Presbyterians go ‘Lion King’
Christian Olympics? No, this is just the opening procession of the 219th general assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA. Odd …
Presbyterians go ‘Lion King’ Read More »
July 28, 2010
Amare is JEWISH!!!
Read this Article:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/nba-star-amar-e-stoudemire-heads-to-israel-after-discovering-jewish-roots-1.304552?localLinksEnabled=false
Below are various posts from his Twitter account
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I’m the new Reggie White. (RIP) I’m going 2 Israel 2 study Hebrew. It’s time 2 get a better understanding on who we R. Follow me !! Shalom
On the flight to Israel. This is going to be a great trip. The holy land. Learn about it. This ze ha’halom sheli. Shalom.
Jerusalem is a beautiful city, I’m at a cafe eating a late lunch. I learning Hebrew by the min. Keep up !!
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For more on Amara check out WWW.THEGREATRABBINO.COM
Amare is JEWISH!!! Read More »
We Did it on Tisha Bav. And You Can Too.
It wasn’t about making a point, or advancing an agenda. Nobody invited our local Jewish journalists, and even the one who was there never entertained the idea of writing about it. Because even though it had never happened before, we weren’t doing it in order to make local Jewish history. The beauty of the event lay in its being completely un-self-conscious.
On the afternoon / evening of the Tisha B’av just past, three shuls – one Orthodox, one Conservative, and one non-denominational – got together to learn in havruta, to sing “If I forget you, Jerusalem”, and to break fast together. When planning the event, my rabbinic partners and I were unsure as to how many of our congregants would actually show up. After all, it would already be 7:30 PM at the end of long day of fasting. And you never know what will happen when invite people to leave the comfortable “four amot” of their own shul, and to make their way over to another. But not only did people come, they came in numbers far exceeding our expectations. We literally had to bring in dozens of chairs from an adjoining room.
For me and for our shul, this get together was the compliment to a gathering that we have been doing for years on the morning of Tisha B’av. For years and years we have been davening and reciting the kinot together with our brothers and sisters from the Young Israel down the boulevard from us, alternating venues each year. This year, we were joined (and hosted) by the third of the three major Orthodox shuls in the neighborhood, generating a truly powerful expression of communal unity and Jewish love. It’s indescribably moving. Which is what led the president of our shul, just after Tisha B’av a year ago, to encourage me to think in wider Jewish communal terms as well.
And now, a year later there we all were. As soon as we got everyone seated for our first-ever inter-denominational Tisha B’av afternoon program, the atmosphere turned magical, as the space filled with the intense din learning and discussion (we learned Brachot 3a, an aggada set in the ruins of Yerushalayim – you can email me at ravyosef@bnaidavid.com for the source sheet). People were learning with fellow Jews whom they had never met before, and remarkably, yet unsurprisingly, it all felt so natural. This was at least in part because it was Tisha B’av, and on Tisha B’av our sense of being family is particularly intuitive.
As the end of the day was approaching, we broke for Ma’ariv. As had been pre-arranged, our chevra davened in a room that had been set for us with a mechitza, as the balance of the chevra davened in an egalitarian setting in a different room. It’s what we do for one another when we’re a family.
I believe this is something you can do in your community too. It’s deceptively easy.
Over the break fast, I heard only one complaint: “Next year, we need to have more time”. To which I would only add, “Next year in Jeruslaem”.
We Did it on Tisha Bav. And You Can Too. Read More »
Materialism Corrupts. And?
Last night, at a panel organized by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, he and three other panelists attempted to answer the question, “Is Materialism Corrupting the Soul of America?” Boteach—who has a new book out on the subject—responded with a definitive, “yes.” Moderator Rabbi Elazar Muskin of the Young Israel of Century City, where the event was held, seemed to agree, kicking off the panel saying, “The answer is yes—but now we’re going to find out how.” The other three panelists would not allow themselves to be put so firmly into one camp or the other.
Boteach had invited Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti, Rabbi Naomi Levy of the Nashuva community, and Jewish Journal staff writer Danielle Berrin to join him on the panel. Boteach spoke first. “Materialism is choking the soul of America,” he said. And though Boteach peppered his speech with comments on Mel Gibson, President Calvin Coolidge (“the business of America is business”) and the iPhone 4, he focused on a past that was far more distant.
“Adam and Eve had nothing,” Boteach said, “and they weren’t ashamed.” It wasn’t until the serpent came into their lives, pointing out the tree from which they could not eat, that the first couple became materialistic—and it’s been that way ever since. “You think you’re happy living in Beverlywood?” Boteach asked with mock incredulity. “You have no idea what Bel Air is like!”
“No matter how much we eat,” Boteach said, citing increasing obesity among Americans as proof of a concurrent rise in materialism, “we’re still hungry.”
