The Marriage was CATastrophic

I love cats.  My immune system doesn't, but I do.  When I was a child I had a strange fascination with the felines, often visiting our strange neighbor 'cat ladies' just to be with their multiple animals (one living near us had 17 in her little apartment in New York).  Then, waaaaay later, as an adult, I suddenly developed adult-onset-cat-allergy.  Just like that.  All I had done was visit a neighbor with 2 dogs and 7 cats.  And that's it--that's all it took.  Started constricting and had to leave, fast.  Ran home, turned on AC, lay on my bed, and tried to breathe.

This guy should have seen it coming; from The Times of Israel:

Purrfect grounds

Couple splits over 550 house cats

Wife was willing to lose husband, but not her pets

By Hillary Zaken May 23, 2012, 1:44 pm 

Cats (illustrative photo credit: Rachael Cerrotti/Flash90)

Related Topics

• divorce
• rabbinical courts
• Beersheba

A

man from southern Israel divorced his wife this week because she had brought 550 cats into their home.

The husband, apparently not a cat lover, told the Rabbinical Court in Beersheba that he was unable to sleep in his bedroom because the surface of the marital bed was constantly covered with cats who refused to lie on the floor.

The man, in his divorce request, complained that the cats also blocked his access to the bathroom and did not allow him to prepare meals in the kitchen, the Hebrew daily Maariv reported Wednesday. When he sat to eat, cats jumped onto the table and stole his food.

The couple attempted reconciliation at the behest of the rabbinical court. The wife, however, was unable to part from her cats… and preferred to part from her husband.

In Honor of "Yom Yerushalayim": Jerusalem Day

In honor of the reunification of Jerusalem in the miraculous 6-Day War of June,1967, and also to show that it is and always has been a JEWISH city, I present three videos. View them.  Be enlightened.  Act accordingly.

(this video is from Israel's 60th Independence Day. Israel just celebrated its 63rd.)





A Jewish city, from then to forever...courtesy Honest Reporting. (Hat tip, my D.H. I told him he'd better start posting on his blog again, now that he has his new DSLR...)





And finally, here are 4,000 years of history.  In 5 minutes (courtesy of The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs).

Questions About Judaisms' Truths

We have always been taught to question, in Judaism.  Jews love pilpul, by definition: love to talk, analyze, discuss, sharply critique.  You may have heard the joke about walking down the street and seeing coming towards you three men in Hassidic dress (as opposed to three obvious Muslims in Muslim dress).  What would you fear? That they'd physically attack you? Be terrorists? No, you'd be afraid they'd debate you to death.  So that's us, the People of the Book (as opposed to the so-called "religion of peace," who are really the 'people of the sword').

Here comes a Jew, educated in England and recently retired from The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Dr. Norman Solomon, who poses the ultimate, most controversial question: is the Torah really Divine in origin?  In his book, Torah from Heaven, he explores the idea that, in light of our more modern knowledge of science and historical critique, can the notion of the Torah being divinely inspired still hold up? This is from an article in Jewish Ideas Daily, by Lawrence Grossman:

Norman Solomon is a distinguished British academician, recently retired from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, who whimsically claims to belong to the "skeptical Orthodox."  His latest book, Torah from Heaven, certainly exudes skepticism.  It argues that the central assumption of classical Judaism—the divine origin of Torah—has become so clearly unbelievable in its literal sense that the only way to keep intellectually honest Jews from abandoning Orthodoxy is to reinterpret the doctrine not as fact but as foundational myth.  Solomon, tongue firmly in cheek, tries to reassure the faithful by pointing out that myths are not necessarily false.  But he clearly thinks this one is.

Solomon painstakingly traces the development of the notion of Torah from Heaven as it mushroomed to include not only the divinity of the Five Books of Moses and the somewhat lesser holiness of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, but also a divinely inspired Oral Torah, eventually written down in the Talmud, that explains and elucidates scripture, and rabbinic decrees and interpretations through the generations that are also alleged to embody God's will.  Solomon then surveys the ancient and medieval critiques of the doctrine, which either denied the Oral Law (Sadducees and Karaites) or superseded or replaced both it and the Bible with a new revelation (Christians and Muslims). 

I myself have had questions about the origins of Judaism, and the interpretation of the "Great Event" that happened to the Jews in the Sinai desert--the "giving of the Torah," witnessed by at least 600,000 (not including women and children, which would bring the number close to a million) people. 

I still consider myself Orthodox, however, and follow the Orthodox lifestyle, because I believe it is a good one. It places a high value on a positive outlook, that we are responsible for our own actions, that we have a Divine purpose in life.  It also values treating others as you would want yourself to be treated.   And it makes time Holy,  by emphasizing holidays, especially that of Shabbat at the end of each week, as a day devoted to emulating G-d, and involving oneself with spiritual matters rather than the workaday mundane world of the rest of the week.  But intellectually, I still have those nagging questions.  Maybe the event that happened those thousands of years ago was misinterpreted, owing to the fact that people had only the scientific knowledge of their day? It is food for thought.  But meanwhile, I wish everyone a Shabbat Shalom!

Necessity: Literally the "Mother of Invention"

I am so proud of my daughter, recently interviewed by The Huffington Post about her company, Baby K'tan, which she started with a friend after inventing a unique product unlike any on the market, that I decided to repost the beginning of the interview right here on Tikkun Olam.  Please click on the links to read the entire piece.

