Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Logi?

Cosa è questa storia che i parenti cattolici non vogliono più avere a
che fare con l'ebreo? Il "pregiudizio-socialmente-accettabile" è
quello contro i cattolici, lo sappiamo tutti (particolarmente in
Argentina, dove l'irreprensibile comportamento delle gerarchie
ecclesiastoche durante la dittatura è attualmente oggetto di una
campagna diffamatoria coordinata dalla massoneria, che ce la ha anche
con le proprietà immobiliari della Chiesa in Italia)
Grato se ci degni di una tua opinione, porgo cordiali saluti.
The monk in the minyan
Sam Ser , THE JERUSALEM POST 	Aug. 30, 2007
If only the abbot could see Justo Jorge Calderon now. With curling
peyot dangling below his chin and the long black cloak of his small
hassidic sect hanging off his broad shoulders, Calderon sure doesn't
look like a Benedictine monk anymore. Besides, he goes by Aharon now,
and he's the proud father of three little children.
Calderon's story is one of those stranger-than-fiction tales that
grows more intriguing the longer it goes on. Fortunately, it's also
one he doesn't mind sharing. It begins in a small town outside Buenos
Aires, Argentina, where Justo Jorge was born into a family of Roman
Catholics.
"Today I am a very kosher Jew," the 36-year-old says with a smile,
"but once I was a very kosher goy."
When Calderon was 12, he says, his parents sent him to a private
religious school to get a better education than the public schools
provided. Before long he was spending extra time studying with the
monks. At 14, he joined the pre-mission seminar.
"I was young and idealistic," he explains with a shrug.
After high school, with his religious zeal increasing, Calderon went
looking for the "ancient, original teachings" of Catholicism. The
local Benedictine monastery offered the oldest, "purest" form of
Christian life around. Based on a 1,400-year-old order and centered
around a largely self-sustaining "holy village," it meant spending
most of the day in silence, reflecting on the divine.
"The word 'monastery' is derived from the Greek 'monos,' meaning one,
or alone. We monks were each one seeking the One," explains Calderon,
revealing his divinity student's mind-set.
Although Calderon's parents weren't happy about his commitment to the
monastic life - he's their only son, and they hoped for grandchildren
- the young man felt at home in the Benedictine monastery. At home,
that is, until he experienced what he calls "my two surprises." The
first came in the monastery's library. One of the largest around, it
helped make the monastery famous, Calderon says. Of the thousands of
volumes it held, though, one particular book would change his life.
"One day," he says, "I chanced upon a Haggada, in Spanish and Hebrew.
I was drawn to it, and read it from beginning to end, in amazement."
At the end of the Seder service, Calderon read the prayer looking
forward to celebrating the Pessah holiday "next year in Jerusalem -
Jerusalem rebuilt" and stared at a drawing of the Third Temple.
Calderon sat in silence - not his usual contemplative silence, but a
stunned silence.
"Christianity," he explains, "looks at Judaism as something of an
archeological concept, not as something that is still alive, relevant
and flourishing... Looking at this prayer at the end of the Haggada, I
was shocked that modern Jews still nurtured hopes for the future of
their religion."
The discovery rocked Calderon, but he was still unsure what to make of
it. Shortly thereafter, though, he experienced his second "surprise,"
which sent his spiritual quest in an entirely unforeseen direction.
It came on one of his weekly visits to the abbot of the monastery.
Upon entering the abbot's study, Calderon found him poring over a
Hebrew Bible. (The abbot, Calderon learned, had once studied in
Jerusalem, and was comparing ancient texts.) "I was fascinated by the
language," he recalls. "I wanted to know, what secrets are in those
letters?"
By that point Calderon had spent several years in the monastery and,
although he was well on his way to a permanent stay there, he returned
to his home for a planned one- or two-year break. Once at home he
began attending classes at the Catholic-run university in town and
working as a nurse for the Red Cross. But, with his "surprises"
spurring him on, Calderon also sought out Jews who would be willing to
teach him Hebrew.
At the time, conversion was not on his mind. "I just wanted to know
how Jesus prayed," he says.
On Friday nights, Calderon attended services at a local synagogue ("it
was kind of like a Protestant church") where the rabbi agreed to let
him join the weekly Hebrew class. He also discovered a Messianic
Jewish congregation, and prayed there as well.
Thus began a period when, Calderon recalls, he would pray to Jesus
while in synagogue on Friday night, and wear a kippa to church on
Sunday morning. To Calderon, these interreligious prayer sessions
didn't seem like a contradiction.
"It sounds strange," he admits, "but at the time, it made sense to me.
Judaism was not 'outside' Christianity, but part of it... like an
ancestor."
Soon, however, something in the Shabbat prayers struck Calderon, and
shook the foundations of his faith. It was part of the Saturday
morning kiddush, specifically, the passage from Exodus that says: "And
the Children of Israel observed the Sabbath, to make the Sabbath for
their generations an eternal covenant. Between Me and the Children of
Israel it is a sign forever..."
"This expression stuck in my mind," Calderon says, repeating the
words. "'It is a sign forever.'"
"That meant," he says, "that there is an eternal bond, established by
God. And since God does not change, then that bond" - the sign
observed by Jews, marking Saturday as the Sabbath - "must still be in
effect!" Why, Calderon asked himself, would the Church move the
Sabbath day to Sunday, if it wasn't really a day sanctified by God?
The question was more than a little troubling to Calderon. After all,
if Sunday was not really the holy Sabbath, and if God's covenant with
the Jews had not been abrogated and superseded by Christianity, then
maybe other tenets of the Christian religion were also not true.
Maybe, he allowed himself to think, Jesus was not actually the son of
God?
Calderon stopped going to church.
"Everything I believed," he says, "just fell apart."
He started a conversion class at the local Reform synagogue. When the
synagogue closed down due to financial difficulties, Calderon sought
out more Jews and discovered the local Chabad rabbi.
Rather than eagerly welcome a new convert, the rabbi at first tried to
dissuade Calderon.
"He would say, 'Why would you want to be Jewish? We have so many
commandments, while non-Jews need only to observe the Noahide laws.
Besides, you are already a good person in God's eyes!'" This, however,
only made Calderon's desire to convert even greater.
"Until then, I had thought that Judaism was a religion of strictness
and law, whereas Christianity was a religion of love. But suddenly I
realized that it was really the opposite."
"You see," he explains, "in Christianity, if you don't believe in
Jesus, you can't go to heaven. But in Judaism, there is a place in
heaven for everyone; you don't have to be Jewish. So really,
Christianity is the religion of strictness, and Judaism is the
religion of love!"
After a period of "trying it out," Calderon knew that he wanted to
convert, and that he wanted to move to Israel to do so. There was just
one problem: finances.
"A ticket to Israel cost $1,200. As a nurse, I was only making $200 a
month. How could I ever afford to go to Israel?" he says.
The situation was bleak. But then something happened that would be
right at home in a hassidic story, the kind that circulates in the
little Stropkover shul in Jerusalem where Calderon is now a gabbai:
There was a raffle in Calderon's town, with a grand prize of a new
ambulance; he entered. Just before Rosh Hashana, Calderon was informed
that he had won the grand prize. He sold the ambulance and, suddenly
able to afford the airfare, flew to Israel.
At first, Calderon, in his new identity as Aharon, studied at a
yeshiva for potential converts. But within a few months the yeshiva
had closed. In early 1999, Calderon met Rabbi Eliahu Birnbaum and
joined the Spanish speakers' ulpan his wife had just started. Around
Rosh Hashana that year, Calderon underwent a brit mila. Before Succot,
he entered a mikve and completed his conversion.
Back home in Argentina, there was little celebrating going on.
Although Calderon's mother was happy that he would, having given up
the monastic life, provide her with grandchildren, several family
members told Calderon, "If you're Jewish, don't come back here."
"A few years earlier, I had realized that love, hate and jealousy were
separated only by a fine line," Calderon says. "I made a choice to
love the Jewish people. Later, I began to see the hatred that some
people in my town had for Jews."
Back in Israel, Calderon met and married a Jewish woman who had
emigrated from Russia with her family. In yet another strange turn,
Calderon's mother-in-law met Russian Orthodox missionaries in
Jerusalem and converted to Christianity.
"Family gatherings," Calderon says with a knowing shrug, "can get
pretty weird."

