Word: torah
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Obeying Jewish religious laws means added expense. El Al loses 60 days a year by not operating in or out of Tel Aviv on Sabbath and religious holidays. Each plane must carry 400 lbs. of additional pots and plates for separate meat and dairy dishes. Soon, even a Torah scroll may be carried by each El Al plane. "We enjoy our Jewish-ness," says an airline official in Tel Aviv. "We are going to make the most...
...word about the painting that appears in the photograph accompanying the article: Henry Koerner's picture showing me standing next to a bullfighter who is also a pagan priest is entitled The Sacrifice. I am depicted in the crimson robes of a Harvard doctor holding the Torah. Next to me stands the bullfighter with drawn sword. There is a woman dressed in white in front of a bird bath in which there is a severed human head. The meaning is that the archaic and the contemporary coexist in religious ritual, as do the conscious and the unconscious. Thus...
...thing, the Law requires that the Temple be administered by Cohens (priests), who are the descendants of Moses' brother Aaron. Yet so many nonpriestly Jews have assumed the name Cohen that rabbinical experts would face a legal nightmare in trying to trace authentic genealogies. For another, the Torah specifies that Temple ritual include daily animal sacrifices-a concept alien to the humane sensitivities of most modern Jews. An even greater obstacle is that the Temple must be constructed on its original site; this could only be done by demolishing Islam's sacred Dome of the Rock, the spot...
Down from the Tree. Most Orthodox Jews consider autopsies generally barred by a passage in the Torah, Deuteronomy 21:22-23, in which Moses says: "And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall bury him the same day." In other words, even criminals were to be spared the possibility of mutilation by wild animals after their execution. Orthodox extremists interpret that injunction as meaning that any human must be given prompt...
...Jews of Jerusalem danced last week in the synagogues and in the streets, bearing in their arms the scrolls of the Torah as they celebrated the end of the thanksgiving period of Sukkot.* The dancers were mostly men, but a few congregations allowed women to join in and carry the scrolls-to the bitter disapproval of the Orthodox. Women are forbidden to touch the Torah by an injunction of Halakah, that vast body of law that regulates Jewish life with a sweep ranging from lofty ethical norms to small dietary injunctions. Halakah, which means variously...