Favorable opinions of famous people about Jews:[1] Winston S. Churchill: Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world. John [...]
Rosh Hashanah is not a biblical holiday[1] Rosh Hashanah is not a biblical holiday, although it replaced a biblical one, and is notably different from the holiday it replaced. The biblical holiday, Yom Teruah, had a totally different purpose than Rosh Hashanah, which focuses on the onset of a new year, [...]
The Bizarre Belief in Evil Angels Part 2 Medieval Jewish Bible Commentators Accept the Existence of Angelic Beings Many medieval Bible commentators were not affected by rational philosophy. Principal among them is Rabbi Solomon Yitzchaqi (Rashi), Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides) and Abraham Saba (born 1407). These Bible commentators accepted the [...]
The Bizarre Belief in Evil Angels Part one[1] Since, as we saw in earlier essays that I wrote, demons and evil angels played such a large part in the lives of many Jews, it is advisable to explore the origin of the belief in some depth. The average Jew today is [...]
Nachmanides on Curses and Magic[1] The biblical portion Nizavim, Deuteronomy 29:9-30:20, offers us an opportunity to observe some problematic ideas of the great thirteenth century Spanish Jewish sage, Nachmanides, ideas common among people of his time, but rejected by many people today. Idolatry, magic, and divination Nachmanides’ view of [...]
Bribing Satan: Part Two[1] The Tashlich service was not the only High Holiday ceremony that the masses felt they must observe to avoid having Satan harm them. The eighth-century Midrash Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer is a rather unusual volume of biblical folk legends that many Jews insisted were true. The Pirkei author believed that [...]
The Tashlich Ceremony: Bribing Satan[1] Tashlich is a rite whose non-rational basis is obvious. It preserves a superstitious belief held by many people in ancient times concerning water and the divine beings that dwell in and around it. The rite has been reinterpreted over time, modified slightly and rationalized, but its original [...]
Strange ideas of Nachmanides His notion concerning the Sanctity of Israel[1] The biblical portion Ki Tavo, Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8, mentions laws that Israelites were expected to observe when they entered Canaan, later called Israel. This affords us an opportunity to discuss the sanctity of the land of Israel. Many [...]
Why Do Women Light the Sabbath Candles Long before the Sabbath Begins?[1] If people would take the time to look at the bulletin of an Orthodox Synagogue, they would find something very curious. The women are instructed to light candles several minutes before the men are scheduled to attend the Mincha service, [...]
The Anti-Jewish Origin of Kapparot [1] The practice of kapparot and tashlich, celebrated by many Jews, is not considered to be rational by many other Jews and Maimonides did not include them in his Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish law. The term kapparot denotes an offering tendered in the hope of gaining forgiveness [...]
The Shofar Scares and Confuses Satan, Keeping Him at Arm’s Length[1] It is absolutely certain that both the spiritual leaders of Jewry and the masses of uneducated Jews (or at least the majority of these) before, during and after the talmudic period believed that the shofar, the ram’s horn, was blown [...]
Judaism Today is Not Torah Judaism The following are some examples where the rabbis changed biblical commands. This is from my book “Unusual Bible Interpretations: Five Books of Moses,” which will be published in Israel in about a month. The stubborn and rebellious son Deuteronomy 21:18–21 has the baffling law of [...]
Rabbi Dr. Nathan and Celia Drazin My dad passed away in 1976 at age 70, but his story remains. He was a remarkable man. Nathan Drazin was one of eight children, including an adopted son taken in by his philanthropic parents. Grandfather and grandmother had a successful real estate business in Canada. [...]
Accept the truth no matter what its source[1] After devoting three chapters in the book of Numbers with ninety-six verses to the story of the non-Israelite prophet Balaam, Scripture adds another two verses In Deuteronomy 23:5–6 to remind us that God refused to listen to Balaam and turned his planned curses into [...]
The Legacy of Cain By Wilkie Collins Amazon Digital Services, 257 pages Cost: Free Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), a friend and sometime co-author of Charles Dickens, wrote enjoyable books. He was the inventor of detective novels. He is best known for his books “The Woman in White” and “Moonstone.” His plots are unusual and [...]
