Hamas escalates violence against Israel

Look I hate to stick my nose in where it isn't wanted, but if I might humbly make so bold as to say....the only thing you girls are going to get out of bickering with Jose is a headache.

The Fake Zionist sees people who are not even there - probably hears voices too. Yes people do get headaches when they find they are unable to substantiate wild and baseless claims and the Fake Zionist knows quite a bit about that too.

Cushy job there at the GLA. 9:30-5…

What's the betting that Pol Pot Khmer Rouge deprogamming/re-education piece will reappear after Hoffman thinks it's safe to post? Yep, it's there. What a coward.

Still I wonder what he and his mate, the one who called for the rape of Israel, thinks of the following (and just to point out that there's a solidarity prayer/protest meeting outside the Israeli embassy tomorrow evening, Rosh Chodesh):

On Rosh Chodesh Kislev, November 15, 2012, Women of the Wall and supporters will gather at the Kotel at 7 a.m. for Tfilat Shacharit, the morning prayer service. Will you join us? If you pray with Women of the Wall, as a Jewish woman on the women’s side of the Kotel partition, you will see a group of women, a sisterhood, that believes in performing mitzvot, who pray every day, some of them with tallit and tefillin and all of them with great kavannah (purpose). They are women of different religious streams who wish to get their kids off to school, pray in peace at the Kotel and then get to work on time. The largest distraction at the Kotel on Rosh Chodesh morning are the screaming, criticizing, cursing haredi (ultra-Orthodox) onlookers and the police who probe us with cameras, invasively filming close to our faces and detaining our sisters.

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the overseer of holy sites, would tell you that you are provoking “the baseless hatred [sinat hinam]... that destroyed Jerusalem.” But all the “baseless hatred” that Rabinowitz speaks of is created by his own community, the haredi men and women who spit at us, and pepper us with gender-biased and hateful slurs. This cruel “baseless hatred” is aimed at the Women of the Wall as they modestly sing in prayer.

The rabbi’s voice and leadership would be better spent encouraging the haredim who pray at the Kotel to practice tolerance at the holy site.

Yes, we want to be seen and heard.

Praying the way we do is not an activity that has to be done covertly. We are proud of our practice and wish it to be one of the many practices welcome at the Wall. We want girls to see us and ask themselves, “why not? Why not take up the role in religious life that we encourage of their brothers? Rabbi Rabinowitz would have you believe that our insistence on being seen and heard in public is not kosher.

His book, Hilchot Hakotel, (2009), has 531 pages with hundreds of photographs of people praying at the Wall – but not one is recognizably a woman.

The rabbi and others want you, as a non-ultra-Orthodox woman, to go pray at Robinson’s Arch, and not at the Kotel, where Am Yisrael has prayed for thousands of years. If you join us, you will see that despite the difficult circumstances, we pray as best as we can at the Western Wall, where our mothers and grandmothers prayed, and we will not be segregated or intimidated.

I hope you will be with Women of the Wall at the Kotel on Rosh Chodesh Kislev, and if you can’t make it, I hope you will join us on Facebook.

Nobody is stopping the self publicity seeking provocateur Anat Hoffman praying at the Western Wall. However as she is not prepared to respect other people's religious sensibilities I trust that if she does arrive with her circus that she will again be arrested and hopefully fined heavily. I am quite sure she would not perform her antics in contravention of prevailing rules and regulations at either a Christian or Moslem Holy site.
And Millis you are being somewhat hypocritical if you hold that Jonathan Hoffman deserved all he got for waving a flag in the Albert Hall but that Anat Hoffman is entitled to disrespect and ride roughshod over the rules for prayer at the Western Wall which have been prescribed by the authority charged with maintaining its sanctity.

And what about Reform Jews' religious sensibilities? Don't they have any? Does everyone have to capitulate to the minority? Did Magna Carta die in vain?

