=Purakis1 ================================================================= THE BROIGES BEGGARS GAZETTE Publiee en Broiges, Belges -----------------------------------------------------------------* FROZEN KISLEV EDITION Slightly Thawed 10 Tevet ------------------------------------------------------------------ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - OUR PRICE: NIE (Nu, Israeli Euros) 1.5 CHEAP "I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - IMPORTANT HALACHIC NOTICE: This Frozen Kislev Edition has been published in Galutz, so it can be read before first chopping off a tithe (though not a Fifth, particularly if soaked in Bourbon) and feeding it to a Holy Polar Bare (or if you're all at sea, to a Holy Mackeral in a Wetsuit.) Persons traveling to the Swiss Alps in winter are advised not to tie their horse to the Servants Entrance of the Osteria before sitting down to supper. ================================================================ù 'Judas Iscariot' is not 'a Jew from the City' ['Yehuda Ish Kyria', the City being Jerusalem, the only city, but 'a >udean from the City' -- presumably a Jerusalemite. Presumably, as he was a traitor, his name was 'blotted out', as is the name of 'Acher' (tho a reference to him survives in Prke haAvot). Most (all?) of Jesus other disciples were Galileans, so a Judean be remembered as such. All were Jews, so that would not be a distinusihing epithet. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe what we light Friday evening is not candles, but a fire -- for the poor man can barely afford to burn wood to eat his evening meal in warmth; weekdays he just eats fast and gets into bed, hopefully with wife, for warmth. ----------------------------------------------------------------- And midnight tikunim ae for old men on long winter nights. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Is a Teflon pan pareve? For, like glass, nothing can stick to it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 3 Tevet -- the night of the full Menorah: Of course the mitzvot are not 'commandments' -- tho that's a useful anthropormophic simplification -- they're signposts, like the cairns above treeline as you climb toward Mt. Washington in snowy clouds. But for most of us, some of the time ("dark night of the soul" and all that), if we didn't think of them as commandments -- then we'd be too downhearted to do them, and then we would get a bit lost, for a bit. (Trust Christianity to oversimplify everything. "It's cute and sweet, but it's not Yiddishkeit." (RSC, more or less, tho in a somewhat different context.)) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 'Impure' is a misleading translation of 'tahar'. 'Funky' would be better. 'Funky' is a baby that needs changing. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 5 Tevet: APOLOGIA FOR A CHRISTMAS TREE: Paganism, being non-ideologic, ('necessarily', or 'grammatically [in Wittgenstein's sense) does not contradict, and is not necessarily incompatible with, Judaism. Like most USA Jews, in the 1940s anyhow, I grew up celebrating Christmas. It is like Thanksgiving -- a family festival -- but with all those presents crammed into it, so, like Hallowe'en, it's really just for children. The patron deity of Christmas is, of course, Santa Claus. There are certain sects in the USA that, I gather, celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas, for reasons that are not quite clear. One may find the presence of Jesus in the land of Israel/Yehudim , but certainly not the spirit of Christmas. Least of all in Bethlehem, even before the PLO trashed it. And it is the land of Israel and of Yehudim. To that people(s) it was given, and possessed, and never to any other people (RSC says that somewhere, more or less.) Some call it the 'Holy Land'. But there are many holy lands. And any land can be recognized as holy, if it hasn't been trashed. (PVK once said, when the bulldozers tear up the land, the fairies flee. And I assume all spirits, and spirit, and holiness.) And anyhow, most of really do not want a holy land, as_it_is_said, "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." Even most Israelis find excuses to not come often to Jerusalem. Which is maybe why it had to be a Commandment, to come three times a year, on the three harvest festivals. Because if it wasn't a Commandment, most folks would be too overawed to dare come up there. Especially on foot, having to decide "every step of the way" to continue with the ascent. If it wasn't for Dumbo_the_Flying_Elephant__747_Cacoons, most folks would never dare go anywhere. I mean, instant womb, from the time you enter the airport terminal you don't have to face reality until you land with a bump. Reb Zusha served with Love, but one day he asked to feel what Yirah (awe, misleadingly translated as 'fear' [of Heaven] ) was like. Immediately his wish was granted, and he hid under the bed until They had mercy (Chesed, over-riding Din, which is: you eventually get what you asked for, whether you really wanted it or not). Well, I was there on Rodos, unable for a while even to walk across the street, much less walked down the Port and buy passage back to Israel. For a while I thought I was locked in Shabat because I hadn't made havdalah. Joel Glick, R. Shlomo's nephew and maybe his only family spiritual successor, used to push havadlah into the evening of motzi Shabat. Now I see the mitnagid point of