Recent content by bananabrain

pamela geller is a moron (although a rather photogenic one). she is best understood as an instance of the "everything is someone else's fault" school of political thought. i'm not sure i particularly like the implication of "pawns of the radical branch of the zionist movement". zionism...

i think it's bollocks. bananabrain

start with rashi - standard commentary on the chumash, available on the Judaism, Torah and Jewish Info - Chabad Lubavitch site (look up "parsha with rashi"). ramban (nahmanides) also very good on this. remember, nothing in the Torah is there for no good reason. b'shalom bananabrain

so do you, therefore, accept that everything in the TaNaKh is a record of a historical fact and therefore evidence of a real genocide? or just the bits that you disapprove of? incidentally, i have very little sympathy with the "no true scotsman" argument that says that "the bombers were doing...

i should say that the consensus is that the Oral Torah in many cases predated the giving of the Written Torah - otherwise, how did people get married? similarly, there are some customs, like halitzah, that are clearly older. equally clearly, the Written Torah also superseded some of the customs...

i don't think it's that important, really. there are some people who really obsess about it, but really the calendar doesn't have much meaning for us before, say, noah or even abraham really, it's all tied up with the mystical significance of the ages of the patriarchs and the meaning of all the...

you are completely missing the point - as well as being unnecessarily accusatory. throughout the period of the judges through to the destruction of the first Temple, jewish culture was a struggle between the siren voices of bloody, child-sacrificing, sexually immoral canaanite idolatry and the...

for us, the Divine Name is accessed through the letters of the holy Torah, in particular the four of the Tetragrammaton (as some call it) - hence, the Names themselves have power and one should avoid casual or even direct use of them unless for a sanctified purpose. this leads people to write...

i wouldn't count on it. i very much doubt G!D is impressed by sanctimonious posturing of this nature, or assertions that my father-in-law's family (for one) deserved to be murdered. one of them was 8. what was she being punished for, you miserable, cruel bigot? bananabrain

oh - i think i see what you mean. in non-philosophical terms, it's like saying that one should admit that when one uses terms such as "truth", "correct", "fact" and "proof" and so on, that it is a sort of shorthand for "working truth", much like the idea that a solid is not really a solid when...

or couldn't we just all live peacefully anyway? why is it so important to everyone to eliminate my culture? b'shalom bananabrain

you know, i'm not entirely sure i understand what the two of you (radar and L7) are arguing about - and i generally think of myself as quite bright (i know, i know, i'm not). indulge me - are you disputing precisely where the line around the concept of "truth" can be drawn, or what? b'shalom...

ben hur - are you familiar with the phrase of the rambam, "ha-'olam noheg ke-minhago"? the existence of jews is no guarantee of the safety of the human race or the planet. your attitude is profoundly immature; jewish is not what you *are* - it is what you *do* - and it is a Torah commandment to...

i've got quite bored recently with the likes of ben hur and ben masada (both of whom sound suspiciously similar) and feel like there are no new subjects or new thoughts. and skinker seems to be more of the same, blah blah big lie blah blah no exodus blah blah israel-palestine blah blah...

i would, but i worry that people will actually think your positions are representative of normative mainstream judaism. b'shalom bananabrain