Woody Allen is a great talented writer and film maker and a funny man. But he is no theologian.
Allen sums up his views on religion for a New York Times interview:
Q. But there’s an undercurrent, isn’t there, in the new movie – not of religion, but of spirituality and supernatural phenomenon?
A. Well, I link them together. To me, there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.
Woody's new film is, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” The trailer is here.
The relationship between Jews and baseball is strong.
Anecdote:
When my dad was a rabbi in New York City in the fifties he was surprised when a congregant came up to him on the bimah early on Yom Kippur morning with a problem. "Rabbi, I need an earlier honor," he declared.
The man had been asked to open the ark late in the morning during the Musaf service.
My dad asssured him he would try to get him a recognition at another time slot. But he politely asked why the gentleman needed to switch.
He told my dad proudly and without any hesitation, "I'm a big Yankees fan and I have tickets to the World Series at Yankee stadium where the game starts at 1:00 PM."
New Film:
"Jews and Baseball: an American Love Story," is a new film out making the rounds at screenings and festivals.
From the wonderful trailer we expect it will be an informative and moving film for any Jew who loves sports.
Yes, there are Jewish composers, but, the crux of the article opines, "Western classical composition, the dominant feature of Christian sacred music for more than a millennium, remains mostly absent from Jewish liturgical music. Given the number of extraordinary Jewish classical composers over the last two centuries, this absence is particularly striking..."... more...
It makes us proud to see Israel compete with honor on the world's stage in any capacity. (OK, it is even nicer if Israel wins.)
The Bergen Record has a fine story about the Williams v. Peer match yesterday that also goes into the relationship between Venus and Shahar as two outstanding sports professionals.
NEW YORK – Venus Williams, the only American woman left in the U.S. Open, had to work harder than most people expected over Labor Day weekend to stay in the tournament.
With injured sister Serena watching in the Arthur Ashe Stadium stands, third-seeded Venus Williams overcame an unspectacular serve and a sometimes spectacular opponent to reach the quarterfinals with a 7-6 (7-3), 6-3 victory over Israeli Shahar Peer on Sunday afternoon.
“It’s always good to have a tough match, or tougher match, the kind of a match where you have to challenge yourself against your opponent and the conditions and just continue to stay tough and to stay positive,” Williams said. “I was happy to do that.”
Williams had five double-faults and was broken three times by the 14th-seeded Peer.
In the 12th game of the first set, Peer faced triple-set point. She saved all three and five total in the scintillating 22-point, eight-deuce game that ended with a Peer forehand winner down the line that forced the tiebreaker.
Here is a video clip released for the holidays from the OU - Orthodox Union.
Transcript of the text of the Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, speaking on the clip:
What does the almighty need prayer for? Why did he tell man to pray? Not the Almighty, but man changes through prayer. God hearkens to prayer because there is a change in the identity of man. By praying man attains another identity. And by attaining a new identity the verdict is not applicable anymore to him.
Talmudic Comments:
This is a wholly elliptical passage. We assumed that is was because it had been taken out of context. In its present gnomic form, it provoked us to ask these obvious questions.
Who ever said that the Almighty needs prayer?
When did God ever tell us to pray?
We do believe that prayer can change God's decisions and actions, don't we?
What does "change in identity of man" mean?
What does "attaining a new identity" mean? Same as the above or another cryptic idea? Does "new" imply "improved"?
What is the "verdict"? What "verdict"? Why does it not apply? Is God fooled or confused by prayer? Or is he impressed? We just don't follow...
We don't know if anyone else is listening. But we are because the Rav was our teacher and because we care about prayer, we take it seriously and we think and write about it a lot.
This random assemblage of sentences did not sound to us like a paragraph that the Rav would have spoken in a public lecture.
We asked Gil Student, managing editor of the OU Press, about this clip. First, we were told about the propriety of using the recording in an advertisement for a book, "It is appropriate to use a brief excerpt from the Rav to inform people about a forthcoming publication with more extensive treatment of the subject." And notice, he used the word "excerpt."
It just did not sound to us like the Rav. We pressed and asked if they spliced and edited this clip. We were told, "Yes, we spliced it to create a coherent thought faithful to the Rav's intent that could serve as a soundbite."
Talmudic bottom line:
Rabbi Soloveitchik was a great rabbi, a scholar and a teacher. We do not think it is proper to splice together a passage out of context and throw the puzzling incoherent result up there on YouTube to help the OU sell a few books.
[Corrected.]
Deborah Solomon interviewed Deepak Chopra in the Times
Imagining the Prophet Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON The spiritual guru talks about his new novel about Muhammad....
Do you think it is possible that the Koran was actually written by Jews? How come there are so many references to Moses and the prophets in the Koran? I would not be surprised if Jewish scribes inserted a lot of that. ... more...
Talmudic reaction: All scholarship ought to begin with the rigorous analytical phrase, "I would not be surprised if..."
Born February 8, 1994, she is 16, and a truly remarkable Canadian jazz-pop prodigy from Hampstead, Quebec.
We listened to her remarkable album, Nikki, several times, before looking up background information on this young musical wonder. Listening to her music, we had no clue that she was so young.
We have not been a big jazz aficionado, until now. Nikki's voice and rhythm comes across with clarity, power and beauty. Wow, you owe it to yourself to buy the album Each track soars.
In one particularly intense, mature and serious stage, while I was on a sabbatical for six months from my teaching in 1978, I decided to try to pray at least one time in every one of the synagogues in Jerusalem, the most sacred city in Judaism. That capital city of Judaism has dozens of varieties of shuls for all kinds of worship styles of the various and sundry communities who live there side-by-side and mostly with mutual respect and at peace with one another.
During that phase of my life I imagined in an especially colorful way that I was engaged in a quest for a perfect religious experience. I saw my professed search as a parallel to the one Bruce Brown cataloged in Endless Summer, his famous 1966 documentary film of two surfers, Michael Hynson and Robert August, on a quest for the perfect wave. That film documented the two boys’ search for simple perfection in their quasi-mystical sport. The movie site IMDB sums up the story of that film, "Brown follows two young surfers around the world in search of the perfect wave, and ends up finding quite a few in addition to some colorful local characters."
Yes, Gmail in general is kosher because it is so good at eliminating spam.
And we all know that spam is not kosher. The actual product Spam was a canned meat made largely from pork invented in Minnesota by Hormel Foods. We used to pass by the Hormel factory where they processed Spam when we went out golfing in Austin MN, home of the Spam museum and the headquarters of Hormel.
According to historians of the Internet, junk mail became known as spam because of a deliberate association with a 1970 Monty Python sketch about a cafe where every dish had spam in it.
Now, Gmail has become glatt kosher (a higher level) because it has launched a priority inbox filter which separates Bacn from your more important emails. Bacn is per Wikipedia, "Email which has been subscribed to and is therefore not unsolicited, but is often not read by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as 'email you want but not right now.'" As Google tells us:
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Woody Allen is a great talented writer and film maker and a funny man. But he is no theologian.
The relationship between Jews and baseball is strong.
No, according to an essay in the Times 
(the prayer book for the High Holidays) is out 
It makes us proud to see Israel compete with honor on the world's stage in any capacity. (OK, it is even nicer if Israel wins.)
Yes, Nikki Yanofsky is a Jew, according to the 
Each track soars.