I discuss the weekly Torah portion with Rabbi Rabbs Mondays at 7:00 pm PDT on the rabbi’s cam and on YouTube. Facebook Fan Page.
This week we study Parashat Tzav (Leviticus 6:1-8:36).
I discuss the weekly Torah portion with Rabbi Rabbs Mondays at 7:00 pm PDT on the rabbi’s cam and on YouTube. Facebook Fan Page.
This week we study Parashat Tzav (Leviticus 6:1-8:36).
I just did an interview with Rael Levinsohn:
Human beings revel in beauty, sensual and erotic pleasures, many would argue that is what makes life worth living. The media and popular culture and the adult film industry exists to bring entertainment/pleasure to its viewers, that is a reality. If Judaism would be able to “photoshop” the world, would all these things be removed? What is our vision for the rest of mankind in regard to these matters?
Beauty has much less significance to Judaism than holiness. As the old saw goes, to the Greeks, the beautiful was holy, to the Jews, the holy was beautiful.
Beauty is like all the other pleasures of this world, fine in their place but never a reason to disregard God’s instructions.. You can’t trample on the Torah to indulge in your natural desires.
Torah has little to say about the importance of aesthetic beauty except as a vehicle to God. We should beautify our mitzvos.
Do you think religion, Orthodox Judaism in particular has unrealistic/cruel/stifling expectations in regards to pleasure and sexuality?
I think religion in general and Orthodox Judaism in particular are very realistic about beauty.They know that men in particular will give up everything to attain a beautiful woman. Beauty is powerful and like the desire for power or fame or pleasure, the desire for beauty must be constrained. Unconstrained pursuit of any of these things will ruin your life. This seems to be the theme of most movies and TV shows I watch. People pursue some temporal end like beauty or power to absurd ends.
What do you think G-d thinks of people who perform in the adult film industry? Do you feel pornography has any redeeming qualities, is there a place for it in existence?
Every religion in the world condemns porn. Judaism is no different in that regard. Any redeeming quality in porn is dwarfed by its damaging qualities. I think God hates people who deliberately and needlessly damage society and destroy the family unit. Some such people are pornographers, others are respected Hollywood types, others are bloggers and talk show hosts and lawyers and politicians.
Every civilization depends upon stigmatizing sexual expression outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage. Do away with this stigmatizing and men will increasingly act naturally (pursuing their lusts and not sticking around their spouse and kids).
What kind of person gets all militant at this point about Trayvon Martin (aside from his loved ones)? We don’t know what happened. We don’t know if his killing was justified or not. We don’t know if he was the aggressor. We don’t know if he was the victim of a murder. We don’t know.
Anyone with a smidgen of sense does not make public statements in such an inflammatory case without having the facts.
That Trayvon Martin was unarmed means nothing. Thousands of women are raped by unarmed men. You don’t need arms to kill somebody. You can be a deadly threat without being armed.
Anybody getting all militant about Trayvon Martin is a race-hating moron, habitually reacting to the stimuli of potential white racism. Only somebody who does not have a life will start marching in the streets and taking photos of themselves in hoodies when we don’t know yet whether Trayvon was a victim or a thug.
People who are acting out right now about Trayvon Martin are looking for an excuse to march and to get militant and to act aggrieved because they have this grudge against white racism and against America and they’re looking for any opportunity to trash this country and to feel like a victim so that they are then absolved from moral responsibility for their actions.
Trayvon Martin protesters would be better off working hard, getting educated, nurturing their friendships and their families rather than wasting their time marching about something they know nothing about. Losers march in ignorance. Winners work hard, get educated and support their friends and families.
The president bears much of the responsibility for this senseless hatred of America. He purposely whipped up racial hatred in this case and he did it out of ignorance of the case because not even the president knows what really happened that fateful night in Florida.
President Obama deliberately appeals to the mob and to the human’s worst instincts. He’s a race-baiter like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He whips up hatred based on economic class, claiming that the rich one percent supposedly ruin things for the rest of us.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Hundreds of people descended on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall on Monday evening to denounce the slaying last month of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and demand that an arrest be made in the highly charged Florida case.
The rally came the same day that hundreds of people joined leading civil rights advocates in Sanford, Fla., to criticize authorities for failing to arrest Martin’s shooter, George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch captian. Zimmerman said he shot Martin in self-defense after reporting him to police as a suspicious person and apparently confronting the African American teenager.
At L.A.’s City Hall, protesters said the failure of authorities to arrest Zimmerman is an example of a criminal justice system that has failed repeatedly to protect the rights of African Americans and Latinos.
“I’m here because I want to fight racism,” said Alejandra Cruz, 27, an attorney who lives in East Los Angeles.
This is how many of the homeless act in Pico-Robertson.
Anyone up in arms about this case does not have a life. We do not know what happened yet. To pile on to this case and say incendiary things reveals that you jump at the least stimuli and use it as a pretext to beat up on America.
Heather Mac Donald writes: Black boys do face a much higher chance than non-blacks that they will be shot when they are “out in the world.” Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 were seven times more likely to die of homicide in 2007 than white and Hispanic males of the same age group combined. But the danger they face comes overwhelmingly from other black males, whose homicide offending rate in the 14 to 24 age category was nearly ten times higher than that of young white and Hispanic males combined. (The federal government’s crime data puts Hispanics and whites in a single category of “white,” thus overstating the non-Hispanic white offending and victimization rates). Most homicides are intraracial, but the chance of a black being killed by a white or Hispanic is much lower than the chance that a white or Hispanic will be killed by a black. Seventeen percent of what the FBI calls “white” homicide victims in 2009 were killed by blacks, compared to 8 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by “whites.” There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. If Hispanics were removed from the category of “white” killers of blacks, the percentage of blacks killed by Anglo whites would plummet, since a significant percentage of what the FBI calls “white”-on-black killings represent gang warfare between Hispanic and black gangs. (Needless to say, there is no reason to think that racism plays a more frequent role in white-on-black killings than in black-on-white killings.)
