A Letter to My Daughter

Hi Denise,

I have been enjoying your emails and finally have a chance to write back. Thanks for the Culver Summer Camp updates and pictures. More on that subject in another email.

Yesterday I had a REALLY good Sabbath day. I was home alone....but it was so peaceful.....and I was peaceful. The weather was perfect, Edenic...the cloud formations were awesome. I had to take a bike ride down the road just to take it all in without trees blocking the amazing patterns. I wondered if there was a message in it.

The main reason I felt so good was that overnight I had been listening to old sermons by Pastor Ron of Messiah Fellowship in Howe, IN....this is the messianic congregation I would like to attend someday....but it is over two hours away and Dad won’t go with me. The group meets at 6 pm. Maybe I can get you to accompany me the first time while you are here? And Dave & family maybe? Anyway....it used to be a Calvary Christian fellowship and they seem to be on my wavelength pretty much. They don’t go for the rabbinic stuff but just want to do what the Bible teaches from Genesis to Revelation. The sermon I woke up to was on the book of James. This was when they were a Sunday church. Pastor Ron gave an invitation at the end. He was asking people to stand up if they were wanting to stop living in the flesh and walk in the Spirit. I was prompted to get up out of bed and stand! Now that I think of it, I did this once before more than a year ago when I heard this sermon. It was powerful.

So I got right with God and felt cleansed, renewed, and spiritual. All my depression and anxiety went away.

I think somebody must have been praying for me that this happened. Was it you? It could have been Daniel K from the Netherlands (see blog comments at Many Sorrows....).....

[It also helped that Peter had written to me on Friday. It was encouraging that he wanted to share his thoughts and news with me. The storms earlier in the day cleared out by the time of the wedding ceremony, he said. He gave me a link to the photographer’s site where there are some pictures. The photographer turned out to be a newbie Sabbath keeper himself which is why he took the Sunday wedding assignment; he no longer works on Sabbath. So that irony gives me hope that the LORD is still working on my friend. It will be interesting to follow the chapters of Peter's life, and I will continue to pray for him and his family.]

I am seriously considering working at Culver Academies and talked to my blacksmith about it. I need to write to Austin and feel bad that I have not done that yet. I was too mopey. Hey....maybe I could go over to Culver later today for the Garrison parade, etc. Do you know what time that is? Did you send me the link to that kind of information?

Dad is in Florida this weekend. He may go on one of the fishing charters. He has to hang out in Florida until a load materializes hopefully. The one he was supposed to pick up was a double dispatch.

More later hopefully......

Love, Mom

Many Sorrows....Welcome to My World of Woe

The following was written over the course of the past week or so....

Forum People Have Feelings (written mid-June)

Bill B. wrote a piece at FFOZ blog entitled “Forum People Have Faces” where he expressed his delight in meeting those whom he had only interacted with on the forum [at the recent Shavuot conference in Hudson, WI].

Nice sentiments expressed....yet it prompted this reply, a reply I would not be able to express as a comment at the FFOZ blog...

Forum people have feelings too. Just because you don’t see someone in person does not make that person any less real. When you dismiss their opinions, views, comments, etc., you are disrespecting them, just as if you were to see them face to face and tell them to “shut up.”

Bill once wrote me and said, “Once we dehumanize a person and their opinions or viewpoints then it is much easier to dismiss them all together.”

I agree....and the opposite is also true:

Dismissing someone altogether (e.g., from a forum) is to dehumanize a person and his opinions and viewpoints.

I wrote this email to Bill in early May:

Though I have forgiven you, I remain silenced by your words. It has shut off communication between us and between me and others at TR. I am very reluctant to post for fear I may inadvertantly say something “offensive” and incur your wrath. I notice you did the same thing to Rick Spurlock at FFOZ, rebuking his post and defending “the plastic pie pastor.”

Now Michael fears offending Tim and is reluctant to share his view. Interesting. Free speech does not seem to exist on either forum for fear that someone may take offense. How few who have been around awhile post at all anymore! A sad state of affairs indeed.

--------

Re: TR and the decision made by Tim to close down the Forum (with consensus from his moderators Bill, John, and Nate)....

