Arutz Sheva reports:
Thursday's road-closings will be less festive, though possibly no less disruptive. The police plan to close downtown streets including Agron, King David, and Emek Refaim, from 4-7 PM, to make way for the controversial gay parade. The marchers will gather near Independence Park at 4 PM, will begin parading at 5 PM towards Liberty Bell Park, and will hold a rally there at 6 PM.
Several anti-parade demonstrations are scheduled to be held in the city at around the same time, including one at the main Jaffa-Ben-Yehuda intersection at 4 PM.
Late last week, Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupoliansky filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the parade, calling it a provocation. The Court refused to cancel the parade, and Supreme Court Justice Ayalah Procaccia even said that it was important that parades such as this "become a normal part of the routine and not arouse storms of protest each year."
A letter was sent to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and the chief of police, calling upon them to move Thursday’s scheduled to’eva parade in Yerushalayim to an indoor venue.
The Shas, National Religious Party, United Torah Judaism and National Union Parties have joined forces in their effort, along with Israel’s chief rabbis, seeking to compel authorities to move the event to an indoor venue to prevent the chilul Hashem associated with such a happening in the streets of Yerushalayim.
(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)
No Sunday services take place here; this congregation meets only on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. You will never see a cross or an altar; there is an Aaron Hakodesh (holy ark) with a star of David adorning its velvet cover, and a Bimah (stage for prayer services) in the center of the sanctuary. The majority of the men who worship here wear kipot, and their tzitzit hang down the sides of their pants. This congregation's rabbi, among many other functions, reads from the Torah and makes Kiddush every Shabbat. Most of the women are modestly dressed. Joyous shouts of "Shabbat Shalom" and "Baruch Hashem" can be heard as young couples greet each other. The sanctuary pulsates to a modern Israeli musical beat. If this sounds like a description of a traditional Jewish house of worship, think again. The above is actually a description of any one of the hundreds of Messianic "synagogues" which flourish throughout the world. Confused? Many are. Such congregations are designed to appear Jewish, but they are actually fundamentalist Christian churches which use traditional Jewish symbols to lure the most vulnerable of our Jewish people into their ranks. Messianic "rabbis," many of whom are Jewish by birth, are committed to bringing the Jewish people to know Jesus. Their agenda is to make Christianity more palatable to the uneducated Jew, and to the astonishment and horror of the Jewish community, their marketing ploys are proving to be successful. Twenty-two years ago, twelve Messianic congregations existed in the United States. Today, more than 300 actively attract and recruit Jews who, because they lack a sound Jewish education and support system, are buying the manipulative rhetoric and persuasive techniques of the Hebrew-Christian missionary movement. Additionally, there are over 600 Christian missions dedicated to converting the Jewish people. It is estimated that there are more than 200,000 Hebrew-Christians in North America and Israel. As an exit-counselor who works with families to reclaim their Jewish family members from these churches, I can testify that the cost in terms of Jewish souls is dear. WHO ARE THESE MISSIONARIES? In order to understand the dynamics of the missionary problem, we must first understand who exactly these missionaries are. To the Jewish community, the word "missionary" is a charged word, with a multitude of misconceptions attached to it. Typically, the word "missionary" is associated with those people who stand on street corners, annoyingly and ubiquitously distributing literature that tries to persuade individuals to believe in Jesus. When we think of missionaries we might think of an organization with members, mailing lists, secretaries, and buildings to which we can point and say, "You see that building on 31st street, between Lexington and Park (New York headquarters of Jews For Jesus)? They are the missionaries." This is merely one of a variety of misconceptions we have about missionaries and how they operate. A number of years ago I lectured at a large university campus in Ohio. In my conversation with a dean we began to discuss the work I do. He immediately reassured me that at his university, they did not have a missionary problem. He recalled how years earlier there were indeed missionaries on his campus who distributed pamphlets and misused traditional Jewish symbols for the purpose of evangelizing. "But we don't have that here anymore," he insisted. "Tell me, are there any fundamentalist born-again Christians on your campus?" I asked. He quickly snapped, "What? Are you kidding? This is the Midwest! We're packed with them!" I then told him that indeed he had a serious missionary problem on his campus because, in reality, fundamentalist, born-again Christians are dedicated to the idea of bringing every Jew to a belief in Jesus. Our second mistake is that we tend to view the Christian world as a monolithic group of gentiles who all essentially believe the same