Category Archives: Talmud

By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for 5tjt.com

Today is Purim Katan. Purim Katan, which happens approximately every 2 years and 8 and a months on average, occurs whenever there is an Adar Rishon. Unfortunately, many people treat it as kind of afterthought. There is a good argument that can be made, however, that marking this day- is actually a Torah obligation!

But, before we get to Purim Katan lets get a little background:

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BACKGROUND OF RABBEINU YECHIEL

Rabbeinu Yechiel of Paris was one of the great Baalei HaTosfos from Northern France. He is perhaps best known for defending Torah Judaism in the first of the Christian-Jewish debates forced upon our ancestors in Europe in 1240. The debate he was forced into by King Louis IX with the evil Nicholas Donin of La Rochelle, who caused the murder of thousands of Jewish children, was the first of a number of such debates.

Rabbeinu Yechiel of Paris also headed the once great Yeshiva in Paris with 300 talmidim. Among them was his student, the Maharam mRottenberg (the Rebbe of the Rosh, father of the Tur). However, after King Louis IX (ironically called Saint Louis) burned over 12,000 copies of the Talmud in France, the Yeshiva had, as a consequence, lost its grandeur.

HIS CELEBRATION OF PURIM KATAN

But Rabbeinu Yechiel of Paris is also known for his position on the celebration of Purim Katan. He invited numerous people to his Purim Katan Seudah. The Leket Yosher writes that Rabbeinu Yechiel also added an extra dish to the meal and also had the practice of eating figs at this Seudah. The Mishna Brurah mentions that Rabbeinu Yechiel had this practice of being marbeh bSeudah likely implying that we should be doing it too.

There are certain other halachos regarding Purim Katan that we follow on this day. We do not fast, nor do we eulogize. Shacharis and Mincha may end a little bit earlier because the Tachanun is not recited on Purim Katan. LaMenatzayach is also not recited at Shacharis. But Rabbeinu Yechiel is noted for even holding a Seudah and inviting others.

We do find other mention of it as well. The Tur in OC 697 cites the view of the Rif (who preceded Rabbeinu Yechiel) that one should have a Purim Katan seudah on the 14th of Adar Rishon. One doesnt do so on Shulshan Purim of Adar Rishon, however. The Bais Yosef writes so as well, but notes that Mishloach Manos is not done. The Baalei Tosfos, however, do hold that even on the 15th of Adar Rishon there would be a Shushan Purim Katan observed. The meaning is (according to the Pri Magadim and the Mishna Brurah) that even cities that are surrounded by a wall that would normally observe Shushan Purim only hold a seudah on the 14th not the fifteenth in an Adar Rishon. The Ran, cited by the Maharil writes that it is a Mitzvah to celebrate on the 14th of Adar Rishon, but the Maharil adds the caveat that he had not seen it practiced. The Bais Yosef and SmaK also cite the Ran.

The Ramahs actual wording on the topic is, There are those who say that one is obligated to increase in joy and feasting on the 14th of Adar I; however, this is not the practice. Nonetheless, one should increase somewhat his joy and feasting in order to fulfill the words of those who are stringent , [as it states in Proverbs,] One who is of good heart is festive always.

But lets get back to Rabbeinu Yechiel and his practices.

WHY DID RABBEINU YECHIEL PLACE SUCH AN EMPHASIS ON IT?

This author would like to put out four theories as to why Rabbeinu Yechiel placed such an emphasis on this observance of Purim Katan:

Theory #1: The simple implication of the Mishna in Megillah (1:4) of, Ain bain adar Rishon lAdar Sheini elah krias hamegillah umatanos levyonim implies that other aspects of Purim should be observed.

The question on this theory would be, Yes, but what about mishloach manos?

Theory #2: There seems to be an indication from the Talmud Yerushalmi that the miracle of Purim had actually occurred in an Adar Rishon.

Rabbi Levi said in the name of Rabbi Choma ben Rabbi Chaninah: That year was a leap year. How so? It is written, Cast the pur, that is the lot, before Haman, from day to day and from month to month, to the 12th month, the month of Adar. The extra verbiage may indicate that it was on an Adar Rishon even though the Bavli indicates otherwise.

Theory #3:

Perhaps Rabbeinu Yechiel held of the future position of the Chasam Sofer (at the end of his Chiddushim on the Mesechta) that not eulogizing and not fasting on Purim Katan is actually a Deoraisah Torah obligation. He writes that although Megillaha and the other Purim practices are miderabanan the obligation to mark a miracle is actually from the Torah. The Gemorah in Megillah 14a derives the obligation to thank from Pesach through the use of a Kal VaChomer. If there is an obligation to thank Hashem on Pesach where we merely obtained freedom from slavery, is it not a kol shekain to do so when we obtained life from death? The Chasam Sofer further cites a Ramban in Sefer HaMitzvos to this effect as well.

Theory #4

It is interesting to note that during the time of the Beis HaMikdash, before we had a set and fixed calendar, there were times when we had two Purim Gadols and no Purim Katan. How is that?, the reader may ask?

In those times, it was the Sanhedrin that decided upon adding an extra month or not in order to ensure that the barley crop would be ready so that we could bring the Korban Omer in its proper time. Sometimes, however, the Sanhedrin would only decide to add the extra month of Adar after Purim had been observed! In that case, we had two observances of Reading the Megillah, Mishloach Manos, Matanos LEvyonim, the Purim Seudah, and at least a month and a half of true Mishenichnas Adar Marbim BSimcha.

Since the Purim of Adar Rishon of the times of the Beis HaMikdash was thus likely to be so much more significant, Rabbeinu yechiel might have felt that it was worthwhile to mimic some aspects of the observation of Purim Katan in the Beis HaMikdash, and he, therefore, held a Seudah, inviting others too.

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Rabbeinu Yechiel of Paris and Purim Katan: 4 Theories - VINnews

CORFU, Greece The door of the Scuola Greca synagogue on the island of Corfu is painted emerald green with two Stars of David in the middle. When you push it open, the hallway leads to a low-ceilinged space where painful memories rest between the bricks: portraits of the islands Jewish Holocaust survivors adorn the walls.

