I regard all religions as at best useful pretenses that provide divine authority for ancient truths, sensible collective behavior, and sensible individual behavior, at worst as memetic diseases, and am apt to give advice to the religious on the basis of what would make a useful pretense. Such advice is not always enthusiastically received.
I have long argued that Jews should actually do what everyone accuses them of doing: Have an ethnic national religion and and ethnic nation in which that religion is the ruling religion.
Trouble is that, during their long exile, Judaism has changed, becoming a religion of exile, has adapted rather too well to exile. For the most part, Judaism is still in psychological exile, hence the reluctance to recognize Israel as Israel, and the reluctance to reach out and take the temple mount back. Judaism is not only inherently subversive of its Christian host states. It is inherently subversive of Israel. It needs to come home. Judaism is subversive because it authorizes all the bad things that Jews need to do to survive as exiles, but no longer authorizes all the bad things Jews need to do to survive as a nation in Israel. Jews feel really bad about doing bad things to Muslims who are trying to kill them. Armenians don’t feel bad at all. Americans whacked Fallujah a lot harder than Jews whacked Jenin, with not nearly as good an excuse, and feel fine about doing so. Every time Jews defend themselves against people trying to kill them, other Jews, notoriously Jews in the US state department, tell them they should just roll over and die, and they are apt to do so.
B, however, argues that his variant of Judaism is fine, is psychologically healthy, and will, in due course, become the dominant strand of Judaism. I am inclined to doubt this,
The Cathedral interpret B’s variant of Judaism as waiting for the Messiah to do the heavy lifting, to make his religion the state religion, and to make the necessary amendments to B’s religion so that it will work as a state religion. If you are waiting for the Messiah to bring the Kingdom of Heaven, no threat to them, even if you were to get the temple mount back, since they don’t expect divine intervention – and neither do I.
The worst the Cathedral think about B’s variant of Judaism is that B’s faction are spoiling for a war with Islam in the hope that this will force the Messiah to miraculously intervene to save Israel.
If you are going to restore the Kingdom of Israel by non miraculous means, restore the Kingdom of Israel rather than the Kingdom of Heaven, have to propose an undemocratic one state solution, in which a distinctly Jewish Israel rules over non Jews within the land of Israel, and expels or eradicates any non Jews that get difficult about that arrangement. Now maybe they suspect B of secretly harboring that plan, but if so, B has been keeping it so secret that they neglect to accuse his sect of it.
Since I regard religions as at best useful pretenses, what I would favor for Israel is an official religion that does not have the secret police spying on people’s washers and does not send people who get wool lint mixed with linen lint to the gulag, but rather restricts participation in the state apparatus and the most prestigious universities to those that plausibly claim to have the correct washers. Those who attempt to subvert or overthrow this restriction get sent to the gulag, as do those who attempt to tighten up on this restriction so that only those as holy as their extremely holy selves get to exercise power. You are going to need soldiers on top of priests, and from time to time, soldiers are going to going to need to smack down turbulent priests hard, even if they are genuinely holy. Indeed especially if they are genuinely holy.
If relying on overtly miraculous divine intervention, I don’t think Jews of B’s type are any great threat to the Cathedral, and even less is the Cathedral likely to think they are a great threat to the Cathedral.
To get to a one state solution you need to tell people that Israel needs a one state solution, and tell them that a one state solution is incompatible with democracy and equality, and propose dismantling democracy and equality without waiting for supernatural rule by the messiah. If B is telling people that, the Cathedral has not noticed, for if it had noticed, would rocket through the roof like an exploding hot water system.
This is quite an interesting topic but getting sort of a Twilight Zone feel watching non-Jews recommend a messiah for the Jewish…
A Messiah is a time tested method of making necessary changes in a religion rapidly, but the Jewish customary method to adjust their religion to reality is Talmudism. In fact, the Jews are kind of allergic to the Messiah method for making rapid adjustments in religion.
