Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim: Invitation to discuss Zohar & Kabbala

Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim basically disagreed with the Kabbala/Zohar discussion that Rabbi Tzadok has posted. I invited him to write a guest post to present his views. He initially agreed to do so but I just received the following e-mail from him. It is an invitation to move the discussion to his website.

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This Blog's author was gracious enough to invite my words regarding this recent Zoharic/Kabbala debate, which cannot be decided based on a halachik mechanism of "majority rule". My thoughts grew to more than a page in length, so I have posted it here for those of you interested in reviewing my thoughts: http://www.mesora.org/ZoharsDeviation.html

I also cannot seem to subscribe here, as I see no "email" link on my Mac/Safari browser. Therefore, I am happy to continue on the Mesora website in the Discussions tab: http://www.mesora.org/Discussions  under the forum: Judaism's Fundamentals>Zohar & Kabbala: The Heresy

May we each cleave to emess, abandon falsehood when we realize it, and adhere meticulously to God's words. May we each show kavod to God's habriyos and learn in order to help others, not for self-aggrandizement, and certainly not l'kantare. may God show us all His intelligent truths.


Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim, Founder
Mesora.org / The JewishTimes
(516)569-8888 ph
rabbi@mesora.org

Jerusalem man indicted on abusing chareidi kids

JPost   A 43-year-old Jerusalem man was indicted by the Jerusalem District Court Wednesday morning on two counts of sodomy and other indecent acts with young children.

Binyamin Schatz, who lived alone on Hanatziv Street in a haredi neighborhood of the capital, confessed to police that he had abused children around his current apartment and in another neighborhood in Jerusalem where he used to live. He said when his neighbors found out that he was a serial child molester, they forced him to move to another area of the city or they would report him to the police.

After his arrest, other parents came to the police station and reported more instances of abuse and sodomy with their children.

Elections: Bibi - Religious or Secular government?

haaretz   Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu claimed 31 seats, Yesh Atid 19, Labor 15, Shas 11, Habayit Hayehudi 11, United Torah Judaism 7, Hatnuah 6, Meretz 6, United Arab List-Ta’al 5, Balad 3, and Kadima likely to win 2 seats.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4335946,00.html

Weberman sentenced to 103 years for abuse

NyTimes    An unlicensed therapist who was a prominent member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn was sentenced on Tuesday to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman, beginning the attacks when she was 12. 

Nechemya Weberman, 54, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, did not react as the judge sentenced him. The victim, now 18, who delivered an impassioned statement asking for maximum sentence to be imposed, dabbed away tears.

“The message should go out to all victims of sexual abuse that your cries will be heard and justice will be done,” said State Supreme Court Justice John G. Ingram before imposing the sentence, close to the longest permissible to him by law. He praised the young victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.” 

Mr. Weberman, who wore his traditional black suit and head covering, did not speak before the sentencing, but his lawyer, George Farkas, said he was “innocent of the crimes charged.” The defense is planning to appeal.

Church documents reveal high-level abuse coverup

NYTIMES   The retired archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, and other high-ranking clergymen in the archdiocese worked quietly to keep evidence of child molesting away from law enforcement officials and shield abusive priests from criminal prosecution more than a decade before the scandal became public, according to confidential church records. 

The documents, filed in court as part of lawsuit against the archdiocese and posted online by The Los Angeles Times on Monday, offer the clearest glimpse yet of how the archdiocese dealt with abusive priests in the decades before the scandal broke, including Cardinal Mahony’s personal involvement in covering up their crimes.  

Rather than defrocking priests and contacting the police, the archdiocese sent priests who had molested children to out-of-state treatment facilities, in large part because therapists in California were legally obligated to report any evidence of child abuse to the police, the files make clear.  [...]

In a written statement released on Monday, Cardinal Mahony, who took over the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1985 and retired in 2011, apologized to the victims of the sexual abuse. 

“Various steps toward safeguarding all children in the church began here in 1987 and progressed year by year as we learned more about those who abused and the ineffectiveness of so-called ‘treatments’ at the time,” the statement said. “Nonetheless, even as we began to confront the problem, I remained naïve myself about the full and lasting impact these horrible acts would have on the lives of those who were abused by men who were supposed to be their spiritual guides.” 

