebrew completely as a "living" language 1600 years ago. There is a community of Jews today who believe it is blasphemy to speak Hebrew as an everyday language.
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It was more that a liturgical language for much of its history. There's no doubt that the modern accents are wild, but the Tunisian/Moroccan communities upheld the integrity of the language very well and has signficant deviations from other parts of the world. Aramaic was adapted to write the gemmora...however English / German was used to write various works as well. If your entire education from a child to an adult was in Hebrew then can it be considered a dead language? This was the case for many years and continues to be. I'm growingly part of the community in the concept of blasphemy through every day language. However; that's because the topics of modern language aren't possible with out changing the language which is dangerous.

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And I thought the picture was kind of funny.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Unlike Christianity and Islam, which fairly demand conformity on penalty of ostracism if not death by stoning, Judaism encourages dissent and argument
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You're kidding right? Show me an Israeli who does not believe Jews have a right to "return" to an Israel that was carved out of Palestinian lands. To me, the fact that after 2000 years, Jews from India walked out on their country is the clincher on how Jews define their identity. The fact that this includes atheist Jews only shows how entrenched this thinking is.
 
S.A.M. said:
You're kidding right? Show me an Israeli who does not believe Jews have a right to "return" to an Israel that was carved out of Palestinian lands. To me, the fact that after 2000 years, Jews from India walked out on their country is the clincher on how Jews define their identity. The fact that this includes atheist Jews only shows how entrenched this thinking is.
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Actually SAM, there are disagreements. Some of those include some Haredi communities who cite the 3 Oaths (שלוש השבועות), which Rambam (Maimonides) disagrees with Ramban (Nachmonidies). Certain Hardi groups such as Naturi Karta can be cited. There is always disagreement even amongst orthodox communities, I myself have and still do have questions on the validity.
 
S.A.M. said:
You're kidding right? Show me an Israeli who does not believe Jews have a right to "return" to an Israel that was carved out of Palestinian lands. To me, the fact that after 2000 years, Jews from India walked out on their country is the clincher on how Jews define their identity. The fact that this includes atheist Jews only shows how entrenched this thinking is.
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The majority of the world's Jews do not live in Israel so you can't equate "Israeli" with "Jew." I can't speak about India's modest Jewish community, but there are more Jews here in America than in Israel and it's a quite different population than the Israelis (and apparently the Indian Jews). They can't help feeling a sense of community with Israel because the memory most Jews share of a thousand years of European antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust is too raw and too recent. But they don't want to live there and with increasingly public voices they question the wisdom of creating Israel on top of Palestine. It can be, and has been, argued that by "giving" the Jewish refugees land that was already populated--by Muslims no less!--the British simply perpetuated the curse of the European people on the Jews, 99% of whom would much rather have been invited back to live in their old homes even if they were now holes in the ground.

America's Jews are as contentious as any other group of two or more Jews and there are plenty of supporters of Israel and Bush's policies. But most Jews in America are secular, liberal, and think of themselves as Americans first and Jews second (or perhaps third or fourth). The right of return means nothing to them. The biggest "threat" to the existence of America's Jewish community is assimilation, and they don't give a damn.

The experience of Jews in America--better treatment than under the Muslim Ottomans, the reference standard for tolerance--suggests that despite the religious crap about having a "Covenant" and being the "chosen people," if Jews are accepted as equals they happily dive into the Melting Pot. My wife and I are both Melting Pot babies with a measurable amount of Jewish ancestry but only American culture.

Jews had the same experience in China. During the Diaspora a number of them had the good fortune to head east. The Chinese welcomed anyone who knew how to transact business profitably and understood the importance of basic hygiene: two traits that got them ostracized by medieval Europeans with their wretched Christian superstitions. Within a couple of hundred years they quietly vanished: absorbed unremarkably into the mainstream population.

I don't know what went wrong in India that inspired so many of your Jews to migrate to Israel. (I assume you're not being your usual disingenous self and you actually mean that most of them left, not just a few oddballs. So if some day I travel to India I won't find a thriving Jewish community smirking about the crazies who left?) That certainly didn't happen here. I knew exactly one family who made that choice. Everyone thought they were lunatics, and they practically had to lock their daughter in a trunk to force her to make the journey.

I'm sure she's back now. There's a steady hemorrhage out of Israel and I'd judge that most of them come here, because we have more freedom and less theocracy. Every big American city has expat Israelis who wonder why their parents decided to live there.
 