Modern Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the ancient Israelites and generally use the Talmud as their guiding text rather than the Torah. So that’s why you often have ultra adherence to ritual law while ignoring the moral law. Much the same as a Mafioso who just murdered someone considers himself a good Catholic because he says his Hail Mary’s, you are a good Jew if you keep your meat and dairy dishes separate.
[…] Jim advises the Jews. […]
[…] Joo talk « Jim’s Blog […]
lol @ b.
B, you a good brah! Do your thang, but put this shit in perspective brah!
Good lord.
Zach, could you please tell those of us on planet Earth what the f**k you’re talking about?
Ha!
I try to avoid that brah. For now, even the host would be in awe…
Thanks Toddy…
Thanks for not being a fucking pussy.
Legit question.
Steam account: KitesAreFun
Say it, then begot it. Then know it. Then own it.
Bring it.
Toddy this is a group email. If you want my email, then say so… I will make sure you get it.
I’ll explain all, and hopefully answer your question.
For now… let me just say… you fuckers only live once… don’t waste your time. Life is short.
Heh Jim… you are extraordinary…
Go fuck yourself 😉
“90% of the police’s job in America is to keep the middle class from curb stomping the criminal class. ”
He’s right and add working class to that. I don’t think it’s nine tenths of the Policeman’s job, but without police protection we’d make short work of criminals. As we did until recently and as do non-elites around the world still.
Mind you we could stop electing politicians who throw the police to the criminal class lynch mob and their lawyers? <<speaking of which…this is relevant to the thread. What happens elsewhere in the world is not my business.
So long as Israel remains integrated with the West (especially the US), this will never be practical. They’ll have to piss off the Cathedral, and with it, a bunch of elite American Jews. The blowback from the westernized parts of Israel, the US State department, US pro-Israel lobbies, and evangelical Christians will be immense.
Without US support, they’ll be isolated, with a large portion of their population supporting disestablishmentarianism. The same situation South Africa faced, except with majority status, and more powerful surrounding enemies.
Israel’s salvation rests on careful demographic policy, and convincing the surrounding Arab states (including Gaza) to avoid hardline anti-Zionism. More Saudi Arabia, less Iran. More realism, less idealism. More Monarchy/Dictatorship, less Democracy.
“LOL. I suspect crime rates among poor religious Jews are not lower, but higher than those of their secular counterparts. Of course, since they refuse to appeal to the police for intervention, and shun all judgment by secular courts, these crimes go unreported and uninvestigated, so the illusion of poor Jews who never rape 10 year olds in the Mikveh or abuse their sisters can be maintained. ”
Crime is always lower when there’s no police presences interfering with the normal functions of justice among orderly people. 90% of the police’s job in America is to keep the middle class from curb stomping the criminal class. Given a 6 months without police “protection” most criminals and their families would be dead or fled.
Jim, normally I visit this site for sanity from the Cathedral but this post and comments are annoying as hell. The Jewish Cathedral at work, hard. Not for me thanks.
PFFFF!
What kind of Jewish shit is this? Not for me, Kthanxbye?
FUK THAT!
Put some hair on those balls, suck it up, and give some examples.
Das how it goes in da underground. 🙂 😉
This debate has been quite interesting. A big thanks to Jim and B for continuing it in a mostly Civil manner. Jim, any chance we’ll get to see you lock horns with Voxday at some point?
I would love to argue with Voxday, and published a post that he was supposed to reply to, but as far as I know, he never did.
[…] By jim […]
Since you have brought up the subject of sex with prepubescent females, that is also forbidden. The often-quoted statement that to a girl before the age of three, sex is like a poke with a stick, so of no significance, is taken out of context. In context, it was part of a discussion about whether she is still considered a virgin for the purpose of marriage if she is attacked by the pedophile. The statement is to say that she is, not that the pedophile is good to go.