By Yannick Pasquet

The interior of the Scuola Greca synagogue on Corfu.

One photograph is of Rebecca Aaron, sitting on a large armchair with a patched armrest, in a blue gown whose sleeve does not quite cover the faded ink on her arm from her time in Auschwitz. Aaron was the last of some 50 Holocaust survivors who returned to Corfu after the war; the islands daily newspaper, Enimerosi Greek for Information said her 2018 death concluded the most tragic chapter of Corfus modern history.

Two thousand Jews lived here before the Holocaust today there are only 60 of us left, Zinos Vellelis, a former clothing-shop owner and former president of the tiny community, told me at the beginning of our long interview. I got married here in 1993, he said, referring to the Scuola Greca synagogue. Since then, only three weddings were held.

I am a French journalist who has worked for the past 20 years in Germany and Greece. Ive spent many summers on Corfu, a jewel on the Ionian Sea with green olive trees, cobblestone streets and about 100,000 residents that is the setting for the British TV series, The Durrells in Corfu. After walking past the synagogue many times, I wandered inside one day in 2015, shortly after the terror attack that killed four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Inside, I found an old man, who shared his fear of starting over. He told me how nearly all of the islands Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust. When you live in Berlin like I do, you are obsessed with the history of the Holocaust, so I set out to understand the history of this small community.

It turns out that Jews have lived here among the Greek Orthodox Christians for more than 800 years. During the Venetian period, between 1386 and 1797, Romaniote Jews those who spoke Greek lived in a ghetto alongside Jews who had been expelled from Spain or Italy. To this day, inhabitants of Corfu refer to the neighborhood as Evraki or Ovraki, which mean Jewish in, respectively, mainstream Greek and the dialect spoken on the island.

Scoula Greca, which was built in the 17th century, is made of yellow stucco and Venetian in style, with the sanctuary on the second floor. It is the only one of the ghettos four synagogues that has survived time. Next to it are the overgrown ruins of the Talmud Torah, which was damaged by bombs during World War II.

There are no rabbis on the island anymore. One from Athens comes for the high holidays and Passover, or to officiate at any major event. We cannot provide a synagogue service on Saturday, Vellelis said.

Vellelis, 68, paged through a book detailing the history of the Jews of Thessaloniki, a port city on the other side of the country that was sometimes called the Jerusalem of the Balkans. There were 56,000 Jews there before World War II; 1,950 after. Here in Corfu, the book says, 2,000 were deported to concentration camps, 187 survived.

Vellelis, himself the son of two of those survivors, recited the wretched figures in a sorrowful tone. On my mothers side, nine people were deported and only two survived, he told me. On my fathers side, nine people were also deported and three came back.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington estimates that Greece lost at least 81% of its 60,000-70,000 Jews during the Holocaust, most of them exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Germans occupied Corfu in September 1943. On June 9, 1944 only four months before the Nazi withdrawal from Greece all islands Jewish inhabitants were systematically ordered to meet in the Kato Platia, the main square of the old town, before being taken to the old Venetian fortress nearby.

The German historian Diana Siebert, in a book on Corfus history, says that about 1,800 Jewish men, women and children were transported on three boats to Athens between June 11 and 15. From Athens, they were taken by train to Auschwitz.

Some unknown number of Corfus Jews escaped this fate by being hidden by non-Jewish villagers on the island.

The French director Claude Lanzmann devoted a part of his 1985 documentary Shoah to the tragedy of the Jews of Corfu. Among those interviewed were Rebecca Aarons husband, Armando, who was also a longtime leader of the community before his death in 1988.

We arrived in Auschwitz on 29 June, Armando Aaron testified in the film. Most of us were gassed during the night. According to the archives at Auschwitz, 446 men and 175 women, slightly more than a third of the total, instead were sent to the camps for forced labor.

At the end of the war, Vellelis told me, most of the survivors from Corfu went to Israel. Among them were his own father, he explained, but British soldiers at the Haifa port turned the boat back, and about 50 survivors from Corfu returned home.

My father was married to my mothers sister, but she died in Auschwitz, Vellelis noted. He remarried my mother after that.

The main person responsible for the deportation of Corfus Jews was Anton Burger, who managed to escape justice after the war. He was sentenced to death in 1947 in the Peoples Court in what is now the Czech Republic, but escaped from detention before the scheduled execution. He was arrested again and escaped again and survived under false identities until his death in 1991.

Many of the Jews in Corfu today are children of survivors, said Lino Sousi, 73, a retired civil engineer and another former chairman of the Jewish community. My mother was sent to Auschwitz with 35 members of her family. Only she and her three sisters survived.

Sousi said his mother never spoke about her Holocaust experience. My aunt told us about her ordeal, but we didnt ask many questions, he said. Children and all those innocent people were murdered. Why? I still look for answers until this day without any luck.

For the thousands of tourists who visit each summer, the history of Corfus Jews remains largely unknown.

To keep the memory alive of those who survived the Nazi occupation, Vellelis has for decades kept the striped prisoners shirt his father wore in Auschwitz hung on the wall of his clothing shop in the former ghetto, just a few yards from Corfus synagogue.

The striped shirt became a conversation starter with tourists from all over the world, said Vellelis, who retired in 2019 after 50 years running the shop. It was one of those things that allowed me to share a common history with Jewish tourists from Brazil, Australia and everywhere else.

Not far from the store and the synagogue, there is a small memorial in a sunny square in the old town, where Corfus Jews were deported to their deaths. The bronze statue was placed in 2001 and shows a frightened couple with their son and a baby in his mothers arms, all nude.

Never again for any nation, it reads.

By Yannick Pasquet

A memorial to the Corfu Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

There are a few other subtle reminders of the islands Jewish history for those who care to look as they walk through the alleys decorated with large flower pots on windowsills and colorful clothing hanging outside to dry. Albert Cohen Street honors the Swiss writer who was born on the island in 1895. There is also the street of the Jewish victims of Nazism, a narrow lane off the towns main pedestrian walkway that connects to the old ghetto.

