Word: torah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kabbalah cohered and still revolves around its essential book, the Zohar--a gargantuan work penned in 13th century Spain by Moses de León--that explores divine mysteries under the guise of a commentary on the Torah. But it wasn't until the 18th century emergence of Hasidism as a Jewish movement in Eastern Europe that Kabbalah began to expand beyond its tiny group of scholars. Many Kabbalist masters, however, were killed in the Holocaust, causing the practice to languish temporarily...
...Haredim, social workers are often called "child-snatchers" and the police "Cossacks," harking back to the 19th century pogroms against Jews in Russia. These cloistered communities, in which women are expected to raise and financially support their large families while their husbands spend their days stooped over the Torah, make up 10% of Israel's population and a third of Jerusalem's, and consider themselves defenders of a core morality in Jewish society. But that moral authority has come under scrutiny since evidence began to emerge in March of incest, rape and child abuse in four different ultra-orthodox enclaves...
...bodies of the eight Jewish seminarians were draped in prayer shawls and laid out in unvarnished wood coffins. Each was buried with a Torah scroll stained in blood from the Thursday night rampage at their seminary where a young Palestinian, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and two pistols opened fire on 80 students, most of them teenagers, trapped in a library...
...Buddha and David Letterman have in common? They love them some lists! There's something magical about distilling wisdom into a single gleaming digit, which may be why so many religions use lists, from the Eightfold Path to the 95 Theses to the show-offy 613 laws of the Torah. An essay on morality would have been more nuanced than 10 commandments but harder to remember. And the tablets would have given Moses a hernia...
...Jewbilation,†a week-long celebration of Jewish life on campus sponsored by Harvard Hillel. Rabbi Ethan Linden, the rabbinic advisor for Hillel’s Student Conservative Minyan, hosted the event, which featured a Jeopardy-style game show and a close reading of a Torah passage. “The literature on sexuality in Jewish law is vast,†said Linden. “It has something to say about all aspects of life.†The turnout of about a dozen people failed to rival past “Jewbilation†events...