To censure and dismiss an entire forum full of people who were benefiting from the interaction, fellowshipping with one another in lieu of other options, all alone in their little corner of the world without like-minded fellowship, is to say, “Get out of here. I’m closing the door and booting you out of my congregation. This congregation is by invitation only. I’m a Calvinist, I am sovereign, and I will treat you in the same manner as the ogre god I serve. This forum is not for “whosoever will”.... it is “by invitation only”....people I don’t like need not apply. I will decide who gets to play in my sandbox. I do not like people whose views differ from mine. I am right....and everyone else is wrong.”

Fractured and Fragile

Do forum owners/moderators realize that “forum people” might be fractured and fragile....alone in their belief system and observances, getting little to no support from family and friends?

In catering to new people, “baby Christians,” those with newbie enthusiasm and dollars to spend at your website, are you abusing the hurting sheep (Ezek. 34)? The Apostle Peter was told to feed the lambs and the sheep if he truly loved Yeshua (John 21).

In all of my church experiences, as I grew in my zealousness for the truth of God’s Word, I kept hearing that we had to be kind and considerate to “the baby Christians” who were not ready for “strong meat.” Strong meat? Like forsaking pagan holidays that God hates? It is the basics in Acts 15 that got us booted or shunned in the congregations. Tickling the ears with pop psychology syncretized with a dash of Biblical flavoring was all many pastors were willing to provide (citing concerns for their retirement package, etc.). In the name of “love and unity” we were not to rock the boat and cause “strife and division.”

In the Messianic world, it is “lashon hara” that is cited. This covers any speech that the moderators or forum owners do not feel comfortable with....including Holy Spirit conviction brought on by the truth of God’s Word or discussion of a sensitive subject in search of greater understanding.

Learning to Endure Pain (written 6/22)

Why should I be happy? There is little to be happy about. Israel is in its season of dread. (see sidebar article). My dog, Forest, died on Friday. I sat with him for much of 7 hours while his worried look and labored breathing indicated the end was near. Another dog, Kenya, is not feeling well either. May be food poisoning. Tainted pet and people food is part of life in America today with foreign suppliers and terrorism. Our country is being brought down by a thousand paper cuts.

Peter is getting married today. Now he will have two wives. Divorce and remarriage amounts to serial polygamy in my view. There is hardly an intact family in America today. Another grief of mind I endure.

Comfort from the Book of Job and Bible Pathway (written 6/26)

“Job expressed his pitiful loneliness....there seemed to be no end to the anguish. One of our greatest trials is to pray and continue praying without any apparent sign that God has heard....But the effectiveness of our prayers cannot be judged by immediate results. There are many reasons for delay...”

How unsearchable are His judgements and His ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the LORD? Or who hath been His counsellor? (Romans 11:34)

6/20....Forest died (13 year old pet dog)

6/22....Peter married Sara

6/24....Kenya died (13 year old pet dog)

6/25....Depressed and dysfunctional....still reeling from the TR/FFOZ snub and the growing realization that I have not had like-minded fellowship at either venue all along. Very disillusioned with both organizations and the “Torah movement” in general. Very sad about Peter’s plight....his kids, family, Tonya ....also Dan and family, me and Pat...grieving and trying to understand how things turned out this way. My sister has not responded to my "olive branch" note card of many weeks ago. Remembering my 18 year old beloved cat, Little Black, who died of kidney failure/multiple organ failure due to tainted pet food on April 19, 2007 (the same week of Peter's family breakup; now, a year later, he remarries coincidal with more pet deaths!) What is going on with poisoned pet food and poisoned relationships??

“When our world turns upside down and everything and everyone seems to be against us, God has promised that He would never leave us. We must learn to trust God. When we recognize the LORD’s ways, all fears and frustrations vanish. It is not required that we understand everything, but only to be faithful and obedient to God’s Word.”

Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him... (Job 13:15)

Hidden Messianics

We are searching for an oasis of faith in a desert of unbelief.

We are ugly ducklings looking for the swan pond.

We are trying to swim in the midst of the Great ApostaSea.

Who will rise up in this generation and become faithful and wise shepherds to the scattered and hurting sheep? (Ezekiel 34)

Neither Christians nor Jews, we have an identity crisis. We are not welcome in churches or synagogues.