The islands 60 current Jewish residents remain close to one another and try to keep the Jewish spirit alive in the heart of this intimate island, even as the younger generation leaves Corfu to study abroad.

And its not only the islands relative handful of Jews who are holding onto the communitys history.

Inside another tiny clothing shop, a few steps from the synagogue, Giorgos Agiotatos keeps boxes of old photographs behind the cash register of his shop.

These photos portray moments of childhood, adolescence, celebrations, house parties, and memories of a time when the Jewish community was much larger. One of the faded images shows Velleliss parents in the 1960s, at a summer party.

I grew up with Holocaust survivors and their children, Agiotatos told me when I visited. They are my friends and family and their agony is mine as well.

He keeps two Israeli flags in the shop as well, one by the box of the photos, the other behind it on a shelf. They are daily reminders that Corfu is a part of Jewish history.

Yannick Pasquet is a journalist for the Agence France-Presse (AFP) who lives mainly in Berlin and has spent many summers on the island of Corfu.

Originally posted here:

How the few Jews left on the Greek island of Corfu hold onto their history - Forward

You may have seen friends posting on social media with what seems like a secret code. A series of numbers followed by gray, yellow, and green boxes. They are part of a game called Wordle which has become an internet sensation over the past few weeks. The internet based game gives players six chances to guess a five letter word, giving clues after each attempt letting the player know if a letter and its placement in the word are correct. Every player gets the same word and resets every 24 hours meaning that you can only play it once a day and spoilers (and sometimes even hints) are strongly discouraged. There are conversations across platforms about strategies and which word to use first to get the maximum amount of most commonly used letters. If you think Wordle is fun, but not challenging or entertaining enough, you can try the many variations that have popped up including ones that use Harry Potter themed words, a dual board where you guess two words at once, and even one only using four-letter (yes those kinds of four-letter) words.

Theres a Yiddish version, of course, and theres also Jewdle, which gives you a word associated somehow with Judaism and once youve either gotten it right or run out of guesses it teaches you about the term! My favorite of the variations is the Hebrew Wordle (although I do get frustrated when it gives me a Hebrew word thats actually based on an English one, for example one day it was sauna, samech-alef-vav-nun-hey). I enjoy testing my Hebrew vocabulary and taking shorashim (root letters) turning them into nouns and building them into various binyanim structures that change the meaning of a verb. This strategy doesnt usually work, but it keeps my conjugation skills fresh and I often get to learn a new word.

This whole experience of the Wordle craze, I think, teaches us some important lessons in Jewish value. First, its good for your brain! The rabbis of the Talmud are constantly trying to stretch their brains with wordplay, to keep their minds agile and fresh with Torah verses.

Though you can play Wordle all by yourself and never share your results or talk about the word of the day, really its best experienced with community, just like Judaism. Everyone across the world gets the same Wordle word of the day and also each week we all read the same parsha (except every once in a while when Israel and the diaspora are one week off). When it comes to our weekly parsha, we learn the same stories and share lessons based on Gods words that have been taught for centuries. We are creating a knesset Yisrael, a worldwide connected community of Israel by studying the parsha in tandem. The same goes for almost any Jewish ritual lighting Shabbat candles, putting on tefillin, celebrating Passover, or singing the Shema. They can all be done alone technically, but are so much more powerful and meaningful when you know there are others doing it with you.

Lastly, words are important. Choosing the wrong word could make your Wordle streak end and also end relationships, friendships, and break trust. Or on the other hand, God created the world with words, meaning we can do the same. We can build up someones confidence, create new bonds, and have new experiences. With words, we make blessings, bring holiness into the world marking a transition from a mundane moment to a holy one.

Do we sometimes miss the mark, being so close just one green square away? Absolutely, we sometimes say the wrong thing, we realize after the fact what we could have said instead. We learn the correct words, to be more articulate, sensitive, welcoming, logical. And then we get the opportunity to try again tomorrow to find the words, to connect with community, to keep ourselves on top of our game.

Rabbinically Speaking is published as a public service by the Jewish Press in cooperation with the Tampa Rabbinical Association which assigns the column on a rotating basis. The views expressed in the column are those of the rabbi and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Jewish Press or the TRA.

Read more here:

The power of Word(le) - jewishpresstampa

Russia and the United States (with NATO behind it) are eyeball to eyeball, and the world waits to see whether Vladimir Putin blinks, to borrow from Dean Rusks comment regarding the Soviet Union from 60 years ago, or whether he orders his military to invade Ukraine (which, as of this writing, he had not).

Tensions are running high throughout the world because of it.

War, though, is a constant presence these days because of the many ongoing global conflictsin Libya, Syria, the Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, in various South American countries in one form or another, and even in Ukraine itself, among many others. Ever since Russia illegally seized Crimea in 2014, separatists in Ukraines southeast have been waging war with the regime in Kyiv, often with the help of regular Russian army units.

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History argues that wars are inevitable. All too often, though, God is used as the excuse for those wars. That was the rationale behind the Muslim conquest that began in the 7th Century and the series of Christian crusades that followed beginning in the 11th.

God is often used today to justify conflicts in our world. We saw it in Bosnia in the early 1990s, where Christians waged war on Muslims. We see it today in such places as Nigeria, where Muslims wage war against Christians.

While it certainly can be argued that God approves of war, the evidence in Jewish law is that God in fact disapproves of war outside very limited situations.

Gods views on the sanctity of life are evident in the Torah from the very beginning. Because all humans are created in Gods image (see Genesis 1:26-27), to maim or kill a fellow human is to commit sacrilege against Gods very own likeness. God says as much to Noah after the Great Flood, as will be seen further down.

Clearly, God disapproves of gratuitous physical violence of any kind. When Cain kills Abel, Gods agony is clear (see Genesis 4). Nevertheless, God sets a protective mark upon Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him. In pre-Flood days, one life was not to be traded for another.

God even tries to keep the pre-Flood humans from killing animals for food. In Genesis 1:29, the First Human is told, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, on which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food.