Cardinal Mahony said he came to understand that impact only two decades later, when he met with almost 100 victims of sexual abuse by priests under his charge. He now keeps an index card for each one of those victims, praying for each one every day, he said in the statement.

Danish Haircuts - Gender Equality vs Commonsense

Reuters       Denmark, which like its Nordic neighbors prides itself on promoting equal treatment for men and women, is taking gender equality all the way to the beauty salon. 

The Board of Equal Treatment effectively ruled last month that price differences between men's and women's haircuts were illegal. It ordered a salon advertising women's haircuts for 528 crowns ($94) and men's haircuts for 428 crowns - plus an extra fee for long hair - to pay 2,500 crowns ($450) to a woman who had filed a complaint.

Now, a trade organization for hairdressers has called the decision absurd, saying it will become a nightmare to set prices for customers and warning of "pricing chaos".

"It takes, quite simply, longer time with women," Connie Mikkelsen, chairwoman of the Danish organization for independent hairdressers and cosmeticians, said in a statement on Monday.

The board's decision has been appealed and a court will determine whether hairdressers need to find a new way to charge for their services, in the length of time, or the standard of the cut.

"Measuring time will lead to a discussion of hair length - what is medium length, and what is long. It will end in a series of conflicts with customers," Mikkelsen said.

Teaching Torah to gentiles | Rav Aharon Kahn | Orthodox Union

Audio mp3

Rav_Kahn_Sheets_-_Shiur_22.pdf

  Content Description: Teaching Torah to gentiles. Analysis of commentaries on gemara Chagigah 13a, which focus on the pasuk brought to support the prohibition of teaching Torah to gentiles. Who ‘owns’ the Torah? Do I have a partial, but individual ownership? Or do I individually own nothing of Torah, but rather, as a part of Klal Yisroel, it is group-owned? An understanding of the word: “morasha”--nuances of ‘yerushas kehillas Yaakov’ in contrast to ‘morasha kehillas Yaakov.’

Citations: Gemara Chagigah 13a with Tosfos, found in the source packets on page 1, and Turei Even on that Tosfos, found in the source packets on pages 1-3, and Sfas Emes (Chagigah 13a) found in the source packets on page 3.

Weberman: 10 more victims reported/ Sentencing Tuesday

NY Daily News She wasn't the only one.

Nechemya Weberman, the unlicensed Hasidic counselor slated to be sentenced Tuesday for sexually abusing a Brooklyn girl, violated at least 10 others — including teens and married women he counseled, a Daily News investigation revealed.

The self-proclaimed religious adviser even invoked Kabbalah — a form of Jewish mysticism — to convince his victims that having sex with him was kosher.

“He’s a monster,” said a man whose daughter was repeatedly brutalized by Weberman a couple of years before the victim at trial came forward.

Nodah B'Yehuda & Kabbala - private & public view by Rabbi Dr. David Katz

The follow is an excerpt from Rabbi David Katz' doctoral dissertaion on the Nodah B'Yehuda. Rabbi Katz is a rav in Baltimore and is a very well respected talmid chachom as well as very knowledgable about many other things. The full dissertation can be downloaded here from the University of Maryland. The main point is that the Nodah B'Yehuda had a negative public attitude towards Kabbala but privately he had a strongly positive one. This also was true of Rav Yaakov Emden, Chasam Sofer and others. This duality was resulted from the concern for the followers of Shabtsai Tzvi and the Frankists as well as the well founded fear of the ignorant studying kabbala without a proper teacher or foundation.

   Nodah b'Yehuda and Kabbala by Rabbi David Katz 

Kabbala & Prof Scholem: Ask no questions

For those who want to understand the important differences between an academic study of Kabbalah and the real thing - there is an interesting article by Boaz Huss Ask No Questions Gershom Scholem & the Study of Contemporary_Jewish_Mysticism. 

