My July Dear Rabbi Talmudic Advice Column: Raging over Rabbis in Randolph

Dear Rabbi Zahavy: Your Talmudic Advice Column (July 2014)

Dear Rabbi,

I read about rabbis in Israel who offer cures, amulets, talismans and the like to their followers. They attend family events of their followers and give advice to businessmen. The rabbis receive fees for these services, sometimes lavish donations. Some of these rabbis have become quite rich, even multi-millionaires. Forbes has published a list of the richest Israeli rabbis! I personally think these guys are despicable con men who use religion to prey on vulnerable people in need of help. Shouldn’t we do something to stop these people?

Raging over Rabbis in Randolph

Dear Raging,

Whoa! It is hard to ask a rabbi to condemn a rabbi. On the one hand, we rabbis need to stick together. If you attack one of our colleagues, common sense dictates that we ought to step up to defend him. However, on the other hand, you are right in your inquiry. If we find that a professional colleague is a fraud, it makes good sense for us to step up to discipline him, lest our whole profession be tarnished.

We rabbis derive our authority primarily from our study and special knowledge of rabbinic literature including Talmud, Codes, Responsa and yes, also from Kabbalah. Secondarily, many Jews believe that some or all rabbis have special charisma, which is power that derives from their closeness to the sacred and from their more direct link to God. This latter belief is more common in the Hasidic and Sephardic communities.

And you no doubt realize that, on the one hand, if you are affiliated with any form of organized religion, that you already are paying significant amounts to rabbis for their services. Nearly all rabbis serving in a professional capacity in America are paid – some quite handsomely. You may derive personal benefits from their services. Some provide solace and counseling in a professional manner based on academic training. I assume that you have no problem with that means of livelihood and you do not consider such practitioners to be con men.

But on the other hand, you may be rightfully indignant if a rabbi exploits his station to demand from his reverential flock exorbitant fees for whatever it is that he offers: presence at events, blessings, advice and the like.

In this case, since you don’t seem to know directly the rabbis that you question, you need to step back and ask if you are incensed specifically about these charismatic holy men making too much money. And you need to consider what provokes you to conclude that they are fakers and charlatans who exploit the weak and helpless. There are many testimonies from their followers praising and thanking these holy men. Celebrity charismatic rabbis, who earn the big bucks for providing the cures and remedies that you dislike, also can and do alleviate much suffering among their followers.

If a rabbi breaks the law by committing fraud or engages in an outright scam, you are justified to call him a con man. But if he engages in legal activities that are within the professional parameters of what rabbis do, you have little basis to label him a fake.

Nevertheless, you may choose to disapprove of extremes of rabbinical activity. For a religious believer, like yourself, if you believe a rabbi's activities are outrageous, you are entitled to your subjective opinion to declare a flashy healer a fake, while you continue to deem the other more modest counselors legitimate.

I do hope that you find helpful this brief Talmudic analysis and (rabbinic) advice for the day-to-day reality of our contradictory world, where one person's holy man may be another person's con man.

The Dear Rabbi column offers timely advice based on timeless Talmudic wisdom. It aspires to be equally respectful and meaningful to all varieties and denominations of Judaism. You can find it here on the first Friday of the month. Send your questions to DearRabbi@jewishmediagroup.com

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Jewish Black Magic: They Cursed Ariel Sharon with the Pulsa D'Nora in 2005 - and can it work in October 2020 for someone else?

I've spent years teaching numerous college courses on religion - always with the disclaimer that we will cover only the positive aspects of the subject. Religion used for evil, that is for war or other forms of harm, is a misuse and distortion of systems of faith.

Curses, I reasoned, were a misuse and distortion of religious practice.

Curses invoked before the Rabin assassination changed my mind about that. Prior to that tragic event, on the eve of Yom Kippur, a group of "Kabbalists" intoned the pulsa curse outside the Rabin residence. Once again, in the summer of 2005, another group gathered to invoke the curse against P.M. Ariel Sharon. It seemed to me that curses indeed were part of our religion - like it or not.