Blow’s fear that his children will be blown away by a white is particularly ludicrous in New York City. Blacks commit 80 percent of all shootings in the city — as reported by the victims of and witnesses to those shootings — though they are but 23 percent of the population; whites commit 1.4 percent of all shootings, though they are 35 percent of the population. Add Hispanic shootings to the black tally, and you account for 98 percent of all of the city’s gun violence. In New York, as in big cities across the country, the face of violence is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “Why did the president need to inject himself into this controversial killing [of black teen Trayvon Martin] in Florida?”
“It was a mob-creating, anger-creating, division-creating statement on his part. There was no need for it. He knows nothing about the case. Almost none of us know anything about the case. The recent history of media mob creation with regard to what happened at Duke, where many professors and the press generally were convinced that the white members of the Duke Lacrosse team had gang-raped this black woman. It turned out to be false. The Jenna six.”
“The left is so adamant about presumptions of innocence until found guilty are only too prepared to call someone guilty without knowing a damn thing about the case. The only thing the president did was to foment anger out of ignorance. This is unparalleled in my lifetime. I do not recall a president injecting himself into a racial issue to fan the flames.”
“Why does a president intervene in the Sandra Fluke – Rush Limbaugh incident? Did he ever condemn Bill Mahr for the far-worse language he used about women?”
“To suspend the police chief because he hasn’t arrested a man without any evidence?”
Jewish Journal blogger Brad Greenberg recently jumped to a bunch of hate-inciting conclusions without knowing almost anything:
Mother of five beaten to death for being a Muslim immigrant
Though on their face, the two deaths look different, they both come from the same hateful place—it’s just that one was motivated by race and the other by religion.
In his second lecture on R. Meir Simcha of Dvinsk for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: “I am in possession of a lengthy autobiography of an important rosh yeshiva who is no longer alive. This autobiography can never be published by any press in the haredi world because it is honest. The rosh yeshiva tells you about his dealings with various gadolim. It was given to me and I was told I could whatever I wanted with it. The rosh yeshiva wanted it to appear in print.”
“It will all come out. It needs to be edited.”
“The things people send me. They don’t want to publicize it but they want me to publicize it and for the most part I don’t mind.”
“I’ll say this now. I know it’s going to get picked up. There’s someone, a nice guy who I find interesting, who listens and for the last few years, he’s been excerpting Marc Shapiro’s greatest lines, or what he thinks are my greatest lines. He puts them all up on the internet.
“As those who listen to me know, we’ll have a whole hour shiur (Torah talk), and there will be all sorts of good history and stories and Torah, and there’ll be some strange and interesting stories, and he excerpts it.”
“There’s a main and there’s a secondary [in every class] and though the secondary is definitely interesting, the main part is the history. I think people who just see the excerpts think I’m sitting here and I just tell all sorts of stories because he’s only interested in excerpting the stories. Some of the stories are very good and I’m happy he does this. Someone created a Wikipedia page for me and there’s even a link there to all these stories. It’s an unbalanced thing.”
“I’m sure this is going to appear on his website. And that’s fine. Whatever I say, I know it can be put out there and I appreciate the effort he takes to put this online.”
“The only time I didn’t put something [online]. Someone sent me a picture of a great Hasidic rebbe [Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam] swimming and he said that in his Hasidic group, they tell stories of when this rebbe was young. They talk about this rebbe as though all he did was learn and here’s a wonderful picture… Although I’ll mention it, I won’t put the picture online because especially in that world it’s not tznious (modest) to see the rebbe without his shirt on.”
“It’s [a picture] of a young teenager swimming with an older hasid but it’s a violation of privacy. None of us want pictures of us [shown publicly] unless we’re in perfect shape.”
“The Chazon Ish loved going swimming.”
“I’m sure it will get out. In today’s day and age, everything gets out. There’s no more privacy unfortunately. Everything is put online eventually.”
I discuss the weekly Torah portion with Rabbi Rabbs Mondays at 7:00 pm PDT on the rabbi’s cam and on YouTube. Facebook Fan Page.
This week we study Parashat Tzav (Leviticus 6:1-8:36).
* Rabbi Berel Wein writes: “This should set us to think about the importance of ritual in our religious and daily life. The secular humanists of the nineteenth century and their followers in the Jewish world attempted to create an idealistic and permanent Jewish life based on the abolition of ritual and the centrality of humanistic values. After two centuries, it is clear that this attempt to ennoble mankind and/or Jews has failed. The basic conclusion that if one does not eat matzo on Pesach, one’s grandchildren will eventually forget Pesach altogether has been proven, sadly and beyond doubt.”
* What should we as Torah Jews do about the rash of massage parlors doing business next to shuls?
* Why don’t many unmarried Orthodox women try to look their best?
In his fourth lecture on R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinksi for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: Now Kellogs has a K, under the Vaad of Boston.
“Often you will have people tell you that when you find a “K” on hashgacha (kosher symbol) on a product, you can’t rely on it because it could just be just packaging. It’s not a trademarked symbol. The company could just put it on. Obviously you should find out who puts the “K” on. Call the company and they’ll tell you. In all the years, I’ve never found a product with a “K” on it without a rabbi behind it.”