Worth a Read 24.03.11

• PETA an animal's rights group requests that translations of the bible should stop referring to animals as "it"  but rather "he" or "they". "“God’s covenant is with humans and animals. God cares about animals," Friedrich said. "I would think that’s a rather unanimous opinion among biblical scholars today, where that might not have been the case 200 years ago.” (ht: PaleoJudaica)
• Goldberg catches Reuters refusal to call a terrorist attack by its name:

"This is from a Reuters story on the Jerusalem bombing earlier today:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

• Robin Shepard was not too happy with the BBC coverage either. 
• Parashablog traces the Rosh Hashana blessing of "May be filled with Mitzvot like a Pomegranate" to kind Darius as told by Herodotus. 
• A new book comes out "Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666-1816", Described by the publisher:

Women are conspicuously absent from the Jewish mystical tradition. Even if historically some Jewish women may have experienced mystical revelations and led richly productive spiritual lives, the tradition does not preserve any record of their experiences or insights. Only the chance survival of scant evidence suggests that, at various times and places, individual Jewish women did pursue the path of mystical piety or prophetic spirituality, but it appears that efforts were made to suppress their activities. This contrasts sharply with the fully acknowledged prominence of women in the mystical traditions of both Christianity and Islam. It is against this background that the mystical 17th-century messianic movement known as Sabbatianism stands out as a unique exception. Its attitude to women was highly liberationist: the leader of the movement, Sabbatai Zevi, promised to make them 'as happy as men' by releasing them from the pangs of childbirth and the subjugation to their husbands ordained for women since biblical times. This redemptive vision became an integral part of Sabbatian eschatology: in their view, the messianic era was unfolding in the present, and as part of this their New Law superseded the Old and overturned the traditional halakhic rules governing relations between the sexes. This was expressed not only in the ritual transgression of sexual prohibitions but also in the apparent adoption of the idea - alien to rabbinic Judaism - that virginity, celibacy, or sexual abstinence were conducive to women's spiritual empowerment. In this book, author Ada Rapoport-Albert traces the diverse manifestations of this vision in every phase of Sabbatianism and its offshoots, demonstrating how the culmination of the Sabbatian endeavor was to transcend the traditional gender paradigm that had excluded women from the public arena of Jewish spiritual life." (ht: Menachem Mendel)

• Bob Dylan is on his way to Israel!