Messianic Judaism has yet to hit a balanced stride; the pendulum swings erratically.

FFOZ is too enamored of Rabbinics.

TR gave us the boot and is too enamored of Calvinism.

Where do we go to search the Scriptures and walk in the truth of God's Word with like-minded believers?

Who will gather the Remnant?

It gets lonely.

What will become of us?

"Methuselah"

"Methuselah" Tree Grew From 2,000-Year-Old Seed
Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
June 12, 2008

The oldest-sprouted seed in the world is a 2,000-year-old plant from Jerusalem, a new study confirms.

"Methuselah," a 4-foot-tall (1.2-meter-tall) ancestor of the modern date palm, is being grown at a protected laboratory in the Israeli capital.

In 2005 the young plant was coaxed out of a seed recovered in 1963 from Masada, a fortress in present-day Israel where Jewish zealots killed themselves to avoid capture by the Romans in A.D. 70.

Because a witness to the long-ago siege recorded the Jews' plight and eventual mass suicide, locations of their food stores—which the Jews left behind to show they didn't starve to death—were well documented.

So the exact age of the seed isn't a big surprise, said project leader Sarah Sallon of the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, but: "I was surprised that we were able to grow it."

Methuselah beats out the previous oldest-seed record holder, a lotus tree grown from a 1,300-year-old seed in 1995 by Jane Shen-Miller, a botanist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues.

The Israeli seedling may advance medicines and reveal genetic relationships between ancient and modern date palms, experts say.

Witness to History

The fortress Masada was originally built in high ground above the Dead Sea as King Herod's pleasure palace, but legend has it that Jews occupied the fort for seven months while they were under siege by the Romans.

Writings recorded at the time indicate that the Jews committed mass suicide rather than be conquered and live under Roman rule. Those same writings told researchers where to look for the long-preserved food stores.

All botanical discoveries from the palace were stored at the Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv for 40 years before Sallon and her team tried to germinate three date palm seeds in 2005.

Only one, Methuselah, yielded a tree.

At the beginning its leaves were plagued with white spots, which the researchers chalked up to insufficient nutrients.

These days it looks like a healthy modern date palm. But unlike its descendants, Methuselah grows better in fresh water than brackish water.

That's because the older version of the tree was usually found near freshwater oases, farther from the Dead Sea, Sallon said.

A study on Methuselah appears tomorrow in the journal Science.

Small Window

Paul Gepts, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, was not involved in the study.

Methuselah "opens a small window into life [in Jerusalem] two thousand years ago," he said.

But he's not sure how valuable a single specimen will be for studies of date palms' genetic diversity.

"How much can we learn from one individual?" he asks. "Normally, palms are cross-pollinated. One would expect them to be very diverse."

Sallon agreed, adding that the plants are "a bit like people. If I wanted to say, What does this one say about a population, it doesn't say much. We're hoping just to germinate more date seeds."

Date Potential

But Methuselah holds potential beyond genetic studies, Sallon said.

Judean date palms once formed thick forests throughout the Jordan River Valley. Today, Israel imports its date palms.

If Methuselah is female—which should be known by 2012, when the plant would be ready to bear fruit—it might support species-restoration efforts.

Sallon also wants to know if the plant may have medicinal properties, as the ancients believed. But any real medicinal value will come from its dates.

No celebrations are planned if and when a first date appears, Sallon said.

"We will celebrate when there is peace," she said. "We will celebrate when all people in this region can plant these trees together, and share any medicinal benefits it brings."

© 1996-2008 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

Holocaust Denial, Version 2.0

By Myles Kantor
FrontPageMagazine.com | 6/12/2008

Holocaust deniers are outcasts, but people who promote a similar lie often appear on television.

I recently learned about Saree Makdisi while researching my FrontPage article about Hezbollah supporter and ex-professor Norman Finkelstein. An English professor at UCLA, last month Makdisi appeared on left-wing television program Democracy Now! for a debate with Finkelstein and Israeli historian Benny Morris on the occasion of Israel's 60th Independence Day.

