Word: yosef
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Nobody but a rabbi would have dared describe the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as the reincarnated souls of Jewish sinners. Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Ovadia Yosef did just that last weekend, bringing down a rain of criticism. But although his controversial remarks speak to the theological dilemma the Holocaust poses for ultra-Orthodox Jews, they are also an eloquent comment on the depth of tribal enmity among the citizens of the Jewish state. Iraqi-born Rabbi Yosef is also the spiritual leader of Israel's third largest party, Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party representing Sephardic Jews, who immigrated...
...slit-eyed world of a country village, the boy's mother Miriam conceived him mysteriously. Promised in marriage to Yosef the builder, she found herself pregnant without explanation--she had known no man, not intimately. Steeped in the malice of small-town talk, she knew not to tell the story she believed--God's archangel Gabriel had visited her at the village well one early-spring morning as she lifted her jar to climb back home...
...town: one narrow lane, two rows of rock houses, sealed with mud and roofed with branches daubed with mud, and each house full of the mouths he could hear saying "Bastard, Miriam's bastard boy, God's big baby!" His mother's story had leaked out somehow, likely through Yosef, who claimed that he had dreamed it but nonetheless married her, took in Yeshu and made other sons and daughters on her body. All of them grudged the favors their mother gave Yeshu as her eldest child; he was only half their brother...
...time Yeshu grew to full manhood--the blacksmith in Yosef's building concern and the best smith in Galilee--he was still called bastard in Nazareth whispers. He had never heard Yosef deny the charge, nor even his mother, who told him only, "They're not completely right." So when he entered his 30th year, still single because he felt polluted, he left town to take baptism from his cousin John in the Jordan River well south of home. The main need licking at Yeshu's heart was to find the father he had not yet known--and never quite...
...chauvinism. Last June in Jerusalem rioting haredim pelted men and women with excrement for praying at the Western Wall in a mixed group. In 1996 haredi "modesty patrols" began attacking women on Jerusalem's streets for exposing their arms or legs. Secular women were offended last year when Rabbi Yosef pronounced that men should not walk between two women, just as they should not walk between two donkeys, lest they take on the attributes of these lesser beasts...