How Michael Wyschogrod Taught Me To Eat Like a Jew

[Michael]

I just thought I would like to add a little anecdote to this thread.

For some thirty years now, if I am in Paris on a Sunday, my French law agent has invited me to join him and his family for Sunday lunch at a restaurant, always Kosher and usually in the Marais district. North African Jewish cuisine is to die for.

Well, on one of these occasions, we started talking about kashrut and his wife spoke at length about the importance this gave to the rôle of the wife and mother in the Jewish home. As she is a prominent Socialist politician, I could not resist asking her what the Feminists would make of that.

"After all," said I, "Shouldn't husbands do their share of the cooking?"

"Ah," she retorted, "But, if the husbands cook, then their wives will have to eat it - And this is liberation?"

Never argue with a politician.

[Collingwood]

Collingwood -- I don't see any reason to attribute to Jesus the idea that Torah observance was impossible under Roman rule. ...

Spengler,

Oh, neither do I. I don't think he had to say it. I think it was assumed by his audience. I think it was in the Zeitgeist of the time and place, part of what he was reacting to, a constraint on his expression of his message rather than a part of it. But he did have to address it, or nobody would have listened to him: he would have been perceived as irrelevant.

I infer that from Josephus. And from the proliferation of apocalyptic Jewish texts that survive from the late scond Temple period. And from recent digs in Israel, especially in Jerusalem, that have turned up an astonishing proliferation of what seem to have been ritual bathing facilities during the later centuries and especially the last century of the Second Temple. From there it's just a hop, skip and jump to John the Baptist ... See Benjamin C. Wright, III, "Jewish Ritual Baths: interpreting the digs and texts; some issues in the social history of Second Temple Jerusalem," online in The archeology of Israel, ed. Neil A. Silberman, 1997, pp. 190-214.

And, whether by Providence or chance, a message crafted for Jews who felt they couldn't obey all the mitzvot proved a remarkably apt vehicle for proselytising Gentiles who didn't want to ...