thing. In fact, the Christian world -- with hundreds of variant denominations that differ on numerous fundamental theological issues -- is far more diverse than the Jewish world. At a baseball game, it is sometimes difficult to know who the players are without a scorecard. Let's break down the Christian world for a moment so that we know precisely to whom we are referring. THE COMPLEX CHRISTIAN WORLD The Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest denomination in Christendom. Yet despite its past often-bitter relationship with the Jewish people, today Catholics are for the most part not interested in converting Jews. I need not worry that a Catholic priest is going to evangelize any of my patients at a hospital. If anything, he is one of the people who will show me where I can secure a kosher meal. Another significant segment of the Christian world, especially in North America, is the Protestant community. For our purposes, we will over generalize and divide the Protestant world into two groups. One group, the mainline or liberal Protestants (Methodist, Unitarian, etc.), is not at all interested in converting Jews. Liberal leaning Protestant denominations tend to shy away from any form of Jewish evangelism. It is, however, the other highly motivated and vocal segment within the Protestant community -- the fundamentalist, born-again Christians -- who are unyielding in their staunch commitment to convert the Jews. There are two rules about Jewish evangelism that must always be kept in mind.
In essence, the central role that Christian missions like Jews for Jesus plays is to act as a clearinghouse and support system for evangelical churches around the world. As a result, these "Jewish missions" spend much of their resources and manpower teaching lay missionaries in gentile churches.
How serious a problem are these Protestant fundamentalist Christians? How many born-again Christians are there in the United States?
Their numbers are not small. According to most estimates, there are well over 50 million Americans who identify themselves as born-again Christians. That is, approximately one in five Americans is part of this army of lay people dedicated to "share" their faith with a Jew. When I spoke in Nashville a number of years ago, an Assemblies of God minister bluntly told me that he would rather convert one Jew than 50,000 gentiles.
WHY THE JEWS?
A question that naturally comes to mind is: Why the Jews? Why are these fundamentalist Christians so consumed with bringing the Jewish people to "know Jesus?" Why has the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention, passed numerous resolutions encouraging more than 15 million American members to target and evangelize the Jewish people?
[...]
In a harsh letter to the Commission for Public Grievances Against Judges MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni demanded retired Judge Tova Strasberg-Cohen retract her recommendation to remove from his post Dayan Avrohom Sherman, who headed a ruling by the Rabbinate Beis Din Godol annulling a fictitious conversion performed by Rabbi Chaim Druckman, and expressed his astonishment over the absurd arguments she presents in her recommendation.
The letter opens with Rabbi Druckman's grievance against HaRav Sherman, who serves as a dayan at the Beis Din Godol in Jerusalem, and her conclusion that extreme measures be taken to fire HaRav Sherman. "HaRav Sherman is a prominent talmid chochom and a skilled expert in his field who has been serving as a dayan for 29 years," writes Rabbi Gafni. "He is renowned for his fabulous judicial temperament, listening to the litigants patiently and not rushing them, sitting for long periods beyond the regular hours and writing carefully explicated rulings. My feeling is that the complaints made by Rabbi Druckman, which represent grave acts bordering on criminal conduct calling for such an extreme decision, cannot possibly be correct.
"I read your points and I couldn't believe my eyes. HaRav Sherman's reputation has been spotless throughout the years and never has his character been called into question chas vesholom, and his rulings, like those of his two colleagues on the bench, have been relied on implicitly. The Attorney General, the legal advisor to the rabbinical courts and even the president of the Beis Din Godol all agree that Rabbi Druckman signed conversion certificates in cases where he was not present, and these claims have not been refuted.
"A public debate over conversion is raging in Israel, the fiercest debate since our formation as a people, and it grew more heated in recent years when hundreds of thousands of non-Jews immigrated to Israel, including some from mixed families, creating pressure on the political and judicial systems to alter or "alleviate the burden" of conversion proceedings (I am not referring to the red tape and internal disputes at the Conversion Authority run by the Prime Minister's Office, which needlessly complicates conversion with matters that have nothing to do with halachic issues). The vast majority of dayanim at the regional botei din as well as the Beis Din Godol, including its president, concur that the halachic view of conversion should not be altered, otherwise we lose our uniqueness as the Jewish people, which has preserved itself throughout the annals of our history, which are filled with the blood of our people being spilled, while other larger and mightier have vanished, cast off into the dustbins of history.