doing it on time, whether you want to or not. This is "not add (nor subtract)". One of the heresies of Chabad is that you have to be holy to go to Israel. You don't, you just have to be Jewish. Or Christian, for a visit anyhow. Or like Hof Tzittzit at Eilat. A necesarry precondition of Christmas is a a snow-draped fir tree. (sa, Campra, 5 Tevet, 17 Dec '04) A NOTE ON HERESY: [ Written after advising a friend not to watch DVD's of The Matrix trilogy. ] I once wrote and posted, briefly, that my Caveats were for "nothing outrageous, just a dash or two of heresy perhaps." Today I say: "Just kidding, folks." "Today make I mention of my sins." Eg, I'm too humble. What I do ain't heresy, and also, heresy exists, and it's nothing to play games with. It's "bad waters" I write, if not l'shem shemayim, at leat to add a bit of interest to the parthenon of the Pantheon Restaurante, which is at the firsts cable-car gondola stopoff. (I guess here I was just pushing out the old notion of siddhis , psychic powers, the occult, as a distraction on the mystic, and especially the religous/mystic, path. Everyone knows that the astral plane occurs at about the 2nd of the 7 spheres, and that is has a nice layer on top, but a bad one underneath. I mean, if you're not real clean, you might go out for just a little sunset flight before supper, and get eaten by a Petrodactyl. So everyone says, stay off it. Heresy is Amalek. OK, whatever. But what is heresy. We're not talking a Friday Night Open Bar Orgy at the Golden Calf Disco. That's just a relatively stupid and expensive way to let off steam. I mean, Moses should have come back down off his mountain, if he had to, the day before, or if he was too high and mighty to come back to earth when we needed him, he should have followed his own heart and gone back to bed, and then come back the next day the morning after, and a civilized hour. Preferably with a lot of tomatoe juice and some black pepper. Then maybe we could have carried on. "Work on what has been spoiled," like the I-Ching says. I mean, whatever put it into his head that he had to wake up and get up and come down at the one time when he should been being an old holy man and let the kids alone. It was no big deal, we could have gone back to work the next day. Now my boyfried is dogmeat and I think I'm pregnant, this is not what I wanted. And I'd got to hide from these facist Levites wither damned swords. I hope my friends are ok. Whatever put it into his head to spil everything that he'd already spoiled by trying to turn back time. THAT's where heresy is at. Whatever nudniked him to wake up and come down must have been the same one that tempted crazy old Abraham -- I mean, when they say Elo(k)im this isn't like from Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms; there's some heavy duty umdercurrents there, and some of them ain't very nice. I mean , tempted crazy old Abraham, that old fool with eyes that could see three thousand years, took him out of a nice place under the Oak Trees in Hebron and sent him into exile in Berrsheva, just when he finally had a boy to be proud of -- the kid was like, totally freaked out , won't talk to him now, won't have anything to to with X halacha, says he's going to go into an ashram or something. So use your common sense and human decency, don't run around listening to voices. Just like it screwed up Abraham, it got to Moses, for all the good stuff he'd brought down. How can someone who came up with all those great ways to go through life have a weakness for a dash of Jewish ?facist I mean, all those dead Midianites And Kosbi was ok, just a bit of a wild lady -- especially when she was with her Sisterhood, or whatever they call it -- I wanted to say: Darwin says, there are predators throughout nature, so why should evolution not have produced Mr. Geeko and the imaginary Donald Trump. PVK once said: If you want to be an Innocent, be careful; there are beings who prey on Innocents. Jesus said: "be wily as serpents. Shevki once said of someone: He takes pleasure in the misfortune of others. That is very strange. Not to the Europeans, or anyhow the Germanics, they even have a word for it, SchadenFreude. Oy. "One could live if they'd let you." It's ok to eat a little bitty lamb if you're hungry and have a spare jar of mint jelly. But everyone knows, those who go out hunting for sport are bad apples. Everyone knows of the shochet who whet his knife with his tears. Frank Walters wrote, in 'The Man Who Killed the Dear' , of how much an American Indian has to pray before he dares to go out hunting for just one dear. The trouble with Christians, especially the New Germans, is that they don't admit the existence of evil. So then they blame us for defending against it. Political Correctness is an affectation of the rich and shelteed. Eg, the President of the USA. And a Vice-President who pulls his strings, and looks like a HerBlock cartoon of the H-Bomb. And the Chief Justice of the USA. I mean, we are talking heavy-duty corruption, Team. but heresy is the mote in the eye of the beholder, that feels like a roofbeam. Some say, the Golden Calf was not heresy, for the innocent looked through it and saw the True Heavens. A friend wanted to watch The Matrix on DVD. I said, don't do it, it's heresy. They know just enough to get everything wrong. Jefferson Airplane says: "Feed Your Head." $PVK adds: that means, don't feed it poison. (My paraphase.)