CheskiChips said:
Actually SAM, there are disagreements. Some of those include some Haredi communities who cite the 3 Oaths (שלוש השבועות), which Rambam (Maimonides) disagrees with Ramban (Nachmonidies). Certain Hardi groups such as Naturi Karta can be cited. There is always disagreement even amongst orthodox communities, I myself have and still do have questions on the validity.
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Do any of the above refuse to live in Israel, on Palestinian land, in Palestinian homes?
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
I don't know what went wrong in India that inspired so many of your Jews to migrate to Israel. (I assume you're not being your usual disingenous self and you actually mean that most of them left, not just a few oddballs. So if some day I travel to India I won't find a thriving Jewish community smirking about the crazies who left?) That certainly didn't happen here. I knew exactly one family who made that choice. Everyone thought they were lunatics, and they practically had to lock their daughter in a trunk to force her to make the journey.
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There are many Americans who move to Israel.


210 American Jews Make Aliya Today

As I write this I am live on a conference call organized by Nefesh B'Nefesh. The occasion is an aliya flight: 210 American Jews leaving the United States to make a new life in Israel. Six of the olim (new immigrants to Israel) are on the call. The oldest oleh is 93 years old while the youngest is just 5 weeks old. The olim come from 22 American states and include 96 singles. The olim also come from all across the religious spectrum.

According to a Nefesh B'Nefesh spokesman they hope to have helped a total of 14,000 American Jews make aliya by the end of this year. 20,000 more (including myself) are in the pipeline to make aliya within the next three years. 94% of the NBN olim are employed, which is better than the Israeli national employment average. Over 90% of those who have made aliya with NBN have stayed in Israel and made lives there. Some of the olim on the call expressed thanks to Nefesh b'Nefesh for their assistance in making aliya possible.

When asked about what their motivations for making aliya were one woman spoke of wanting to live in a Jewish state.

At this point former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon joined the call. Ambassador Ayalon informed us that Prime Minister Olmert will be meeting the new olim upon their arrival in Israel. Ambassador Ayalon praised NBN for their work which helps insure the future and security of the State of Israel.

According to Ambassador Ayalon the biggest constraint right now on aliya is budget. The waiting list for American olim waiting to immigrate numbers 20,000. Ambassador Ayalon expects to be able to increase aliya, possibly doubling or tripling the numbers, with a goal of 100,000 American olim making aliya by 2016. Ambassador Ayalon reported that he has talked to leaders in Israeli government about the budget issue including the Prime Minister. He also expressed hope that the Jewish Agency can be brought back on board.
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http://israel-aliya.blogspot.com/2007/09/210-american-jews-make-aliya-today.html
 
S.A.M. said:
There are many Americans who move to Israel.
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Eight thousand per year??? Sam, there are six million people in America who identify themselves as Jewish and are counted in the official figure. It's often estimated that there are at least that many secular Jews, and another equal number of people like my wife who are technically eligible under the matrilineal Rule of Return--all of whom studiously avoid the Jewish and anti-Jewish radar and check the "American" box on the census form. And that doesn't even count the people like me who would be invited into Hitler's camps but not into Israel, and would just as soon avoid both places.

8,000 emigres a year is an insignificant segment of that population. There are surely far more who move away to other countries in the normal course of their business and scholarship. And as I pointed out, we find ourselves welcoming quite a few of them (and their children) back after a decade or two of disillusionment with a racist, bellicose, theocratic society.

I'm flabbergasted that a woman who calls herself a scientist plays so fast and loose with statistics. Is this what you meant by Indian Jews moving to Israel? A few tenths of a percent of the total population and the other 99+ percent stayed?
 
I assume many American Jews hold dual nationalities with Israel but live in the US [India does not allow dual nationalities].

Cheski Chips here is a fine example of an American Jew turned Israeli. Spidergoat is also an atheist American Jew with an Israeli passport. How many American Jews have dual nationalities in Israel?
 
S.A.M. said:
I assume many American Jews hold dual nationalities with Israel but live in the US [India does not allow dual nationalities].

Cheski Chips here is a fine example of an American Jew turned Israeli. Spidergoat is also an atheist American Jew with an Israeli passport. How many American Jews have dual nationalities in Israel?
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Easily half of the Orthodox communities.
Fraggle, many Jews are not calculated in the Census if they're non-affiliate even in the slightest. I also would never consider myself Israeli until I have lived there the same amount of years I lived in America + 1.

What S.A.M. is describing is the recent entry of Indian Jewish community influx. There were many being denied citizenship for a political reason, mostly the unsurity of the land they intended to live. And the displacement (and re-location) of people from Gush Katif.
Since this issue has been settled many of the Indian-Jewish community has been allowed entry. A relatively large influx that would have spanned much time has been condensed into a small period of time.


Do any of the above refuse to live in Israel, on Palestinian land, in Palestinian homes?
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Yes, many of them DO refuse to live there. Others refuse to abide by Israeli law, and some others protest. They're all a little different in how they protest but all have in common the 3 oaths.
 
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