by Rabbi Boruch Leff
What does it mean that Shabbat is married to the Jewish people?
There is a weekly wedding which takes place each and every Shabbos --the marriage of the Jewish people and the Shabbos Queen. But in this wedding we don't merely attend the ceremony as honored guests; we are at the center of the celebration. We are the groom and Shabbos is the bride. The first source in the Torah where this concept is found is a Midrash: Rebbi Shimon Bar Yochai said: Shabbos came before the Master of the World and complained, 'Each day of the week has a mate. Sunday has Monday, Tuesday has Wednesday, Thursday has Friday. But I have no mate!' God replied, 'The Jewish nation will be your mate!' (Beraishis Rabbah 11:8)What exactly does this mean? How are Sunday and Monday 'mates'? In what way are they 'married'? And how are Jews wedded to Shabbos? How do you marry a day?TODAY AND TOMORROWLet us suggest an explanation. What gives any day value? A today can only have value if there is a tomorrow. I build, I work, I accomplish something in the material world because I want the building, the contract, ...   more »

Sometimes we make the most fundamental errors. When large numbers of people make mistakes -- even monumental ones -- it is almost impossible to challenge the resultant prevailing view. It was once the conventional wisdom that the earth is flat. In ancient times if anyone dared to claim that the earth was round, they would have been denigrated as being detached from reality. When, in the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus dared suggest that the sun was the centre of the solar system and not the earth, he was regarded as a heretic. In today's world any attempt to explain the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms other than "Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land" and the "denial of Palestinian nationalist aspiration" is often regarded like a declaration that the earth is flat and the center of the universe. But what if this view is wrong? What if, in terms of understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are living in pre-Copernican times? What if the Jewish State that is considered to be the root of all evil in the Middle East were instead the victim?  
Unlike the ANC, Israel has not found genuine negotiating partners.    
South Africa's Apartheid history is often invoked against Israel ...   more »

By Aaron KleinTemple Mount
JERUSALEM – Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has quietly granted the Waqf – the Muslim custodians of the Temple Mount – permission to dig unsupervised on the sacred site, WND has learned. The permission was granted in spite of longstanding fears from leading Israeli archeologists the Waqf might hide or dispose of Jewish Temple artifacts discovered during any Muslim digs. The last time the Waqf conducted an unsupervised excavation on the Temple Mount, in 1997, the Muslim custodians ultimately were caught by Israeli authorities disposing truckloads of Mount dirt that contained Jewish Temple artifacts. Most Palestinian leaders routinely deny well-documented Jewish ties to the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism. According to Palestinian sources, the Waqf last month requested permission from Israel to conduct what it said were needed excavations under the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount to install new electrical and telephone infrastructures in the mosque. Olmert's office at first turned down the Waqf request, but after petitioning by the Jordanian government, the prime minister acquiesced and has allowed the dig. The Waqf this week quietly began digging a massive tunnel that snakes from the Al Aqsa Mosque to the nearby Dome ...   more »

It has been two years since European voters rejected the EU Constitutional Treaty, a veritable coup which left politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels scratching their heads. Efforts were made to revive the failed proposal, but to no avail. The people had spoken – or so it seemed. Today, the EU constitution is once again set to become the law of the land. However it is now being called the EU "reform treaty" and this time around its fate may not rest in the hands of the people. The new EU reform treaty is essentially a repackaging of the EU constitutional treaty – not unlike putting lipstick on a pig – critics say the bulk of the document remains unchanged. According to Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister, the reform treaty is "90 percent the same" as the former constitutional treaty. However because it is not technically a constitution, government leaders may be able to ratify the treaty without submitting it to national referendums (giving it a better chance of survival). Like the constitutional treaty, the reform treaty establishes a new permanent EU president and a new foreign policy chief. It also abolishes national vetoes in more than 50 areas, strengthens ...   more »

By Jennifer Carden-Homeschooling mother and literature expert Nancy Brown once banned all "Harry Potter" books from her home, having heard witness after witness to the book's "evil" content. But when a trusted friend recommended she give the boy wizard a second chance, she did – with great trepidation. The results of her tests were a surprise to both the Catholic community, and to Brown herself, and are detailed in Brown's "The Mystery of Harry Potter: A Catholic Family Guide." "I began reading the first book, and immediately, I started absorbing the plotline, the characters. The fact that they were witches immediately fell to the background. First and foremost, they were people," Brown told WND. After she encountered the humanity of the characters, Brown found that the themes became infinitely relatable, and even spiritual. "This was a story about good and evil," she said. "The choices that Harry Potter had to make were important. His momentary despairs, his aching feelings for his parents – these things resonated with me." "I thought, 'Gee, these books really do have good themes, although they were couched a story about witches and wizards,'" she said. Brown's conclusions are in opposition to the positions adopted by ...   more »

CBNNews.com - History will be made Thursday on Capitol Hill when a Hindu chaplain will deliver what is believed to be the first Hindu prayer ever read in the United States Senate. The religious leader is calling the Senate prayer "an illustrious day for all Americans and a memorable day for Indian Americans when opening prayers from ancient Hindu scriptures will be read in the great hall of democracy." According to the Chaplain of the U.S. Senate web site, prayer has opened all sessions of the chamber for the past 200 years, "strongly affirming the Senate's faith in God as sovereign lord of our nation." The web site also lists the office of the chaplain as nonpartisan, nonpolitical, and nonsectarian.