One blogger, Canonist, dealt briefly with the curse back in July 2005, complete with a link to the video of the curse "ceremony" and quotations from learned professors:

Praying for Ariel Sharon's Death

Yesterday's death-curse seems thus far to have gone unanswered by the Almighty, but we'll see. Generally speaking, I don't write much about Israel and the disengagement, but this latest is quite interesting. PaleoJudaica's got a great roundup, including descriptions of the pulsa de-nura ceremony, its detractors, and the threat of prosecution that've come out of it. Meantime, you can actually watch the ceremony in this video, which, with a bunch of people in sweats reading from photocopies, looks oddly like some run-of-the-mill Jewish ceremony, like burning chametz or somesuch. The video comes courtesy of Samuel Heilman, via a listserv to which he wrote, with the subject "Jewish Jihadists": "Lest any of you think that only Islamists have jihadists, see the video below in which so-called 'religious Jews' pray for Prime Minister Sharon's Death in a Pulsa De Nura." Bold words on both sides. Let's see what comes of them.

Erudite rabbis have written about the matter, explaining that magic is not a part of Judaism, as in the following:

Ten years later I still agree. Here is what is wrong with our Jewish prayer book commentaries

After reading in a June 2009 morning at KJ some initial and random comments in the new Koren-Sacks Siddur, I was reminded of what in the past I have found lacking in prayerbook commentaries.

They are not complicated enough.

They portray our services as if they are beautifully woven together and, in the case of the longer services, as if they unfold in a gentle rising crescendo of drama from initial inspiring prayers, through more meaningful and expressive liturgies to our culminating praises and petitions.

When you read our most popular prayer book commentaries, you think the correct background music for our prayers would be say something soothing and nearly seamless, like Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

I have logged many davening hours and I never saw the Orthodox Jewish services projecting this sort of connected and calm mood.

No I've always thought the services were at best symphonies with abruptly varying movements, often characterized by stark contrasts and even at times by cacophony.

Our Siddur is in fact a complex composite document that evolved over many centuries. Many hands had a role in expressing the values and beliefs that our collective prayers represent. By its own definition, such a work should not be a smooth fabric.

A few times I have attempted to say just this in the modes of expression that characterized our scholarly writings. For instance in a paper I wrote, "The Politics of Piety: Social Conflict and the Emergence of Rabbinic Liturgy," I summarized at the outset a major theme of our more lengthy arguments as follows,

Prayer services do not emerge spontaneously or arbitrarily in a vacuum. They are the public pronouncements of the central values and concepts of the religious leaders who initially propounded them and are social rituals that often emerge out of intense conflict and hard-fought compromise. Specific historical, social, and political conditions contributed to the distinct origin of two major rabbinic services. In the crucial transitional period after the destruction of the Temple, the Shema emerged as the primary ritual of the scribal profession and its proponents. The Tefillah at this formative time was a ritual sponsored mainly by the patriarchal families and their priestly adherents. Compromises between the factions of post-70 Judaism later led to the adoption of the two liturgies in tandem, as the core of public Jewish prayer. But this came about only after intense struggles among competing groups for social and political dominance over the Jewish community at large and concomitantly for the primacy of their respective liturgies. The political, social, and even economic dimensions of the religious life of the synagogues were crucial to the formation of nascent rabbinic Judaism.

I think this is what brings our Siddur alive. It's a story of sharply competing ideas and values all striving for attention within a closed but utterly vibrant religious world. That's the story I'd like to see in some variant form in our prayer book commentaries. It's the narrative of a dialectical theological universe of debate and dispute over which notion we ought to employ to express our most urgent needs before our creator. For instance, do we put our scribal needs at the top of our agenda? Or do we cast our priestly yearnings at the top of our list?

In our Siddur we see a constant flow of traffic, changing of lanes, jostling for position of values and notions, ideas and concepts. And more than this, we see layer upon layer of meaning imposed upon our every practice and festival. Sacred time in our prayer book has mystical, agricultural, historical and Torah-logical importance, all at once. And all of us see different angles of this "lasagna" of religious life.

(When I start using such metaphors, that means uh-oh, I must be getting hungry and it's time to wrap up the post.)

See these among my published writings for more details.

