Ah...

I have been very busy these last few days. I started another teaching job, I'm chairing a banquet at my synagogue and I started redoing the bedrooms in the home (painting the walls, redoing the floors...).

All-in-all, I'm bushed.

On top of that, I just connected a wireless router to my DSL which took forever to work. That - more than anything else - kept me off-line the last few days.

Anyway...

One of the weekly emails I receive (signed up for) is from James Hirsen. Hirsen writes "the Left Coast Report" for Newsmax.com. Aside from once being a member of the Temptations, he is a very funny individual. I bought his book, "Tales From the Left Coast: True Stories of Hollywood Stars and Their Outrageous Politics" a while back and loved it.

The Left Coast Report is a weekly take on the insane liberalism in Hollywood. One of the stories this week is as follows:

BBC Uncovers Madonna's Kabbalah Center

The British Broadcasting Corporation has aired a documentary that has put Madonna and other Hollywood celebs who embrace a newly packaged version of Kabbalah in some hot water.

Correspondent John Sweeney used three undercover reporters to film members of the Kabbalah Center in London, which is a branch of the Los Angeles Kabbalah Center run by founder Philip Berg.

The program showed an unidentified member of the London group speaking about the Jews who died in the Holocaust and blaming them because they rejected the Zohar, the Kabbalah holy book.

"The story is that the Jews from Morocco came to the Jews from East Europe ... And offered them the Zohar and they said, 'No, we're not interested.' They were too religious," the unidentified member explained, adding that "a few years after, the Holocaust came. You know we say there is no coincidence. So look what happened to the Jews in those places - Morocco, Iraq (where the speaker says the Kabbalah was accepted). Nobody touched them."

The London center responded with the following statement: "For millennia, Kabbalah has been misrepresented by some members of the community trying to discourage others from studying its wisdom."

Rabbi Barry Marcus of the Central Synagogue in London told Reuters that the center is "trading on the name Kabbalah and duping people into thinking it is a legitimate source of study."

With respect to the Holocaust comment, Marcus said, "It's preposterous. It is insulting to the memory of people who died in the Holocaust. This is arrogance I can only condemn in the strongest terms."

One scene in the documentary has a covert reporter who claims he has cancer. There is then an attempt to persuade him to buy $1,600 worth of cures including 10 cases of Kabbalah water.

The Left Coast Report says, you've got to hand it to the Kabbalah promoters - it's not every day that a religious conviction claims to be able to cure cancer and prevent genocide.

The reason I mention this is because I'm working on an article about the "Kabbalah fad" that has taken on a life of its own.

It's amazing what people will do in the names of "hip" and "trendy."