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!!
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Palestinians Vote For Terrorists, Then Claim Israelis Are ‘Extremists’ and Jewish-purchased lands in eastern Jerusalem to be reclaimed? and Researchers Crack Mystery of Chinese Bronze Formula and PASSWORD 1964-05-28 Betty White & Paul Anka
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.
Pictured: Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of the Hamas terrorist group, casts his vote in the Palestinian Authority legislative election in, on January 25 2006 in Gaza City.
The Palestinians, who keep complaining about the rise of the right-wing parties in Israeli elections, are the ones who brought the terrorist Hamas group to power.
In 2006, a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas, whose charter openly calls for the elimination of Israel.
The Palestinians who voted for a jihadist terror group would therefore seem to have little justification to complain about the outcome of any Israeli election.
The statements that Palestinian leaders and officials are making in response to the latest elections are identical to those they issued after previous rounds of voting in Israel.
After Israel's 2020 election, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum… urged Palestinians to step up the "resistance" against Israel to thwart then US President Donald J. Trump's plan for peace in the Middle East, titled "Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People."
As far as the Palestinians are concerned, any elected government in Israel that does not submit to 100% of their demands is a bad and dangerous government.
The second camp, represented by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and several other armed groups, is seeking to replace Israel with an Islamist state. This camp does not believe in Israel's right to exist….
The Palestinians… continue to engage in fear-mongering after each Israeli election in efforts to intimidate the Israeli public into complying with their demands. They also have used this tactic for three decades to frighten the international community into pressuring Israel to make dangerous territorial concessions.
The Palestinian claim that there is no partner for peace in Israel is totally false. In fact, the opposite is true…. The sad fact is that there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side.
The next time the Palestinians wring their hands about Israeli elections, the international community might remind them that it is Palestinian terrorism that drives the Israeli ballot-box results.
The Palestinians also need to be reminded that it is their own leaders, and not those of Israel, who reject peace.
Rather than bemoaning the Israeli election results, Palestinian leaders should be granting their own people even a part of what the Israelis wish for them in the Abraham Accords: equal justice under the law, freedom to speak and publish without fear of retribution, freedom to become prosperous, and freedom to live lives that have opportunity apart from the cottage industry of terrorism — lives free from their own leaders' corrupt, unending suppression.
Even before the final results of the latest Israeli general elections were announced, Palestinian leaders and officials were quoted as expressing deep concern and fear that the outcome of the vote would lead to increased tensions and violence between the Palestinians and Israel.
Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh was quoted as saying that the results of the election "confirms" that the Palestinians have no partner in Israel for peace."
The Palestinians, who keep complaining about the rise of the right-wing parties in Israeli elections, are the ones who brought the terrorist Hamas group to power
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.
Jewish-purchased lands in eastern Jerusalem to be reclaimed?
A Jewish enclave purchased at the beginning of the previous century was recently returned to the State.
An enclave of 16 dunams on a green hill overlooking the separation fence between Abu Dis and the eastern border of the Jaber Mukaber neighborhood of Jerusalem, appears to be the next battleground in the capital after the Ministry of Justice completed the transfer of land to the temporary ownership of the State of Israel, according to a report in Israel Hayom.
The report states that investigators hired by the General Custodian obtained evidence that the land was purchased by Jews at the beginning of the previous century and recently received the court's consent in the matter.
The story begins in 1924 when property prices dramatically rose in British-occupied Jerusalem, making it increasingly difficult for its Jewish residents, mostly belonging to the lower middle class, to acquire land. This led to the establishment of an investment group by the name of "The Neighbors Committee" whose intention was to purchase land and create a new neighborhood featuring lower-priced homes. The group soon expressed interest in buying about 400 dunams in the Arab town of Abu Dis, neighboring the future capital.
To this end, they established an association by the name of "The Tenants' Association", whose chairman was Yehoshua Avizohar Singlovsky (brother of the founder of the Ort network), and the secretary of the association was Ya'akov Yehoshua Diamond. Among the approximately two hundred members of the group was Rabbi Tzvi Pesach Frank, a great Torah scholar and future chief rabbi of Jerusalem.
In 1927, they completed their purchase of 453 dunams and in 1930, construction of the neighborhood was set to get underway, but was interrupted by the outbreak of WWII, as plans to build a Jewish neighborhood on the site were canceled before getting off the ground.
After the events, the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel decided to abandon the construction on the territory of all the enclaves, mainly due to difficulties in protecting them, and to build only in a territorial sequence. Due to the outbreak of the "Great Arab Revolt" in April of 1936, and financial issues discovered among group leaders, all activities were ceased in their entirety.