One verse later, God issues virtually the same command to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to all that creep upon the earth, where there is life.

All life is sacred.

This changes after the Flood, but not because Gods had second thoughts.

In Genesis 9:1-6, God begins by conceding that humans now can eat meat, but only from a dead animal. Human behavior, it seems, had sunk so low that people did not wait to kill the animals to get their meat; they just ripped limbs right off (a practice that still happens in many non-kosher meat packing plants). Gods dispensation recognizes that human nature is baser than God hoped, and that the only way to prevent such bestial behavior by humans on animals requires making some concessions and setting new rules.

Next comes the equating of human life and animal life. Yes, God says, you can eat meat, but your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it. To make the point that taking animal life qualifies for life-for-a-life treatment, this is immediately followed by Whoever sheds mans blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The positioning of these two statements makes clear that if man wants to be a meat-eater, the animal kingdom has the right to become blood-avengers, just as a man may become a blood-avenger for his beloved dead (although God is not keen on blood-avenging).

This message is brought home in Leviticus 17:3-4, where we are told that a person who kills an animal for food without some kind of sacred justification, blood shall be imputed to that man; he has shed blood. In the immediate case, that sacred justification required that the animal be killed within the precincts of the Tabernacle, presumably as a sacrifice of some kind. The late 19th century founder biblical commentator Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch put it bluntly in commenting on those verses. Killing an animal for no sacred purpose is to be taken as murder.

If to all this we add the laws God makes prohibiting murder, severely restricting the taking of human life in general and otherwise protecting the sanctity and dignity of human beings, there should be no doubt where God stands.

On the other hand, God never issued a blanket ban on killing. God never said, Thou shalt not kill, that oft-quoted phrase that is nowhere to be found in the Torah. Murder is the word used in the commandment (see Exodus 20:13).

As God continues to set forth Israels laws in the Sefer Ha-brit, the Book of the Covenant, in the chapters that immediately follow the Ten Commandments, a distinction is made between murder and manslaughter (see Exodus 21:13). Then, in Exodus 22:1-2, God denotes a difference between justifiable homicide and cold-blooded murder.

While God does not like violence and bloodshed, God also is a realist. If someone is coming to kill you and killing that person is the only way to prevent being killed, that is justifiable homicide.

Gods pragmatism is evident in the commandment regarding an unbelievably cruel enemy, Amalek. As we are commanded in Deuteronomy 25:17-19, You shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. Amaleks goal was our annihilation. War against Amalek also is justifiable homicide.

Time and again, God also tells us in the Torah that we will have to go to war against the seven Canaanite nations living in the Land of Israel. And, in Deuteronomy 20:1-18, God sets out some of the rules of war, and even promises to fight for you against your enemies, to save you. It is hard to make a case that God is anti-war given such a declaration. (It needs to be noted, though, that these wars against the Canaanite nations had no religious motivation attached. They made war on us, and we were commanded to fight back, or strike pre-emptively.)

Based on all that the Torah has to say (both pro-life and pro-war), Jewish law deduces the existence of two kinds of acceptable war: the obligatory war and the discretionary, yet divinely sanctioned, one. (Women, by the way, are required to fight alongside men in obligatory wars, according to the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sotah 44b.)

An unsanctioned discretionary war is obviously an illegal war. Davids war of conquest against Syria may be one such, because it was a discretionary war with no divine sanction. (See Sifre to Deuteronomy, Piska 51.) Any deaths that occur in such a war are considered to be outright murder.

The Talmud in BT Sotah 44b attempts to explain the two legitimate categories in this way: The wars waged by Joshua to conquer [Canaan] were obligatory, [while] the wars waged by the House of David for territorial expansion [that did have divine sanction] were discretionary.

Obviously, the eternal war against Amalek also is an obligatory war since it is mandated by the Torah. That would seem to shut down the possibility of obligatory wars in the current day, since neither the seven nations of Canaan nor Amalek exist any longer. Maimonides, however, includes as obligatory a war waged to fend off an attacking army (see Mishneh Torah, The Laws of Kings and Their Wars, 5:1). Elsewhere, he refers to the defensive war as a commanded one, perhaps in an effort to distinguish it from an obligatory war. Ostensibly, he bases this on Numbers 10:9, which recognizes the need to go to war in your land against an enemy who oppresses you. Others have argued, however, that obligatory and commanded are synonymous where war is concerned.

Pre-emptive strikes against an enemy who poses a credible and somewhat immediate threat fall under Maimonidess definition of a defensive war.

If Putin invades Ukraine, that war clearly falls under the category of an illegal war, just as Davids war against Syria was illegal.

As for God wanting wars waged for religious reasonsin order to compel the people being attacked to convert or dieGod never said any such thing. In fact, when Moses, speaking for God, warned Israel not to consider joining alien religions, he specifically said that those religions also were given by God (see Deuteronomy 4:19), so declaring war against those religions defies God. While it is true that the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus forcibly converted the Idumeans, that was an exceptionand one of which Judaism disapproved.

God reluctantly approves of war in very limited circumstances, but to use God as an excuse for making war is abject heresy.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is http://www.shammai.org.

Link:

Of God and war - The Jewish Standard

PODCAST Hello Rapids Fans! This week on Holding The High Line, its a new season, new intro, who dis? Rabbi and Red have Rapids CCL Fever. We react to the kit drop and that tweet congratulating the Los Angeles Rams. Also weve got a bunch of stickers you can just have if you message us a mailing address and how many you want.

The guys review the final preseason game, a 1-1 draw with Orlando City. Then we preview the first leg Round of 16 match with Comunicaciones FC. The show ends with an interview with Academy Technical Director Chris Cartlidge.

Heres the link to the armadillo trophy.

Holding The High Line is an independent soccer podcast focused on the Colorado Rapids of MLS and a member of the Beautiful Game Network. If you like the show, please consider subscribing to us on your preferred podcatcher, giving us a review, and tell other Rapids fans about us. It helps a ton. Visit bgn.fm for a bunch of other great podcasts covering soccer in North America.

