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Purim Guide for the Perplexed 2025 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on March 12th, 2025

1. Purim is a Jewish national liberation holiday – just like Passover and Chanukah – which highlights the transition of the Jewish people from subjugation to liberty. It is celebrated seven days following the birth and death date of Moses – a role model of liberty, leadership and humility.

Purim is celebrated from the evening of March 14 through the day of March 15, 2025.

2. Purim’s historical background: 

^A Jewish exile to Babylon and Persia was triggered by the 586 BCE destruction of the 1st Jewish Temple and the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria by the Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar.
^Persia replaced Babylon as the leading regional power. 
^In 538 BCE, Xerxes the Great, Persia’s King Ahasuerus, the successor of Darius the Great, proclaimed his support for the reconstruction of the Jerusalem Jewish Temple, the resurrection of national Jewish life in the Land of Israel, and the recognition of Jerusalem as the exclusive capital of the Jewish people. 
^In 499-449 BCE, King Ahasuerus established a coalition of countries – from India to Ethiopia – which launched the Greco-Persian Wars, aiming to expand the Persian Empire westward.
^Persia was resoundingly defeated (e.g., the 490 BCE and 480 BCE battles of Marathon and Salamis), and Ahasuerus’ authority in Persia was gravely eroded.

3. “Purimfest 1946” yelled Julius Streicher, the Nazi propaganda chief, as he approached the hanging gallows in Nuremberg (Newsweek, October 28, 1946, page 46).  On October 16, 1946, ten convicted Nazi war criminals were hanged, similar to Haman’s ten sons, who were hung in ancient Persia. An 11th Nazi criminal, Hermann Goering, committed suicide in his cell, similar to Haman’s 11th child, who committed suicide following her father’s demise (according to the Talmud’s Megillah tractate 16a).

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OPINION, RELIGION Comments turned off

Swinburne, Rossetti, and the Power of the Erased Line A. N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral explores the Victorian crisis of faith with wit and skepticism, blending intellectual history with sharp anecdotes that both critique and mourn the loss of belief. By Roger Kimball

By on March 9th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/09/swinburne-rossetti-and-the-power-of-the-erased-line/

Since Lent began this past week, I thought I might take a vacation from current events and repost an updated and decidedly non-newsy reflection on religion I wrote some years ago.

When Alcibiades defected from Athens to Sparta at the height of the Sicilian Expedition, one of the things that made his treachery so effective was that he knew the Athenian military strategy intimately from within. Having himself been a commander of the Athenian forces, he understood exactly what Sparta should do to inflict maximum damage on Athens’s interests. It would be unfair in all sorts of ways to compare the English writer A. N. Wilson to Alcibiades—“the most complete example,” Sir Edward Creasy remarked in 1851, “of genius without principle that history produces, the Bolingbroke of antiquity”—and I have no intention of doing so. But there is a peculiarity about Wilson’s book, God’s Funeral, that kept reminding me of someone who, feeling betrayed, switches sides and sets out to avenge himself on his former compatriots. Wilson’s announced subject in God’s Funeral is “the demise of faith among the Victorians”—less, he explains, “the end of a phase of human intellectual history” than “the withdrawal of a great Love-object.” And Wilson himself, as one reviewer put it, is “a lapsed orthodox Anglican.” (At one time he even studied for the clergy.) In God’s Funeral, this interesting conjunction of lapsed orthodoxy and lost love yields a species of intellectual history in which arrogance infects the exposition and professed admiration often betrays a current of contempt.

Of course, that is not the whole story. A. N. Wilson is an engaging and knowledgeable writer—a notably prolific one as well. In addition to having written a shelf of novels (Wise Virgin, The Vicar of Sorrows, Daughters of Albion, etc.), Wilson is also the author of something like a dozen biographies: of Milton, Hilaire Belloc, C. S. Lewis, St. Paul, Jesus, and Tolstoy, among others. He is also an inescapable presence in English journalism, producing with indefatigable regularity articulate, quirkily Toryish columns for various quality papers.

It is not surprising that such prodigious output often lends Wilson’s excursions in intellectual history an intermittently potted quality. It would be surprising if this were not the case. Much of God’s Funeral, in any event, shows signs of hasty digestion, though in this book as elsewhere the verve of Wilson’s rhetoric helps to mitigate—or at least distract attention from—its summary, swotted-up character. But because the subject of God’s Funeral continues to resonate powerfully, it is worth following the course of its argument with some care.

