Sluggo Needs a Nap

Stolen from Fausta, via Malkin.

For the time being, it's just symbolic. Any newspaper or media outlet has the right to publish the Jihadapalooza Danish cartoons. It's worth remembering, though, that Great Britain has apparently and just barely beaten back a law that would have made publishing them, even in a blog, patently illegal.

Hasidism came to have a whole group ritual, special
ways of celebrating the old Jewish holidays and rites of
passage. Most conspicuous was ecstatic dancing of a
peculiar character. It is like nothing else in the world,
although I suppose its antecedents go back to the dancing
dervishes of the Levant and through them to the
Corybantic brotherhoods of the Baals and Baalats of Canaan.
Great emphasis was placed on the bath of purification. For
the antiquity of this we have physical evidence amongst
the Essenes of the Dead Sea settlement. The Baal Shem
frowned on asceticism and taught that the holy man
“redeems” food and drink by consuming it. Alcohol was
consumed, especially before dancing, to produce a kind of
holy intoxication. Erotic mysticism and direct adoration of
the Shekinah as the Bride of God were central to most rites.
The ritual dance was customarily performed to singing in
which all took part, dancing in a circle around a young boy
with a pure unchanged voice who stood in the center of the
ring dance on a table, and who was understood as a surrogate
for a woman. Dances like this are referred to in both the
Jewish and the Christian Apocrypha and they are common
in other Gnostic sects from Japan to Bengal. This, however,
did not result in any sort of orgiastic sexual promiscuity.
There is no question but that sacred prostitutes, male and
female, were part of the temple ritual until the revolution
which “discovered the ancient documents” of the present
Torah. In Hasidism their place is taken by each married
couple — a temple unto themselves. All Hasidim, and
especially their leaders, the Zaddiks, were expected to
marry, and the final expression of erotic mysticism was
centered in the marriage bed and the family. In this
way Hasidism, after all its colorful and emotional detour,
returns to be at one with the most orthodox mystery of
Judaism — the seed of Israel.