• Studies in Jewish Prayer (HTML) (PDF)
• Kavvanah in Jewish Prayer
• Three Stages in the Development of Early Rabbinic Prayer
•  The Politics of Piety
• Jewish Prayer (syllabus) 

Arguing about Orthodox Women Rabbis and Finding your Past Lives - My Jewish Standard Dear Rabbi Zahavy - Your Talmudic Advice Column - March 2019

Dear Rabbi Zahavy - Your Talmudic Advice Column March 2019
Arguing about Orthodox Women Rabbis and Finding your Past Lives

Dear Rabbi Zahavy,

I have been bothered deeply to read and hear about a conflict among Teaneck Orthodox rabbis over the hiring of a woman in a rabbinical capacity at a local synagogue.

I think our rabbis ought to set better examples in their behavior and be more progressive in their views about women.

Tired of tiffs in Teaneck

Dear Tired,

I’m sure you realize, first of all, that contention over female clergy is an issue only in the Orthodox world. The Conservative movement has counted women in the minyan for decades and ordained women starting in 1985. Reform Judaism also takes an egalitarian approach to the role of women in their communities. Its first woman rabbi was ordained in 1972.

Sorry, I fear there is not much I can suggest to you to do to help resolve this Orthodox rift. And I say this not based on an assessment of the contemporary persons and institutions involved in the current spat.

It's a Good Time to Review the basics of Zionist Religious Nationalism, Zionist Mysticism and Zionist Philosophers

It's a good time (after an election) to recall some basics about Zionist Religious Nationalists, Zionist Mystics and Zionist Philosophers.

I recommend The Zionist Idea by Arthur Hertzberg.

-Part 7: Religious Nationalists, Old and New -397

-RABBI SAMUEL MOHILEVER 1824-1898 -398

-MESSAGE TO THE FIRST ZIONIST CONGRESS (1897) -401

-YEHIEL MICHAEL PINES 1842-1912 -406

-ON RELIGIOUS REFORMS (1868-1871) -409

-The Religious Idea -409

-Methods in Reforms -410

-JEWISH NATIONALISM CANNOT BE SECULAR (1895) -411

-RELIGION IS THE SOURCE OF JEWISH NATIONALISM (1895) -412

-JEWS WILL ACCEPT HARDSHIP ONLY IN THE HOLY LAND (1892) -414

-RABBI ABRAHAM ISAAC KOOK 1865-1935 -416

-THE LAND OF ISRAEL (1910-1930) -419

-THE WAR (1910-1930) -422

-THE REBIRTH OF ISRAEL (1910-1930) -424

-LIGHTS FOR REBIRTH (1910-1930) -427

-SAMUEL HAYYIM LANDAU 1892-1928 -432

-TOWARD AN EXPLANATION OF OUR IDEOLOGY (1924) -434

-JUDAH LEON MAGNES 1877-1948 -440

-"LIKE ALL THE NATIONS?" (1930) -443

-MARTIN BUBER 1887-1965 -450

-THE JEW IN THE WORLD (1934) -453

-HEBREW HUMANISM (1942) -457

-FROM AN OPEN LETTER TO MAHATMA GANDHI (1939) -463

The early forms of religious Zionism beginning with Mohilever and continuing with Pines, Kook, Buber and others -- which led to the organization called Mizrachi and other religious arms of the movement - were peripheral to the success of Zionism overall, but important for its ultimate inclusiveness and definition.

Hertzberg summarizes Mohilever as follows:

SO FAR the selections in this reader and the biographical sketches at the head of each selection have seemed to tell the story of the Zionist idea in a straight line: it began with certain stirrings in the minds of men of religion (e.g., Alkalai and Kalischer) and went on to express itself as a secular nationalism, though Zionism always more or less assumed, and was in tension with, emotions derived from religion. This impression needs to be qualified. Religious Zionism -- that is, not mere traditional piety about the Holy Land but a conscious blending of orthodoxy in religion with modern Jewish nationalism -- has been an important, albeit minority, trend throughout the history of the modern movement.

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Is Mindful Meditation Finally Going to Become Jewish?

Around 1992 I took up both yoga and also mindful meditation a la Jon Kabat-Zinn. I wrote the post below 8/28/09 ending with the question/suggestion that we bring mindfulness into our shuls and schools.

Five years later, Jews finally are noticing mindful meditation -- because it saves money, according to the Forward, "Why Jews Should Tune In to the Mindfulness Revolution. It's Not Just 'Hippie Stuff' — Meditation Can Save Billions."

