Margi is a member of the Shas party supports the right of Ashkenazi ultra orthodox to wear their traditional fur hats and coats many ultra-Orthodox sects traditionally wear.Of course, like most liberal issues a large part of the leadership of the legalize pot movement is by Jews. From The Tablet .Green, 32, is a founding member of Doc Green’s, a medical-marijuana collective established by Orthodox Jews, who, like the late kabbalistic rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, believe that cannabis was one of the ingredients in the holy anointing oil described in the Torah.Balm of Gilead is a balm (healing compound) made from the resinous gum of the balsam poplar (Populus candicans), a North American tree species. It takes its name from the allusive Biblical phrase "balm in Gilead", referring to the balm or balsam carried from Gilead by the caravan of merchants to whom Joseph was sold by his brothers (Genesis chapter 37). In all likelihood, this ancient trade item was what is now known as balsam of Mecca, produced from the tree Commiphora gileadensis (syn. Commiphora opobalsamum), native to southern Arabia. Working in a commercial loft space where sets of the Zohar and Midrash line the bookshelves and the Grateful Dead is heard as often as Hasidic melodies, the collective’s founders combine cannabis extract with fair-trade shea butter to produce Doc Green’s therapeutic healing cream, a medicinal lotion used to treat ailments from sore muscles to eczema.
VATICAN CITY (RNS) A special Vatican meeting on the Middle East ended Saturday (Oct. 23) with a flare-up in Catholic-Jewish tensions, after an American bishop declared the Bible does not give Jews privileged rights to the land of Israel. "We Christians cannot speak of the 'promised land' as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people," said Archbishop Cyril Bustros, a native of Lebanon who is currently a Melkite Greek Catholic bishop in Newton, Mass.
Overly literal reading of Torah is something your buddies the Christians invented. For about 2500 years, even Orthodox Jews have insisted that the Torah needs to be read with ALL the knowledge we have .. traditions, science included.Response (attributed to God on HA)
So were the Jews still stoning women for adultery 2000 years ago? There is a story in the New Testament about Jesus stopping some rather Orthodox Jews from stoning a woman accused of adultery
Richard,
You missed my point. I referred to the literal interpretation of Torah, not to what punishments were normal 2000 years ago.
A major part of the message of the Pharisees was that Torah had to be interpreted in the light of tradition and other sorts of knowledge. That concept led to the writing of the Talmud, an extraordinary effort to use rational thought to understand the Torah. Literalism, in the Christian sense, has never been a major part of Judaism except for one sect, the Karaites. BTW, that sect sought and was given protection by the Nazis!
As for whether woman were still being stoned for adultery during Jesus' time, I do not know. Blasphemers, however, were stoned to death and one piece of evidence that the Jesus story is a fiction intended to protect the Romans, is that the Sanhedrin could have had Jesus stoned to death if, as the Christian story claims, he had misused the name of God.
Finally, the historical (as opposed to Christian Bible) record makes it very unlikley that the Jesus of the Christian bible existed. There are no contemporary writings about a figure of his stature, the claim to a virgin birth (other than being heresy) would have led to others calling him a bastard, Roman records do not refer to him, and his supposedly revolutionary preachings were actually rather main stream among the Pharisees.
My own hunch is that the Pharisees created the first non violent resistance. This affected not only the Jews in occupied Israel, but the every large expatriate community across the Roman world as well as a large number of people looking for a form of resistance to the oppressive culture of the Romans.
Jesus, whether he existed as a real character or not, was metamorphed by Paul into a deity well within the traditions of most of the occupied people. Paul's Jesus is clearly a Greek deity figure, son of a virgin,dad was a deity who screwed a woman, miracles, descent into hell, ascent to the god hood, sitting in judgment over the gates of heaven and hell, etc. This, plus the Pharisaic ideas of passive resistance would have been broadly attractive to the people living under the rather barbaric rule of the Romans.
Back to the Jews, after the Romans destroyed the Temple, we morphed into something utterly different than Paul's vision. Adhesion to the Torah was strengthened and became the core of Judaism. The rabbis evolved, not as priests or clergy in the Christian sense, but as experts in understanding the Torah .. in the light of the real world. They, the Rabbis, evolved many of the ideas modern humanists take for granted .. including the primacy of science over other forms of revelation and the concept of human law.
Hope this helps!