Of the 453 dunams purchased, the association managed to complete the legal registration of land ownership in the mandatory transaction book for only 371 dunams, with the remaining 82 never registered, despite their purchase procedure being completed.
Once the World War II came to an end, the land manager of the Israel National Fund, Yosef Weitz, wrote upon visiting the aforementioned area: "The place is beautiful but very isolated. In a few years it may be possible to begin construction."
In 1948, when Jerusalem was divided following Israel's War of Independence, Abu Dis remained under Jordanian jurisdiction. It expanded and houses sprang up on lands owned by the Tenants' Association, despite them being registered on the "Jordanian Custodian for Enemy Property."
After the completion of the Six Day War, Jerusalem's borders were determined in such a way that a majority of the Jewish-owned lands remained on the Palestinian side.
In 2003, the separation fence was constructed in the area, ensuring that only 60 dunams of the existing 400 remained on the Israeli side. The lands, which were registered with the Jordanian registrar, passed into the hands of the general custodian at the Ministry of Justice in Israel. Over the years, the Ministry has located some of the heirs of the Tenants' Association and transferred the plots of land to them. These were purchased by Irving Moskovitz, and in 2004, 10 Jewish families settled in the area at the behest of the Ateret Kohanim group.
However, the largest area of land on the Israeli side, known as F, was not registered with the Jordanians as Jewish land, and is considered an abandoned property outside the State's jurisdiction.
Over the years, the general custodian assumed that the tenants' association also purchased this area, but despite attempts beginning in 2005, no evidence of this was found. In 2017, Sigal Yacobi was appointed to the position of general guardian, and is currently an acting judge in the Jerusalem District Court. Following her appointment, Yacobi began to promote the issue of a Jewish return to the lands.
In 2021, civilian investigators hired by Yacobi succeeded in finding evidence that Area F had been purchased by Jews. That same year, the evidence was submitted to the District Court in Jerusalem, and as part of a confidential procedure, Judge Tamar Bar-Asher accepted the claims of the Ministry of Justice, and the area was transferred to the temporary ownership of the General Custodian.
The location, an enclave between the separation fence of Abu Dis and the eastern border of the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood named "Swakhara" after the Bedouin tribe found in the are, bears far-reaching political implication since there appear to be a number of lone Arab houses on the property.
These days, the General Custodian, under the leadership of Benzie Feigelson, is busy attempting to locate the heirs of the original purchasing group and Feigelson has mandated additional research regarding other lands in the area with the hopes that they will be returned to their rightful owners.
Researchers Crack Mystery of Chinese Bronze Formula
Six ancient recipes include the enigmatic ingredients jin and xi. But the Chinese alloy had three elements
You (a lidded ritual vessel) with zigzag thunder pattern, Early Zhou, Shanghai Museum.Credit: Mountain/Wikimedia Commons Ruth SchusterAug 11, 2022 2:03 am IDT
How did the ancient Chinese make bronze around 2,500 years ago? We know that in Bronze Age China, copious amounts of the material were produced. We even have recipes for six different types of bronze from that period, all consisting of varying amounts of two components, "Jin" and "Xi".
The only snag is that what these two components were had remained mysterious. Interpretations over the years and decades have varied.
Now Ruiliang Liu of the British Museum in London and Prof. A.M. Pollard of Oxford University think they may have cracked the mystery. Their paper was published Wednesday in the journal Antiquity.
Metal apparently first entered our lives in the Neolithic northern Levant. About 10,000 years ago, somebody in Anatolia discovered that copper-rich ore could be hammered into crude artifacts: small beads, pendants, blades. Next came heating ore in small clay crucibles, and then came smelting. One example of an early furnace was found in Be'er Sheva, from about 6,500 years ago.
Several thousand years after this emergence of copper, bronze was invented. It isn't as simple as the non-metallurgists among us might assume. Its main component is copper, a soft metal rendered less malleable by mixing it with other materials to create alloys: metal elements such as tin, aluminum, zinc, nickel or manganese, and nonmetal elements such as arsenic.- Advertisment -
Early metalworkers in the Levant are suspected of keeping their "magical" metalmaking capabilities confidential, but thousands of years later, in China, there was no secret.