Here's what I said about my practices in 1992 in Minnesota, and a link to a 2007 Times article.

Our club, Northwest Racket and Swim in St. Louis Park had a wonderful yoga program. Our favorite instructor was Bonnie West, who led a totally Americanized yoga class. She'd crack jokes and talk about current events and get all of us to go to our limits.

At our HMO they decided to offer a free course in mindful meditation as an experiment. We were right there to take up the offer. We did yoga and meditation for several years and let it taper off when we moved back East.

Why did we stop? We actually didn't. We integrated mindfulness into our everyday life to a large degree. But that is a whole other story.

Anyway we were quite pleased to read in the NY Times, in 2007, about the acceptance of the practice in mainstream schools.

Wouldn't it be a great thing to offer instruction in mindfulness in our shuls and synagogues too?

In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

Discover Mindful Jewish Meditation

The benefits of Jewish meditation are accessible to every type of Jew through acts of Jewish piety.

People tend to think that the Orthodox and Hasidic Jews are really pious, the Conservative Jews less so, and the Reform and Reconstructionist even less.

Not so. Piety is individual. You decide how pious you wish to be. Some may argue that the Liberal Jew who makes a decision to engage in piety every day is more pious than the Orthodox Jew who rarely pauses to decide for himself what endows his structured life with meaning.

If you want it to, piety can fill your life as a Jew and endow it with transcendent meaning. Piety can overshadow faith at the central defining core of your Judaism. You can bring it into your daily, weekly and annual routines, and life cycle events.

"Mindful" is a term made popular by meditation guru, Jon Kabat-Zinn and others through their writings and teachings. They brought the concept into Western life from its origins within Eastern cultures. These teachers instruct us to meditate on the here-and-now. As if this was some new idea to us in the West. Done properly, religious practice affords us this mindfulness constantly in any number of ways.

We describe some elements of the religion of the Talmudic rabbis. If this is a form of Judaism that fulfills your needs, go with it! If not, we suggest you discover and then extract the major concepts of classical Judaic practice and apply them to your circumstances. In that way you will develop mindful piety for yourself, for your community and your calendar.

The Judaic Roots of Mindful Piety

Long ago rabbis prescribed, for example, that each Jew recite one hundred blessings each day. The recitation of a blessing prior to the performance of many basic rituals helped make a Jew mindful of his every action.

R. Meir used to say, "There is no man in Israel who does not perform one hundred commandments each day [and recite over them one hundred blessings] . . . And there is no man in Israel who is not surrounded by [reminders of the] commandments. [Every person wears] phylacteries on his head, phylacteries on his arm, has a mezuzah on his door post and four fringes on his garment around him . . . [Tosefta Berakhot 6:24-25]."

From the first stirring every morning, the mindful Jew began his day with acts of religious significance.

Is the author and spiritual seeker Paulo Coelho Jewish?

No Paulo Coelho is not a Jew. He was brought up Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Brazil. Coelho is not a big fan of any organized religion. He speaks with lyrical disdain and disparagement in his books about the wisdom and ritual of religions.

His current publication, Manuscript Found in Accra, is set in Jerusalem before a battle. The people in the book gather to ask about life so that they can learn enough to save "the soul of Jerusalem." The publisher tells us:

July 14, 1099. Jerusalem awaits the invasion of the crusaders who have surrounded the city’s gates. There, inside the ancient city’s walls, men and women of every age and every faith have gathered to hear the wise words of a mysterious man known only as the Copt. He has summoned the townspeople to address their fears with truth:

“Tomorrow, harmony will become discord. Joy will be replaced by grief. Peace will give way to war. . . . None of us can know what tomorrow will hold, because each day has its good and its bad moments. So, when you ask your questions, forget about the troops outside and the fear inside. Our task is not to leave a record of what happened on this date for those who will inherit the Earth; history will take care of that. Therefore, we will speak about our daily lives, about the difficulties we have had to face.”

The people begin with questions about defeat, struggle, and the nature of their enemies; they contemplate the will to change and the virtues of loyalty and solitude; and they ultimately turn to questions of beauty, love, wisdom, sex, elegance, and what the future holds. “What is success?” poses the Copt. “It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace.” ...