Like Boteach, the other panelists invoked historical precedents to support their points. Berrin acknowledged that many of the Hollywood-types she writes about had always loved stuff. But as a community founded by immigrants, Berrin said, the newly rich and famous drove fancy cars and bought big mansions as a way of saying, “we’ve made it in America.” And she didn’t think that was necessarily bad. Like the Jewish community that focuses on torah, spirituality and matters of faith, Berrin said, Hollywood is also ultimately dedicated to something immaterial: human imagination and its products.
Speaking third, Garcetti said that by decrying American materialism as the scourge of our era, we risk “idealiz[ing] a past golden age that never was.” Today’s American economy is 70% based on consumer goods, Garcetti said, but pointed out that in 1947, the earliest data he could find, it made up roughly the same percentage. Ultimately, Garcetti said, neither materialism nor its opposite—idealism—is any good without hard work. “Materialism needs work not to be corrupted,” he said. “But idealism needs hard work to be relevant.”
Levy also cast a backward glance and found that today’s America might not be all that different than earlier societies. Drawing from midrashic commentaries on biblical texts, Levy showed that rabbis recognized that materialism was “a universal problem, a human problem—and a Jewish problem.”
“All the labor of man is for his mouth,” Levy said, quoting from Ecclesiastes, “yet his soul is not filled.” In the lead-up to the High Holy Days, Levy challenged the audience to seek things that will nourish the soul—which often aren’t things at all.
The efficient event concluded at just after 9pm, with Muskin proclaiming consensus.
Materialism Corrupts. And? Read More »
Israel Pushing for More Solar Power
Israel’s Public Utilities Authority has announced a new initiative aimed at boosting the volume of solar power produced in the country.
The authority announced on Wednesday that it would boost volume of solar power the government is willing to buy, while reducing by 25 percent the rate it would pay solar power producers from 2.04 shekel [53 cents] to 1.55 shekels [40 cents] per kilowatt hour.
Israel incentivizes the production of renewable energy by paying an enhanced rate to producers who pump energy from renewable sources into Israel’s electrical grid, thereby forcing the authority to limit the volume of renewable energy it can afford to buy.
The move comes a few months after Israel’s National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau announced that 10 percent of Israel’s energy needs will come from renewable sources such as wind and solar power by 2020.
To meet the goal, Israel must install enough renewable energy infrastructure to produce over 4,000 megawatts hours of power.
“We decided to enlarge the number of megawatts to match the Israeli government’s intention to have 10 percent of electricity production come from renewable energy by the year 2020,” Nurit Felter, a spokesperson with the Public Utilities Authority told The Media Line.
Chaim Brown, Chairman of Real Housing Israel, which builds solar power panels on private homes, said solar power has become a profitable business in Israel.
“It’s not a surprise, it’s a very lucrative business,” he told The Media Line. “It pays over 12 percent on your investment.”
Brown was optimistic that the newly raised quota would be filled.
“That’s the quota that fills up the fastest,” Brown said. “They have the most to gain.”
Brown argued that Israeli companies are more likely to install solar panels because they are more willing than private citizens to go through the bureaucratic process that is required to be allowed to install solar panels.
Dr. Amit Mor, CEO of the Israeli consulting firm Eco Energy Ltd, commended the decision.
“The move by the Public Utilities Authority is a move in the right direction,” he told The Media Line. “The installation of small PV [photovoltaic] system on rooftops, although important, does not have any strategic importance to the renewable energy consumption. The Public Utilities Authority’s activity should focus on providing and analyzing the regulation that is necessary for encouraging the construction of a large scale CSP [Consecrated Solar Power] power station in the range of 100 megawatts in the Negev [desert] in south of the country as well as large PV [photovoltaic] plants.”
“A cost benefit analysis by EcoEnergy on the penetration of renewable and solar energy, and a report by the World Bank on the same subject analyzing the potential for renewable and solar energy utilization in Israel, show the potential for thousands of hours of megawatts that can bring in some $3 billion in the next decade,” Mor said. “In addition the PV systems are manufactured in China and Germany with no befit for Israel, meaning Israeli electricity consumers are paying to subsidize jobs in those countries.”
“Israel should focus on large scale solar and wind power stations with Israeli-based technology from which manufacturing and labor benefits will remain in the country,” Mor said.
According to the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructure the country’s three main energy sources are coal (69 percent), natural gas (23 percent) and oil (7 percent).
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Israeli officials: Bodies of copter crash victims found
The bodies of seven soldiers aboard an Israeli transport helicopter that crashed into the side of a mountain in central Romania have been found, Israeli officials said.
Six Israeli soldiers and one Romanian soldier were on board the CH-53 transport helicopter, which was flying at a low altitude in heavy fog for a search, rescue and medical evacuation exercise when it lost radio contact Monday afternoon.
