Word: torah
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...which only goes to reinforce the fact that nobody cares more genuinely about movies than Kael. They move and compel her to weigh each nuance, to mull over each jarring image, and to track down every pop association like an amateur sociologist-sleuth. She even lifts and carries the torah for the whole creative tradition in her long, worried, and proscriptive essay on the film industry, "On the Future of the Movies." And when she's in top form, Kael merits the hackneyed testimonial, "she cares enough to be brilliant." Hopefully she will weather the hyperbolic fuss over film critics...
...dramatic equivalent of dozing off. To begin with, the story does not lend itself to a willing suspension of disbelief. The setting is a Polish ghetto town about a century ago. Yentl (Tovah Feldshuh) is an extremely bright girl who relishes reading and discussing the Talmud and the Torah with her learned father. It is strictly taboo for a Jewish woman to be studying these sacred texts. Yentl is precocious and prone to dispute with her elders, like the young Jesus...
Lorincz's offense was that during a parliamentary debate he had compared the chief Ashkenazy rabbi, Shlomo Goren, to Uganda's President Idi Amin, a notorious anti-Semite. "We are sitting in Jerusalem, the city of the Torah, and not in Kampala," remarked Lor-incz as he accused Goren of autocratic tactics in appointing religious judges. The rabbinate's decree cited the 12th century philosopher Maimonides' advocacy of a ban against "he who shames a scholar." Lorincz offered a Talmudic citation in reply: "Where God's name is put to shame, there is no obligation...
...imply a religious 'second-class' status" for Judaism. What especially grieved Tanenbaum and other Jewish critics was the guidelines' silence on Jewish historic and spiritual ties to the land of Israel. Any definition of contemporary Judaism that does not consider "the inextricable bonds of God, People, Torah and Promised Land," wrote Tanenbaum, "risks distortion of the essential nature of Judaism...
...Orthodox Jewish exegetes, like Catholics, modern critical methods were a stumbling block: by questioning Moses' authorship of the Torah, biblical criticism cut to the heart of Jewish tradition. A modern Orthodox scholar like Rabbi Norman Lamm of Manhattan's Yeshiva University still supports Mosaic authorship of the Torah because "it is a dogmatic necessity." But Lamm, like most Orthodox Jews, allows much more latitude than fundamentalist Christians in understanding Genesis accounts. "Certainly the creation text is not literal," says Lamm. He is also not concerned, for instance, whether Noah and his family were the sole survivors of the biblical flood...