This Shabbat morning we'll be talking about Maimonides' guidelines for character development. As a physician and rabbi, he understood that the key to a sound mind was to maintain a sound body.
In his Mishna Torah, Maimonides listed the top ten services that must be provided by any community. It is noteworthy that #1 on his list is health care. What was true 9 centuries ago is true today.
23) It is not permitted for a learned sage to live in a town which does not have the following ten things: a doctor, a blood-letter, a wash-house, a toilet, naturally occurring water such as a river or spring, a synagogue, a midwife, a scribe, a warden of charity and a Court of Law
which imprisons people.
See the entire chapter on health (it's fascinating - remember, he was a doctor) at http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/healthliteracy/hl-classical-maimonides-hilchot.pdf
Did you know, for instance, that
...One should not eat until one's stomach is [very] full, but one should [only] eat until one's stomach is three-quarters full. Nor should one drink water during a meal, except a little mixed with wine, but once the food begins to digest one should what one needs to drink, but one should never drink too much, even when the food digests. One should nor eat unless one has checked oneself to make sure that one does not need to relieve oneself. One should not eat unless one has first relieved oneself, or until one's body gets warm, or unless one has worked at something else first. The general rule of the matter is that one should always answer one's body. In the morning, one should work until one's body gets warm, then one should wait until one's soul has settled, and then one may eat. It is good to wash in hot water after having worked, then wait a while, and then eat.
Who needs "Doctor Mom" when we can get the straight dope from "Dr. Rambam."
Monday, August 31, 2009
Archives for Shabbat-O-Gram and Jewish Week articles 2002-2008
For more than a decade, I've been sending my congregation a weekly Shabbat-O-Gram. While that format has now been replaced by this blog, I want to preserve the archived links here so that people can continue to access them. These O-Grams are a window into the recent history of TBE, containing photos, Bar Mitzvah speeches, announcements, Super Bowl predictions and essays by congregants. You can access them here, by clicking on the dates:
Articles from The Jewish Week and other sources
- 9-11 and 613
- 10 Taboo Topics for 5764
- A Renaissance Without Rabbis?
- A Tribute to Mel Allen
- A Young Rabbi
- Agnostic Tevye Not So Crazy
- Bar Mitzvah Nation
- Being Inscribed in the ‘Video of Life’
- Bialik’s Bird: Of Flight and Return
- Changing the Culture
- Civil War
- Confessions of a Quickie Converter
- DancingSheva
- Developing God’s Image
- Disengagement: The Package Tour
- Doing the Passover Shuffle: Matzah vs. Wine, via iPod
- Down is Up in America
- Dressing Up as a Rabbi
- Facing East
- Feeling the Power
- From Shepherd to Weaver: An Excerpt from ‘thelordismyshepherd.com: Seeking God in Cyberspace’
- Full Circle, Halfway Home
- Gay Marriage: Is it Our Issue Too?
- Gay Vote Reflects “Passionate Centrism”
- Getting to ‘Yes’
- Gibson’s ‘Midrash’
- Giving U.S. Kids Their Birthright
- God’s Clubhouse
- God’s Place: The City
- Hugging Through Glass
- Inscribed in the Video of Life
- Invasions of Privacy
- Is Haman Just Misunderstood
- Jewish and Gentle: Time for a Mussar Revival
- Judaism in the Foxhole
- Kosher Oreos: The Rest of the Story
- Kosher Pigs: Why This Pesach is Different
- Letters from Camp
- Link the Holocaust with Tisha b’Av
- Losing Touch with Touching
- Marketing the Miracle
- Mesopotamian Idol
- Minyan Mastery
- My Dance with Amalek
- On Scouting and Outing
- On the Red Sea, SARS and Fear
- On the Same Page
- Our Millennial Masterpiece
- Pokemon’s “Swastika” and the Right to Cultural Privacy
- Power to the Person
- Purim Meets Good Friday
- Ranking Your Rabbi
- Saving Daylight
- S.O.S.: Saving Our Synagogues
- Spirituality and Religion
- Surfing for God: A Review of “Give Me That On-line Religion”
- Superabbi: The Flawed Model
- Terezin and the Vision Thing
- The Anne Frank Rule
- The Cathartic Candidacy
- The Eclipse of the Curse
- The Forbidden Oreo
- The Gazan Exodus and Joseph’s Bones
- The Knife
- The Litmus Tree
- thelordismyshepherd.com
- The Lord is My Web
- The Muddle in the Middle
- The New ‘Kotel’
- The November Dilemma
- The Other Four Sons
- The Parent’s Blessing
- The Peter Panning of America
- The Plague of Passivity
- The Problem with Pedestal Rabbis
- The Proud Jewish Stain
- The Show Must Go On
- The Toughest Job Around: Being Human
- The Towers of Babel
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being Jewish
- The Wall and the Mall
- The Zigzag Life
- Too Jewish — Or Not Jewish Enough?
