Wednesday, January 23, 2013

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.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

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.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Teaching Torah to gentiles | Rav Aharon Kahn | Orthodox Union




  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.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

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.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

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.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

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.)

Egyptian president is anti-Semite - anyone suprised?


NY Times   Nearly three years ago, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood delivered a speech urging Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In a television interview around that time, the same leader described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.” 

That leader, Mohamed Morsi, is now president of Egypt — and his comments may be coming back to haunt him.

Since beginning his campaign for president, Mr. Morsi has promised to uphold Egypt’s treaty with Israel and to seek peace in the region. In recent months, he has begun to forge a personal bond with President Obama around their successful efforts to broker a truce between Israel and Palestinian militants of the Gaza Strip. 

But the exposure this month of his virulent comments from early 2010, both documented on video, have revealed sharp anti-Semitic and anti-Western sentiments, raising questions about Mr. Morsi’s efforts to present himself as a force for moderation and stability. Instead, the disclosures have strengthened the position of those who say Israel’s Arab neighbors are unwilling to commit to peace with the Jewish state.

Zohar's concerns about marrying a widow? - Rav Sternbuch

Rav Sternbuch( 4:279): Should one avoid marrying a widow?







This that you ask regarding marrying a widow, we find in the holy Zohar in parshas Mishpatim about taking another wife -
Zohar (2:102a): ‘What, then, becomes of the spirit of an ordinary man whose widow has married.again? Come ye and see the wonderful and mighty works of the Holy King! Who can utter them? When.the second husband's spirit enters into the body of the woman the spirit of the first husband contends with.it, and they cannot dwell in peace together, so that the woman is never altogether happy with the second.husband, because the spirit of the first one is always pricking her, his memory is always with her, causing.her to weep and sigh over him. In fact, his spirit writhes within her like a serpent. And so it goes on for a.long time. If the second spirit prevails over the first one, then the latter goes out. But if, as sometimes.happens, the first conquers the second, it means the death of the second husband. Therefore we are taught.that after a woman has been twice widowed no one should marry her again, for the angel of death has taken.possession of her, though most people do not know this. Friends, I am aware that on this point you may.well object that in that case the second husband's death was not in accordance with Divine judgement. It is.not so, however. It is all decided by fair trial, whether the one spirit should prevail over the other or be at.peace with it; but he who marries a widow is like unto one who ventures to.brave the ocean during a storm without a rudder and without sails, and knows not whether he will cross.safely or sink into the depths. ‘
In Jerusalem many have the practice of marrying a widow only after they have done the Tikun of the Rashash. However in the majority of communities there is absolutely no concern about this and they marry directly without the Tikkun. Your question is whether one should in fact be concerned about this?

It would seem that in our days that there is a basis to be lenient in spite of the Zohar. The basis of the Zohar's concern is the joining of the souls of the husband and wife in the first marriage. That means that each one has kedusha created in his soul through their joining together in the first marriage. Consequently the Zohar writes that the soul of the woman now is bound together with the first husband. Consequently his spirit strongly impacts her even after he has died and therefore no one else should marry her. However it is known from the commentaries that today marriage is always considered zivug sheini (a second marriage). That is because we all are reincarnations from a previous existence since our souls have not achieved the proper perfection. Therefore the marriage is according to one's deeds and therefore it is alright to marry a widow and I have never heard anyone saying otherwise. In addition I have never heard or seen outside of Israel that anyone insisted on during the Tikun of the Rashah. Therefore it would seem that even according to the Zohar it is not necessary in our day since the nature of the marriage is different and therefore the reason for concern of the Zohar doesn't apply anymore. Consequently the poskim don't even mention this issue.

In fact it would seem that the main concern of the Zohar is when the first husband is a great talmid chachom and now the widow is marry a person who is truly ignorant of Torah. In that case the spirit of the first husband would disturb her and would not find peace. However if the second husband is a talmid chachom or at least a G-d fearing man who observes all the mitzvos properly - then this would not arouse the objection of the deceased husband. Because there is no question that we have no desire to keep her unmarried for the rest of her life. In fact I heard that the Gra married a widow and had no concerns. That is because the first husband obviously had no objection for his widow to marry such a great Torah scholar and in such a case the husband's spirit would not disturb his widow. Even though we in truth find kabbalists in mishnas chassidim who warned not to marry a widow (see Chavis Ya'ir #197)  -nevertheless since the established practice is not to be concerned with this we say "G-d guards the fools" and one should not be concerned at all about this.

However since one can in fact readily take care of even this ignored concerned then I would advise that the second couple should request of the kabbalists in Jerusalem  to do the Tikun of the Rashash - and this is the right way to act.  If this is done there is absolutely no concern at all but they should get married and have a wonderful life together with G-d's help. The main thing is to direct ones deeds according to the Shulchan Aruch and poskim.

Furthermore the Chida writes that the Zohar's concern only apply in the first 12 month of the first husband's death and this is also mentioned in the Maharasham (2:141) who says he receives this from the Shinover. In the new Maaseh Rav of the Gra he writes, In the Zohar parshas Mishpatim we find that it is very strongly against marrying a widow. There is a leniency that after 12 months of the death of the first husband there is not so much of a danger since his spirit has left from there. And this is what I have observed amongst distinguished rabbis of our day. ... We see from there that as long as the second marriage be done for the sake of Heaven that a frum person has nothing to fear and there is absolutely no concern for this issue. Consequently according to all this if he has an alternative to marrying a widow even after 12 months perhaps it is best if he take it since he is protected only if he does it for the sake of Heaven. See there that some say that the concern for the spirit of the first husband returning is only for special individuals and very holy people but not for others. Some are insistent that on the day of the wedding to give charity for the elevation of the soul of the first husband and that is sufficient.

You should also be aware that in the case of marrying a widow I am very stringent to insist that the yichud should be in a room in which there is a bed so that it possible to have sexual intercourse. That  is because a widow requires either intercourse or at least the chupah should be possible to actually have intercourse. I am also very insistent that the time of yichud should be extra long (at least 10 minutes) before others entere the yichud room. In this manner the chupah and marriage are absolutely not problematic. In contrast with a virgin it just depends on being secluded for a short time as is explained in Sotah (4b). ... and it is necessary to remain in the yichud room for the amount of time that sexual intercourse takes according to many poskim.

Monday, January 14, 2013

R' Amnon Yitzchok says Rav Ovadiya Yosef faked stroke

kikarhashabat

ר' אמנון יצחק ממשיך במתקפה חסרת תקדים נגד תנועת ש"ס המונהגת על ידי מרן פוסק הדור רבי עובדיה יוסף.

כמו בשיעוריו הקודמים טען הרב יצחק כי הוא אינו נגד מרן הרב עובדיה יוסף אולם במתקפה נגד תנועת ש"ס.

הרב יצחק התייחס לטענות שהופנו בסוף השבוע (מוצ"ש) על ידי מקורבי הרב עובדיה יוסף, לפיהם מרן הגר"ע יוסף לקח באופן אישי וקשה את האמירות של הרב יצחק נגדו.

הרב אמנון יצחק אמר במהלך הרצאה שנשא: "אמנם שלושה עיתונים חרדים, לא התפתו ולא כתבו בכלל, כי הם חושבים שזה (הארוע מוחי שמרן הגר"ע יוסף עבר ק.ר) גם היה מבויים".

"הם (בני ביתו המסורים של הגר"ע יוסף ואנשי ש"ס ק.ר) מסוגלים גם להסיע את הרב בשבת בשביל להצליח במפלגה" אמר הרב אמנון יצחק.