Everybody wants spirituality. To be a good person means to walk in G-d's ways. How does that translate to reality? The only guidebook to spirituality that has stood the test of time is the Hebrew Bible. The Bible says that the Jews will be a light onto the nations. But if you are not a born Jew, you have to convert, which is not so easy!! If you do convert, it is a lot of work to be a Jew (three times a day prayer, keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath).
This blog will show you how to be Jewish without the work!!
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Hamas Leader Instructed Arab Terrorists to Use Axes and Knives and then they did and Ten Top live hacks! and Holocaust survivor, subject of Oscar and Emmy-winning film, dies at 97 and Why does a 3,300 year-old piece of rock from Mount Ebal matter? and Character Actor Nehemiah Persoff Dead at 102, Played in On the Waterfront, Gunsmoke, Yentl By David Israel
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
Hamas Leader Instructed Arab Terrorists to Use Axes and Knives
In the wake of a deadly terrorist attack on Thursday night in the Israeli city of Elad, Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar is drawing renewed attention to a speech he made earlier this week calling for lone-wolf assaults with guns, cleavers, axes and knives.
Security forces are searching for the assailants who murdered three Israelis and injured at least four people, two critically, in Elad as crowds were celebrating Israel's 74th birthday. The suspects, who attacked people in the city's main park by Ibn Gvirol Street, were believed to be armed with an ax and perhaps a firearm.
According to a report by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), in his April 30 speech, Sinwar said: "Our people under occupation inside [Israel] in the Negev … the Galilee, Haifa, Jaffa, Akko and Lod—whoever has a gun should prepare it, and whoever does not have a gun should prepare his cleaver, ax or knife."
He also praised the terrorist who carried out a recent attack in the West Bank settlement of Ariel in which an Israeli security guard was killed.
The Hamas leader further said "we must prepare for a big war if Israel does not stop harming the Al-Aqsa mosque," a longtime anti-Semitic trope that riles would-be agitators against the Jewish state.
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
Why does a 3,300 year-old piece of rock from Mount Ebal matter?
Why does a 3,300 year-old piece of rock from Mount Ebal matter?
For starters, it may help connect several other texts used to reconstruct history, though archaeology largely reflects messy events, and not neat narratives
The shocking part of the discovery of the Mount Ebal tablet is how little new information it provides. Most of the information it gives us about the early years of Israelites in Canaan is well-known to researchers, even to those who strenuously (and sometimes mendaciously) deny the importance of this information.
The site at which the inscription was found, an archaeological site on the northern slopes of Mount Ebal, is clearly a cultic site, dating to 13th and 12th centuries BCE. The quantities of bones found at the site show that it was used for worship. The pottery found at the site links to it a larger settlement phenomenon in the highlands of the Samaria region. In the period between roughly 1250 and 1100 BCE, hundreds of new settlements were founded in this region. Mostly small hamlets, their inhabitants survived by subsistence farming, generating few surpluses that could be used for trade. Apparently independent of any larger political formation, these were mostly distant from the only urban center in the region (Shechem) and many were concentrated in the northern reaches of the Samaria region. As such, they could be seen from the slopes where the altar was located.
None of this information is new. But a battle royal has emerged over its interpretation.
The simplest explanation for this new settlement phenomenon is that many people had moved to the region. They established a new settlement pattern, dissimilar to that which had characterized the region since 2000 BCE, and in so doing, rejected the traditional political structures of the area. In a carefully-argued scholarly work, entitled Israel's Ethnogenesis, Avraham Faust enumerated over a dozen ethnic markers that show how these new settlers set themselves apart from those who inhabited the Samaria region before them, and from the Canaanites who lived in other parts of Palestine in the 13th and 12th centuries.
Despite the coherence of the argument that the new settlement patterns and new political organization indicate a new group, many in Israel's archaeological community have expressed reservations about seeing these settlers as a distinct ethnic group. Their opposition revolves around similarities between the 13th-century settlers of the Samarian hills and the Canaanites who lived at the time in the lowlands. It is incontrovertible that much of the ceramic repertoire found in the hills in this period is similar to that found in the lowlands. But these similarities come alongside important differences in the choice of how to decorate these ceramics, and how to relate to imported wares, beyond differences in settlement pattern and political organization.
