The Kosher Compass (dot com)

A new spin on novelty gifts for Hanukah? (Left: The kosher compass; Right: Limoges dreidle)



Readers of the Jerusalem Post and other Jewish web content have recently been bombarded with the following advertising hype:

The compass that defies Nature! Just open the cover and find your way home to Jerusalem!

The Incredible Jerusalem Compass will show you the proper direction for your daily prayers, anywhere in the world. No Computer chips, no circuitry - this non-electric device spins and stops in the direction of Jerusalem from any place you are in the world [emphasis mine]. It's an incredible device that defies nature as it shows you the direction of your prayers and dreams... Recommended by leading Rabbis.

The question is: How true can this be? If it's non-electric, surely the only posibilities we are left with are magnets, mirrors and... miracles?

According to Parshablog it would seem I'm not the first to ask this question, and not the first either to be reluctant to shell out $24 to buy one and test it. (One would feel so silly buying one...) The patent having been located by the above blogger, it seems likely that the incredible kosher compass that defies nature is probably not more than a cute novelty item, based on the following two principles:

1) A non magnetized needle is attached to a regular, magnetized compass needle that is hidden beneath the compass face.

2) The angle between the two needles can be adjusted for different locations using a knob on the outside of the compass (visible in the picture but not mentioned in the hype).

If this is the case, you actually have to carry the "adjustment leaflet" with you when you travel, not just the compass, and using the thing in Jerusalem - with the exact direction for prayers changing at every block - might be a nightmare rather than "a dream".

Business is obviously swift, with some webstores already being "Sold Out" of the wonder item; but I suspect that before long interest will wane and the "the compass that defies nature," will do a vanishing act.

Disclaimer: I have not seen the compass itself and am merely speculating based on a basic knowledge of physics and an Internet Search.

Gaza synagogues the day after

Gaza synagogues before the Disengagement

Smashing, Positively Dashing...

Royal Ascot is well underway, and betting closed early for guessing the colour of the Queen's hat at Ladies' Day (yesterday). The bookies are down thousands of pounds due to a palace insider having snitched that HM would wear brown. (See the Times article on the ten-year old tradition of betting on this essential detail.) One feels so sorry for them. Absolutely not cricket.

Mrs Edward Claridge (above right) is an Ascot Ladies' Day regular who's usually good for a laugh, while Ms Getty (left) favours unrestrained elegance. But my dear, something simply must be done about tradesmen advertising their wares (below left)... so dreadfully "non-U"...



To see more hats, take a butchers at the BBC website, or visit the Official Ascot Image Store, or alternatively listen to a midi recording of the evocative Ascot Gavotte from My Fair Lady.

"Can I help you?" [Not]

Ever feel frustrated by inane and time-wasting offers of help from modern shop assistants who know less about their products than you do?

"To the man who tried to help me find the right computer cable at Future Shop: Thank you for taking the time to carefully read the packaging of all the cables on display right there in front of me... It was nice of you to make yourself available, but guess what? I, too, can read the information on the packages. In fact, I am an accomplished reader of the English language. And if you have no idea what cables you have in your store and what each one is for, then what exactly can you help me with?

"To everybody who works in stores, restaurants, banks -- anywhere in customer service: Clearly you have been instructed to be helpful, but please stop offering to help when you have no idea what that is."

Read Karen Hahn's beautifully expressed article at The Globe and Mail: HELPLESS

Is it raining or spitting?

The Israeli-in-the-street is still trying to understand whom he is disengaging from, and whether "disengagement" in any useful sense is actually possible.

On 13 May, Palestinian Authority TV broadcast a religious sermon that blamed antisemitism throughout history on the Jews themselves. Delivered by a bearded Palestinian mullah (on the payroll of the PA), dressed in white robes, it was broadcast on the Palestinian Authority's official television station. It has to be seen to be believed, so click here, you need to see this for yourself.

I can't help feeling sorry for any intelligent men in the audience there, having to sit cross-legged at this mullah's feet and listen to his diatribe - supposedly as the fulfilment of a religious duty.

Can one "engage" with this? Can one "disengage" from it?

The comment of the proverbial Jew upon being spat in the face at is: "It seems to be raining". Well... isn't it?

But heavens this is all so gauche. For real spitting, I mean really elegant spitting the way only the upper classes can do it, read this interesting article by Shlomo Avner, former Israel ambassador to the Court of St. James, describing a royal dinner party at Hampton Court. I don't find the events he describes as quite as surprising and shocking as he did, and I do think he may have over-reacted, but the inside information is fascinating none-the-less.

Beautiful Bookbindings

Talmudic tradition tells us not to look at the vessel but at what it contains, and that is certainly sound advice on one level. However, I have always been fascinated by beautiful vessels of all kinds - not least bookbindings, which are perhaps more closely bound up with their contents than other types of vessel.

With a tip of the hat to Mirabilis (a consistently fascinating Blog) for the reference, here is a link to an online exhibition of beautiful Hand Bookbindings from the Special Collections in the Princeton University Library. The display is large and varied, including leather bindings of many kinds, marbled end-papers, gold tooling, and much more.

Just to give you a small taste of the riches on view there, here is an example of "gauffered edge-work":



However, my personal favorite category in this field has long been "fore-edge painting", a secret art in the following sense. When you see the book it looks as though it is merely gilt-edged. Only when you fan out the pages slightly - not too much now - does the painting appear. Here is an example of a fore-edge painting of an English village scene.

Tsunami: terrifying magnificence

Tsunami by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)


Tsunami by the Almighty (2005)

And here is a Hebrew prayer written in the wake of the disaster.

On January 2, in the Daily Telegraph, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, is quoted as saying of the disaster: "This has made me question God's existence." Jonathan Rosenblum came down on him like a ton of bricks in the London Jewish Tribune.

"One presumes that some time before reaching the pinnacle of the Anglican Church, with 70 million members world wide, the learned Archbishop knew of natural disasters, and had wrestled with the questions of theodicy that they raise."

Or, in other words: That the idea of an omnipotent, benevolent God poses logical problems given the shape the world is in is nothing new, and Job discussed it 2500 years ago (and it was already an old story then). But a world without God also poses insuperable problems, like: how did we get here, how can we think, how can we know right from wrong,and how come every single culture believes in God?

On the other extreme, some Christian and Muslim clerics have been ascribing the disaster to Divine wrath. This is not the Jewish approach to disasters of this kind. As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach puts it in Don't call tsunami divine punishment:

" I do not know why God allows the murder of innocents, but I do know that it takes tsunami-sized hutzpa to claim to know the mind of God, and to claim that 150,000 people whom they never met were so sinful and evil that they merited extermination by drowning. The specter of Islamic and Christian clerics coming to the faithful in their greatest moment of sorrow and robbing them even of the dignity of victimhood is deeply troubling."

In an aside, and at the risk of appearing trite on a subject that certainly requires our most sober consideration: it does seem poignant that water, the source of all life upon our planet, can become such a terrible weapon against the beings whose lives depend upon it. There may be a lesson in that *.

(*) Please note that whenever I refer to a lesson learnt from a tragedy, I certainly do not mean it as an explanation of why the tragedy occured, but merely of what we can possibly learn from it now that it has occured.