Word: raphael
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...Israel, perhaps partly because internal disputes and social conflicts made that state less a Jewish Camelot than it had appeared to be. Jewish thinkers have begun to emphasize an old dialectic in Judaism, the dialectic between the homeland and the Diaspora. In his. 1971 book Tents of Jacob, Anthropologist Raphael Patai points out that Jews had their first consciousness as a people not in the homeland but in an early Diaspora?in "the strange land" of Egypt. History further demonstrates that after the Babylonian captivity, Judaism was never without a Diaspora, never without Jews?some of them important thinkers?...
...Jews, and indeed to many Jews, the ethnic and religious variations among the world's 14 million Jews are bewildering. Scientifically speaking, there is no Jewish "race." As Scholar Raphael Patai points out in his book, Tents of Jacob, Jews of one geographical area share physiological traits with their immediate non-Jewish neighbors but much less so with Jews of a distant geographical area. Still, the Jews' long history of wandering as tightly knit communities has dispersed them into a wide range of distinct ethnic groups...
...Seder meal on the eve of Pass over is "the most universally ob served and therefore the most unifying of all Jewish ceremonies," says British Author Chaim Raphael. When Jews throughout the world sit down to the meal this week, they will recount and reflect again on the 3,000-year-old story of how the Angel of Death "passed over" the Israelites when slaying Egypt's firstborn, as told in the Seder narrative, the Haggadah...
They could have no better guide than Raphael's lively, scholarly new history of Passover, A Feast of History (Simon & Schuster; $12.50). Drawing on a rich selection of illustrations, Raphael traces celebrations of the Seder back through the centuries, all the way to Abraham (rabbinic lore anachronistically had it that he celebrated a Seder with the three angels who visited him centuries before the Exodus...
...Raphael also provides the full Hebrew-Aramaic text of the Haggadah, along with his own English version. For the translation of the Bible narrative he eschews modern editions in favor of the King James Version, because it preserves the "loving intimacy which the rabbis had with the original." But when it comes to the Haggadah's blessings, prayers and songs, he applies a free hand, as in his cheerful rendering of this favorite from 7th century Palestine...