We also have anewsletter. Visit ourSubstack pageto read our content and sign up for our newsletter via email.

Find us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Blubrry, and many other podcatchers. See the full list of podcatchers with subscription links here. For full transcripts of every episode, check out our AudioBurst page. Our artwork was produced by CR54 Designs. Juanners does our music.

We are brought to you by Ruffneck Scarves and Icarus FC. Ruffneckscarves.com is your one-stop-shop for official MLS, USL, and U.S. Soccer scarves as well as custom scarves for your group or rec league team. Icarusfc.com is the place to go for high-quality custom soccer kits for your team or group. With an any design you want, seriously motto, they are breaking the mold of boring, expensive, template kits from the big brands.

Have your team looking fly in 2022 like Andre Shinyashiki with bleached hair with custom scarves and kits from Ruffneck Scarves and Icarus FC.

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We have partnered up with the Denver Post to sustainably grow soccer journalism in Colorado. Listeners can get a three month trial of the Denver Post digital for 99/month. Go to denverpost.com/hthl to sign up. This will give you unlimited and full access to all of the Posts online content and will support local coverage of the Rapids. Each month after the trial is $11.99/month. There is a sports-content-only option for $6.99/month.

Follow us on Twitter @rapids96podcast. You can also email the show at [emailprotected]. Follow our hosts individually on Twitter @LWOSMattPollard and @soccer_rabbi. Send us questions using the hashtag #AskHTHL.

Matt Pollard is the Site Manager for Last Word on Soccer and an engineer by day. A Colorado Convert, he started covering the Colorado Rapids as a credentialed member of the press in 2016, though hes watched MLS since 96. When hes not watching or writing about soccer, hes being an outdoorsman (mostly skiing and hiking) in this beautiful state or trying a new beer. For some reason, he thought that starting a podcast with Mark was a good idea and he cant figure out how to stop this madness. He also hosts Last Word SC Radio.

Mark Goodman, the artist formally known as Rapids Rabbi, moved to Colorado in 2011. Shortly thereafter he went to Dicks Sporting Goods Park, saw Lee Nguyen dribble a ball with the silky smoothness of liquid chocolate cascading into a Bar Mitzvah fountain, and promptly fell head over heels in love with domestic soccer. When not watching soccer or coaching his sons U-8 team, hes generally studying either Talmud or medieval biblical exegesis. Which explains why he watches so much MLS, probably. Having relocated to Pittsburgh in 2019, he covers the Pittsburgh Riverhounds of the USL for Pittsburgh Soccer Now.

Photo courtesy of Colorado Rapids.

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Rapids Podcast: CCL Fever, Chris Cartlidge Interview - Last Word on Baseball

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I caught up with Somerville writer Steven Beeber, author of Heebie-Jeebies at CBGBs: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. This study of the intersection of Punk Rock and Jewish culture must make for a very interesting read. I dont know if any Punk Rock dirges have made it into a hymnal yet or can be interpreted through Talmudic Law but hey, as the Bard wrote, Ah, Sweet mystery of life.

Doug Holder: How has living in Somerville been for your writing life. Do you think it is a good place for creatives?

Steven Beeber.

Steven Beeber: Somerville is an excellent place to be a writer. Ive heard it said that there are more writers here per capita than anywhere else in the country. Im not sure thats true Im not a statistician but I do know that in a field that can often be lonely and isolating, that there is a genuine community here, which is so important. Its not Paris in the 20s, maybe, but the cafes are plentiful and the gatherings regular, so it isnt far off. Also, my wife and I both have writing sheds in our backyard, so thats yet another plus. On a more serious note, it should be said that the institutional support from the city itself is amazing. The Somerville Arts Council, among other institutions, is pivotal to providing not just support, but a forum in which writers can reach an audience.

DH: How in the world is Jewish culture reflected in, of all things, Punk Rock?

SB: Jewish culture, as opposed to Judaism the religion, is deeply embedded in Punk, especially the original version of Punk that came out of New York City. Needless to say, New York is home to many Jews, and this was especially true in the 1950s and 60s, the period during which the Punks came of age. The character of Jewish culture ironic, humorous, attuned to the injustices inflicted upon the marginalized is all but synonymous with Punk. Add to that a preoccupation with neurosis, anxiety, and, above all, Nazis, and you have all the ingredients to birth a new rock movement. Ultimately, I would say that Punk was a reaction to the Holocaust by the first generation that was raised in its aftermath.

DH: Did the Ramones, John Zorn, Lou Reed, the Dictators, etc., ever talk extensively about their Jewish background in regard to their music?

SB: Only John Zorn did before I approached them about my book. His Radical Jewish Culture movement took the unspoken elements of NY Punk to an explicit level, which makes sense since he is categorized as Post-Punk more than Punk. But in regard to the others, all of them did speak about their backgrounds extensively on record for my book.

Tommy Ramone (born Tamas Erdelyi), for instance, was raised in anti-Semitic Hungary until coming to NY as a child, and his idea for what became the Ramones bore all the hallmarks of his conflicted feelings about being an outsider. In many ways, Tommy was the mastermind behind the band, the original manager who insisted that they look and behave a certain way, the one who came up with their signature drum sound and joined the band because no one else could be taught to play it, the one who, most pivotally, insisted against the other members protests, that Joey be the lead singer. While Dee Dee and Johnny felt that Joey was the opposite of what a rock star should look like, Tommy knew that it was this very quality that made Joey perfect. As I say in my book, this look was about as Jewish as it could be, to the point where Joey could have passed for an anti-Semitic caricature in the official Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.

In regard to The Dictators all of whom were Jewish the lead singer, Handsome Dick Manitoba, and the original songwriter, Richard Meltzer, were especially forthcoming about the connection, though others such as the producer, Sandy Pearlman of Mo cowbell fame and lead guitarist and band founder, Andy Shernoff, were clearly influenced by their backgrounds.