Toward the end of the debate, Morris criticized Makdisi’s proposal of a one-state “solution” to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Makdisi replied, “the great moments of Sicily and Spain, and so forth, and Baghdad, etc., were always moments where Jews and Arabs lived together and worked together.” Similarly, in a May 11 op-ed in The Los Angeles Times titled “Forget the two-state solution,” he claimed, “It [Israel] is an ethno-religiously exclusive state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it was founded.”

Others have argued that Israel’s restoration in 1948 deviated from a past of peaceful Jewish-Arab coexistence and created new animosity. CBS News Middle East analyst Reza Aslan asserted last year in a debate with author Sam Harris, “Before 1948, of course, there were tens of thousands of Jews living alongside their Arab neighbors without any problem at all.” Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the anti-Israel organization Neturei Karta said at a June 3 protest of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “we are thankful…for the hospitality and safe haven and friendship that the Muslim people and the Arab people throughout the world has [sic] constantly given to the Jewish people throughout the ages.”

Here are some important dates in Arab-Jewish history: 627, 1066, 1465, 1828, 1912, 1920, 1929, 1934, 1938, 1941, and 1967. These dates correspond to massacres of Jews by Arabs in Medina, Granada, Fez, Baghdad, Fez again, Jerusalem, Hebron, Constantine, Tiberias, Baghdad again, and Tripoli.

Jews under Arab rule had to wear identifying clothing, pay special taxes, could not ride horses, bear arms, etc. The Spanish-Jewish sage Maimonides noted these abuses in his 1172 Iggeret Teiman (“Epistle to Yemen”), responding to violent anti-Semitism in that country. Maimonides described the Arabs as those “who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.”

Institutional degradation of Jews in Arab countries continued into modern times. Eli Moyal, the mayor of Sderot in southwestern Israel, was born in Morocco and has described his youth there:
We lived quietly and in peace as long as we obeyed the rules. We had no political power, no say. It was against the law for a Jew to be involved in politics. It was a ghetto we lived in…We know the Arabs better than the Ashkenazim [Jews of European descent]. We obeyed Arab regimes for centuries; we know their traditional and cultural way of life—we ran away from the Arabs.
Jews dispossessed and expelled from Arab countries after 1948 offer similar recollections in the documentary The Forgotten Refugees.

Aslan, Makdisi, and Weiss misrepresent Arab-Jewish history before 1948 in a way that resembles the filth of Holocaust denial. While the abhorrent facts have been widely documented in both cases, these individuals whitewash the Arab world’s tyranny and terrorism against religious minorities.

This falsification of history is today’s version of the blood libel. Not only did the Jews betray a tradition of multicultural peace; they initiated an era of death and destruction with their belligerent nationalism. The falsification is thus another attempt to delegitimize Israel.

In January 1935, a Palestinian religious authority issued a fatwa against selling land to Jews, denouncing how it would promote acceptance of “the Jews as rulers.” Accustomed to subjugating Jews for centuries, the post-1948 reality of Jewish sovereignty unsettles Arabs’ perception of dominion. This vile worldview manifests in a saying like "Al Yahud Kelabna” (“The Jews are our dogs”), chanted by Arabs in front of the Israeli consulate in San Francisco last July.

The more clever Arabs claim that subjugation was really serenity, and how they wish for previous brotherhood to return. But they are not that clever, and they cannot erase what their people perpetrated against my people.

Myles Kantor is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and editor-at-large for Pureplay Press, which publishes books about Cuban history and culture. His e-mail address is myles.kantor@gmail.com.

Nehemiah's Message: Key to Revival

I have been meditating in the Book of Nehemiah this week. This is a Book that deserves greater attention than it gets. There are numerous implications and applications in its passages. It is interesting that the name Yeshua appears 18 times in this Book. When an unbelieving Jew reads this Book, does the thought that Yeshua could be the name of the Messiah ever enter his consciousness? Maybe that is one reason this Book is seldom read in Judaism. Round and round the cycle goes with the Torah portions....yet this neglected Book sheds considerable light on the violation of Torah and its consequences....and holds the key to revival and restoration.....godly sorrow and teshuvah. God’s people must sanctify the Sabbath and become a peculiar, set-apart people.... resisting pagan/worldly influences and unholy alliances.