Scholem insisted on approaching kabbala as an "it" - something to be examined from outside and something which lacked vitality. He had no interest in contemporary kabbalists and having failed to have any  mystical experiences [Idel - New Perspectives in Kabbala ] insisted on dealing with kabbala as something entombed in the letters of musty old texts rather than  a living entity touching the souls of profound and complex men. I bring this up because it is obvious that many who have been commenting on these issues - come from his perspective. A related attitude was expressed by Shaul Leiberman who said

"In an introduction to a lecture Scholem delivered at the seminary, Lieberman said that several years earlier, some students asked to have a course here in which they could study kabbalistic texts. He had told them that it was not possible, but if they wished they could have a course on the history of kabbalah. For at a university, Lieberman said, "it is forbidden to have a course in nonsense. But the history of nonsense, that is scholarship." wikipedia

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By way of introduction, let me recount something that happened to a young acquaintance of mine in 1924. The fellow came to Jerusalem,unpretentiously bearing his training in philology and modern history,and sought to get in touch with a circle of latter-day kabbalists who had preserved, for over 200 years, the traditional mystical teachings of the Jews of eastern lands. Eventually, he met a kabbalist who told him:“I am prepared to teach you Kabbalah, but on one condition that I’m not sure you’ll be able to fulfill.” Some of my readers may not guess that condition: “Ask no questions.”1 

 Gershom Scholem used this mythical tale to open his lecture“Kabbalah and Myth” at the Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland,in 1949—the first time he lectured at that conference. In a 1974 interview with Muki Zur, Scholem disclosed that he himself was the young man in the story, a fact that had no doubt been clear to his audience at Eranos. He went on to tell of his reaction to the condition imposed by R. Gershon Vilner, the aged Ashkenazi kabbalist from the “Bet-El”yeshiva, a reaction that was likewise unsurprising: “I told him I wanted to consider it. And then I told him I couldn’t do it.”2

Paradoxically enough, by his negative response Scholem effectively accepted the condition proposed by the kabbalist, for he chose not to ask questions about—and not to study—Kabbalah as a living, contemporary phenomenon.3

In his partial autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem , Scholem mentions several more encounters with kabbalists and mystics, but he presents these meetings anecdotally, never raising the possibility that these mystics might be the subjects of study or research. 4

Indeed, Scholem’s meeting with contemporary kabbalists left no impression whatsoever on his vast corpus of scholarly work. He labored to examine the most out-of-the-way kabbalistic manuscripts he could find, but he devoted not a single study to the Bet-El kabbalists or any other kabbalistic stream of his own time. The kabbalistic yeshivas that functioned in Jerusalem during Scholem’s time (“Bet-El,” “Rehovot ha-Nahar,” and“Sha‘ar ha-Shamayim”) and prominent kabbalists, most of them likewise in Jerusalem during Scholem’s period, such as R. Saul ha-Kohen Dwlck, R. Judah Petaiah, R. Solomon Eliashov, and R. Judah Ashlag, go nearly unmentioned in Scholem’s studies. That is the case as well with respect to the few mystics of his generation for whom Scholem expressed esteem—Rabbi Kook, R. Menahem Mendel Schneerson,and R. Ahrele Roth.

Rav Kook suggested studying kabbala in Telz Yeshiva

Making of a Godol page 979. Sometime after the Hasman tenure - probably before R' Katz took the post and certainly before R' Luft did - R' Laizer tried to strike out in a direction other than Musar by offering the post of mashgiah to R' Avraham-Yitzhaq Kook, then serving as Rav of Boisk. The latter spent several days in Telz before turning down the position because the post of Rav of Jaffa, in Eretz Yisrael, was offered him at the same time - but not before making the revolutionary suggestion to R' Gordon that "the yeshiva institute classes in Tnakh, Midrash, Zohar, Kuzari, שמונה פרקים and the like ''. (Regarding the suggestion that yeshiva bahurim study Zohar, cf....  where, in a letter to .... dated Rosh Hodesh Elul 5673 (September 3, 1913), about a decade after R' Kook's visit to Telz, he defends studying Kabala before being "full with the bread and meat" of Talmudic studies.)