Now, these many centuries later, the wise man’s answers are a record of the human values that have endured throughout time. And, in Paulo Coelho’s hands, The Manuscript Found in Accra reveals that who we are, what we fear, and what we hope for the future come from the knowledge and belief that can be found within us, and not from the adversity that surrounds us.

This book is new age in every respect that we can think of especially in the way that it wanders through spiritual landscapes and themes without a care for a conventional framework of organization or presentation.

One passage struck us because it sounded like the utter opposite of the philosophy of life and values that we heard espoused at Yeshiva University by our teacher the Rav, Rabbi Soloveitchik and by his followers.

We will cite Coelho's passage and leave it without explanation; and we wish that understanding will flow to those who understand:

Beauty is present in all creation, but the dangerous fact is that, because we human beings are often cut off from the Divine Energy, we allow ourselves to be influenced by what other people think... And we become ugly and embittered.

At that moment, we can draw comfort from so-called wisdom, an accumulation of ideas put together by people wishing to define the world instead of respecting the mystery of life. This "wisdom" consists of all the unnecessary rules, regulation, and measurements intended to establish a standard of behavior. 

According to that false wisdom, we should not be concerned about beauty because it is superficial and ephemeral. 

That isn't true. All the beings created under the sun, from birds to mountains, from flowers to rivers, reflect the miracle of creation. 

If we resist the temptation to allow other people to define who we are, then we will gradually be able to let the sun inside our own soul shine forth... (pp. 60-61)

Back in 2011 we wrote about his previous book Aleph saying that the book... will greatly entertain the spiritual seeker. By that we mean if you are open to the concepts of past lives and the mystical energies of the universe, this book will speak to you. But even if you are such a seeker, you may feel, as we do, that at times the book overdoes some of its themes.

Within the story Coelho provides some gems of writing. We identified with his metaphor of the Chinese bamboo plant since we had spent several years putting down the roots of our latest book. And now, that book (God's Favorite Prayers) has sprouted up boldly after its publication.

Coelho explains that the Chinese Bamboo first, “...spends 5 years as a little shoot, using that time to develop its complex root system. And then from one moment to the next, it puts on a spurt and grows up to 25 meters high.”

Within the narrative Coelho casts in what can be wonderful observations, if they resonate for you. On the life-value of mistakes he tells us, “...only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risk and do what you really want to do. Seek out people who aren’t afraid of making mistakes and who, therefore, do make mistakes. Because of that, their work often isn’t recognized, but they are precisely the kind of people who change the world and, after many mistakes, do something that will transform their own community completely”.

He does get this inspiring exhortation partly right. We'd say to seek out people who are afraid to make mistakes -- that is a human trait -- but who nevertheless go ahead and make them. And he does need to differentiate and specify what he means by "mistakes". He surely means the worthy and meaty and bold and creative mistakes, not the foolish ones. And then of course, we all need to know some definition of the notion of "transform" -- but we never do get that from most of those who throw out the idea. We just know that they mean that transformation is something good and different and fresh and original.

It's all in a narrative that is highly intuitive and new age. And we get it and we like it. We also like the title.

Requested Book Excerpt: The Mindful Meditation of Berkahot Blessings

Here is the much-requested excerpt from my book "God's Favorite Prayers"  ("The Meditator," pages 111-120) wherein I define just how the berakhot (blessings) of rabbinic Judaism constitute a complete system of mindful meditations.

Deborah sits in the synagogue visibly engaged in her prayers. She closes her eyes at times. She sways as she prays, rhythmically and persistently, but slowly, gently and with deliberation.You cannot tell just from these external cues that Deborah is a meditator. To know that, I need to probe and ask her about her innermost thoughts during her time in the synagogue and at many other times when she is out and about throughout the day. During her prayers, you need to know, is Deborah attentively introspective of her own needs and desires and those of her friends and loved ones? Does she see her dreams fulfilled? Is she accepting of her personal and spiritual shortcomings and failures? Is she aware of her own breathing and heartbeat and the air that swirls around her, the heft of her Siddur and the humming of her fellow daveners?Does Deborah recite one-hundred daily blessings with mindful recognition? Does she reach a state of compassion as she says the grace over her meals? 

I might describe the activity of meditation as “study or thinking intently and at length, as for spiritual purposes,” or as “contemplation of spiritual matters.”

