Shyne-ing Star: Moshe Levi Raps Ultra

From Mexico City, the world's formost Orthodox rapper moved to Jerusalem in 2010, correspondent Karl Vick blogs in Time.com.  For an ultra-orthodox Jew he seems, well, unorthodox. Read on:

Moshe Levi both fits in and doesn’t. Race is only part of it. Israeli Jews come in all shades, from the Falash of Ethiopia to the pinkest German Ashkenazi. When it comes to religious observance, however, skin color generally signals less than attire. The round felt hat, formal suit and high white stockings Levi sports is the uniform of the Ultra-Orthodox, Jews who dress in the clothes of 18th century Eastern Europe for a reason: They take great efforts to form communities removed from a modern world riven with degradations like television, the internet and, yes, rap music. As a group, they are also the poorest Jews in Israel, families often subsisting on welfare while the husband spends the day studying scripture.
That’s not Levi, who doesn’t actually read Hebrew. “I’m more of a doer than a reader,” he says.
Nor does he follow a particular rabbi, another Ultra-Orthodox norm. “I definitely try not to get into the whole gang affiliation thing,” Levi says.  If on some days he wears a striped suit, other times flat black, it’s because he admires the traditions. He also jets up to Paris for Fashion Week.
“I don’t really have time to figure out their thing. I have my thing.”
His thing is not Zionism, the ideology that brought Israel into existence as a state.  “Absolutely not,” Levi says. “I just said I’m absolutely not into sects or gangs. I love all human beings.”
His thing is music. As Shyne, he has completed two unreleased albums, Gangland and Messiah. Both are rap, but “totally philosophical and sophisticated,” he says. “No misogyny. None of that deranged stuff  I used to be into” a decade or so ago, as a protégé of Sean “P. Diddy” Combs at Bad Boy Entertainment. He was with Combs and his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lopez, when the ruckus broke out in the Club New York.  Combs and his bodyguard were also tried but acquitted.
“I don’t even want to be a rapper,” Levi says at one point in the interview. “I don’t listen to that music. I’m a musician. I’d rather be like Bob Marley or Leonard Cohen, one of those guys.”

 Read more.

thanks alot

Thanksgiving is for family, and gratitude for much else... and I am personally thankful forcompleteing two years blogging on line, from Lala Land and the Holy Land.!

This Thanksgiving I am grateful not to be stuck in Gaza. Back from there for the past two weeks, lately I have been busy all day, in full expat turkey mode here in Jerusalem. Izzy has been cooking instead of blogging for a change, so let me share some holiday sentiments, lifted from
Tim McGirk of Time magazine:

As you sit down to a Thanksgiving feast, please spare a thought for the starving Palestinians of Gaza. There are 1.5 million of them, most of them living hand to mouth, or on UN handouts, because Israel has them under siege.

It's a vicious cycle, one that's being repeated every few months or so. The Islamic militants do something crazy, Israel strikes back, the militants fire missiles into southern Israel and then the entry points into Gaza slam shut. Food and the basic necessities of life are squeezed off to the barest minimum.

And who suffers? Not the militants, not Hamas nor Islamic Jihad. As usual, it's the people of Gaza who are dazed with hunger. My friend Azmi, who has diabetes, tells me he is running out of insulin, and he can't find any pharmacy or hospital that still has supplies.

Dialysis machines are breaking down in the hospital (the rare moments when there's electricity to run them) and there are no spare parts to replace them. Bakeries have run out of flour. “I've been to the Cairo zoo,” says Azmi, “and I swear those animals are treated better there than we humans are in Gaza.”

Many stories are written about the smugglers' tunnels that honeycomb Gaza's southern border with Egypt. We write about how the smugglers bring Viagra and tiger cubs through the tunnels, as though Gaza were some big exotic shopping mall, a Neiman Marcus on the Mediterranean. But the truth his, all the stuff coming through the tunnel is expensive because it is taxed by the smugglers, and beyond the reach of most Gazans.