Thought for today: Outlandish women caused even Solomon to sin (Nehemiah 13).


Excerpt from Nehemiah 9:

.....but thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness....when they cried unto thee, thou heardest them from heaven.....But after they had rest, they did evil again before thee: therefore leftest thou them in the land of their enemies, so that they had the dominion over them; yet when they returned, and cried unto thee, thou heardest them from heaven; and many times didst thou deliver them according to thy mercies;

And testifiedst against them, that thou mightest bring them again unto thy law: yet they dealt proudly, and hearkened not unto thy commandments, but sinned against thy judgments, (which if a man do, he shall live in them;) and withdrew the shoulder, and hardened their neck, and would not hear.

Yet many years didst thou forbear them, and testifiedst against them by thy spirit in thy prophets: yet would they not give ear: therefore gavest thou them into the hand of the people of the lands.

Nevertheless for thy great mercies' sake thou didst not utterly consume them, nor forsake them; for thou art a gracious and merciful God.

Now therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the terrible God, who keepest covenant and mercy, let not all the trouble seem little before thee, that hath come upon us, on our kings, on our princes, and on our priests, and on our prophets, and on our fathers, and on all thy people, since the time of the kings of Assyria unto this day.

Howbeit thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly:

Neither have our kings, our princes, our priests, nor our fathers, kept thy law, nor hearkened unto thy commandments and thy testimonies, wherewith thou didst testify against them.

For they have not served thee in their kingdom, and in thy great goodness that thou gavest them, and in the large and fat land which thou gavest before them, neither turned they from their wicked works.

Behold, we are servants this day, and for the land that thou gavest unto our fathers to eat the fruit thereof and the good thereof, behold, we are servants in it:

And it yieldeth much increase unto the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins: also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we are in great distress.

And because of all this we make a sure covenant, and write it; and our princes, Levites, and priests, seal unto it.....


.....Remember me, O my God, for good (Nehemiah 13:31).

From Time Immemorial

Is it true that Arabs and Jews lived harmoniously in Arab lands before 1948? Did “Jewish terrorists” intrude into the Arabs’ traditionally poor but tranquil existence in ‘Palestine’ ....and when Palestine became Israel in 1948, “Jews forced the exodus of millions of Arabs from their plots of land inhabited by them from time immemorial?”

The historical detective work by Joan Peters has produced startling results, which should impact any discussion about the “Palestinian problem.”

The following review of Joan Peters’ landmark book, FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine is one of the most balanced and comprehensive I could find. No discussion of this controversial issue should exclude the factual information in this objective, well-researched account of what has transpired leading up to the volatile situation that exists today. I am wading through the 600 plus pages and finding the book fascinating and highly readable. Here is the Amazon review:

Conversion on the Road to Damascus
By Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA)

In the first two paragraphs of FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL, author Joan Peters states:

"... The book was originally meant to be solely an investigation of the current plight of the 'Arab refugees,' as that subject was then still generally known ... The deprivation of Arab refugees' human rights and the political manipulation of their unfortunate situation were unconscionable to me, particularly because it seemed their plight had been prolonged by a mechanism funded predominantly by contributions from the United States..."

It is inferred that she gave credence to the observation by Pope John Paul II in 1980:

"...the Jewish people ... gave birth to the state of Israel (after) the extermination of so many sons and daughters, (but) at the same time, a sad condition was created for the Palestinian people who were excluded from their homeland. These are facts everyone can see."

Yet, near the end of the book on page 390, Peters states:

"The Arabs believe that by creating an Arab Palestinian identity, at the sacrifice of the well-being and the very lives of the 'Arab refugees', they will accomplish politically and through 'guerilla warfare' what they failed to achieve in military combat: the destruction of Israel - the unacceptable independent dhimmi state. That is the heart of the matter."

Saul of Tarsus himself, on the road to Damascus, hardly experienced such a reversal of beliefs. How did Joan arrive at this place?