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A Critical Look at Elaine Pagels’ Religious Scholarship In her quest to liberate early Christianity from orthodoxy, Elaine Pagels ends up chaining it to modern politics. By Roger Kimball

By on December 29th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/29/a-critical-look-at-elaine-pagels-religious-scholarship/

Over at Instapundit, Mark Tapscott called my attention to an interview in our former paper of record that Times journo Nicholas Kristoff conducts with Elaine Pagels, the celebrated (by some) Princeton historian of religion. Tapscott cites the commentator Erik Manning, who subjects Pagels’ new-age, secular-lite responses to withering criticism in a delicious column called “The New York Times And Ivy League Professor Team Up To Debunk Christmas.” At bottom, Manning shows, Pagels’s position is

“I like Christmas and some of the moralizing parts of Christianity, but miracles are nonsense, biblical scholarship has it all figured out, evangelicals are too dogmatic, and Jesus was probably a rape baby.” Great backhanded patronizing to stick it to the fundies on Christmas, New York Times. Very cool. Much editorializing. Muh scholarship.

I hadn’t thought about Elaine Pagels for many years, but Manning’s gimlet-eyed analysis reminded me of a longish column about Pagels I wrote many years ago. As a public service, I reprint it here with a few minor tweaks and updates.

I called the essay “Trouble in Paradise: the Gospel According to Pagels.”

It was only to be expected [I wrote] that Elaine Pagels’ book, temptingly entitled Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity, would be showered with all manner of adulation when it appeared in 1989. When her previous book, The Gnostic Gospels, appeared in 1979, it too was greeted by a chorus of critical and popular acclaim. It scooped up both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award in 1980, became something of a best-seller, and greatly boosted the reputation of its thirty-seven-year-old author, then chairman of the department of religion at Barnard College. The following year, 1981, Pagels was visited by grace in the form of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a grace soon compounded by an offer from Princeton University, where she is currently the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion. How could Adam, Eve, and the Serpent fail to be declared (as it promptly was) a “masterpiece?”

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ISRAEL, RELIGION Comments turned off

The Pope’s embrace of evil With his attack on Israel fighting for its life, the pontiff has taken the Vatican backwards into a very dark past Melanie Phillips

By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.jns.org/the-popes-embrace-of-evil-discourse/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

With just a few words, Pope Francis has plunged relations between Jews and Catholics into their worst crisis for decades and undone years of delicate rapprochement.

In a new book published for the Catholic Church’s jubilee year, he wrote:

According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. We should investigate carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.

This is far from the first time the Pope has attacked Israel over the war against Hamas and Hezbollah.

In September, he berated Israel for an immoral lack of proportion. “Defence must always be proportionate to the attack,” he said. “When there is something disproportionate, one shows a tendency to dominate which goes beyond what is moral.”

These remarks are deeply troubling. They are the accusations routinely made by the enemies of Israel in the west, and they are shameful on many levels.

The “genocide” claim is as ludicrous as it is monstrous. Genocide is the intentional annihilation of a people. Yet according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the population of the Gaza Strip has grown by 2.02 percent since the October 7 pogrom and the war that has followed.

Far from intending to wipe out the residents of Gaza, the Israel Defence Forces have been shunting them around the Strip in order to get them out of harm’s way as the IDF has pounded Hamas.

The Pope is also wrong about proportionality in warfare. Defensive military action must be proportionate not to any one attack but to the threat posed by the enemy. The threat against Israel is the stated intention to eradicate it from the face of the earth. What does the Pope believe is the proportionate response to that?

If he really is arguing that the response should be identical in scope and nature to the attack, is he therefore proposing that Israel should set out to murder, rape and mutilate 1,200 Gazans as they did to the Israelis on October 7? Or fire tens of thousands of rockets and drones at civilians in Gaza and Lebanon with the intention of murdering them, as Hamas and Hezbollah have done to Israeli civilians for years?

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RELIGION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamism, the West and Human Rights by Nils A. Haug

By on November 8th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21088/islamism-west-human-rights

Sharia tenets – which have views of human rights, justice, mercy and compassion that differ from those of the West — can appear alien to Judeo-Christian precepts. Sharia, in usage, often appears to contravene the basic humanistic values of the West.

The outcome is that, in application, the moral laws of each tradition — that of the Torah as opposed to that of Sharia — which prescribes harsh punishments, such as amputation for theft; death for leaving Islam (apostasy) or blasphemy, or being stoned to death for adultery, which can include having been raped — are consequences inimical to Western ideas of justice, mercy and human rights.

By practicing a different faith, those who do not subscribe to Sharia are “disbelievers” (infidels), deemed to be in breach of “The Path” and consequently subject to a penalty of conversion, subjugation or death.

This is particularly true for Jews and Christians, who were offered opportunities to accept the gift of Islam but ungratefully declined.

“Slay the infidels wherever you find them…” — Qur’an, Sura 9:5.

The concept of universal human rights might seem quite strange to Islamists.

The intent of jihadi state actors …. in their own words, appears to be the imposition of Sharia law and Islamic dominance over the world.

That is why textual originalism in the interpretation of US Constitutional law is of particular concern to jurists. Emphasis on the original intent of the writers of the US Constitution rather than the fluctuating views of a succession of lawyers is of prime importance.

Reinterpreting the US Constitution can easily become like the children’s game of “telephone”: after a few migrations, the original intent of the founders could well become unrecognizable.

