Boing Boing has a link to one of the most interesting kids books I have seen in a while.
These pictures are among the tamest in the book. I am certainly not prude, but this book is a little out there.
Or maybe not.
You make the call.
Archives for August 2006
A Quick Roundup of Posts
Here is a snapshot of what I blogged about:
If You Died, Who Would Take Care Of Your Children
Frum & Gay
CNN Reporter- You Left Your Microphone On
Not All Values Are Equal- Moral Superiority
Another Day, Another Funeral- It is Elul
You might also enjoy reading these older posts:
The Supermarket
I Yelled At G-d
The Search For Answers About Our Ourselves
If You Died, Who Would Take Care Of Your Children
If you ever want to kill a conversation. If you ever want to change the tone into something more somber and muted ask a parent if they have made plans for where the children would live if something happened to them.
It is a frightening topic. It is a hard topic. It is uncomfortable to consider what would happen to your children if they were to lose their parents. It is painful to think about a future in which you do not participate.
It is a discussion that you have to have. As a parent you have to take the time to consider all of the angles. If the worst happens, who gets the kids. Who do you trust to raise them. If the worst happens is there someone who can provide for them. Is there is friend or family member who you can rely upon to take care of your children.
Will they respect your wishes and impart the same values upon them that you would. And assuming that you have someone in mind that you would like to act as a surrogate parent, will they be capable of taking this responsibility on.
One of my sisters and I recently spent time talking about this. We live on opposite coasts. She is on the Frigid East and I am out here in the Sunny West. Neither one of us is likely to pick up and move any time soon so if anything happened there is a good chance that the kids would find that their worlds had been turned upside down in every possible way.
Of course this is only a hypothetical, a worst case scenario that we hope never develops into any sort of twisted reality.
But you know the old saying, people plan and G-d laughs. As we head into another new year I ask again to be given the opportunity to see my job through. At a minimum I need another 100 years or so.
I’d like to meet my great-grandchildren. Is that so much to ask for.
Frum & Gay
Welcome to the ten minute post. Yes, that is right. This post was composed in ten minutes. Let’s see if it actually makes sense.
The impetus for this particular post is a result of the discussion taking place over at A Whispering Soul. I’d like to pick out a couple of sections and briefly comment on them.
“The Orthodox community has been notoriously slow in dealing with issues they are uncomfortable with, or which they would like to pretend do not exist (domestic abuse, childhood sexual abuse, etc.). With regard to the issue of homosexuality, I am certain there is a great deal of homophobia that comes into play in the Orthodox world. The advice normally given by Rebbeim in the past to “just get married and it will go away” clearly indicates a lack of understanding of the issues involved on the part of the Rebbeim, not to mention being horribly unfair to the individual concerned and their unsuspecting spouse.
With the recent coming out of the principal of Flatbush Yeshiva, who has stated that he can no longer be Orthodox, and the film Trembling Before God, which explores the lives and struggles of “gay Orthodox Jews, ” and with more young Orthodox Jews coming out, Orthodox Jewry is being confronted with the issue like never before. In the last year alone, I have heard four different shabbat sermons delivered at different shuls on the topic. Most advocate compassion. While that is a start, it is not enough.
No, I don’t know what the answer is, because there is no answer. I have a hard time believing that HaShem would seemingly be so cruel as to expect someone to lead a life without love or a life of celibacy, but the Torah is also fairly clear. In the end, we don’t know HaShem’s reasons, and really it doesn’t matter what the reasons are. I guess what I would like to see is for Orthodoxy to better understand the issues involved and see beyond the homophobia; to set up a framework to allow those who want to stay Orthodox but not indulge their sexuality to not feel left out of the community; and not to shun those who struggle.”
I appreciate MCAryeh’s candor and his sensitivity. It is not a black and white issue, no matter how badly some people might want it to be. If you maintain the immutability of Torah than the matter would in theory have an easy answer. You can be homosexual, you just cannot act upon the desire.
To me it is not that simple. I cannot accept nor believe that there is an omnipotent creator who set up this sort of stumbling block for people. I cannot accept nor believe in answers such as “G-d has a plan, we just don’t know what it is.”
Comments like that tend to infuriate me. I once heard someone tell a group of survivors something similar. I wanted to throttle him. Are you trying to tell me that survivors of one of the greatest horrors ever seen by mankind should be comforted because they are part of some unexplainable celestial plan.
No Way. It is unacceptable.
At some point in time you have to wonder about it all. You have to ask yourself if the concept of immutability is valid and even if it is, has man corrupted it. That is, if man is fallible have we gotten it wrong. Have we made a mistake in our understanding and interpretation and are we passing this mistake down through the generations.
What do you think?
CNN Reporter- You Left Your Microphone On
Not All Values Are Equal- Moral Superiority
Dennis Prager has another good opinion piece here.
“Last year at UCLA, I debated a professor who argued that Israel and the Palestinians were moral equivalents. He is not alone (especially on college campuses) in his lack of understanding of the immoral nature of the Islamic enemies of America and Israel.
Thus it is important to remind people once again about the moral world inhabited by the people we are fighting, whom President George W. Bush calls the Islamic Fascists. Societal examples:
– The Islamic Republic of Sudan, in its attempt to force Arab/Muslim rule on the largely non-Arab and non-Muslim population of southern Sudan, has led to the killing of well above 1 million Christians and animists and black (i.e., non-Arab) Muslims, in addition to the widespread enslavement, rape and torture of those people.
– No major international Arab or Muslim organization has condemned the Sudanese government’s mass murders that border on genocide.
– The leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and repeatedly called for the annihilation of Israel. As the 6 million Jews of Israel do not plan a mass exodus from their ancient and modern homeland, such annihilation would in fact mean another Holocaust.
– The holy center of Islam, the Muslim country where the holiest Muslim sites are situated, is Saudi Arabia. That country bans the practice of any religion other than Islam, amputates hands of thieves, does not allow women to drive a car, mandates what women wear outside of their homes and is the only country in the world to feature a weapon on its national flag. Women were treated considerably better and had more civil rights in ancient Rome, not to mention ancient Israel, than women living in the holiest cities of Islam today.
– Virtually every Islam-based country decrees the death penalty for any Muslim who converts to another religion.
In other words, every country that calls itself “Islamic†is morally inferior to just about every country in North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, almost every Asian country and many African countries.
No Muslim country treats non-Muslims and their religions anywhere nearly as decently as any Western non-Muslim country (including Israel) treats Muslims. That is why tens of millions of Muslims immigrate to non-Muslim societies and virtually no non-Muslim immigrates to any Muslim society. In every Muslim country, non-Muslims are either systematically persecuted at worst or treated as inferiors at best.
Individual examples (in just the last five months):
– “A German court sentenced a Turkish man to more than nine years in jail yesterday for the ‘honour killing’ of his sister. . . . The murder of Hatun Surucu, 23, who was shot several times at a bus stop in a Berlin suburb last year, shocked Germany. . . . Forced to marry a cousin in Turkey as a young girl, Ms. Surucu later broke with her Turkish-Kurdish family in Berlin and was living independently with her 5-year-old son, to the intense disapproval of her relatives. . . . Public outrage at the murder was exacerbated when some teenage boys at a school with many pupils from immigrant families . . . reportedly openly applauded the killing, condemning the victim for having lived ‘like a German.’†(The Guardian, UK, April 14, 2006)
– “Men using machetes attacked worshipers in three Coptic [Christian] churches in the port city of Alexandria [Egypt] on Friday morning, killing an 80-year-old man and wounding at least six other people, the police there said.†(International Herald Tribune, April 15, 2006)”