Lou Reed, of course, wrote indirectly about his Jewishness from the beginning and more explicitly about it near the end. The Black Angels Death Song, from the Velvet Undergrounds debut, appears to be about the killing fields of Holocaust-ravaged Poland, and Egg Cream, from one of his last albums, extolls the magic of that Jewish elixir that was so much a part of his New York Jewish boyhood. Reed also took part annually in the gathering known as The Downtown Seder, a hip Passover gathering organized by the Knitting Factory founder Michael Dorf, in which Reed would read the traditional Four Questions attributed to the Wicked Child.

Many other members of the Punk scene also spoke at length about their Jewish backgrounds, including, among others, Lenny Kaye of The Patti Smith Group, Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs, Alan Vega of Suicide, and Punk manager and impresario, Danny Fields, to whom Legs McNeil dedicates his oral history of Punk, Please Kill Me. My book, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGBs: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, contains profiles based on extensive interviews with almost every early Punk rocker of importance.

DH: The Punk Rock scene originated in the Lower East Side of New York City, once the home of many Jewish immigrants in the early part of the last century. This was fertile ground for the Jews starting out in America. How did this neighborhood help to birth this new genre of rock music?

SB: I actually published an essay about this very subject in a collection called Jews: A Peoples History of the Lower East Side. In it, I posited that the LES was pivotal to the burgeoning Punk scene. Not only did Hilly Kristal born Hillel Kristal on a Zionist Socialist collective in New Jersey choose that location for CBGB, the club that became ground zero for the scene.

Tuli (Naphtali) Kupferberg of The Fugs and Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground both performed there regularly during the late 60s when future punks such as Chris Stein of Blondie religiously went to see them. Tuli remained there most of his life, and Richard Hell (Richard Meyers) fled there from anti-Semitic Lexington, Kentucky as a teenager. I could go on, but the bottom-line is that many of those who laid the groundwork for Punk and many of those who brought it to fruition, both lived and worked there, and even if they didnt, they were influenced by its volatile mix of gritty urban drama and theatrical liberal schmaltz. Its no mistake that CGBG was within spitting distance of Ratners, Katzs and the Second Avenue Deli.

DH: I am Jewish, and have a weakness for the Concord, Grossingers style of Jewish Borscht Belt humor. How did this play out in this music scene?

SB: The Borscht Belt is at the heart of everything. The Punk rockers as teens idolized Lenny Bruce, who began in that world before becoming too risqu to continue there. But other Borscht Belt comics, while tamer on the surface at least in terms of four-letter words still held the same attitudes as Bruce and dealt with them in the same way. So much of Borscht Belt humor is a coded attack on the mores of polite society, a sendup of the stuffy, hypocritical world in which Jews found themselves.

Think, in an earlier era, Groucho doing his number on society doyenne Margaret Dumont. At the same time, this humor was also self-directed, a way of defusing the attack through self-deprecation that at times hinted at genuine internalized self-loathing. Jerry Lewis and his arrested development act, Henry Youngman and his take my wife, please. Groucho himself and his, I wouldnt belong to any club that would have me as a member. Remember too, though, that Groucho is also renowned for his reply to a restricted club that denied his half-Jewish daughter admittance: If she keeps out of the water from the waist up, maybe you could let her in the pool?

DH: I dont know if my old Rabbi would agree with your thesis. Has the book been used for serious study in the Jewish academy?

SB: Yes. But I wouldnt say its limited to the Jewish academy. I have been asked to speak on the topic at conferences and universities around the world, and in fact am pretty well known in Germany. You know the phrase, Im big in Japan? I often say Im big in the other former Axis power.

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Somerville writer Steven Beeber: Finding the bagels, knishes and schmaltz in Punk Rock - The Somerville Times

Wed, 9 Feb 2022 18:00 - 19:00 Greenwich Mean Time (UTC0)

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Ancient rabbinic advice about mad dogs

About this event

This lecture will discuss some significant passages from the early (Mishnah/Tosefta) and late (Palestinian/Babylonian Talmud) rabbinic traditions of late antiquity that deal with so-called mad dogs (kelev shote). The texts introduce different classifications or taxonomies of this condition and elaborate on theoretical and practical knowledge about appropriate cures and remedies. These therapeutic advices, embedded in a religious-normative discourse, contain unexpected and sometimes puzzling details and terminology. Moreover, they display conceptual structures and literary techniques that point to a certain familiarity with technical or epistemic genres (e.g., recipes, diagnosis, incantations), while deploying also traditional rabbinic discursive forms.

The regionally diverse Talmudic texts from Palestine and Babylonia seem to reflect different assumptions and medical approaches of their surrounding cultures. The analysis will shed some light on possible interactions with and transfers of medical and cultural concepts from ancient Graeco-Roman, Byzantine-Christian, Mesopotamian, and Persian-Zoroastrian traditions. Moreover, the discussion will provide some keys to the specific ways in which the rabbis adopted, integrated and authorized such knowledge.

The speaker is Lennart Lehmhaus (PhD), lecturer at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Tbingen (Germany). Before that he held positions as research fellow and lecturer at Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), Freie Universitt Berlin (as a member of the research center SFB 980 Episteme in Motion), The Katz Center for Judaic Studies- University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. His research and teaching interests comprise ancient Jewish cultures and literatures, specifically rabbinic and Talmudic; premodern knowledge and sciences; trajectories of Jewish traditions, motifs and customs into contemporary Jewish and Israeli culture.

He has published widely on the so-called late Midrash texts in their early Islamicate contexts. His monograph on discursive features and cultural backgrounds of the ethical work Seder Eliyahu Zuta is currently in press and will be published in the Text and Studies in Ancient Judaism series with Mohr Siebeck.

In his current research, Lehmhaus works on Talmudic discourse on medical knowledge and practice in comparison to Graeco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern medical traditions. As publications from this project will emerge the Sourcebooks of Medical Knowledge in Talmudic Literature (Mohr Siebeck, 202225) and Talmudic Bodies of Knowledge Jewish Discourse on Health, Illness, and Medicine in Late Antiquity (forthcoming 2023).