But the ancient rabbis did not have a term to describe meditation, so they called the meditative dimension of prayer, “the service of the heart.” To them, that indicated an inner intellectual and emotional activity, which they located in the heart, since they could detect that as the organ which beats slower or faster depending on one’s state of mind. Ancient rabbis had no ideas of brain activity and surely had no devices to monitor it or methods to speak about it.

Today, there are indeed multiple ways that we use the term meditate to describe a person who practices meditation through a variety of activities that we may call meditative. It’s enough to make your head spin. Before I get to what goes on in and around the synagogue, consider for instance those meditators from the 1960s or 70s, who practiced a popular form of Transcendental Meditation (TM), Zen or other related types of meditation. Far outside of establishment places of worship—separate from synagogues and churches—they sought a regimen that would help them achieve a sensation that they could transcend or go beyond themselves. They sought to bend their consciousness by a variety of methods, such as by finding their mantra or via deliberation on gnomic Zen sayings, called koans.

Is Madonna Jewish?

No, superstar singer and dancer Madonna is not a Jew. She was born and brought up Catholic. However in recent years she has been linked to the Jewish mystical practice called Kabbalah.

On Madonna's 2005 album, "Confessions on a Dance Floor" the tenth track is controversial because it is called Isaac and contains allusions to the Kabbalah. Rabbis in Israel (mistakenly) thought Madonna was trying to cash in on the good name of Isaac Luria, the Ari, the great founder of Lurianic Kabbalah. So those good men condemned the singer and the album.

It turns out that the singer named this song in homage to her quite living London spiritual guide, a Mr. Yitzhak Sinwani - Isaac is his English name. So what do we think? Is Madonna misappropriating the Kabbalah in this song, distorting it in her now-expected sacrilegious manner? (See below for the lyrics.)

What is "Displaced Talmudic Energy?"

Jenna Weissman Joselit asks at HuffPost, "Do These Amazing Jews Have 'Displaced Talmudic Energy?'" If we bought the analysis referred to in the article about talented contemporary Jews, we would begin to refer to this syndrome as DTE. Alas we do not buy the theory.

The Talmud is a literature with distinctive contents and ways of thinking about the world. If it was a source of "energy" we would be among the first to market Talmud-Water or Talmud-Bracelets and try to get Madonna interested in the Talmud.

Wait a second, those are not bad ideas.

We do track a high sense of drama in the world of the Talmud and a conviction that we Jews are stars at the center of the stage. That is at most an idea, a concept or a meme, and not an energy bar.

The Mystical Maggid of Rabbi Joseph Caro of Safed Israel

Rabbi Joseph Caro (1488-1575) was one of the most influential rabbis in Jewish history. He was the compiler of the Shulkhan Arukh, the best known code of Jewish law, and other distinguished books of rabbinic interpretation.

Caro was also a kabbalist, a mystic who received intruction from his own personal muse, or maggid, as it was called in the rabbinic tradition. We currently are studying his mystical diary and commentary, published in part as the Maggid Mesharim. A standard edition is available at HebrewBooks.org (three editions, here, here and here), and a scanned Hebrew-Aramaic text is online at an amazing Czech mystical text site and on wikitext.

Since studying with a mystical maggid is not a usual mode of rabbinic learning, in 1949 several scholars and doctors put out a book discussing Caro and his mental state, "The Maggid of Caro: The Mystic Life of the Eminent Codifier Joseph Caro as Revealed in His Secret Diary" edited by Hirsch Loeb Gordon.

Thinking about Caro made us focus in on rabbinic ordination, a mechanism that Caro wanted to revise. What we call "semicha", i.e. the ordaining of rabbis, is not really "semicha", i.e. the laying on of hands in the full-fledged transfer of charismatic powers. Our ordinations are certificates, diplomas of education achievement. Most such diplomas certify that the "rabbi" bearing the certificate studied the laws of "the prohibited and the permitted". Based on that "pseudo-semicha" certifying educational accomplishment, rabbis exert a claim to communal leadership. Real semicha ceased to be given, some say in the fourth century CE due to Roman prohibition of the act of Jews arrogating authority.

All rabbis since that time have received at most a "pseudo-semicha."

