Relations between the Diaspora and Israel \”were torn apart by a lethal combination of rising Orthodox fanaticism and a Netanyahu government that\’s pandering to increasingly crude Orthodox political coercion,\” said Wilshire Boulevard Temple\’s Rabbi Harvey J. Fields, among the American Reform movement\’s most prominent leaders.
In Leviticus, male sexual relations are considered an abomination,punishable by death. \”A man shall not be with another man as if with a woman. It is an abomination,\” reads one passage. But, as with all things biblical and Jewish, the Torah passages are open to interpretation. And interpret they did last week at University Synagogue at a panel discussion on Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist views on homosexuality and bisexuality.
Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels received the surprising news during Rosh Hashanah morning services at Beth Shir Sholom in Santa Monica. The Rev. Sandra Richards of the Church in Ocean Park stood up in her seat to tell him: The Oct. 1 vote on whether to decertify the union at the Miramar Sheraton Hotel had resulted in a virtual draw.\n
During the last days of summer, I confess that our most focused family activity seems to be the annual pilgrimage to Target for new lunchboxes. All of that changes when September hits. From Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to Sukkot, then Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the month of Tishrei is to the Jewish holiday cycle what the decathlon is to Track and Field Day.The kitchen table rapidly piles up with day school holiday projects– cardboard shofarot, handmade New Year\’s cards, drawings of lulavim and the countless apples, made from every conceivable non-toxic medium known to teachers.
The story itself is a laconic autobiographical statement that not only describes Wiesenthal\’s experience as camp inmate, but joins that experience to an excruciating ethical question about forgiveness. Now that Simon Wiesenthal is a legend and an icon, his modest story seems larger, somehow, and the republication of the book is a kind of commandment to read it again.
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