While these scholars may refuse to recognize the new settlers as a distinct nation, the 13th-century Egyptian king, Merneptah, felt otherwise. Writing of a campaign launched against a point in the region between Gezer (near the modern Ben-Gurion Airport) and Yeno'am (apparently in Transjordan, opposite Beit-Shean), he speaks of the defeat of a group of Semitic-speaking individuals, lacking a king, whom he calls "Israel." Despite repeated attempts to question this reading, the text clearly refers to Israel, and clearly designates this group as Semites. Significantly, Merneptah's stele places this group in the same region where the 13th-12th century wave of settlements were centered, in the Samarian hill-country.
Merneptah's inscription may not be the only Egyptian text to speak of the Israelites. From his predecessor, Raamses II, we have a topographical list of nomadic pastoralist groups known as the "Shasu." From other Egyptian texts, we know that one group of Shasu were those of 'Aduma, apparently the Edomites, whom Genesis describes as the Israelites' first cousins. Raamses' list mentions the "Shasu of Yahw," which some have seen as a reference to Israel's God, known as YHWH. Is Raamses' list the oldest known mention of the Israelites, whom he calls the "nomads of YHWH"?
The excavators of the Mount Ebal altar have stated that the inscription they recovered also mentions a God called YHW. Their reading of the poorly-preserved text will need to go through the customary scholarly review by recognized experts in epigraphy. If the proposed reading is sustained, this would clearly demonstrate that already in the 13th or 12th centuries BCE, in the period of Raamses II and Merneptah, the new settlers of the Samaria region worshiped YHWH. These were the settlers whom Merneptah called "Israel" — probably because they called themselves "Israel." If these Israelites can be shown to have worshiped YHWH already in the 13th or 12th century BCE, the link between the "nomads of YHWH" in Raamses' list and the Israelites will become hard to deny.
We could then show that YHWH-worshiping nomads from outside of Palestine entered the hill-country of Samaria sometime in this period. The Mount Ebal inscription, therefore, may be a small but significant additional link in a long chain of texts used for historical reconstruction.ADVERTISEMENT
It could link the new settlers to the Shasu "nomads of Yahw" mentioned by the Egyptian king Raamses II, nomads who lived in lands under Egyptian control. This link would make it much harder to argue that the 13th and 12th century settlers in the Samaria region were simply Canaanites who sought new stomping grounds.
Why does all this matter? Why have scholarly publications and newspapers devoted much attention to a small slip of rock 3,300 years old? What is at stake is not simply a battle about how to reconstruct the ancient history of the Israelites, but about modern Jewish identity and how we view Israel's future. Yigal Allon famously said that Israel's future is defined by knowing and respecting its history. Each side in the current historical debate is trying to refashion the ancient Israelites in light of how that side sees Israel's modern identity. Israelis committed to Israel's place among the nations and to a cosmopolitan view of their own identity would like to view the ancient Israelites as cosmopolitan traders. Therefore, they emphasize Israel's origins as an offshoot of the Canaanites known for their trading prowess and close relations with ancient empires. To other Israelis, the distinctive nature of Israel's history is worth highlighting, and the desire to do so finds expression in how they view the ancient Israelites.
Interestingly, the current excavations at Mount Ebal are headed by American Christians, rather than Israelis. For them, the question is not one of identity so much as proving the historicity of biblical events, a desire founded in the Protestant Christian emphasis on the importance of the literal meaning of Scripture. They seek "proof" that Joshua indeed established an altar at Mount Ebal, and view the tablet as an element in that proof.
The problem with this approach is that archaeology can never prove narrative. It cannot prove narrative because any narrative, biblical or otherwise, only narrates a small selection of the events that occur. Events are chaotic, narrative is orderly. Any narrator chooses to emphasize certain events, to re-cast others in order to force them to make sense, and to ignore those events that do not fit into the narrative. Archaeological data reflects the messy and disorderly events that occurred in real time, rather than a narrator's attempt to fit those disorderly events into a narrative framework. So that, rather than discovering Joshua's altar, the excavators may well have found an altar established around the period when Joshua lived, but a different one, from the early period of Israelite settlement. Does this altar matter? If one seeks to find "the true Joshua altar," then the altar where the tablet was found matters very little. But if one seeks to understand more about the larger series of events that transpired in the 13th and 12th centuries, and how these relate to the narrative told by the Hebrew Bible, this altar is one link in a very long chain.
Holocaust survivor, subject of Oscar and Emmy-winning film, dies at 97 In 2011, she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor in the United States.
Holocaust survivor and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Gerda Weissmann Klein died on Sunday at age 97.