In the Third Act of this sorry performance, the international community and the UN start complaining loudly, and Israel lets in a few dozen trucks of food, or turns the fuel spigot on for a few hours to reduce the international outcry and show what good guys they are. That's what happened today. The Israelis let in 40 trucks. It's hardly enough. At a minimum, says Chris Guness, an UNRWA spokesman, “We need to bring in 15 trucks a day, every day.” Adds UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Palestinian Territories Maxwell Gaylard, “This is an assault on human dignity with severe humanitarian implications.”

Then we have Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, obviously irritated by Gaza questions during his valedictory tour to Washington. He dismissed the near-famine in Gaza as nothing more than the whining of a few cry-babies, as if he expected them to make souffles out of sand, soups from stone.

Israel wants to draw a curtain around Gaza so nobody can see how it's punishing the Palestinians. That's why, for the past two weeks, they've barred the foreign press from entering Gaza. The reason, says the Israeli military, is that catch-all phrase “security”, and it is pronounced with arrogant solemnity as if to say ‘Take it from us, we have our very good reasons. Don't challenge us.”

Well, the foreign press did challenge the Israeli government. We took the matter to the high court, petitioned Olmert and got our editors to write letters of complaint. Some journalists talk of chartering a boat from Cyprus and trying to run the Israeli naval blockade. These are desperate tries, but this is a violation of the press's freedom, and the world's right to know. This is the sort of shameful attitude you might expect from Zimbabwe's Dictator Robert Mugabe, not Israel. Please.

Choking the life out of the Gazans isn't going to make them turn against their Hamas overlords. On the contrary, says my friend Azmi, “Everything that Israeli does isn't harming Hamas in Gaza. It's making them stronger.” Starving Palestinians and depriving them of medicine certainly isn't going to make them like Israelis, or their supporters in Washington, any better.

Happy Thanksgiving.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

I am thankful to escape the Southern California wildfires, and that I was nowhere near Mombai, and non of my Indian friends were hurt, and hoping that the Bangkok airport will be open for us this weekend. Time to feast!

Messiah Prequel? Gabriel Revelation tablet stirs Believers in Resurrection

Reading between the inked lines on a pair of ancient stone tablets from the east bank of the Dead Sea, scholars in Jerusalem suggest that the idea of a suffering Messiah, who would die and resurrect within three days, was in the Jewish tradition decades before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Hmmm. And so what?

This news has been picked up around the world after the New York Times ran a piece about it. They resurrected excitement about a discovery made ten years ago and now being presented speculatively to an academic conference at the Israel Museum. Many gospel-reading Christians will just shrug off the news. Hundreds of old prophecies in the Old Testament were fulfilled by the events of Jesus's 33 years and, as prophesised, numerous false messiahs have surfaced over the centuries.

Acc to the Scotsman,perhaps the discovery shows a link between Judaism and Christianity. (Duh. This we knew already.

The tablet's text concerns an apocalyptic vision transmitted by the archangel Gabriel and draws on Old Testament prophets Daniel, Hagai and Zachariah. Prof Knohl says he has filled in a crucial missing word, hayeh, meaning live, making a line of the text say: "In three days you shall live, I Gabriel command you."

According to the tablet, the command is addressed to "The Prince of Princes". Ada Yardeni, one of the scholars who wrote the original analysis of the tablet, says Prof Knoll's deciphering of the word hayeh was "100 per cent" accurate.

Prof Knohl is convinced that "Jesus acted according to the concepts in the tablet: that the messiah must die to bring redemption".

However, the actual evidence says
"In three days you shall ----, I Gabriel command you"
...so pick a verb, folks. Fill in the blank. This verse could be interpreted as almost anything.

The antiquities owner hwo bought the curiosity is sheepish that he hesitated before calling in experts to interpret it, he told Time magazine.