Together with Rabbi Jacob Berab of Safed, Caro wanted to restore actual "semicha" as a religious ceremony investing a rabbi with formal authority. Berab and Caro and a few others claimed to have revived the ancient formal semicha. But other rabbis of the time objected and the project failed (see for example the last 100 pages of Levi ibn Habib's responsa volume, known as his notebook on semicha).

Today in Israel, rather than building up the eminence of ordination, many rabbis appear to be bent on eroding the authority of semicha once again. It's a problem. Discuss.

"God's Favorite Prayers" - written without the help of a personal maggid

Is the smiling Taoist vinegar taster Jewish?

No, the Taoist vinegar taster is not Jewish, and not Talmudic.

A friend of mine a while ago sent me a quote from Lao Tzu, which reminded me of a wonderful book that I read several years ago called, "The Tao of Pooh."

My interpretation most days is that the smiling taster is glad that the vinegar tastes the way that it should. But you ought to read the parable and decide for yourself. Here is the excerpt from Benjamin Hoff's wonderful book:

Vinegar Tasters

"You see, Pooh," I said, "a lot of people don't seem to know what Taoism is..."

"Yes?" said Pooh, blinking his eyes."

So that's what this chapter is for - to explain things a bit."

"Oh, I see," said Pooh.

"And the easiest way to do that would be for us to go to China for a moment."

"What?" said Pooh, his eyes wide open in amazement. "Right now?'

"Of course. All we need to do is, lean back, relax, and there we are."

"Oh, I see," said Pooh.

Let's imagine that we have walked down a narrow street in a large Chinese city and have found a small shop that sells scrolls painted in the classic manner. We go inside and ask to be shown something allegorical - something humorous, perhaps, but with some sort of Timeless Meaning. The shopkeeper smiles. "I have just the thing,", he tells us. "A copy of The Vinegar Tasters!" He leads us to a large table and unrolls the scroll, placing it down for us to examine. "Excuse me - I must attend to something for a moment," he says, and goes into the back of the shop, leaving us alone with the painting.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Posthumous Story Gilgul in the New Yorker

New Yorker has published fiction by Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. It reports that “Gilgul” is a “short story in which a man in crisis consults a medium and considers the transmigration of souls.” The story begins:

“You know,” she said almost shyly, “that I have the ability, if you wish, to look into your eyes and tell you when you will die?” “No, I didn’t realize you could do that.” He hesitated for a moment.

Professor Yerushalmi passed away in December 2009. A New York Times obituary  said about him,

“An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his generation’s foremost Jewish historians by plumbing eclectic subjects like the history of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, messianism, the intellectual history of modern German Jewry and Freud’s relationship with his religion.”

The new magazine story closes with a reference to a narrative of a Jewish physician who wanders widely but never makes it to Israel. This may be a thinly disguised bookend of sorts for Yerushalmi, closing his career as a writer and thinker. The Times says that, “Dr. Yerushalmi received a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1953 and a doctorate from Columbia in 1966, writing his dissertation on Isaac Cardoso, a 17th-century Marrano physician.” He published the dissertation in 1971 as, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: a Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics. Wikipedia tells us that, “Isaac… ridiculed the kabbalistic, Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls.” In this fiction piece in the New Yorker the conflicted main character, Ravitch, consults a self-assured psychic, Gerda, at the her home in Jaffa Israel.

It strikes us as somewhat ironic that that this story titled the Hebrew word for the transmigration of souls appears now, nearly two years after the author’s death, embodying how his creative spirit, has move on to its next gilgul, the immortal archives of the New Yorker.

If you subscribe to New Yorker, by the way, you can download the iPad app for the magazine and sign up to read every issue on your tablet at no extra cost.

Whoops. Times Does Not Adore Golf in the Kingdom

It's a pan, not a praise. Yes, new age golf movies are an acquired taste.

Movie Review | 'Golf in the Kingdom'
Fellowship of the Links
By NEIL GENZLINGER

Golf may be the world’s dullest spectator sport, not counting soccer: it takes a long time for not much to happen. By that standard, “Golf in the Kingdom” captures the game perfectly.

The film, Susan Streitfeld’s adaptation of Michael Murphy’s 1972 novel, will probably draw the same love-it-or-hate-it response the book has: either it’s a brilliant merger of golf and philosophy, or it’s a collection of windy New Age nonsense about a sport played mostly by rich people.

