On Eve of Passover, Bread Stirs Deep Thoughts in Israel

[struggle4progress]

... Hametz is bread and other leavened products that many Jews do not eat for the eight days of Passover, which starts Saturday night. The Bible says that when God freed the Jews from enslavement in Egypt, they left in such a hurry that there was no time for their bread to rise, and to mark that circumstance, consuming leavened bread during the holiday is forbidden.

The focus of the debate here is a ruling by a Jerusalem municipal judge overturning the convictions of four shops and restaurants for having sold pizzas and rolls during the holiday last year despite a law that many thought prohibited businesses from doing so. The judge said the law barred only the public display of hametz, not its sale inside shops ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/middleeast/18israel.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

[Evoman]

1. *sigh*

Convicted for selling FORBIDDEN leavened bread because a group of people thousands of years ago who probably didn't even exist didn't have time to let their bread rise.

This, my friends, is religion in a nutshell.

[YankeyMCC]

2. "The Ambergris Element"

Is an episode of Star Trek the Animated Series which I watched recently and this story puts in mine a line from the show that I laughed at when I heard it.

There is a race of beings who are descendant of beings who once lived on the land but altered their genetics to become water breathers, the original land dwellers left a bunch of rules for their descendants to follow which became known as the "wisdom of the ancients" or something like that.

In the episode there is tension between the elders and younger generation of the now water breathing beings. At one point one of the younger water breathers says in exasperation "Can't we ever make a decision on our own without consulting the book of the ancients?"