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By Pavel Felgenhauer  
MiG-31E (Foxhound) jet fighter Yesterday, June 19, Moscow's respected business daily Kommersant reported that Russia's arms trading monopoly Rosoboronexport has begun to fulfill an arms deal it secretly signed with Syria earlier this year to sell five MiG-31E (Foxhound) jet fighters, considered one of the best in the world, and an additional unspecified number of the newest MiG-29M/M2 fighter-bombers. The paper reported the total price to be around $1 billion. MiG-31s were produced in Nizhniy Novgorod at the Sokol aviation factory from 1981 to 1994 (some 500 planes overall). Since production has been terminated, Syria, according to Kommersant, will get the jets from the Russian Defense Ministry stockpile after a refurbishing at Sokol (Kommersant, June 19).
Kommersant suggested that Iran is partially or even fully covering the purchase bill, and that the jets may partially or fully end up as part of the Iranian air force. Commenting on the Kommersant report, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamiynin yesterday morning told reporters, "All Russian arms deals comply with international law and Russia's obligations under international treaties and UN Security Council resolutions" (RIA-Novosti, June 19). This vague statement was widely taken as indirect conformation of the Kommersant story, but ...   more »

DETROIT -- While the NAACP has been fighting for the rights of African-Americans for nearly a century, it's important to fight for Muslim Americans in a post-9/11 world, the nation's Homeland Security chief told guests at the 98th NAACP national convention Tuesday evening.
"(We've) fought too long and too hard for the rights of African-Americans to turn our backs on the rights of Muslim Americans," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a crowd of more than 600 at the Armed Services and Veteran Affairs awards dinner at the Renaissance Marriott Hotel.
The NAACP convention continues today with a report expected on the "State of Young Black America." Etan Thomas of the Washington Wizards also is scheduled to speak at a youth leadership luncheon. A gospel extravanga, featuring CeCe Winans, is on tap for tonight.
At the dinner last night, more than a dozen people were honored for their work in fostering equality in the military. The ceremonies Tuesday were hosted in part by the U.S. Coast Guard.
In his keynote speech, Chertoff recounted stories of heroic rescues by African-Americans serving in the Coast Guard in the 1800s as well as work by the Coast Guard to save thousands of African-Americans ...   more »

While environmentalists are usually vocal about perceived threats ranging from pesticides to global warming, there is a silence when it comes to one threat already harming the water supply: hormones from birth-control pills.
According to the National Catholic Register, EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a mountain stream near Boulder, Colo., two years ago.
When they netted 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city's sewer plant, they found 101 were female, 12 were male, and 10 were strange "intersex" fish with male and female features.
It's "the first thing that I've seen as a scientist that really scared me," university biologist John Woodling told the Denver Post.
The Denver Post published this graphic in October 2004 featuring results of a study showing how fish near Boulder, Colo., had their sex impacted by estrogen from birth-control products in local waters. Figures were from the University of Colorado and the Colorado Division of Wildlife
The main culprits were found to be estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth-control pills and patches that ultimately ended up in the creek after being excreted in urine into the city's sewers.
The Register says Woodling, University of Colorado physiology professor ...   more »

Anatole Kaletsky
Yesterday, the pound and the euro hit their highest levels in a generation against the US dollar. The dollar, meanwhile, collapsed to a record low against an average of all the world’s major currencies. It is tempting to interpret the flight from the dollar in financial markets as the clearest, most objective, indicator of America’s relative decline.
Europe has long been derided as an ageing, sclerotic continent, doomed to irrelevance in a world dominated by America and Asia. But could it actually be America, not Europe, that is failing to compete in the globalised world economy and is now threatened with long-term decline?
Much that is happening in the world today certainly seems to belie the hubristic assumptions about American hegemony that were so prevalent a few years ago. It is not just the military debacle in Iraq and the geopolitical setbacks suffered by American diplomacy from the Middle East to Venezuela to North Korea. Less prominent in the media headlines, but in some ways more troubling, are the indicators of economic underperformance: the reliance on foreign borrowing (now equivalent to $2,000 annually for every American man, woman and child); the loss of Wall Street’s global dominance in ...   more »

The New York City Police Department is creating a web of cameras and roadblocks around Lower Manhattan designed to detect, track and deter terrorists.
The New York Times reports that the lower Manhattan Security Initiative will begin monitoring cars moving through the area by the end of this year with the use of more than 100 cameras.
The program is not yet fully financed. But if it is, it would mean a network of license plate readers, as well as three-thousand public and private security cameras below Canal Street. Police and security officers would staff an operations center and movable roadblocks.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of the nation. He says the initiative's aim is to make it less vulnerable.
But critics questions the plan's cost, efficacy and effects on privacy.
It would cost an estimated $90 million. The department currently has $25 million to spend on it.
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