by Rabbi Doniel Baron
The inner meaning of 50 and why Shavuot has no date.
Every Jewish holiday falls on a specific day of the month, with one exception: Shavuot, the day on which we accepted the Torah. Shavuot is always the 50th day following the beginning of Passover. It could technically fall on any one of three dates since the number of days in a Jewish month could vary from year to year. The name Shavuot alludes to its independence from the standard calendar. The name means "weeks," demonstrating how the holiday marks the culmination of seven weeks regardless of the date. What is the essence of that dateless day? Hints to the answer lie within the process that leads to Shavuot, the book we read on Shavuot, and the number 50 itself.
Metamorphosis
The key to understanding Shavuot lies within the process that leads up to it. We start counting the days from our exodus from Egypt, our birth as a people, and continue to count until Shavuot, the 50th day. That count marks a period of national metamorphosis. The Jewish people had been so entrenched in Egypt that the Torah described the Exodus as the extraction of ...   more »

Damascus lambasts Israel, US over demands UN nuclear watchdog agency conduct visits to Syrian facilities
AFP
Syria's official press lashed out at the United States and Israel on Tuesday over claims it was building a secret nuclear reactor, and said the Jewish state's own atomic facilities should be subject to international inspection.
Fact or Fiction?  
Syria to allow probe of nuclear allegations 
IAEA chief says Damascus has agreed to let inspectors into country this month to probe allegations of illegal nuclear activity     
UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said on Monday that his inspectors would this month visit the site of the suspected reactor that was bombed by Israeli warplanes in September last year.
The site at Al-Kibar was attacked after Israeli and US intelligence concluded it was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, but the Syrians have denied the allegations.
"The American and Israeli claims are false. Instead, Israel should be called on to submit its own nuclear installations to international inspection so at least we know how many nuclear weapons it possesses," Syria's official Ath-Thawra newspaper said in an editorial.
Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear armed power in the Middle East but has ...   more »

By Ofer Aderet,  
Nazis against anti-Semitism? As bizarre as that sounds, a group of Germans which calls itself "National Socialists For Israel" launched its Web site in support of Israel.
"Stop the hatred of the Jewish people," the Web site reads. "The Jews are a healthy, strong nation."
The organization - whose members have yet to reveal themselves to the public - claims that Israel's right to exist is anchored in the principles of social Darwinism, the same principles which the Nazis adopted prior to the Second World War.
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"Israel earned the right to live among the nations [after emerging] from unending wars," the group writes on the site. "Israel also has a right to exist. This nation also has culture... The nation of Israel is appreciated... It is our duty, as neo-Nazis, to defend this supreme success. Not just for the German people and the European cultural sphere, but also, especially, for Israel."
As such, "Nazis for Israel" also leveled criticism at their colleagues in the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), calling them "politicos, cowards, and reactionaries."
"Show us proof of a Jewish plot to dominate the world," they wrote in a rare manifesto which was ...   more »

By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent, and News Agencies   
The moment when Israel and the Palestinian Authority will have to make tough decisions is fast approaching, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference Tuesday.
"We must stop the Iranian threat by all possible means," he said.
"Each and every country must understand that the long-term cost of a nuclear Iran greatly outweighs the short-term benefits of doing business with Iran."  
Olmert is to meet Wednesday with U.S. President George W. Bush to discuss the Iranian nuclear program and upgrading security relations between the U.S. and Israel.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who also addressed the AIPAC conference in Washington Tuesday, stressed the urgency of establishing a Palestinian state, saying that the increase in violence in the Middle East makes the establishment of a peaceful Palestinian state more urgent rather than less.
That remark, however, was greeted with silence - though the secretary had been warmly greeted by the conference. AIPAC has been a leading skeptic regarding the current Palestinian leadership's ability to control terrorism should a state be established.
Rice said that while the present opportunity is not perfect by any means, it ...   more »