Mason Gamble portrays Mr. Murphy, who on his way to India stops in Scotland. He ends up playing a round of golf with Shivas Irons (David O’Hara), a mysterious fellow with a knack for spinning pithy-sounding phrases that, if examined in any depth, really aren’t. He also mingles with some golf-playing locals and goes on a predawn hunt for Shivas’s mentor (segments so underlighted that you might as well close your eyes).

Everyone spouts nicely turned baloney elevating golf to the level of a religious experience, which grows tedious fairly quickly. The film almost works, though, if you view the whole thing as a very, very dry comedy.

Times: Shivas Irons' Golf in the Kingdom Comes to Film

The Times starts its meaty article about the long-awaited film version of Michael Murphy's famous golf novel, Golf in the Kingdom by saying that the book is "practically a sacred text." We think that they mean that it has mystical and philosophical qualities, that people read the book with veneration, and that it addresses ultimate issues of life and meaning. Indeed, like religion, the game of golf is quite elaborate in its rituals and practices and in its demarcations of space. And the classic golf book in question goes far beyond addressing those surface issues. It's one of the most memorable books we ever read.

We are eager to see how the film treats the highly complex book and the more elaborate realities of the game itself. Charles McGrath's essay on the film's long gestation, "A Mystical Tale, From Tee to Green," for the Times begins thusly:

For many golfers Michael Murphy’s 1972 novel, “Golf in the Kingdom,” is practically a sacred text. It’s about a young man, modeled on Mr. Murphy himself, who on his way to an ashram in India stops off in Scotland, where his life is transformed by an encounter with a golf pro and mystic named Shivas Irons, who knows as much about Pythagoras and the Hindu scriptures as he does about hitting a high fade. Several filmmakers have felt similarly transported by reading the book, and “Golf in the Kingdom” has been optioned or in development since before it was even published. Gus Van Sant was interested for a while. Sean Connery was approached about playing Shivas. Clint Eastwood fell in love with the book and clung to the rights for a decade or so before giving up.

At last, though, “Golf in the Kingdom” is coming to the screen. It opens in New York on Friday in a version written and directed by Susan Streitfeld, who has never played golf in her life, and produced by Mindy Affrime, an independent producer...more...

Newsweek: Madonna's Philip Berg Kabbalah Center Raising Malawi Scandal

It is sad to report that instead of doing good for impoverished children in Africa, Madonna's project Raising Malawi has become a "disaster" according to Newsweek ("Madonna's Malawi Disaster").

The story implies that Philip Berg and Kabbalah Center are to blame.

What are the four forms of Jewish meditation?

Rabbinic Judaism is a thoroughly meditative religion. In a recently completed paper we show how the Jewish meditator’s kavvanah takes at least four forms. Here are some excerpts…

In the first form of kavvanah, blessings are formulaic texts that appear liberally around the landscape of prescribed rabbinic practice. Blessings demand mindful meditative awareness of the physical world. The blessings for deriving benefit and for the performance of the commandments are mini-mindful meditative experiences for the meditator, interspersed throughout the waking day.

Judaism articulates a system of blessings for food, the meal, other ritual performances and natural events. Though frequent and repetitive, those brief, even momentary, performances are habituated spiritual pauses for meditation. This manner of meditation that we describe in the liturgical personality approximates what we typically call “mindfulness.”...

JPost: David Sarna Praises Tikkun Olam

Repairing the world or Tikkun Olam is a good virtue, says writer David Sarna in the JPost, and we agree.

...Lurianic Kabbala inspired Bee Season, a highly praised first novel by Myla Goldberg, later made into a movie of the same name. Goldberg says, “For modern-day Jews who aren’t so into the traditional and deistic elements of religion, tikkun olam provides a philosophy of volunteerism. This is the idea that the world is flawed, and the only way it’s going to get better is if each individual does something to try to make it a better place.”

This secular use of tikkun olam has been embraced by Madonna, who has studied Kabbala but says she retains her belief in Jesus, as well as by Britney Spears, Demi Moore, Gwyneth Paltrow (the daughter of a Jewish father and Quaker mother) and others.

When Shai Agassi, originally from Israel, named his low-emission electric car infrastructure company Better Place, he was undoubtedly informed by tikkun olam, making the world a better place....more...