Born in 1924 in Poland, she survived three Nazi concentration camps, where she almost died from exhaustion, overwork and a forced death march through her native country, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Though she survived, both of her parents and brother died in the Holocaust. After World War II, she married Kurt Klein, a soldier and one of her American liberators, and they moved to the United States.
Weissmann Klein wrote 10 books, including her autobiography All But My Life, which was made in 1995 into a 40-minute documentary short called "One Survivor Remembers."
The film won an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Special and an Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject). "One Survivor Remembers" is now part of the National Film Registry and is available for educators as a part of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance program, according to Deadline.
In 1997, Weissmann Klein was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Governing Council by then-President Bill Clinton.
She served as keynote speaker at the inaugural U.N. International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2006; two years later, she co-founded the nonprofit organization Citizenship Counts, which educates students about their rights and responsibilities as U.S. citizens.
In 2011, Weissmann Klein was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor in the United States. At the presentation ceremony, Obama stated that the Holocaust survivor "has taught the world that it is often in our most hopeless moments that we discover the extent of our strength and the depth of our love."
She is survived by three children, eight grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.
Never. Ever. Joke about a person's intellect, body shape or career. Not unless you want to create resentment and destroy your friendship with others.
Don't speak openly of your achievements. Let others find out naturally. The "wow" impact would be greater too.
If someone pays you a compliment, accept it and say "thank you". Don't be overly humble and reject the compliment.
Don't ask "anyone can help me with this?" Specifically, delegate a person. Otherwise, everyone's going to be waiting for someone to volunteer, which will never happen.
Use praise strategically. Don't give it too easily, but deliver it when it's well deserving.
Deploy punishment tactfully. You don't want your subordinates (if you're in a leadership position) to be discouraged by constant scolding, but neither do you want them to feel that they can get away with anything. Be understanding, but remind them occasionally that you mean business.
Sound decisive. Don't ramble, mumble or use "uh" and "um" excessively. It makes you look less competent.
Don't complain.
If you're good at a particular skill, never do it for free.
Master your craft. Stand out from the others. Be irreplaceable.
Character Actor Nehemiah Persoff Dead at 102, Played in On the Waterfront, Gunsmoke, Yentl
Nehemiah Persoff, who played the cab driver in Marlon Brando's and Rod Steiger's immortal, "I coulda' been a contender" scene in "On The Waterfront" (1954), Mr. Dino in a 1965 episode of Gunsmoke, Barbra Streisand's "Papa," Reb Mendel, in Yentl (1983), and dozens of other roles, died on Tuesday of heart failure at age 102 at a rehabilitation facility in San Luis Obispo, California.
Persoff was born in Jerusalem in 1919, and at age 10 moved with his family to the United States in 1929, where he graduated from the Hebrew Technical Institute in 1937. He was drafted in 1942 and served through World War II until 1945 as part of an acting company that entertained the troops around the world.
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After the war ended, Persoff was accepted into the Actors Studio in 1947 and took an acting class that was taught by Elia Kazan.
After playing a smiling man on the subway in "The Naked City" in 1948, and Brando's cabbie in 1954, Persoff played Leo the accountant in "The Harder They Fall" with Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger (1956), the gangster boss Little Bonaparte in Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" (1959). He also appeared in supporting roles in "The Comancheros" (1961) and "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965), in Twins (1988), and was the voice of Papa Mousekewitz in the animated movie series "American Tail." His last movie was "4 Faces" (1999).
Persoff's numerous TV appearances include Five Fingers ("The Moment of Truth"), The Big Valley ("Legend of a General", Parts I & II, episode), Alfred Hitchcock Presents ("Heart of Gold" episode), The Twilight Zone ("Judgment Night"), The Untouchables (six episodes, including three episodes as Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, Naked City, Route 66 (two episodes), Seaway ("Last Voyage" episode, 1965), The Legend of Jesse James, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Gunsmoke, Columbo ("Now You See Him…"), Gilligan's Island, The Wild Wild West, The High Chaparral ("Fiesta" episode, 1970), Hawaii Five-O (seven episodes), Cannon, Ellery Queen ("The Adventure of the Pharaoh's Curse" episode), Mission: Impossible (three episodes), Adam-12 ("Vendetta" episode), The Mod Squad, Barney Miller (three episodes), and Star Trek: The Next Generation, ("The Most Toys" 1990). He appeared as the Eastern Alliance Leader in the Battlestar Galactica episode, "Experiment in Terra" (1979).
Persoff retired from acting in 1999 and pursued painting, mostly watercolors. His wife of 70 years, Thia, died of cancer in 2021. They had four children.
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