 che fare con l'ebreo?
imbecilli ce ne sono ovunque, finchè tengono la loro imbecillità
dentro la famiglia, sono affari di famiglia su cui non dovrebbe
mettere becco la stampa...
vediamo invece cos'ha da dire il sabra su questa storia, su cui
continua stranamente a glissare:
http://www.cdt.ch/interna.asp?idarticolo=tio345389&idtipo=2

 che fare con l'ebreo?
non so, sei tu l'esperto di quelli che vogliono diventare ebrei
--
"il Logi è goi e quindi, poverino, abituato a credere che
quel che c'è scritto non necessiti di interpretazione"
(il cosiddetto agnosco/nahum/jabo/shampista/delafia/borat/andrea su
it.politica.internazionale, 26/10/06)

 non so,
sarà mica che esiste ancora un po' di pregiudizio?


santiddio, aspetta almeno che nasca, il sabra.
per quanto riguarda la mia opinione penso che nell'opinione dei
signori citati nell'articolo non c'è assolutamente antisemitismo anzi
secondo me se la è pure inventata il direttore del jerusalem post che
è ebreo quindi vai a fidarti, secondo me una sinagoga dovrebbe
assumere solo rabbini sposati con clero di altre religioni,
preferibilmente islamisti, così avremo sicuramente la pace, anche se
il corriere del ticino se ne renderà conto solo troppo tardi. Perché
questa ritrosia degli ebrei a sposarsi con i non ebrei, oltre ad
essere una piaga davvero diffusa è anche la causa della
sovrappopolazione mondiale e soprattutto ebraica e la vera ragione per
cui non si trova acqua su marte - che i sionisti se la sono presa
tutta per affogarci i nemici. Di più non ti dico, solo stai attento e
glu glu.

 wrote:
Non ti chiedo di vergognarti perchè altrimenti non saresti
quell'ipocrita che sei.


wrote:

Non fare l'antisemita!
--
O penitenza o l'inferno.

glu glu.
Penoso. Ma davvero sei un rappresentante della intellighenzia ebraica?



e già che ci sei, gira alla tua amica Faith la propaganda subliminale
antisemita del Corsera, che nell'inserto giochi del Magazine ha messo
un quiz in cui si chiedeva quale fosse l'intrusa tra 5 figure, di cui
4 quadrilateri e una stella di David...