Secular AND religious Jews founded Israel, and the model of the secular ones like Ben Gurion were the religious Jews of the Bible-that is who he wanted the Israeli of the future to resemble. The most reactionary part of Israeli society, the one that scares the local Cathedral senseless, is the religious Zionist settler movement and their counterparts on the “Israeli” side of the Green Line. If you read the Haaretz article closely, you will notice that it is not the patronizing contempt that you see when the Cathedral writes about Duck Dynasty and other marginalized rednecks (“hahaha, they dip tobacco and pray to Jesus on their ATVs!”), which is exactly how the Israeli left used to describe the religious (“hahaha, they have peyoth and shtreimels and rock back and forth when they pray!”). It is a basic description of the Cathedral’s enemies, and how threatening and pervasive they are, and that they are completely unapologetic. The secular left here is scared, and for a good reason-they’re more marginalized every year, despite their control of the levers of power.
Jews in the State Dept-I’ve talked about what happens with every generation, where there are secular Jews and Marranos, who have a flash of light, then come to nothing.
Yet, somehow, all the negotiations keep coming to nothing, and for every destroyed settler house, five are built. Hmmm…it’s almost like our govt verbally kowtows to the left, and actually kowtows to the right. By the way, check out Route 50, being built right now, connecting the Jerusalem highway system to the main Judah/Gush Etzion artery, running right through the middle of Beit Safafa (a big Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem.) Huge construction project connecting the southern settlements to the heart of Jerusalem at high speed (right now, you have to take local roads, making the journey long and difficult for commuters.) How did THAT happen? Think the investors and govt permitters are banking on kowtowing to the Cathedral? And that’s far from the only project.
As for the idea that things used to be run by cohanim (priests,) who were subverted by the rabbis in exile, this is simply not true. If you look at the Torah, it explicitly says that the cohanim served ceremonial functions, not governmental/legal ones, and did not decide the law. The hierarchy of community courts with the Sanhedrin on top did that, which was established by Moses using criteria which had nothing to do with priestly status. And it continued-the conqueror of Israel, Joshua, was not a priest or a king.
Dishwashers- I know, this reality contradicts your idea, that the Rabbis are puritans who always ratchet for holiness, instead of largely being men of integrity examining halakhic issues on their own merits, so feel free to explain that reality is actually an aberration. Maybe the dishwasher companies didn’t offer them a high enough bribe.
Our problems vs. your problems. Your reactionary hero: Mormon Clevon Bundy, lobbying to have his cows returned in Nevada. If he gets any positive Cathedral coverage, it is precisely because he is so completely unthreatening. Oh, and the Duck Dynasty guy. Our reactionary heroes: 30-year old guys with five kids, building towns 30 minutes to an hour away from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, provoking panicked screeching from the Cathedral, and sympathy and support from the majority of the country (especially when they go looking for an affordable, clean and safe place for their family to live, not too far away from their work, or when they decide to do some internal settlement in largely Arab Israeli cities like Akko and Lod, and set up settlement-type neighborhoods in them.) Your social trend-the seculars turn gay or just have no kids, because they aspire to Lady Gaga values. Our social trend-the secular radio station now mentions the weekly Torah portion in passing (this didn’t ever happen 10-20 years ago,) and the seculars are having 3-4 kids, because they see their religious neighbors and family members with their 6-8 kids. Your social trend-alienation and atomization for all but the most progressive progs (like that douche in the article I linked with the ear stud, holding neopagan rituals in the British forest with his fellow douches.) Our social trend-strong social support networks and deep structure for the reactionary and religious, hollowing out of social structure for the secular (I think their college networks and military connections are all they have, but every college and military unit has lots of religious guys as well.) Our problems are not solved, but we’re getting there, and we are heading AWAY from the cliff. You guys are heading for it, and the best hope is that it’s not too high. Sorry, man, bitter pill-I really do want the best for the West (and all the other nations of the world.) But you can’t build a plane out of coconut palm fronds.
>Now maybe they suspect B of secretly harboring that plan, but if so, B has been keeping it so secret that they neglect to accuse his sect of it.
