When will the propaganda from Aish ever end? Aish.com speaks of the sukkah holiday as a bailout plan for the jews. Ya that really worked, like when rockets were hitting religious neighborhoods in Israel, during the 1940s, the pogroms in russia , the persecution in Arab countries, the Spanish Inquisition, the roman invasion of ancient israel, etc. etc.
The article http://www.aish.com/spirituality/odysseys/Invincible.asp says "The holiday of Sukkot is about vulnerability and faith." Lots and lots and lots and lots of faith. So much faith, we have to believe it's ok for synagogues to engage in commerce and sell seats on Yom Kippor when the laws of Shabbat are supposed to come into effect.
Next, the article goes into some new age bull shit by saying "we live within two realms: the physical and the spiritual. Both are real and both demand our attention." You see, if you break one of the orthodox rules that comes from stretching what is actually written in the torah, you are hurting yourself in another dimension. You can't feel it, you can't know that it's there, it is undetectable by human science, but shhhh! You are HURTING yourself. * gasp *
The whole thing is trying in a roundabout way to use the economic crisis as an advertisement for orthodox judaism, by saying that God gives people problems out of love. Has the Aish people lost their minds?
There is a completely rational reason for the economic crisis which is, banks were buyin mortgages of / and giving them to less than qualified borrowers and wall street was giving the banks insurance in case the borrowers defaulted. The borrowers defaulted, then the banks didn't have $$$, then even wall street could not keep up.
It has nothing to do with "showing God's love" as Aish implies, it has everything to do with banks and wall street taking dumb risks.
About Aish's relying on God stuff I have this to say, about a year ago I was very sick from consuming too much fast food unwittingly. I always knew that such things were not conductive to good health, but the extent of that caught me WAY off guard. My primary instinct was to increase my consumption of vegetables, vitamin c, green tea, water, and I lived. If I were an orthodox jew who got sick from consuming too many unhealthy foods, my primary instinct would have been an increase in prayer and study of religious texts- and today I would be a dead man.