Besides several peer-reviewed articles, he has edited the volumes: Collecting Recipes. Byzantine and Jewish Pharmacology in Dialogue. De Gruyter, 2017 (with M. Martelli), Defining Jewish Medicine Transfers of Medical Knowledge in Jewish Cultures and Traditions. (Harrassowitz, 2021), and Female Bodies and Female Practitioners in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (Mohr Siebeck, 2022).

Lehmhaus is the founding editor of the series ASK Ancient Cultures of Sciences and Knowledge (Mohr Siebeck, 2022-).

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Rabbinic Rabies and Rabid Rabbis the 'Mad Dog' in Talmudic Texts - The Media Line

The Torah begins with the world being created by words. Let there be is the recurring refrain. God names each item Light. Day. Night. Darkness. Earth. Sea. Heaven. From this emerges the concept that words can build or destroy.

Words matter. Every letter in the Torah is believed to have significance, and every word is essential. There are no errors. The idea of precision is so important in the Jewish origin story that we have pages of commentaries, stories, explanations and laws when an extra letter is added onto a phrase. While some critical readers of the Torah define extra letters, words and redundancy as scribal errors, there is a deep spiritual practice in combing through phrases, repetitions and words. We find meaning to justify each phrase; each phrase justifies its meaning.

It is difficult to reconcile this deep relationship between word and meaning with a 21st-century culture of using words as if they do not matter. Last week the Jewish world erupted after Whoopi Goldberg, a co-host of The View, used ill-informed words on the show to describe the Holocaust, saying the genocide was not about race and was, instead, essentially a case of infighting between two groups of white people. A flurry of conversations, articles and rage emerged in response. The words evoked fear and reflections on antisemitism, and revealed ignorance of the history of race (and genocide).

The Talmud teaches, The world exists only in the merit of the person who restrains him or herself at the time of an argument (Chullin 89a). Words create narratives. Words have the ability to disrupt, provoke and uproot, and in a world that is divided, they can cause terrible harm. Building false narratives about Jews or any other group for that matter can destroy. In Nazi Germany, Jews were dehumanized first by words as they were described as rats, defiling society. Dehumanizing another by using words can help categorize a people as less than, thus normalizing horrific acts. Of course Jews are not the only people to have been leveled by words. Indeed throughout history, efforts to separate cultural, religious, ethnic or racial groups from one another consider Rwanda or the Balkans have often begun with dehumanizing descriptions and unraveled from there. Words can highlight vulnerability and trigger attack.

Though Ms. Goldberg had no intent to deny the Holocaust, the gaps in knowledge she was forced to reconcile exposed a different lack of understanding: the degree of trauma Jews carry around all the time.

Since the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, the need for heightened security has increased the feeling among Jews that we are in existential danger. We have a history as a people of not being fully accepted into the places we call home. There is a weariness and a wariness in the Jewish community; much like for other minority groups, there is a feeling of never quite being able to rest.

How can we? Just two weeks ago a man walked into a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, and terrorized a rabbi and three congregants for 11 hours. The next week, in Washington, D.C., the city where I live and worship, the citys landmark train station was defaced by swastikas, and two Chicago synagogues and a Jewish high school were vandalized. Each incident pulls us back, echoing darkly for us the racist narratives that targeted Jews through history, and in the not-so-distant past, causing us, at various times, to lose our right to citizenship, our right to work and finally our right to live. This year the Church of England has promised that a formal apology is forthcoming to the Jews for the medieval antisemitic laws that led to their expulsion in 1290. Groups in Britain say the history of antisemitism in that country, set in motion 800 years ago, cast a shadow to this day.

Let me be clear: We are, thank God, certainly not in a time resembling 1937 Germany or medieval England. But there is good reason our community has never quite been able to calm our instinct toward fight or flight. That is why moments of misunderstanding projected from a national platform let alone having synagogues terrorized are never just about that one incident. They evoke a traumatized past that has never healed.

Jews care about not just the words that hurt, but also those meant to mollify. Ms. Goldbergs apology I said the Holocaust wasnt about race and was instead about mans inhumanity to man. But it is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race has itself been dissected and analyzed. Has it gone far enough? Had her original words had more impact than her apology could? Did it represent real teshuvah, a real desire to atone, through understanding? I believe it did. I believe there needs to be a space for error and apology in our society.

Teshuvah is the process of regretting, renouncing, confessing, reconciling and making amends. Ms. Goldberg regretted her words, renounced what she said, confessed in public, reconciled by educating herself on national television and sought to make amends. Teshuvah shleimah a complete teshuvah is when we are in the same situation again and we choose to act differently. Then we know that our internal work has taken effect.

The Jewish tradition asks me to guard my tongue, to be careful of what I say, of promises I make. If these promises are said with Gods name, I must carry out the actions promised by my words. In this time of social platforms that influence millions, pausing before we speak and taking words seriously might not be such a bad thing. Indeed it might do the work of repairing the world.

Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt is a co-senior rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C.

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Opinion | In the Jewish Tradition, the Words We Choose Matter - The New York Times

NINETEENTH-CENTURY RABBI Simcha Bunim of Peshischa told one of his followers to transcribe a quotation from the Talmud The world was created for me onto a slip of paper to keep in his right pocket. Whenever he felt sad or distraught, the man could pull out the words to remind himself that his life was of boundless value. When he was feeling powerful or important, he should instead read the words in his left pocket I am nothing but dust and ashes which would point out the humbleness of his true state. By reading these reminders, suggested the rabbi, human beings can maintain balance in their daily lives. While there are times when people might need one particular message more than the other, fundamentally both truths are always in our pockets: we are everything and we are nothing, at the same moment.

In her new book Lost & Found, Pulitzer Prizewinning essayist Kathryn Schulz comes to an understanding similar to the rabbis: the experience of grief and sadness and the experience of love and joy always happen at the same time, even when we are not fully aware of how much they are connected. In her lyrical and deeply thoughtful memoir, Schulz recounts the emotional confluence of grieving for her father following his death and falling in love with a woman, whom she soon married.