The wreckage, which was found late Monday, is spread out over a large area; the bodies were found Tuesday afternoon. Representatives of the IDF Rabbinate and the Casualty Identification Center were headed to the scene to make the final identifications, according to the military.
Israel released the names of the missing soldiers early Tuesday.
An Israeli military delegation, comprising personnel from the Israel Defense Forces Medical Corps, the Israeli Air Force, the Chief Military Rabbinate, Search and Rescue teams, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and an investigatory team, arrived in Romania Tuesday morning. Members of the rescue team have reached the crash site, according to reports.
Israeli and Romanian troops had been participating in a drill called Blue Sky 2010, an 11-day exercise to train troops to fly at low altitudes for certain missions.
An Israeli transport helicopter reportedly crash landed at the beginning of the exercises last week.
Israeli officials: Bodies of copter crash victims found Read More »
Israel: Palestinians have set ‘impossible’ conditions for direct peace talks
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has laid down “impossible” conditions for moving to direct peace talks, Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said on Wednesday, according to French news agency AFP.
“The Palestinians have set three impossible conditions: that the negotiations start from the point they left off at the end of 2008 when Ehud Olmert was prime minister, that they be based on a total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and that the freeze of [settlement] construction continue,” Shalom was quoted as saying.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he wants to begin direct talks with the Palestinians immediately, but the Palestinians have demanded certain guarantees they say are necessary to ensure that these talks succeed where past rounds have failed.
Read the full story at HAARETZ.com.
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Lieberman: Freeze extension has no bearing on direct talks
The foreign minister of Israel rejected any link between extending a West Bank building freeze and direct talks with the Palestininans.
Avigdor Lieberman told a joint news conference Wednesday with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos that Israel has no plans to extend the 10-month freeze after September. Extending the freeze is among the Palestinian Authority’s conditions for moving to direct negotiations with Israel.
Lieberman said there was no room for linkage between such talks and a settlement construction freeze.
“We must start direct talks, but there is no place for a [construction] moratorium after Sept. 25,” he said.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly will tell the Arab League’s peace process committee on Thursday that the lack of progress in the proximity peace talks with Israel rules out moving to direct talks, a Palestinian official said Wednesday, according to a Reuters report.
“Abbas will tell them that until this moment, there is nothing to convince us to go to direct talks,” the official told Reuters. “There is nothing new.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the construction freeze last November. The Palestinian Authority described it as insufficient, notably because it did not include eastern Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.
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Groups condemn MSU suspension at UCI
When it comes to UC Irvine’s one-year suspension of its incessantly unruly and antagonistic Muslim Student Union, spurred by the coordinated disturbance of a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States, a coalition of civil rights groups and professional bar associations (the legal kind, not the drinking kind) say the punishment doesn’t fit the crime:
Fifteen groups throughout the country – including the Asian Law Caucus, Afghan-American Bar Association, Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, South Asian Bar Association – Northern California and National Lawyers Guild – are urging UCI officials to abandon all efforts to suspend the Muslim student organization.
“Taking the unprecedented step to ban this group will memorialize UCI as a campus that violates its students’ constitutional rights, and will have negative repercussions that will reverberate around the country,” according to a letter signed by the groups and sent to the chancellor’s office late last week.
“Such a decision would amount to selective punishment of a group whose ideas are disfavored by the U.C. administration, and sets an extremely dangerous precedent that threatens all Americans who exercise their Constitutional rights to freedom of expression and association.”
Oh how oversimplified that is. The MSU has a long, long, long history of incendiary behavior, and for years the university and community have wrestled with how to make students of all beliefs and worldviews feel comfortable on campus.
UCI has cut the group a lot of slack. But this time—as opposed to when MSU members exploited Anne Frank during Palestinian Awareness Week, or all the times they brought Amir Abdel Malik Ali to campus, or when they orchestrated a Daniel Pipes walkout and one of the protesters proclaimed “Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth”—they crossed the line. They violated a code of conduct that all students agree to, and they aren’t being banned. Their organization has just been suspended for a year. It happens to fraternities all the time.
Groups condemn MSU suspension at UCI Read More »
Hoops star Stoudemire Israel-bound to explore Jewish roots
Basketball all-star Amar’e Stoudemire reportedly was on his way to Israel after learning he had Jewish roots.
“On the flight to Israel. This is going to be a great trip,” Stoudemire, who recently joined the NBA’s New York Knicks as a free agent, wrote on Twitter, according to Haaretz.
Stoudemire, a power forward formerly of the Phoenix Suns, was heading to Israel for a voyage of discovery after finding out he has a Jewish mother, Haaretz reported.
According to an Army Radio report, Stoudemire plans to spend time in Israel learning Hebrew.
“The holy land. Learn about it,” he wrote, adding “ze ha’halom sheli”—Hebrew for “this is my dream.”
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