If I visit a Christian or a Muslim or any other religious site, I do so as a guest. At the Kotel, I am at home, as is Anat Hoffman. Better get used to it.

Millis you do not answer the point - the authority administering the Western Wall has made rules governing its sanctity, not your or my right to do there as we please. If we break those rules we have to accept the consequences. Even at home we have to behave or does that not apply in your home? In any event we are all guests at the Western Wall as we are when we enter any house of prayer.
The rules are for the benefit of all Jews not just those who consider their right to flaunt established Jewish practice by dressing to provoke or behaving in a manner which would cause unnecessary discomfort to other worshippers are more important than the sanctity of the Western Wall. Religious Jews (in which I include myself) as you well know do not intermingle when praying what you are saying is that that there should be no respect for those Jews who hold sincere beliefs as to the correct behaviour when praying which have been followed for thousands of years. Now because those beliefs have been replaced in some communities by those whose practices are wholly alien to Jewish tradition we have to accept them? Does thta mean we would also have to allow Jews for Jesus to openly hold services at the Western Wall?
Whilst demeaning all religious Jews you also are of the opinion that therefore they should not be allowed to pray at the Western Wall because allowing a fringe group to carry on their circus is more important than allowing the majority of Jews who go to the Western Wall to pray (rather than engage in theatricals) to do so in accordance with long established and accepted tradition which is why it is upheld by the Law of the Land.
As I have said before people who wish to undertake prayer which is outside the accepted norms of Jewish tradition have place to do it.

Those rules don't benefit all Jews. They benefit only the minority (Orthodox) who appear to have centre stage while others are forced on to the fringes.

I'm not demeaning all religious Jews. I'm merely pointing out that while some seem to think that only they have religious sensibilities, there are other Jews whom they hate with a passion whose religious sensibilities account for nothing.

You talk about traditions going back thousands of years, but in fact Judaism has always evolved - and for want of a better phrase reformed itself. Midrashic and rabbinic Judaism would have been totally alien to those who adhered to the religion hundreds of years beforehand, just like ritualistic Jews think Progressive Judaism is not Judaism.

It all really boils down to this: Is Israel the nation state of all Jews or is it he state of those who are willing to accept only the Orthodox way of religious observance?

The Lubavitcher Rebbe ZTz"l had this to say:
One of the inner and essential reasons for the Mechitzah—since you insist on an explanation—is that the synagogue, and the time of prayer in general (even when recited at home), are not merely the place and time when a formal petition is offered to Him Who is able to fulfill the petition; it is much more profound than that. It is the time and place when the person offering the prayer unites himself with Him to Whom the prayer is offered, by means of the prayer. And as our Sages declare: Know before Whom you stand: before the Supreme King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. “Know” (da), as the term daas [knowledge] is explained in the Tanya, in the sense of unity, as in “And Adam knew Eve.” The union of two things can be complete only when there is not a third element involved, be it even a matter of holiness and the like.

From the above it follows that there certainly must be nothing to distract the attention and the attunement of the heart and mind towards the attainment of the highest degree of unity with G‑d.

From the above it also follows that the separation of the sexes by a Mechitzah has nothing to do with any particular condition or state in the women, as has been suggested to you.

It further follows also that the purpose of the Mechitzah is not just to set up a visible boundary, for which a Mechitzah of several inches might do, but it must be one that completely hides the view, otherwise a Mechitzah does not accomplish all its purposes.

I have indicated above, though quite briefly, some of the basic facts about a Mechitzah and the essential explanation behind it in order to answer your questions and satisfy your curiosity. I must say, however, quite emphatically, that the approach of testing and measuring Torah and mitzvoth by the yardstick of the limited and often fallacious human reason is totally wrong. The human intellect is a very unreliable gauge, and quite changeable from one extreme to the other. Even in the so-called exact sciences, the unreliability of human reason and deduction has been amply demonstrated, and what was one day considered as an “absolute” truth is the next day abrogated with equal certainty and absoluteness. Hence to presume to make conditions in regard to the eternal and G‑d-given Torah and mitzvoth is completely out of place.