Evidently, via exhaustively thorough research. FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL contains 121 pages of Notes and a 13-page Bibliography, both in a small type that challenged my aging vision. As one who hated being tasked with semester-ending research papers in high school, the enormity of Joan's project boggles the mind. The amount of information she presents, consistently referenced by the Notes, is prodigious. At times, it verges on the exhausting.

A convenient starting point for a summary of Joan's narrative can perhaps be taken at the beginning of Chapter 3, "The Arab Jew", when she returns to a time immemorial, circa 622 A.D., with the rise of Muhammad:

"... the Prophet Muhammad's original plan had been to induce the Jews to adopt Islam ... but the Jewish community rejected the Prophet Muhammad's religion ... Three years later, Arab hostility against the Jews commenced, when the Meccan army exterminated the Jewish tribe of Quraiza. As a result of the Prophet Muhammad's resentment, the Holy Koran itself contains many of his hostile denunciations of Jews and bitter attacks on Jewish tradition, which undoubtedly have colored the beliefs of religious Muslims down to the present ... Omar, the caliph who succeeded Muhammad, delineated in his Charter of Omar the twelve laws under which a dhimmi, or non-Muslim, was allowed to exist as a 'non-believer' among 'believers.' The Charter codified the conditions of life for Jews under Islam - a life which was forfeited if the dhimmi broke this law."

So, with Omar's Charter in place, Peters recounts the lives of the Jews in Arab countries - Yemen, Aden, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Arabia - down through the subsequent centuries to the present. It gives lie to the Arab assertion that "their Jews" have been treated well under Islam.

Joan then turns to the Roman principality of Syria Palestina, which was to become "Palestine". In explaining the demographics of the region over the centuries, it's here that the sheer volume of detailed information becomes almost eye-glazing, especially when she enumerates the numbers of Jews that migrated into Palestine from 1882 to 1948, as well as the number of Arabs that migrated, legally and illegally, into the same area during the same period. In short, Joan make crystal clear that the Jews never entirely left the Holy Land, and the number of truly indigenous Arabs in Jewish-settled Western Palestine that were ostensibly displaced by the newcomers has been wildly exaggerated. And, indeed, the number of displaced Arabs is matched by an equal number of Arab Jews that have fled persecution in their home countries to take refuge in what has become Israel. This population exchange is something not acknowledged by the Arab world.

Perhaps, for me, the most revealing chapters were those detailing Britain's handling of the Palestine Mandate, which was assigned to Britain's oversight after WWI by the League of Nations and which originally grew out of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which it was declared:

"His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object ..."

Yet, Britain's ultimate custody of the Mandate was reprehensibly and shamefully duplicitous. Fearful of offending the Arabs, the British government separated the National Home of the Jewish People into eastern and western sectors, the former - roughly three-quarters of the total land area of the Mandate - subsequently closed to Jewish settlement and eventually to become Jordan, and severely limited Jewish immigration into the latter while allowing rampant illegal Arab immigration into the same. The author's verdict on British actions and policy prior to and during WWII is positively scathing:

"... that the British virtually signed the death warrants for countless Jews in mortal danger by engaging the might of the British Empire to enforce strict laws against Jewish immigration; that simultaneously Government declared an excess of jobs amounting to a need of 'emergency' proportions, whereby Government not only encouraged or winked at, but officially enacted the illegal immigration of thousand of Arab indigents from neighboring and more distant lands, to take jobs in the Jewish National Home that might have saved the lives of Jewish concentration camp victims - the whole action, seen in context, matches the barbarism that the Allies were battling to defeat."

Mind you, all of this isn't a figment of Joan's imagination, but is rigorously documented and proved by contemporary records.

Any convert from one belief system to another, be it religious, political or whatever, may become overzealously energetic in espousing the new faith. Here, Peters expends her surge of energy in perhaps going further then necessary to make her bottom-line point, which is that the world is being cynically manipulated by Arab public relations when it comes to the conjoined questions of Palestine and the Palestinian refugees. However, Joan's devotion to her new-found cause doesn't produce in FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL a flawed work when it comes to historical facts, but rather one that provides more information than necessary to make the conclusion. Under the circumstances, this is understandable, but it does make for a long read.

