Thanks everybody for reading and responding...I'm assuming that it's OK for authors to respond to their letters. Anyways,

1) The mystery is solved: http://www.forward.com/articles/7130. Ask for Asher.

2) The last sentence was not meant to be exclusionary. Stealing money is a "Lo Ahsay", a "Don't do that Commandment". It applies to stealing money from both Jews and Gentiles (something Abramoff did). The amount of Chillul Hashem in this affair is staggering.

3) To those who basically questioned the legitimacy of posting an article about religion in a secular magazine, 2 thought experiments: a, change the subject from Orthodox Jew to Gay, and b, examine how successful the strategy of ignoring the Religious until they've gone away has been. I mean, American progressives are so powerful that they were able to stop a stupid war from occuring, they control all 3 branches of American government, they've totally corrupted the major media outlets into stenographers, etc.

4) To those who bring up difficult passages in Torah, I will say that you are absolutely correct. I will also say that you have never read the Torah, Prophets, and Writing (TaNaKH, aka the so-called Old Testament). One, I really doubt that you are fluent in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, and two, I suspect that you are not aware of the companion explanatory text, the Oral Tradition, which is detailed in the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.

For a little taste of what you are missing, the 4 volume The Living Torah/The Living Nakh series (Moznaim) is the best translation of Tanakh into English, ever, while The Stone Chumash (Artscroll) is an excellent introduction to the Oral Tradition.

And to think that it was my first article...Thanks for being gentle!

Cosmicmojo, you definitely got my point. Just like "I may not do it" does not mean "I can not do it", "Orthodox" and "Frum" mean two different things. I consider Orthodox someone who goes to a synagogue where the men and women sit separately, and where the Services are in Hebrew exclusively. To be Frum is to observe all of the applicable Commandments, not that anyone does it perfectly in this world. That's why we have Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur.

after the Revolutionary War. It was called British North America until 1867, I believe.

It's very American for you to believe in negotiations, but there is no chance for peace. Jerusalem is not negotiable, the right of return is not negotiable, it's time to admit that there is not and never was a chance of peace between the Jordan and the Sea. They are doomed to fight forever.

How about this scenario: Democratic landslide in November, Cheney dies, Bush impeached. After the conviction, loyalist troops surround the White House. Unfortunately, the probability is not 0, except for the assumption that Democrats would have any kind of spine.

But what if we finally find our U.S. Grant? Then what?

It's kind of hard to understand how someone can know Biblical prophecy when they almost assuredly don't know Biblical Hebrew, let alone Aramaic. While on the one hand, their faith is amazing, on the other, so is their laziness.

Thanks for showing the complexity. In our instant gratification, short attention span culture, it is very nice to read something that discusses people who believe that they are acting well without demonizing them.

a fetus does not have the status of a human being: Exodus 21:22-23 (right before the mistranslated "eye for an eye" sentences). You won't get that from reading a translation, you'll have to dive into the Hebrew and the Talmud, but it's a clear inference. According to Torah, if a pregnant woman is accidently killed, the killer(s) are liable for the death penalty, but if she miscarries, they are merely liable for a monetary fine.

Torah certainly does not permit abortion, it's just that the overwhelming number of "pro-life" people who take inspiration from the Bible have absolutely no idea what it says. The woman who "touted technological advances, such as clearer sonograms, that they believe will make it 'harder to argue that a fetus is not a person'" has no idea of what she professes to believe.

She was doing her job well, what was the problem? And, all of those properly credentialed therapists causing iatrogenic problems, what of them? And as for being a stripper in the past, it probably gives her great insight into men!

but none over the extremely racist, obnoxious cartoons of Jews in Muslim majority countries. Caricatures out of Der Stürmer would be right at home in those publications; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was on Egyptian TV. Can't eat their own cooking, I guess.

As much as I don't like the communist confederates in charge of the federal government, global warming is not Bush's fault. It's not the rate of emissions that is bad, but the total emissions, period. There's no way government regulation is going to work. People want things, economies want to grow, and growing economies will put carbon into the air.

The only solution, other than riding it out, is to regrow the tropical rainforests to try to clean up the carbon from the atmosphere. This will involve a massive transfer of wealth to the damp tropics. Fortunately for us, the people who live there owe tremendous amounts of money that they are never going to pay back; at least to start, we should do a carbon for debt swap.

First of all, the whole "Eye for an Eye" thing is a terrible, terrible mistranslation. Ayin tachas Ayin literally means "Eye under Eye"; the sentences refer to paying cash compensation for injuries sustained through negligence. There are many such instances of figurative language in Torah; to take them literally (as the author of the King James translation did) is the equivalent of literally translating "Go jump in a lake".

There's no hope for peace in our lifetimes, short of the Messiah coming. Give up hope and adapt the reality-based worldview.

but, it was a very powerful book for boys, too...