Michal Chesal, Baby K'tan: A Baby Carrier Born From Necessity

Follow:

Baby K'Tan, Entrepreneur Spotlight, Michal Chesal, Michal Chesal Baby K'Tan, Success Stories, Babies, Baby Carriers, Baby Products, Baby Stores, Best Baby Carriers, Small Business News

After two baby showers, Michal Chesal owned a ton of baby gear and felt fully prepared for the birth of her first baby. But then something happened that she wasn't prepared for: Her baby, Coby, was born in December 1999 with Down syndrome. Immediately after Coby's birth, Chesal entered into a whirlwind of therapies, classes and adjustments. But when the therapist told her that her baby carrier wasn't good for Coby because of his low muscle tone, it was the final straw. "I thought, 'Great, one more thing I can't do,'" Chesal said. "But that's when I started to get creative."
Experimenting with products, Chesal put two slings together to create a baby carrier that provided Coby with the support he needed. People constantly asked Chesal, who worked as a director of academic affairs for a university based in Israel, where she got the unique carrier. But she didn't seriously consider starting a business until her friends, Isaac and Aviva Wernick, borrowed the carrier after their baby's open heart surgery and encouraged her to bring her creation to market.
Now in business with Isaac, Chesal sells about $1 million worth of the Baby K'tan internationally each year through roughly 700 specialty shops and chains including Buy Buy Baby and Bed Bath & Beyond. She has even tapped that must-have market for baby businesses: celebrity parents, including Patrick Dempsey and Jenna Fischer. But Chesal's biggest accomplishment has been to provide not only physical comfort and support for babies through Baby K'tan, but also comfort and support for her own children, Coby, now 12, Noa, 9, and Ally, 7, as a single mother.
How did you find out your son had Down syndrome?
We suspected it when he was born, but tests confirmed it when he was two weeks old. He had low muscle tone, so even though looking back, it was so obvious, I was young, and this was my first kid. I had no idea that newborns' arms don't typically flop around. Those first two weeks, waiting for the test results, were a whirlwind. And when I got the news, it was like being hit on the head with a baseball bat. It was just out of left field, the last thing I expected. It was definitely a huge shocker...

(to read the rest of it, click here.)

The Real Israel: "Israel Inside" Documentary

Thanks to Arlene Kushner for spreading the word about this new documentary on Israel, called "Israel Inside," streaming free for only one week starting today.  In other words, this post will self-destruct in 7 days, or 168 hours, 10,080 minutes, 604,800 seconds.  View it NOW, and pass it along: this is the true Israel.  Not the negativity you get from reading the media or strolling down your average college campus.

The REAL Avengers...were Jewish

In difficult times, we humans, when confronted with evil, an overwhelming enemy, or an uncertain, frightening future, sometimes secretly long for a super-human savior, someone who is stronger than mankind, and is able to fight for us and protect us-like, say, Superman, or Batman.

We, as well as the rest of the world,  are living in times like these at least since the atrocity of 9/11, but really much earlier than that: recall the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 2000 USS Cole bombing, just to name a few.  We were in a long, drawn-out war in Iraq and are still in a long, drawn-out war in Afghanistan, neither of which have completely defeated the Taliban or Al Qaeda.  We are still threatened by terror attacks and suicide bombers globally, on our subways, in our malls, at our bases.  Maybe this is why the new Marvel (remember Marvel Comics and Captain America? Iron Man?) movie  just released, The Avengers, has done so well at the box office.

But here is a little known story: did you know that not too long ago, during World War II, there were real heroes, who were not a myth and not super-human, but in their actions, were larger-than-life?  They were Jews, led by Abba Kovner, a Lithuanian Hebrew poet who became the head of a secret underground composed of Jews, some from the Partisans and others from the Jewish Brigade, called "Nakam" ("revenge"). This group was created after the end of WWII.  They were not satisfied with merely gaining their freedom from the death camps, while most of the Nazis were able to walk away with no punishment (there were only 24 of them in the Nuremburg trials), and continue their lives unmolested.  This was unacceptable to HaNokmim (The Avengers), and they began pursuing Nazis, hiding as ordinary citizens in various countries. Their goal was to kill 6 million Germans, one for each murdered Jew.

Now, at war's end, they saw that the guilty were about to walk free. The world wanted to move on; the Americans, especially, were anxious to absorb western Germany into a new alliance against the Soviet bloc. But these fighters were not ready; before they could be at peace, they would first have to avenge the blood of their fellow Jews.
Some accounts suggest the group that would come to be known as the Nokmim, Hebrew for avengers, was born in the spring of 1945 in Bucharest. A Passover gathering of survivors was addressed by Abba Kovner, of the Jewish uprising in the Vilna ghetto, who would go on to become the uncrowned national poet of the State of Israel. He spoke passionately, invoking Psalm 94, in which God promises that he shall deal with the enemies of the people of Israel: "He will repay them for their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness." This, Kovner suggested, was the fate that should be meted out to the Germans. And if the courts of international justice would not do it, then the Jews should do it themselves.

They succeeded in bringing their justice to hundreds, at least.  These, were the true Avengers.

Ironically, or in the light of the story above, maybe not so ironic--the creators of many well-known comic super-heroes such as Superman, Batman, and others, were Jews.

"The Heart of an Israeli"

Wild Bill for America, as he calls himself, A former law enforcement officer who grew up in the Colorado Rockies has figured out  the difference between Israelis and "Palestinians" after having dealt with Islamic terrorist activities, and learning about stories such as this one, below.

                                                                          

He has figured out who the enemy is.  Have you?

He Doesn't Mince Words. Ouch.

These are Pat Condell video from perhaps a year or so ago.  I must have missed it the first time around.  No better time than...now (you might say he's rather blunt).  Here is what the truth sounds like.  You know which truth: the one everybody is afraid to say, but secretly in their hearts, believe.