Staying Real in Israel
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It is SUCH a pain in the tush (butt) for a Jew to keep kosher…the Jewish dietary laws mandated by the Torah. So many yummy foods that a Jew may not eat…seafood, bacon, not to mention cheeseburgers and meat with a creamy French sauce.

Non-Kosher Food...Tasty, But Dangerous for the Jewish Soul

Then there’s all the trouble you have to go through to make sure that your meat is slaughtered properly, even if it IS of a kosher species, and that, of course, makes it much more expensive. Now, once you have your properly slaughtered kosher meat, you’ve got to go through the long process of ridding it of blood…salting and on and on. And do NOT get me started on liver…hardly worth the trouble required by the Torah to prepare just to enjoy a little chopped liver.

Oh, yeah, and then, since Jewish dietary law forbids mixing milk and meat, you have to have two sets of everything…dishes, utensils, pots, pans, dishwashers, sinks…talk about burdensome! Not to mention that you have to wait six hours after eating meat before you can eat a dairy product. What, am I expected to go around with a stopwatch? What did they do before every watch had a digital timer on board? And it sure would be nice if I could eat in any old restaurant that my non-Jewish or non-religiously observant friends choose for our night out, or that required attendance business lunch.

So, why bother? Why do I, just because I was born Jewish, have to jump through all these hoops just to have a little nosh? And don’t give me that “health” answer…no pork because of trichinosis centuries ago, it’s more healthy, yadda yadda yadda…none of which is true OR the reason we Jews have to keep kosher.

Bottom line is…Jews have to observe the dietary laws of kashrut (kosher) because G-d said to…period…
But if maybe this is not enough for you, my thinking friends, there is a whole world of spiritual reasons, none of which make any rational sense, as to why a Jew may not eat certain foods or certain mixtures of foods, and on and on with the minutiae of kashrut…their is something special about the Jewish “Soul”, or Spirit, that which turns our body from a lifeless blob of flesh into a living, talking, thinking human being…This special Soul is damaged by taking in non-kosher food. Non-kosher food is spiritually unhealthy for a Jewish Soul…but there is absolutely NO way that you can understand this on a rational level.

I did, however, run into something interesting as I was studying the Torah reading for this Sabbath, the portion of Shemini, where, among other topics, the basis for the Jewish dietary laws is laid out.

On the verse that tells us, “these are the living things that you may eat”, the medieval Torah commentator, Rashi explains the following…To what can this idea be compared? (the idea of dietary laws that limit and proscribe what a Jew may or may not eat and how)

Rashi says, it is like a doctor who tells a sick person to go ahead and eat whatever he wants…it doesn’t matter anyway…your case is hopeless…nothing can save you anyway, so you might as well enjoy it while you can…as opposed to the OTHER sick person, who DOES have hope of being saved…cured of his illness…HE is ordered by the same doctor to partake of a strictly controlled diet, only eating certain foods and mixtures of foods, consuming certain special medicines and avoiding at all cost other, harmful foods…all in the interest of restoring and preserving good health…

Jewish dietary laws…kosher…Mandatory universal Jewish health insurance…THAT is how G-d is insuring the spiritual health of his Chosen People, the Jews…

Food for thought…

I KNEW it, Ellen..There really IS something to this marriage thing, after all…Even after almost 40 years…

Happily married men ‘much less likely to suffer stroke’ than single or unhappily married friends

Scientists say an unhappy marriage or being left on the shelf was as big a risk to your chances of having a stroke as having diabetes

Telegraph.co.uk

Single men and those in unsuccessful marriages were 64 per cent more likely to have a stroke than men in successful marriages.

Scientists say an unhappy marriage or being left on the shelf was as big a risk to your chances of having a stroke as having diabetes.

The findings even shocked scientists, who said they did not expect to see that a happy home life had such an impact on a man’s health.

The study did not look at how at whether women’s chance of stroke was reduced if they had a happy marriage, but researchers are keen to test out the theory on them too.

The study followed 10,059 civil servants and council workers who completed the Israeli Ischemic Heart Disease Study in 1963.

They followed the men through death records and other public registers to 1997 to check their cause of death.

In 1965, two years after the first study, the participants were asked to rate their marriages as successful or unsuccessful or if they never married at all.

Dr Uri Goldbourt, of Tel Aviv University, said the study was a sign of how important good relationships are to men.

“An analysis of the 3.6 percent of men who had reported dissatisfaction in their marriage found the adjusted risk of a fatal stroke was also 64 percent higher, compared with men who considered their marriages very successful,” he said.

“I had not expected that unsuccessful marriage would be of this statistical importance.”

Dr Goldbourt said the risk of stroke was just as high for single men as it was for those stuck in dead end marriages.

He said: “Considering age at death and adjusting for socioeconomic status, obesity, blood pressure, smoking habits and family size, as well as existing diabetes and heart disease at the time of the earlier survey, single men had a 64 percent higher risk of fatal stroke than did married men.

“That figure is comparable to the risk of fatal stroke faced by men with diabetes.”

Dr Goldbourt said the new research had several limitations.

“There was a lack of data on nonfatal versus fatal strokes and on participants’ medical treatment after the first five years of the initial study. Women also weren’t included.

“While the effects of marital status and success may be similar in women there are still differences, and research on women is clearly needed.”