People of the Book and the Bible
By Yair Ettinger"Attention female book lovers! Please conclude your shopping and start heading out, since at 8 P.M. it will be the men's turn to look for some reading material." Shoppers at the Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox book fair in Jerusalem will hear this announcement booming from speakers every night this week. While separation between the sexes is strictly observed, the reading material suggests that the community has seen some major advances in recent years.
Like during the last couple of years, the third annual Biblical Book Week was timed to coincide with its secular equivalent taking place across the nation. Biblical Book Week is held in three different locales across Jerusalem, each appealing to a slightly different crowd.
Two sales points can be found at two of the capital's ultra-Orthodox shopping centers: Center 1 and Rav Shefa. The two centers target all strata of the Jerusalemite religious community, from the national religious to modern ultra-Orthodox families.
The third sales center is a bit different. It is located in a closed wedding hall near Bar-Ilan Street, and is sponsored by the ultra-Orthodox daily newspaper Hamodia. The Bar-Ilan book fair appeals to a far more conservative crowd and is subject to more rabbinical supervision. It is also the one sales point that separates female and male shoppers.
But even the Bar-Ilan book fair demonstrates the significant progress the ultra-Orthodox community has made. In addition to the holy writings and religious encyclopedia for diligent yeshiva students, the stalls at Bar-Ilan offer children's books, comic books, suspense thrillers, biographies of prominent religious figures, cookbooks, and leisure literature. In fact, almost anything goes as long as the authors and publishers hail from within the community.
For example, the Feldheim ultra-Orthodox publishing house recently published a new kosher version of the Guinness Book of Records. The "Book of Records and Wonders" appears to be very popular with the young readership, and ultra-Orthodox children can be seen huddling by the Feldheim stall chirping with excitement as they read about Jewish records. There, inquisitive young minds can find answers to nagging issues such as what is the world's largest yeshiva (Mir in Jerusalem), or the world's oldest synagogue (Bevis Marks Synagogue in London).
"We have seen a tide of new publications over recent years," Yitzhak Pollack of the Feldheim publishing house says. "We receive new manuscripts on a weekly basis. The public is thirsty for more books, and it appears they can afford to buy them. This, in turn, leads more people to take up writing."
Alongside relatively novel and even daring books such as one entitled "A Thousand Tears" that is based on the lives of young yeshiva students who lose their path and stray away from God, ultra-Orthodox readers can also find classics.
A good example is the 23-volume collection of writings assembled by Rabbi Biton, who heads a Jerusalem yeshiva. In recent years, Biton employed a team of yeshiva students that studied and annotated the writings of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher, an influential Medieval rabbinic authority. The product of their labors can be yours for NIS 1,950.
An especially delightful characteristic of Biblical Book Week that may also appeal to many secular book lovers is the blissful absence of commercial stands, advertising cellular phone companies and banks. Espresso bars are also unheard of.
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Why the tongue in cheek, sarcastic appraoch... "nagging issues". Oh, and when secular kids read about who ate the most hot dogs it is an important issue? STOP. We are NOT you. we are different.
I do not force you to drive, smoke, dance on shabat,etc.- but you and your leeches who suck us dry are forcing us to not drive, not eat ham etc. You can have your superstitious way of life, but do not force me to be that way, especially since we are paying your bills. I love Israel, do not like most Arabs- so I am here to stay, and, hopefully, get rid of people loke you, or, at least, put you in your place.
For the most part, the Talmud has already solved the halakhic challenge that transsexuals pose. As far as we can tell, transsexuals somehow have the body of one sex (eg. female) and the brain of the other sex (eg. male). While its difficult to verify transsexuality outside of the individual's own self-identification, in principle, they are gender-indeterminate (like hermaphrodites), which the Talmud calls Tumtum, and already have an honorable place within Judaism.
Humans evolved with males and females dividing into "hunting" groups and "gathering" groups, respectively. Certainly, this gender-divided social behavior is in our genes. The only catch is (that Orthodox might not want to hear) evolving humans also included transsexuals: males who identify with the feminine "gathering" group and females who identify with the masculine "hunter" group. Evolutionarily speaking this makes sense. When the male group were hunting game, they may be following herd migrations for days, perhaps months. If the hunters got lost, the feminine males who stayed with the female group could facilitate reproduction, and visaversa. Note, transexuality (gender) is different from homosexuality (orientation). A feminine male may be sexually attracted to women, a masculine male may be sexually attracted men, etc.
It seems to me that it is you secular who force your velues on us religious, like Shabbat driving and smoking, swearing, deporting religious Jews from their houses and synagogues and plantations, abolishing hesder IDF units, selling pork, mixed dancing and the like. If you are so much against Jewish values what keeps you here, your love for the Arabs? Over and above of being a Democratic Republic, Israel is the Holy Land given to the Jews by G.d.
About this lesson I talked with a female friend. She asked why I didn't give the zinc subject to the girls and the magnesium subject to the boys. I answered that, first, I didn't want to confront the girls with male sexuality on such an occasion. Maybe I thought I would be going to far. Second, I was trying to make chemistry interesting for us personally. When she returned her test she quietly but firmly said: "Of late, I feel more and sexually harressed by A." I answered: "I realized something like that." The boy then excused himself with a laugh: "It's only joke!" I valued the fact that she said this to me and before the others as a confirmation that she wasn't afraid I wouldn't take her seriously. But I was wondering if I should have been more strict to the boy. The author, John Emsley, from one of whose books I got the informations about the importance of these and other elements for the body, concludes: For any sex it's good to begin the day with a bowl of cereals with bran...
Does anyone know who published the book "A Tousand Tears" mentioned in your article?
Occasionally we had discussions if separating the sexes is defensible not only by devine norms but also by reasonable thoughts. We might wait for the impact of gender theories, but at present, men and women ar not the same. Already when I was a boy, I was told: "You don't hit women!" We could ask why I wasn't told more generally: "You don't exchange blows with others!" The reason might be what a female friend told us: "The 30% of physically strongest women overlap in strength with the 30% of weakest men." 3 boys and 2 girls had to resit one of my chemistry tests and I decided to separate the tasks: Girls: "The element magnesium is suspected to alleviate the premenstrual syndrom." Boys: "The human body contains zinc. It's found particularly in sperm." I must admit that at school and during studies I always had comrades of both sexes and I think we have to learn to live with our differences. But difficulties surely occur: Reading his test one of the boys asked a girl if she lacked zinc
The haredim can afford to by more books than us, seculars; you see, we get no tax payer monies from the secular majority, we work to support the leeches... so they can buy their Harry Potter Like religious, superstitious crap...really irks me- would be different if they worked for a living, and did not force their values on us...
I beg your pardon, the oldest synagogue in the world being Beavis Marks from 1701? Just the Alt-neu schul in Prague dates back to the 1280s...