"HaRav Sherman and his colleagues faithfully carry out the duty they were charged to perform by the legislature — to hand down halachic rulings based on halacha — particularly in a case of a conversion certificate signed by somebody who was not even on hand. Had this occurred in another judicial framework the individual committing such an act would have been removed from his post, as was the case with the judge at the Haifa Magistrate Court, Hila Cohen."
WHEN Thomas Beatie gives birth in the next few weeks to a baby girl, the blessed event will mark both a personal milestone and a strange and wondrous crossroads in the evolution of American pop culture.
Mr. Beatie — as anyone who has turned on a television, linked to a blog or picked up a tabloid in the last few months is aware — is a married 34-year-old man, born a woman, who managed to impregnate himself last year using frozen sperm and who went public this spring as the nation’s first “pregnant father.”
That this story attracted attention around the world was hardly surprising. Who, after all, could resist the image of a shirtless Madonna, with a ripe belly on a body lacking breasts and with a square jaw unmistakably fringed by a beard? For a time, clips of Mr. Beatie’s appearance on “Oprah,” where he was filmed undergoing ultrasound, as well as shirtless images of him from an autobiographical feature in the Advocate magazine, were everywhere, and they were impossible to look away from.
Partly a carnival sideshow and partly a glimpse at shifting sexual tectonics, his image and story powered past traditional definitions of gender and exposed a realm that seemed more than passing strange to some observers — and altogether natural to those who inhabit it.
“This is just a neat human-interest story about a particular couple using the reproductive capabilities they have,” said Mara Kiesling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. “There’s really nothing remarkable” about the Beatie pregnancy, she said.
Yet as the first pregnant transman to go public, Mr. Beatie has exposed a mass audience to alterations in the outlines of gender that may be outpacing our comprehension. In the discussions that followed his announcement, what became poignantly clear is that there is no good language yet to discuss his situation, words like an all-purpose pronoun to describe an idea as complex as a pregnant man.
“When there’s a lot of fascination around a figure like Thomas Beatie,” said Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California, “it points to other changes already happening elsewhere in the culture.”
Among the changes Ms. Halberstam noted are medical innovations that have expanded the possibilities for body modification. There are also studies that indicate, as Ms. HalberstamBeatie, who says of himself, “I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy,” but who might have trouble holding on to some of those assertions if he did something as simple as moving from Oregon.[...] noted, that women respond sexually to the individual, before differentiating by sex. And the broadening legal scope of marriage has also had its effects on people like Mr. who says of himself, “I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy,” but who might have trouble holding on to some of those assertions if he did something as simple as moving from Oregon.[...]
Issues like these have made Mr. Beatie’s story so compelling; the sense that trans identity in the Webster sense of the prefix signifies some threshold state of being — “across” or “beyond” or “through.”
Ms. Sedgwick said that if you look at postings on Web sites like Oprah Winfrey’s and The Huffington Post, “It seems as though there are lots and lots of comments saying: ‘That’s not a man having a baby. That’s a woman having a baby.’ ”
Partly that reaction results from what Ms. Sedgwick calls a phobic response to changes in identities that for most people seem God-given and settled at birth. Partly it is a matter “of people having to go through the stages of figuring things out,” she said.
As Ms. Kiesling, of the National Center for Transgender Equality, noted: “The long-term benefit of this story is not ‘Pregnant Man Trims Hedge,’ ” referring to a widely circulated photo of a bearded and pregnant Mr. Beatie wielding a power tool. “The Beatie story raises questions we’re all looking at now, in a lot of contexts,” about the welter of new possibilities produced by a landscape in which legalized same-sex partnerships reshape traditional ideas about husband and wife and mom and dad.[...]
By then his story may have served its purpose, Ms. Sedgwick said. It will have showed us that: “People experience gender very differently and some have really individual and imaginative uses to make of it. That’s an important thing for people to wrap their minds around.”