Schulzs title, Lost & Found, establishes the structure of the three-part memoir. In Lost, the books first section, the author expresses her resistance to euphemisms for dying such as passing away. Such metaphoric language, she feels, turns away from deaths shocking bluntness and instead chooses the safe and familiar over the beautiful or evocative. Despite her rejection of such evasive language, she finds herself turning to one particular phrase after her father dies: I have lost my father. The idea of losing a loved one rang true to Schulz. As she writes, these particular words seemed plain, plaintive, and lonely, like grief itself.

Schulz spends much of the Lost section exploring not the details of her fathers death or her own grieving, but the multiple meanings of the word lost. She first recounts its etymology, discovering that the word emerged from the Old English verb meaning to perish. For Shulz, to lose has its taproot sunk in sorrow. Over time, the word lost began to take on a wider variety of usages. We can lose our keys or lose a game. We can be lost in thought, or lost in a book. And we can lose our minds and lose our hearts.

As Schulz begins her intensely logical analysis of the words implications in various circumstances, the reader might be tempted to wonder if the authors riff into these abstractions is simply its own kind of evasiveness another way of looking away rather than reading the words in the pocket filled with grief. But Schulzs intellectual meditation on the language of loss is not an effort to pivot away from pain. Instead, it is an effort to open grief up to a larger and deeper kind of engagement.

Schulz returns to her familys story with a broadened perspective. Long after the familys decision to stop treatment and begin hospice, Schulz comes to the awareness that part of her loss was that everything that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see. That is, the loss she felt most acutely was that she knew she and her father would no longer be able to share in an ongoing life together. He would not see whatever might be newly found.

Schulz experienced intense grief at the loss of her father, but one thing above all others made it bearable, she says: [T]he year before he died, I fell in love. So begins the early pages of the books second section, Found, which details how Schulz initially fell in love with C. and how their relationship grew. These scenes are full of sweet romance, starting with the story of how, shortly after their first meeting, her mind underwent a life-altering reorganization as she imagined their future together. Next, she gives her account of an evening stroll during an early date: I can still remember the exact route we took, writes Schulz, and also the wending way we walked, now closer and now farther, the shifting amount of space between us suddenly uppermost in my mind. She recounts the magic of making pancakes together in the middle of the night, and the mornings reality of seeing her new partner settling down with a mug of coffee and a legal pad to start her work day. In its own way, this everyday scene was equally magical: [T]here she was, going about her life in my home, realizes Schulz, going about her life in my life.

Just as Schulz does in the previous section, in Found she considers the variety of meanings and usages of the word that makes up the sections title. She analyzes the difference between finding that is recovery and finding that is discovery. Recovery essentially reverses the impact of loss. It is a return to the status quo, a restoration of order to our world, she explains. Discovery, by contrast, changes our world. Instead of giving something back to us, it gives us something new.

Unlike in the first section, however, in the books second part Schulz has a constant awareness of how grief is always waiting for her in her other pocket. Lost and found are opposing concepts, just as grieving and falling in love are, yet both change our perception of our place in the world: What an astonishing thing it is to find someone. Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny, writes Schulz. But finding does the same; the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair.

The stunning final section of the memoir is a description of what lies for Schulz between grief and joy, between what is lost and what is found: the symbol of union the author uses in the middle of her title, &. She points out that until almost the 20th century, the end of the English alphabet was not the letter Z but the ampersand symbol. When schoolchildren recited the alphabet, it was the last symbol they pronounced. And is not an ending, writes Schulz; it is a word that leaves us hanging, waiting for what is yet to come.

Schulz finds a series of deeply touching ways to honor and celebrate both the conjunction and continuity that her entwined experiences of losing and finding love have shown her. Life, she realizes, is clearest in the forward-moving union that and promises: that moment when were alive with both grief and joy, both the knowledge that we are nothing and the awareness that the world is waiting for us. This gorgeous memoir is heartbreaking and restorative all at once.

Hannah Joyner is a freelance critic and an independent historian. She is the author of Unspeakable(with Susan Burch) andFrom Pity to Pride.

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Written in the Book of Life: On Kathryn Schulz's Lost & Found - lareviewofbooks

In ancient times the holy Torah was a manuscript that Jews would write upon a parchment scroll.Once printing was invented they divided all its verses and its chapters in an annotated book,but always their interpretation of the words made their imagination play a greater rolethan the printed or handwritten text on which they hung their own ideas like an imaginary hook,

and fill up to the brim,like vavei amudim,ideas that link like hookshiddushim in their books,to ands in columns ofthe Torah where a vavstarts each page with an and.A maskil will understand,thanks to his eruditionthe process of addition.Like vavei amudimit generates hiddushim,thereby enabling Torahto glow, and grow its aurajust like the Torahs vavim,lead-letters of its qelaphim,no less important thanits leading words which fanthe texts and make them coolfor those who use this tool.

The practice of starting every Torah column with a vavwas frowned on by great Rabbi Meir, known as Maharam,and on top of Torah columns showing as little loveas what all great rabbis showed to halakhic decisions that are dumb.

Theres more: another function that each vav not just a hookthat links all Torah columns in the parchment scroll, by signifying addition implies that, like the columns of the tabernacle, all the verses of the bookare templates of reversal of the tense into a non-linear edition.

The second verse of this poem was inspired by David Z. Mosters article inthetorah.com, Scribing the Tabernacle: A Visual Midrash Embedded in the Torah Scroll :

https://www.thetorah.com/article/scribing-the-tabernacle-a-visual-midrash-embedded-in-the-torah-scroll

Moster writes about the custom of beginning each amud, column, of a Torah scroll with a vav, the sixth letter of the alphabet, which means hook, and points out that the practice follows a paradigm that was applied to the building of the tabernacle. The columns of the Torah scroll are called (ammudim), the same term as the columns of the Tabernacle, and the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a (vav), denotes each hook that was attached to the columns of the Tabernacle to become one of the vavei hamishkan, the hooks of the tabernacle, adding that the scribal practice of the vavei haammudim is not mentioned by theTalmud or Maimonides and was attacked by Rabbi Meir ben Yekutiel HaKohen (d. 1298) and his famous teacher, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (d. 1293).

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Scrolls, Books, Hooks and Ands - Jewish Journal