Therefore, inasmuch as we have been instructed to have a Mechitzah in the house of prayer, it would violate even common sense to present a petition to the Almighty in a manner which displeases Him, and to add insult to injury, to declare that “the reason I do not accept this regulation is because my human intelligence suggests to act otherwise than is the will of the En Sof [the Infinite G‑d], yet, please fulfill my request anyway!”

The Lubavitch Rebbe? Isn't following him a form of idolatry? Like Akum? And what was it Eliezer Schach said about Lubavitch: What's the religion that is closest to Judaism? Lubavitch.

it would violate even common sense to present a petition to the Almighty in a manner which displeases Him,

Displeases him or displeases the Orthodox men? I'm sorry, but I think the Orthodox ritualist version of God is far too human. I know about Tzelem enosh and all that, but that kind of God has all the attributes of a raging, jealous, egocentric person. Not Godlike at all.

I am of the opinion that if there is a divine entity, it is far more metaphysical than some middle-management bureaucrat who has not been promoted in a long while.

Millis unfortunately you betray your ignorance with your postings - a little knowledge and all that. I do not follow the Lubavitcher RebberZTz"l I ma just quoting him.

This is what Rabbi Soloveichik has to say on the subject:
After briefly mentioning the halachic and historical arguments for maintaining separate pews, he makes what I would call a “definitional” argument in which he describes his understanding of the very nature of prayer. "During prayer man must feel alone, removed, isolated...." For those who accept his definition of prayer, or at least, his ideal of prayer, it is worth reflecting how so many of our synagogues seem to have strayed from this ideal. Even with separate pews, frivolity prevails. Sadly, conversations had with neighbors, seated to one's right or left, are often more earnest than those had with the Creator. What can be done? To start, the queries need to be turned to the right address: 'Lord, what can I do to pray better?'
In the meantime here is the excerpt:
'Thirdly, the entire concept of “family pews'' is in contradiction to the Jewish spirit of prayer. Prayer means communion with the Master of the World, and therefore withdrawal from all and everything. During prayer man must feel alone, removed, isolated. He must then regard the Creator as an only Friend, from whom alone he can hope for support and consolation. Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes look unto the Lord our God, until He be gracious unto us (Psalms 123:2)
Clearly, the presence of women among men, or of men among women, which often evokes a certain frivolity in the group, either in spirit or in behavior, can contribute little to sanctification or to the deepening of religious feeling; nor can it help instill that mood in which a man must be immersed when he would communicate with the Almighty. Out of the depths have I called Thee, O Lord (Psalms 130: 1), says the Psalmist. Such a state of being will not be realized amid "family pews."' (The Sanctity of the Synagogue: Page 116)
http://www.rabbihausman.com/2011/07/rabbi-joseph-b-soloveitchik-and.html

The Lubavitcher Reebe however encapsualtes your problem thus:
"The human intellect is a very unreliable gauge, and quite changeable from one extreme to the other".
Unfortunately because you have no faith you have no concept of sanctity so let's be frank are wholly unqualified to voice a knowledgeable opinion on the matter.

You quote him. I quote him back at you. I never suggested you followed him, so enough already with the straw rabbis. And enough already with the quite obvious reactions of minority rabbis. They say what they are always going to say, for them a statement of the bleedin' obvious. That's why Orthodoxy is becoming, on its fringes, so ossified.

I have no faith in a God that was invented by humans to behave like them, as seems to be the case with your beliefs.

Millis stop projecting you have no idea what I believe. You show your complete ignorance by calling Rabbi Soloveichik a "minority rabbi" but that's about par for the course. Just be honest you do not have the knowledge to give an educated opinion on this matter which is why you descend to demeaning anyone who has faith in a Supreme Being. That is surprising since it was that faith that sustained a whole nation through 2000 years of persecution.