Western leaders find it difficult to regard religiously powered radicalism with the weight it deserves. “[I]t’s precisely because it’s religiously grounded that such radicalism is exceptionally dangerous.” — George Weigel, First Things, January 31, 2024.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, during World War II, said in the House of Commons on June 18, 1940: “If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

Although Churchill’s statement also applies to Western nations at this time, Israel has been largely alone in the fight to preserve the West’s Judeo-Christian ideals. It would be to the West’s advantage for other nations to join Israel in this noble task.

The Torah’s ethical and moral laws, which became known to the world as Moses’ Ten Commandments, founded the West’s moral-ethical precepts on which its laws and judicial concepts such as justice and mercy are based. This development is reflected in the United States’ founding documents, as well as England’s Magna Carta of 1215, among others.

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EDUCATION, RELIGION Comments turned off

Hannah E. Meyers Days of Awe This is the week for universities to reestablish community around open, civilized debate.

By on October 9th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/october-7-and-the-days-of-awe

The anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel falls during Judaism’s ten “Days of Awe.” This is the charged period between Rosh Hashanah, when fates for the coming year are inscribed in the Book of Life, and Yom Kippur, when they are sealed. All across America, Jews will be chanting in unison this year’s communal sins and beseeching: “For all of these, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!” Jews stand before their fate, not as individuals, but as a community.

This will also be “The Week of Rage,” when anti-Israel groups on America’s campuses will chant in unison for the annihilation of Jews—now entering their 5,785th calendar year—and their nation-state. They will openly express their support for terrorism: killing, raping, and torturing civilians to achieve political goals. “By any means necessary!” they will call out. They will wave the insignias of Hamas and Hezbollah, for whom the goal is death to America and death to Israel—and while they’re at it, death to homosexuals, to political rivals, and even to their own children, if it results in their gaining power. As a community, they stand behind an ideological vision as intolerant in its aims as it is savage in the means it chooses to pursue them.

Sensibly enough, considering what we’ve seen on American campuses over the last year, many universities are planning extra security, erecting additional barriers to movement around their quads and buildings. So far this semester, however, similar strategies have failed to quell the rage: students from Pittsburgh to Michigan have been beaten or slashed for being identifiably Jewish. Creating truly safe campuses will require more than purely defensive measures.

To work a genuine transformation in campus safety this week and onward, universities need to confront the problem as a community. They must embrace the American community tradition, which thrives by welcoming disagreement.

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ISRAEL, RELIGION Comments turned off

Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) Guide for the Perplexed, 2024 Yoram Ettinger

By on October 9th, 2024

1. Yom Kippur is observed on the 10th day of the Jewish month of Tishrei (October 12, 2024), starting on the evening of October 11.  Yom Kippur is a Super Sabbath (Shabbat Shabbaton in Hebrew), concluding 10 days of soul-searching and spiritual self-awareness and self-enhancement, which begins on Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish year.

2. Ten, which represents wholesomeness, has a special significance in Jewish history: God’s abbreviation is the 10th Hebrew letter (Yod – י); the 10 Commandments; the 10 Plagues of Egypt; Yom Kippur on the 10th day of Tishrei; the 10 spheres of the spiritual universe, which were highlighted during the Biblical Creation; 10 reasons for blowing the Shofar (ram’s horn) on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; the 10% Biblical gift to God (tithe); the 10th day of the Jewish month of Tevet commemorates the beginning of the 586-589 BCE siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar; the 10 Martyrs (Jewish leaders), who were tortured/murdered by the Roman Empire; the 10 generations between Adam and Noah and between Noah and Abraham; the 10 divine tests passed by Abraham; the 10-person-quorum (Minyan in Hebrew), which is required for a collective Jewish prayer service; the 10 sons of Haman and the 10 Nazi leaders, who were hung; etc.   

3. According to Leviticus 23:26-32: “The Lord said to Moses, that the tenth day of this seventh month [Tishrei] is the Day of Atonement…. Do not do any work on that day…. This is a lasting ordinance for generations to come….”
Yom Kippur commemorates the day of divine forgiveness for the sin of worshipping the golden calf idol, and the introduction of the Moses-made second set of the Two Tablets (Ten Commandments). It induces human beings to marshal the capacity to learn from mistakes, while warning against a recurring human fallibility: the temptation to sacrifice spiritual values on the altar of materialism.

4. The astrological sign of the months of Tishrei is Libra (♎), which symbolizes the scales of justice, truth, optimism, humility and tolerance. Libra is ruled by the planet Venus (Noga – נגה in Hebrew – is the name of my oldest granddaughter), which represents divine light and compassion. 

5. The Hebrew word Kippur [כיפור] means atonement/repentance – a derivative of the Biblical word Kaporet [כפורת], which was the dome/cover of the Holy Ark in the Sanctuary, and the word Kopher [כופר], which was the cover/dome of Noah’s Ark and the Holy Altar in the Jerusalem Temple. 

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