"The Rites of Zhou," a text that may have been written as long as 2,700 years ago, contains the Kao Gong Ji. Considered the world's oldest-known encyclopedia of technologies, its name has been translated variously as the "Book of Diverse Crafts," "The Artificiers' Record" and "Notes for Examining the Artisan." The Kao Gong Ji includes the chemical formulas for mixing bronze to make six different objects, from swords to musical instruments, using different proportions of Jin and Xi. Whatever they were.
"Attempts to reconstruct these processes have been made for more than a hundred years, but have failed," says Liu, who is the curator of the British Museum's Early China Collection.
Credit: Ruiliang Liu, A.M. Pollard, Antiquity, August 2022
It wasn't helpful that scholars are unclear as to whether the Kao Gong Ji is a manual or a distillation of vague instructions to guide the supervisors of court artisans, the researchers explain. "The Rites of Zhou" (also known as "Rituals of Zhou") lists offices in an idealized form of government, suggesting that the Kao Gong Ji was written for administrators, not artisans, and incorporated into "The Rites of Zhou."
Pollard and Liu note an article by Prof. Lothar von Falkenhausen of UCLA in 2014, suggesting that the Kao Gong Ji was originally an independent text that may have been incorporated into "The Rites of Zhou" to replace a lost section, and is itself incomplete: Of its original 31 chapters, six are lost. "The Zhou is considered historically unreliable," Von Falkenhausen wrote.
Whatever the historical veracity of "The Rites of Zhou" and the possibly later Kao Gong Ji's formulas for bronze, making the alloy would have required mixing copper with other inputs. The question is which inputs and in what proportions.
In modern Chinese, Jin means gold, the researchers explain. But in the Kao Gong Ji, could it just mean copper? Or a pre-prepared copper alloy, or perhaps just "metal"? There is no consensus on this. As for Xi, it has been conventionally interpreted as tin, they say. But that's impossible, as we shall see.
A recipe for an ax
What does the Kao Gong Ji say? The authors cite a translation by the 20th-century Japanese scholar of chemistry Masumi Chikashige: "The jin is divided into six, tin [xi] occupies one. This is the receipt for bells and tripod-vessels. The jin is divided into five, tin occupies one. This is the receipt for axes and hatchets" and so on.
The options were that jin was generic for metal, pure copper or a copper alloy. But xi can't be tin because its concentrations in the formulas exceed those found in Chinese bronze objects from the time, the authors explain.
The professors' starting point for interpreting Jin and Xi was coins, though they're not among the six recipes in the Kao Gong Ji. The coin analysis shows they weren't made by mixing two pure metals, but three, in the form of two pre-prepared alloys. One was copper-tin-lead and one was copper-lead.
Obviously, as Liu and Pollard point out, one cannot make a three-element alloy using any combination of two pure ingredients, and the coins have too much lead to be explained by natural contamination of copper ore. "If both Jin and Xi represent pure elements (as in the modern periodic table), there is no way to explain the third element," Liu says.
Therefore, either Jin is not pure copper, Xi is not pure tin or neither is pure anything. Pollard and Liu conclude that Jin and Xi were both premixed copper alloys that would be supplied to the artisans. "We have suggested that a bronze comprising approximately 80 per cent copper:15 per cent tin:5 per cent lead and a diluting component of a 50/50 copper-lead alloy gives a reasonable reflection of the compositions seen in Eastern Zhou bronzes, but this is by no means the only possible combination," Liu says.
Asked why their Antiquity paper focuses heavily on coins, which aren't even mentioned in the Kao Gong Ji, Liu explains that's where he and Pollard first realized there were two types of pre-alloys (published in the Journal of Archaeological Science). They then used this discovery as a working hypothesis to test the six recipes, each with only two ingredients, Jin and Xi.
"Other types of objects (e.g., weapons) could be made from somewhere else and deposited in the Qi state area, which obviously could make the pattern more complicated," Liu adds. "So we start from coinage, using what we got out of the coins, the two types of pre-alloys, then combine them according to the six recipes and compare against chemical data of different types of objects."
One wonders whether the bronze in ancient China and in the ancient Levant was the same. "That depends on the period and the aspect," Liu answers: In the Levant, metallurgists developed not only leaded bronze but also bronze with arsenic, whereas in China, leaded bronze dominated the Bronze Age from the beginning to the end. They used it to fashion magnificent ritual objects, unmatched by other cultures in the Eurasian Bronze Age.
PASSWORD 1964-05-28 Betty White & Paul Anka
Featuring the delightful television and motion picture star, Allen Ludden's beautiful wife, Betty White, and the popular singer, international recording star, and talented composer, Paul Anka!
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