Anti-Semites, Arab or otherwise, will positively loathe FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL for the inconvenient truths it brings to the table. Israelis and those who sympathize with them should applaud (unless they're otherwise bent on hand-wringing). Those in between must read this superlative book, along with other works representing the opposing view, to arrive at a knowledgeable position. This is perhaps one of the most informative pieces of investigatory journalism on the market today.

Elitism

Academic elitism seems to be manifesting these days, just as in Pharisaical times. Those lacking certain letters after their names have no room to speak, apparently, and nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation. Advanced degrees determine dogma. The uncredentialed should respectfully remain silent.

Maligned mavericks are in good company, however. Yeshua would also be disqualified by these elitist standards, not to mention most of the Apostles:

And the Jews marvelled, saying, How knoweth this man letters, having never learned? Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine is not mine, but His that sent me. (John 7:15,16)

Recently, while watching a DVD debate between Young Earth and Old Earth proponents, I was struck by this interchange:

Ken Ham: “Where did you get that rule?”

Dr. Walter Kaiser: “That rule cost me $150,000 in graduate training.”

When Ken pointed out that other Hebraic scholars and respected lexicons had a different view, Dr. Kaiser’s answer was, “too bad for them” and cited “context” once again. This was concerning the word “yom” and whether or not it was an ordinary day (as defined by evening and morning) on Day 1, 2, and 3 in Genesis 1.

Disc 5, Part 9 of The Great Debate On Science and the Bible:

(See AIG link at Interesting Webpages)

While it is admirable that some have had the privilege and tenacity to attend seminaries and graduate schools, is this training, and the cost in dollars and time and effort, the last word in determining doctrine and proper exegesis of Scripture?

Today I was somewhat grieved as I read a modern day parable full of scathing scorn for “pseudo-scholars".....

A Parody on the Present State of Affairs

Are you tired of all the shoddy teaching that is constantly being foisted upon the growing Torah movement? Does it bother you that self-proclaimed "teachers" flood the internet with materials devoid of genuine scholarship? Click here for a "Modern Parable" that speaks to the issue.

www.torahresource.com/ModernParable.htm (See link at Interesting Webpages)

Those who would dare to voice an opinion, tackle a practical issue, raise concerns about a seemingly unscriptural teaching, present a well-researched or self-evident Biblical truth, recommend a website, or simply ask a question are being silenced in some circles, sadly including FFOZ and TR. However, as the parody points out, the Internet is flooded with information of all kinds. Knowledge is increased, just as prophesied (Daniel 12:4). Anyone can publish a book, or an article, or a blog, not just the lettered Elite. The Internet is the Wittenburg Door of our generation.

For Zion’s sake, we will not be silent (Isaiah 62:1).

Verse for today....

God....comforteth those that are cast down.... (2 Cor. 7:6)

My Computer Wears Tzit-tzit

Four blue strings adorn the corners of my computer monitor. They remind me not to spend too much time on the Internet, to be kind in my communications, and to remember Erev in the late afternoon so that I do not fall behind in my Bible reading and thus miss the message in God’s Word.

Today’s Bible reading in Ezra talks about a river called Ahava. I wonder where that is? Ahava means love in Hebrew. The river of love. It talks about gathering there. There was a camp-out for three days in Ezra’s time. The people fasted and prayed, trusting the LORD for protection against nomadic robbers in their journey to Jerusalem.

The LORD is good. I am thankful for His protection from storms...and protection from injury when my horse stumbled and I fell off the other day. My arm is bruised but no broken bones. I need to do more with my horses than hop on once in a blue moon. Speaking of the moon, is today the New Moon.....or tomorrow? Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care? What if God’s people are celebrating His feasts on the wrong days? What if many miss the Day of Atonement this year because of calendar issues? According to Dan’s calculations, it falls on September 11 of all dates. Interesting. I feel anticipatory. I know that the LORD is preparing me for changing times, tribulation, Great Tribulation. I know He will gather the Remnant.

I discovered in my Internet searches that Tim has a jazz gig going. He plays a trumpet very well! I really like the music.

I am going to try to write something daily on my blog. Whatever comes to mind.

Verse for today.....

The hand of our God is upon all them for good that seek Him; but His power and His wrath is against all them that forsake Him. (Ezra 8:22)