This is why I often feel like Don Quixote trying to remind Jews of our mission as a Kingdom of Priests. Sigh.
Orthodox Jews Desperately Need to Learn How to Communicate for Public Consumption
Thursday June 4, 2009
Categories: Jewish Mission
That's the simple lesson from the Rabbi Manis Friedman affair, which, if you haven't looked into it, you're probably better off. What on earth was he thinking? It will blow over quickly, but what a bad day for Chabad. And what a strange day when I find myself agreeing with the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman. What was Moment magazine, a very mainstream publication, thinking in publishing Rabbi Friedman? Yet the funny thing is that I know from his admirers, among whom my wife counts herself, that he's a riveting and illuminating speaker.
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About Kingdom of Priests
David Klinghoffer is an author and senior fellow in the Religion, Liberty & Public Life program at the Discovery Institute. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Jewish Forward. A California native, he currently lives on Mercer Island, Washington, with his wife and five children.
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Although I in no way agree with the Orthodox Jewish hardliners on how to deal with the Arabs, I think their point of view should be publicly represented--because it makes the Jewish Left look so much more reasonable! This is called the Mutt and Jeff, or good-cop/bad-cop theory of political organizing. If the Ortho hardliners did not exist, the Peace Now folks would need to invent them.
RE Marion
So just how do you propose to deal with these ghouls
http://al-ghoul.com/rocketmen.htm
(and yes, that IS their family name)
How do you propose to reason with beasts?
They may once have been human, and they may be able to be human again, if they renounce their hate, but until they do, their thirst for human blood makes them lower than animals. It's not because they are gentiles, but because they are cold blooded killers.
If they will not forsake their hatred of and desire to dominate humanity, then they MUST be erased from history. Having mercy on them only condemns many innocent to suffering and death.
That is what the Rabbi means. If you don't exterminate the evil, it will spread, and the longer you wait the more damage it does. And that will be the fault of those who could have acted, but did not.
Before Hitler, one might have been able to say they didn't know how it would turn out. But now we know what happens when evil is left unchecked, and so we have no excuse for not acting.
Grover wrote:
"LazarA:
b. Your excursus was illuminating … but specious...."
I'm trying to find where in your comment you detail what, exactly, was "specious" in my previous comment. It seems that you are limited to snide remarks about John Woo. (The same is true of the commenter who associated my comments with apartheid.)
The fact remains that Torah sources clearly consider non-Jews to be fully human and capable of attaining great spiritual heights. At the same time, Torah sources also teach us that the Jewish people have a unique spiritual status, especially in pre-Messianic times. Kabalistic sources use highly technical and esoteric jargon in discussing these ideas and literalist translations can be very misleading.
The fact that you disagree with the outreach policies of various Orthodox groups - including Chabad - is utterly irrelevant. There are practical, historical, and philosophical reasons for Jewish outreach to focus on estranged Jews before attempting to recruit non-Jews. None of these reasons is based on a denial of the spiritual significance of non-Jews as "a lesser breed," God forbid.
dear "Your Name"
"1. it is "talis" not "tails.""
I said "tails" as in "tall tails" (there was also a hint at his potential adherence to Darwinian evolution)
But I guess you are a stranger to sarcasm, and double meanings? And as to the rest of your rant... what are you babbling about? No, that was rhetorical, I really don't care to have you regurgitate any more nonsesnse.
grover
Your idiotic assertion that "much Kabbalistic thought moves in a different direction from the Torah and Talmud, often in aberrant ways." is such a total fiction that it isn't worth addressing accept to show that the one uttering it is himself so removed from Torah and Mitzvot that he doesn't know up from down. All the objections against Chabad have been addressed ad nauseam, and none are considered credible by virtually anyone today. The only people who regurgitate those slanders are anti-Semites and malicious ignoramuses.
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