Pre-Shabbos Link Dump!
1) I'll eventually get around to writing that post about our Founding Fathers and religion. In the meantime, the Founders Blog is guaranteed to become one of my favorite ways to spend my time.
2) Andy Garcia has a new movie that exposes the evil side of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara:
Che-a Communist responsible for Castro’s gulags-was a monster. But nothing I could tell you about him could do him the kind of justice that Garcia’s film does. You see some of Guevara’s brutality, but Garcia’s most powerful scene may be the one where Fico himself faces Che. When Fico is forced to confront the executioner on prison grounds on behalf of a friend, the viewer feels not only Garcia’s anger and disgust (he himself, as a child, fled this tyrant’s thuggery), but the pain and hatred of an entire people whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Castro-Guevara nightmare. This is Garcia’s moment: You watch a race of overwhelming emotions in the character, and you have the palpable sense it’s not all acting.
3) The NYT exposes the "Kabbalah Center" for the nonsense it really is:
This can hardly be the fate that the Kabbalah's creators... could have imagined for their teachings, which were intended to reveal the inner meaning of the Torah. And it has traditionalists up in arms. The phenomenon has been derided on some Jewish Web sites as "McMysticism."
The connection between pop-culture Kabbalah and the real thing "is the relationship between pornography and love," said Adin Steinsaltz, a Hasidic rabbi in Jerusalem who has written several books about Jewish mysticism, including the newly published "Opening the Tanya: Discovering the Moral and Mystical Teachings of a Classical Work of Kabbalah" (Jossey-Bass, 2003).
"Pornography is intrinsically soul-less, and doesn't have any obligations attached," Rabbi Steinsaltz said. "It's just using externals. They are doing exactly the same thing."
scholars of Jewish mysticism say the center divorces Kabbalah from the obligations, or mitzvot, of traditional Judaism. ...
"What they teach is heresy," said Rabbi J. Immanuel Schochet, the author of 30 books on Jewish mysticism.
Rabbi Schochet then went on to quote one of Kabbalah's architects, Rabbi Isaac Luria, who was born in Jerusalem in 1534 and believed that each commandment has a mystical meaning, " 'Just as the body cannot live without the soul, the soul cannot function without the body.'"
"All the Kabbalists without exception emphasize that there has to be a preliminary commitment to Torah and halacha [Jewish law] before one can engage in it," Rabbi Schochet said.
4) This idiot is suing a baseball park for being "sexist" because they wouldn't give him a Mother's Day totebag.
2) Andy Garcia has a new movie that exposes the evil side of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara:
Che-a Communist responsible for Castro’s gulags-was a monster. But nothing I could tell you about him could do him the kind of justice that Garcia’s film does. You see some of Guevara’s brutality, but Garcia’s most powerful scene may be the one where Fico himself faces Che. When Fico is forced to confront the executioner on prison grounds on behalf of a friend, the viewer feels not only Garcia’s anger and disgust (he himself, as a child, fled this tyrant’s thuggery), but the pain and hatred of an entire people whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Castro-Guevara nightmare. This is Garcia’s moment: You watch a race of overwhelming emotions in the character, and you have the palpable sense it’s not all acting.
3) The NYT exposes the "Kabbalah Center" for the nonsense it really is:
This can hardly be the fate that the Kabbalah's creators... could have imagined for their teachings, which were intended to reveal the inner meaning of the Torah. And it has traditionalists up in arms. The phenomenon has been derided on some Jewish Web sites as "McMysticism."
The connection between pop-culture Kabbalah and the real thing "is the relationship between pornography and love," said Adin Steinsaltz, a Hasidic rabbi in Jerusalem who has written several books about Jewish mysticism, including the newly published "Opening the Tanya: Discovering the Moral and Mystical Teachings of a Classical Work of Kabbalah" (Jossey-Bass, 2003).
"Pornography is intrinsically soul-less, and doesn't have any obligations attached," Rabbi Steinsaltz said. "It's just using externals. They are doing exactly the same thing."
scholars of Jewish mysticism say the center divorces Kabbalah from the obligations, or mitzvot, of traditional Judaism. ...
"What they teach is heresy," said Rabbi J. Immanuel Schochet, the author of 30 books on Jewish mysticism.
Rabbi Schochet then went on to quote one of Kabbalah's architects, Rabbi Isaac Luria, who was born in Jerusalem in 1534 and believed that each commandment has a mystical meaning, " 'Just as the body cannot live without the soul, the soul cannot function without the body.'"
"All the Kabbalists without exception emphasize that there has to be a preliminary commitment to Torah and halacha [Jewish law] before one can engage in it," Rabbi Schochet said.
4) This idiot is suing a baseball park for being "sexist" because they wouldn't give him a Mother's Day totebag.