ATTN: Jewish Kungfu peeps!!!

[red5angel]

Dezhen, something I have been wondering about. If you have seen the movie 13th Warrior you will know right away what I am talking about.
In the movie he drinks mead because it is fermented honey and not grapes or grains. Was this a creative interpretation of this idea or is this a real loophole?

[HopGar]

for a serious answer to Red's question:

Female rabbis is a pretty recent phenomenon and is mostly in conservative, reform, and recontructionist (whatever the terms are now adays) communities.

As for laughing cow's comment about women not be able to study the torah, that's just not true. They have to know certain laws, things like kashrut (kosher), taharat mishpacha (family purity, which involves things such as periods and the like) and various other things that I do not have time to get into detail about. I don't know where this misconception came from, but it is wrong.

Have a great week y'all

[ewallace]

Hey man, how's everything going for you over in Israel?

[dezhen2001]

red5: im not a scholar, only using my own experiences and brain... the word used actually means 'intoxicant' or something similar to this... hence why alcohol, illegal drugs etc. are all forbidden.

this is as far as i understand right now

Laughing Cow: Again it depends on if you use Quran only or all the other dogmatic Hadith etc. "Halal" form Quran is any meat (apart form pork) that has Gods name pronounced on it before EATING (like saying grace)... but Hadith and things state otherwise...

as far as i am aware anyway, i am not 100% on the arabic wording yet.

human beings are amazing

dawood

[dezhen2001]

HopGar: hope you are well in Israel... i would really like to learn more about the Torah and Jewish scripture one day, once i understand Quran better (free from the hate that most muslims have for christians and jews as its not in Quran)...

dawood

[Laughing Cow]

Originally posted by HopGar

As for laughing cow's comment about women not be able to study the torah, that's just not true.

Did you read the first 2 words of my comment they say "I thinK".

ergo I am not sure about it as I am not Jewish and have to go on info available to me.

[HopGar]

Israel is great. I'm studying and all, but also enjoying myself. It's not half as dangerous as the media says.

See Y'all

[dezhen2001]

cool, take care

dawood

[red5angel]

hopgar, dezhen, thanks for your answers!

[fa_jing]

Oh, I think that it is not that females couldn't study the torah, it was that they could not read from it in the synagogue - you know they might mess up on a word or something, like the way they drive . That's what I heard, anyway.

[FatherDog]

Here's something for Jewish Kung Fu Peeps, to get this thread back on topic

[HopGar]

no problem red5.

"Oh, I think that it is not that females couldn't study the torah, it was that they could not read from it in the synagogue - you know they might mess up on a word or something, like the way they drive . That's what I heard, anyway."

They couldn't and still can't. But its for a reason that is way too complicated for me to explain in one post. If care to know why, send me a pm and I'll be happy to oblige you with a detailed answer.

As for fatherdog's post, thats amusing. Not that I care.

See y'all, have a good week

[GeneChing]

Thread Necro from 2003 - FTW!

Self-Defense, King David–Style
An ex-rapper in biblical robes is promoting a unique Jewish martial art in Jerusalem.
By Eliyahu Kamisher


Yehoshua Sofer teaching a Hebrew martial art called Abir Qesheth.
Photo courtesy of Abir-Qesheth Hebrew Warrior Arts

Each week, Roads & Kingdoms and Slate publish a new dispatch from around the globe. For more foreign correspondence mixed with food, war, travel, and photography, visit their online magazine or follow @roadskingdoms on Twitter.

This article was originally published in the Times of Israel.

JERUSAELM—In a network of rooms underneath Jerusalem’s Teddy Stadium, a variety of martial arts classes thrive. Advertisements adorn the walls for everything from Korean tae kwon do to the Brazilian dance-fighting capoeira. Among the familiar disciplines, though, there is also a practice unique to Jerusalem, a Hebrew martial art called “Abir Qesheth,” which aspires to build young men into modern-day biblical warriors.

The head practitioner of Abir Qesheth is Yehoshua Sofer, an extraordinary character who claims to be the sole teacher of an ancient Hebrew martial art that was practiced by King David himself and secretly preserved for centuries by Yemenite-Jewish warriors.

Classes of around 10 students are held twice a week at 8 p.m. The classroom-gym is equipped with only a mat lining the floor and a few punching bags in the corner. As they trickle in from the stadium parking lot, the students prove to be mostly religious young men, many of them from the United States or children of U.S. immigrants, some with scruffy beards and payot (Jewish side curls). Unlike the typical white suits of martial arts, their uniform is black and decorated with Aramaic writing, with a black head wrap.

Practice begins with kicking and punching drills, beards and payot jumping with each kick and punch. The warmup ends with the students rhythmically chanting in unison the Hebrew letters that spell Abir—“Aleph, bet, yud, reish.”

Sofer strides into the gym, white head wrap confining his dreadlocks, white robe flowing, leather sandals peaking out from beneath.