I Kings Torn in Two By Alex Israel Maggid Books, 2014, 350 pages ISBN 978-1-611329-004-0 Cost: $22.47 Too few people read the early historical books of the Hebrew Bible – Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings – and those who do fail to get as much out of the books as they can. Alex [...]
Thump By Avraham Azrieli It takes some time for most good novelists to be recognized by the public. Avraham Azrieli, a lawyer like many good crime novelists, is just beginning to be recognized as a very fine crime writer. He is the author of seven fictional books and two non-fiction works. One non-fiction [...]
Do we want a king?[1] Deuteronomy 17:14-20 contains laws concerning kings, specifically what a king should not do. The royal power brings to mind the ridiculous belief once held by many people, and still held some today, people who don’t know they are retaining this ancient idea. It is the [...]
Significant words with no meaning People use many words that have no meaning. Two such words are “religious” and “spiritual.” The words are usually used in a negative fashion, as in “she is not religious” and “that pastor is not spiritual enough.” The problem is that we have no idea what makes [...]
Review by Israel Drazin You Don’t Understand the Bible because you are Christian By Richard Gist Friesen Press, 2014, 176 pages ISBN 978-1-4602-4271-7 Cost: $13.99 I enjoyed this book; it is intelligent, informative, and thought-provoking. It is not a Christian book, and not even religious, at least not in the usual [...]
The Obligation to learn Hebrew Should Jews and non-Jews learn Hebrew? Rabbi Evan Hoffman of Congregation Anshe Shalom in his always learned weekly column emphasizes the values of learning Hebrew and decries the view of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), the Grand Rabbi of the Satmar Hasidic sect who was the foremost ultra-Orthodox [...]
Review by Israel Drazin Some of My Best Friends A Journey through Twenty-First Century Anti-Semitism By Ben Cohen Edition Critic, 2014, 215 pages ISBN 978-3-981-4548-9-5 Ben Cohen is a specialist on Jewish and international affairs and has written articles for the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Haaretz, Tablet, and many other publications. He [...]
Line up By Liad Shoham Harper Collins, 2013, 306 pages ISBN 978-0-06-223744-6 Liad Shoham, a practicing attorney who wrote five critically acclaimed crime novels, demonstrates the skills that made him Israel’s leading crime writer with this novel translated from Hebrew into fluent and engrossing English by Sara Kitai. Events escalate in Tel Aviv [...]
The Terrible Beauty of the Evil Man By Finis Leavell Beauchamp Finis Coronat Opus, 2014, 395 pages ISBN 978-0692237885 Cost $12.49 This is one of the best biographies I read in years. Finis’ experiences are unusual, even bizarre, but fascinating and thought-provoking. The book is written in language that reminded me of William Faulkner [...]
Should we act to get a reward?[1] Deuteronomy details the rewards that one can expect to receive for obeying God’s laws. There are many similar biblical sections. In Deuteronomy 7, the gains will be children, fruit, grain, wine, oil, cattle, flocks, goats, no infertility, no illnesses and no enemies. In Deuteronomy 11, [...]
The evolving law of levirate marriages Although the Bible mandates levirate marriages, and although the rabbis believed Scripture was revealed by God who knows everything and makes no mistakes, the rabbis changed the Torah law; in effect nullifying what the Torah states and creating an entirely new law. The practice of levirate marriage [...]
When were the Jewish temples destroyed? The Jewish fast day of Tisha[1] B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month Av, occurring in 2014 on the eve of August 4 and the day of August 5,[2] commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples. However, neither temple was razed on [...]
Did God write Deuteronomy?[1] Bible critics, as is well known, insist that neither God nor Moses wrote Deuteronomy. Many of them contend that the essence of the book originated during the first Temple period in the reign of King Josiah (640–609 B.C.E.) and that it was organized into its final form during [...]
What does Shema say? Deuteronomy 6:4–9 contains the shema, which is recited by many Jews two or three times a day, as an affirmation of their relation to God. The first two verses are translated in the 1955 version of The Jewish Publication Society (JPS) as follows. “Hear, O Israel: the [...]
The truth about conversion Many rabbis insisted that the biblical Ruth and perhaps even Orpah converted to Judaism. There are good reasons to think that the concept of conversion did not exist at the time and was only introduced into Judaism around 125 BCE. Until that time, the Israelites thought of themselves as [...]
