Word: rabbis
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...BEGIN? by Rudolph Brasch. An Australian rabbi has collected an intellectual's compendium of trivia dealing with the origins of countless things from trouser cuffs to Caesarean births to soap. The effect is as irresistible as peanuts at a party...
...others see that we had the right religion. The attitude we now take is that we are on common ground with them, that we will work along with them." The ground has become so common that when Knights invite Masons to a joint meeting, the speaker is frequently a rabbi. Frank C. Staples, grand master of the New York State Masons, says that Masonic lodges are meeting the Knights more than halfway. In Syracuse, the Masons even challenged the Knights to a blood-donation contest; the Masons won by two pints...
These tidbits, as irresistible as peanuts at a party, are among the hundreds of facts assembled by an engagingly unstuffy Australian Reform rabbi in this intellectual's compendium of trivia. Among his findings...
...FOOD. The custom of three full meals a day has been established only since 1890. Anglo-Saxon tradition knew only two meals-breakfast and dinner-and in the 16th century, dinner was eaten at 11 a.m. While discussing diets, the rabbi rejects the notion that the Jewish and Moslem prohibition against pork started because of fear of food poisoning. The pig was taboo from earliest times because it was worshiped by primitive peoples who also sacrificed it to their idols and ate it in sacred meals. This made Jews, in their passion for monotheism, reject...
...necessary first step toward unity, suggests Conservative Rabbi Seymour Siegel of Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, is a recovery of Judaism's ancient tolerance. In the 1st century B.C., for example, the Sadducees and Pharisees and the rabbinical schools of Hillel and Shammai differed bitterly in their interpretations of the law; yet they did not seek to exile opponents from the ranks of accepted Judaism. Siegel concludes that in today's Judaism there can be no single interpretation-which means that Orthodoxy in particular must surrender its exclusive claim to represent true Jewry...