- Tough Questions About NJPS
- Two Jews, One Opinion
- We Need Aleph Jews
- What I Do
- Who Knows One?
- Why an American Chief Rabbinate is No Joke
- Why Lieberman Makes Some Jews Nervous
- Yom HaShoah Meets Earth Day
New Year 5766
[Text]
Rosh Hashanah Day 1 [Audio]
Rosh Hashanah Day 2 [Audio]
Kol Nidre [Audio]
Yom Kippur [Audio]New Year 5764
[Text]New Year 5762
[Text]New Year 5760
[Text]New Year 5758
[Text]New Year 5755
[Text]
[Text]
Rosh Hashanah Day 1 [Audio]
Rosh Hashanah Day 2 [Audio]
Kol Nidre [Audio]
Yom Kippur [Audio]New Year 5764
[Text]New Year 5762
[Text]New Year 5760
[Text]New Year 5758
[Text]New Year 5755
[Text]
Deuteronomy and the Jacee Dugard case
I always find the Torah relevant. Heck, that's my job. But there are times when I'm reading the Torah portion on a Shabbat morning and it's as it were that morning's newspaper. it just jumps out at you. Such a moment happened last Shabbat, when I got to Deuteronomy 24:7 and immediately thought of the Jacee Dugard kidnapping case. People are fascinated about how someone could be abducted 18 years ago and never be given the opportunity to escape. The fact that she may have in fact become attached to her abductors is nothing new. So now we are reading about the Stockholm Syndrome (see Hearst: Patty). We're all so curious about how that could happen.
But it shouldn't reduce by one iota our outrage. Rather than being fascinated by the psychology of the criminal and victim, we need to focus on the morality of the crime itself. Deuteronomy brings us right back to those moral basics:
If a man kidnaps a fellow Israelite, forces him to serve and then sells him, when the kidnapper is caught, he shall be put to death. You shall thus rid yourself of the evil in your midst.
Rashi and the Talmud note that "forces to serve" "hitamer" means "does business." Sifre makes it clear that it is not the kidnapping alone that makes this a capital crime, it is the enslavement of the individual - using that person as an object, for monetary gain.
All this happened with this child - and then add what likely would be considered rape to the mix. The message of this verse is clear:
THIS GUY DESERVES TO DIE.
But Jewish law also makes it nearly impossible that the penalty would ever be able to be carried out. What appears as a capital crime in the Torah is almost never carried out in post-biblical sources. The rabbis were careful not to treat human life as callously as these monsters do, even when it meant - and means - keeping most of them alive. These days, as DNA evidence is clearing many death row inmates many years after their convictions, we are discovering how right the rabbis were in their caution.
Still, it is reassuring that such a crime is on the books, (on THE book, as it were) as something akin to murder. Jaycee may get her life back at some point, but her childhood and innocence were ruthlessly taken from her.
I read that verse and nodded. Yes, Phillip Garrido deserves the chair. But we're going to confound him even more by forcing him to bend to a moral code that is far more humane than any that he has ever considered.
But it shouldn't reduce by one iota our outrage. Rather than being fascinated by the psychology of the criminal and victim, we need to focus on the morality of the crime itself. Deuteronomy brings us right back to those moral basics:
If a man kidnaps a fellow Israelite, forces him to serve and then sells him, when the kidnapper is caught, he shall be put to death. You shall thus rid yourself of the evil in your midst.
Rashi and the Talmud note that "forces to serve" "hitamer" means "does business." Sifre makes it clear that it is not the kidnapping alone that makes this a capital crime, it is the enslavement of the individual - using that person as an object, for monetary gain.
All this happened with this child - and then add what likely would be considered rape to the mix. The message of this verse is clear:
THIS GUY DESERVES TO DIE.
But Jewish law also makes it nearly impossible that the penalty would ever be able to be carried out. What appears as a capital crime in the Torah is almost never carried out in post-biblical sources. The rabbis were careful not to treat human life as callously as these monsters do, even when it meant - and means - keeping most of them alive. These days, as DNA evidence is clearing many death row inmates many years after their convictions, we are discovering how right the rabbis were in their caution.
Still, it is reassuring that such a crime is on the books, (on THE book, as it were) as something akin to murder. Jaycee may get her life back at some point, but her childhood and innocence were ruthlessly taken from her.
I read that verse and nodded. Yes, Phillip Garrido deserves the chair. But we're going to confound him even more by forcing him to bend to a moral code that is far more humane than any that he has ever considered.
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