Sofer says he is the world’s only “Aluf Abir,” or grandmaster of Abir, a title he claims to have inherited from his father in an ancient Hebrew-Yemenite warrior tradition. According to Sofer, his ancestors in Yemen were Jewish warriors who worked as security guards for Saudi kings and Ethiopian royalty. Yet Abir Qesheth was practiced in secret due to fears of anti-Semitism. Only in the past decade has Sofer been granted permission from his father to transmit the fighting system, he says. Now Sofer is the sole person responsible to “preserve the Abir tradition” and “create whatever new protocols, guidelines, parameters, and boundaries are necessary to ensure the Abir organization continues to function.”

Whatever the veracity of such claims, Sofer certainly looks the part of an ancient Hebrew warrior and refers to himself as a “high-tech desert nomad, walking right out of a page in the Torah.”


Sofer demonstrating Abir Qesheth.
Photo courtesy of Abir-Qesheth Hebrew Warrior Arts

Eyebrows arching and nostrils flaring with exertion and passion, he makes for a charismatic instructor, with a coaching style that involves standard martial arts instructions, interwoven with Judaic teachings and pauses for personal, grandiose stories of training with martial arts movie stars Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee in Los Angeles.

There is no specific mention of a Judaic martial art in the Bible, but Sofer claims inspiration from the biblical word qesheth for “bow.” And it is the discipline’s “looping and bowlike movements,” he says, that make Abir Qesheth unique.

“People will criticize, saying that Abir is just an Asian martial art in disguise. That’s not true,” he insists. For example, “in Abir we never lock our limbs like other disciplines.”

Abir practitioners use an “Aleph-Bet fighting system” that incorporates Hebrew and Aramaic letters into their movements, he adds. In the course of the class, underlining the point, one student asks, “What do I do if I’m attacked with an elbow?” Sofer responds in his distinctive Yemenite-Hebrew accent, “You strike him from the top, with your wrist forming a [Hebrew letter] vav.” To practice Abir Qesheth, he says later, “you must embody the Torah through your actions.”

An hour into the session, with the room full of twirling black—bar one student who is wearing pajama bottoms—Sofer takes a break and walks over to me. He points to a scruffy-looking boy wrestling in the corner. “You see this kid, he is from New York, a yeshiva boy. Now he’s dangerous, and I’m happy he’s dangerous.”

“You must embody the Torah through your actions.”
Yehoshua Sofer

Judaism has become “emasculated,” he asserts, elaborating that he sees Abir Qesheth as not just a martial arts system but also as a way of casting off Westernized “diaspora” forms of Judaism and reincarnating the warriors of ancient Israel.

One of the students, who gives his name as Gershon, endorses the goal. “Jews are idol smashers,” he says. “We are meant to spread and defend truth.”

According to the Abir website, what’s being taught is far more than a martial art. Students learn how to use traditional weaponry but also circumcision techniques, animal husbandry, and ritual bath construction, though there is no evidence of any of this at the Teddy session. “Abir is holistic. It’s about serving God with your entire being,” Sofer says. Ultimately, Abir practitioners “must completely submit to the will of the God of Israel” and become “instruments of God.”

Yet there’s a great deal more to his story. Sofer was born into a Breslov Hasidic family in Jamaica—where, he once said, his father was an ombudsman for aluminium and bauxite workers. It was a Chinese man he ran into in Kingston, he once said, who introduced him to martial arts (though that hardly squares with the family warrior tradition he now claims). The family then moved to Los Angeles, where he lived before moving to Israel.

Here, he became known as a pioneering rap musician, even regarded by some as a father of Israeli hip-hop. In 1993, Sofer produced an Israeli rap album under the name “Nigel Ha’Admor” (Nigel the teacher), including the song “Hummus Makes You Stupid,” a cult hit that pioneered a genre called “ragamuffin.”

According to entertainer, musician, and TV host Yair Nitzani, who worked with Sofer on the album and owns the record label that produced it, Sofer “had an amazing style. His rap was different and was cool. It was the first of its kind in Israel and influenced many Israeli hip-hop artists like Hadag Nahash, Subliminal, and Shabak Samech.”

In a clip on YouTube, Sofer can be seen performing his Hummus song on Israeli TV, sporting a short haircut and fluorescent pink suit and speaking in Jamaican-accented Hebrew. Quite the contrast with his current image.

[Cataphract]

There is no specific mention of a Judaic martial art in the Bible

Technically neither Bible nor specifically Judaic, but

the third was named Gadreel: he it is who showed the children of men all the blows of death

(Book of Enoch, chapter 69)

Admit that you just thought "Dim Mak".

[Subitai]

Hopefully still on topic...but I always found these shows to be pretty interesting and educational:

All throughout this series they talk about training up armies.

Battles BC S01E05 Moses Death Chase



Battles BC S01E02 David The Giant Slayer
youtube;oCmSao5rzQM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCmSao5rzQM