And I'm not the only one...

Just after I published the quick post about my stand on the Matzav below, I did what I've been doing since the first announcement of Israel's Gaza campaign: move through every J-blog I have on favorites, and then click links like a mad woman to get as much info as possible.

How could I have forgotten to link to some of the wonderful bloggers who are making my up-to-dateness possible?

First, Leah shares that she, too, is standing with Israel...admittedly, last Friday well before I made that statement. Amazing how these things come together!

Second, this week's HH was hosted at Ima's blog...appropriately titled "The We Can't Stop Twittering/Blogging/Reading/Worrying/Watching/What's Going On in Israel Right Now Edition.... or....The Stuck To My BlackBerry Like Glue Edition.... "

A huge feature on Haveil Havalim is the blog of Jack, where he has posted myriad roundups and updates on the Gaza offensive...an excellent resource for information. (That's 16 links from "roundups" on...as I said, truly a wealth of information).

With all the blogging going on, of course there are what Jack politely terms "the opposition." Frume Sarah received a trollish comment, but rather than simply deleting she went one better...she answered him/her, point for point.

And my favorite blog, to which I have returned again and again. This woman speaks with poignancy about her son Elie, who serves in the IDF artillery. She calls herself simply, A Soldier's Mother.

Please check all of these links and follow up...Israel is not a terrorist state, she's a state under fire, acting as humanely as possible given the circumstances.

Thank you to all the bloggers who have made this possible, those listed, and those they link. Shalom.

The Five Minute Shower Challenge

If you look to the right, you'll see I've added a button titled "I'm having a Quickie." I would tell you not to blush, but I'm sure I'm more prudish than most of my (limited) readership, so I'll just explain.

As a military spouse I've found it's not good to be alone, either in real life or here in La-la-land. I'm very blessed in that I have a wonderful, close-knit group of online friends who help each other get through the hard times and celebrate the good times of being married to the military. Not only do we ooh and aah over babies and cry over deployments, we also talk about our everyday lives. One of our most recent topics of conversation has been about being "green" in whatever ways we can find. You could say we're a more crunchy-granola group than some, I suppose. Which means finding the Crunchy Domestic Goddess fit in perfectly with what we'd been discussing already, and I am more than willing to take up the challenge of a five minute shower each day. As I told the ladies, the kids don't let me get by with more than three to five minutes most days, anyway...hopefully this will be a piece of cake!

Military spouse or not, I encourage you to consider taking up this challenge...or setting one of your own, for recycling, driving less, or reusing more. Every little bit adds up and makes a difference.

Don't forget to check out Haveil Havalim!

I never seem to remember to post this, but I do enjoy reading Haveil Havalim from time to time (when I find a spare few minutes)...

This week HH is over at Ima on the Bima's blog.

If you haven't heard of HH before, here's the quick explanation:

Founded by Soccer Dad, Haveil Havalim is a carnival of Jewish blogs -- a weekly collection of Jewish & Israeli blog highlights, tidbits and points of interest collected from blogs all around the world. It's hosted by different bloggers each week and coordinated by Jack. The term 'Haveil Havalim,' which means "Vanity of Vanities," is from Qoheleth, (Ecclesiastes) which was written by King Solomon. King Solomon built the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and later on got all bogged down in materialism and other 'excesses' and realized that it was nothing but 'hevel,' or in English, 'vanity.'

Enjoy!

Christianity and Judaism, Scriptural Interpretation

Look at the NT based on the OT. There are parallels that are apparent once sought and studied. Prophecies and statements in the Old Testament were made realized in the New Testament.

Of course if a newly evolving “religion” wanted to sway believers that they are the inheritors of an existing belief with over 12 centuries of collective prophetic experience, they just might do everything possible to “spin” the facts described in their newly evolving literature to appear to match the expectations hinted at in the prophetic scripture of the targeted religion.

I’ve said it many times. Christianity (and in many ways Islam as well) are offshoots of Judaism. All the content they profess to teach their believers are teachings regurgitated from Judaism. They are locked in a love/hate relationship. Love in that their message is a message borrowed from another. Hate in that they can never truly superseded the other without negating the very source of their own legitimacy.

By: Yoel Ben-Avraham on May 25, 2007
at 8:27 am
Found in a comment on this blog.

I know that with all the reading I've done, I'm sure to have picked up many ideas and thoughts along the way which I can't attribute to any one person, but which did not come about through my own reasoning. This is one of the downfalls of reading such a large amount of information all the time: it's very difficult to hang onto or sort out everything that has been digested. However, even though I can't claim to have come up with the idea stated above, I feel that it is very true.

At some point I saved the link to Yoel Ben-Avraham's blog Second Thoughts. Today I had a little extra computer time and chose to check out this blog I had favorited. Looking over some old posts, I found a link to Jeremiah Andrew's blog where Yoel Ben-Avraham had posted several responses, one of which is the one quoted above.

It only makes sense that a new religion would borrow from other established religions. As I told a friend once, I believe there is something to be learned from all religions. Religions most similar to my own upbringing are most interesting to me, probably on the basis of familiarity. Of course it is easy to study Islam without feeling particularly drawn to convert to it. There are many things about Islam which I respect but do not believe in, not the least that Muhammed was a prophet sent by G-d who apparently had all the right answers. (I know I'm simplifying a lot, forgive me.) However, Judaism, with the backbone Tanakh on which the New Testament of the Christians is based, is much more compelling. Of course both religions have evolved over the centuries since the founding of Christianity, and Judaism itself was involved in an evolution of theology and thought even before that. How can a Christian not see that in essence they have stolen another's sacred text and are twisting it to their own ends?

Of course anyone will change anything to suit their needs or their viewpoint; this is what interpretation of scriptures is all about, and is inescapable. I, for instance, read the verses against boiling a kid in its mother's milk. From this I draw the conclusion that one should not doubly insult a mother by first killing her young, and then adding insult to injury, taking her milk and using it to create a dish of her baby. Thus to me it might be understandable that a cheeseburger (since one does not know from which cow the milk for the cheese nor the meat from the hamburger came) is treif, non-kosher. On the other hand, I can't quite see why chicken parmesan would be treif. A chicken does not give milk, thus adding cheese to it is not rubbing salt in the wound. However, the rabbis deem it so, and so it is. Perhaps the rabbis felt barnyard animals hung together, I don't know.

All this to say, I felt Yoel Ben-Avraham made a compelling argument for the genesis of the give and take between a parent religion and its offspring.

More time equals more blog reading!

This blog is a bit of a departure from my normal religious meanderings, but I'm not in the mood to try to unravel more threads today. Thus I'm going to blog a little boring piece about Jblogs (ie, Jewish blogs).

My darling dear is currently away for training, which leaves me with more time to myself after the children are put to bed, or while they're playing peacefully. Although I miss him dreadfully, I put this time to good use (*snicker*) by catching up on my reading. There are quite a few JBC blogs I enjoy, as well as some JBB blogs. The more I read, the more I find linked together...and I'm simply amazed! Is the blogging world so small, that everyone is inter-connected? Or perhaps it's the J-blogosphere that is small...although we should all realize by now that it's truly a small world, after all. :D

Right now I'm enjoying starting one by one, and reading from the farthest archive forward. It's almost like reading a novel, albeit a Faulknerian novel with many turns for stream-of-consciousness.