If you read the Haaretz article closely, you will notice that nowhere in there do they accuse us of waiting on supernatural events. The whole point of the article is that we are trying to transform Israeli society in ways that are not supernatural, thus very threatening, that we want to build the Temple instead of waiting for it to drop from above, that we are trying to fulfill the commandment of the Passover sacrifice (for instance) and demand the Israeli govt supports this in direct ways, and that there is a very real possibility (which threatens the author and his tribe) of this happening.
Jenin vs. Fallujah-this is interesting, because I spent a lot of time north of Fallujah, and live south of Jenin now. The fascinating part is this: in Fallujah, the US went in twice and tore things up, arty, planes dropping JDAMs, doorkicking, Lee Greenwood singing “I’m proud to be an American” while a bald eagle flew past the American flag and an AH-64 launched Hellfires in the background, etc. They killed hundreds of insurgents. They had to do this, because Fallujah had become a threat to the US occupation of Anbar Province. That was 9 years ago. Today, America is out of Iraq, Fallujah belongs to Al Qaeda again and there is a healthy Iraqi diaspora in the states (all lovely people, I’m sure.) The Israelis went into Jenin, which was likewise full of insurgents who were posing problems to the Israeli occupation of the Shomron, 12 years ago. They killed a few dozen insurgents, then spent years apologizing to the “international community”, i.e., the NYT. Today, Jenin is relatively quiet, and is surrounded by dozens of growing Jewish settlements.
The central accusation is that you want to bring about the war of the whole world against the Jews in order to force the return of the Messiah, who then does all the heavy lifting.
Supposedly, you want to build the temple to piss off the entire world, whereupon the final war occurs, and the messiah returns. But the Cathedral really does not care about the temple. It is religious Jews who don’t want to rebuild it.
What the Cathedral does care about is democracy and equality, and what the article neglects to accuse you of is favoring a one state solution and opposing democracy and equality.
All that stuff about going to war with the whole world is a smokescreen. The writer of the article is actually concerned that he and his are losing power and legitimacy.
He is not accusing you guys of proposing a theocratic undemocratic one state solution implemented by ordinary non miraculous means. If your path to power lies through a miraculous messiah, and that is what he thinks you believe and intend, he is not afraid of losing power.
You know what, Jim, I love you to death, but you can be annoyingly pedantic at times. When I tell you what is between the lines in the article, it’s not because I’m making it up. It’s because I have context. They hate us for our freedoms! I mean, undemocratic ideology:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/dismantle-israeli-democracy-and-replace-it-with-jewish-law-says-settler-leader-1.406035
http://972mag.com/settler-leader-democracy-must-be-dismantled/32401/
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/settlements-pose-fundamental-threat-democracy-israel
(thanks, Cato Libertards!)
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/03/02/is-a-settlement-boycott-best-for-israel
“Most important, settlements threaten the two-state solution, without which Israel’s future as a democracy and a Jewish state are in peril.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/israels-fading-democracy.html?pagewanted=all
“Israel arose as a secular, social democratic country inspired by Western European democracies. With time, however, its core values have become entirely different. Israel today is a religious, capitalist state. Its religiosity is defined by the most extreme Orthodox interpretations. Its capitalism has erased much of the social solidarity of the past, with the exception of a few remaining vestiges of a welfare state. Israel defines itself as a “Jewish and democratic state.” However, because Israel has never created a system of checks and balances between these two sources of authority, they are closer than ever to a terrible clash.”
The author, Avraham Burg, is as much of a Cathedral elitist as anybody, and yes, he is afraid of losing power.
Your first two links are straight reporting of anti democratic sentiments. That they were reported straight indicates the Cathedral perceived them as non threatening, and they are no threat to the Cathedral because Orthodox Judaism, unlike recently existent Christianity, is ill suited to be state religion. When it reports anti democratic Christians they have horns and tails.
Your third link is whining that the settlers are deliberately getting in the way of a two state solution, which of course they are.
Let us look at your second link.
It seems that these religious Jews artificially lower the status of women and raise the status of men by having some men only activities. Women use their voting power to force inclusion, which if successful would lower fertility among both religious and non religious Jews. So a leader of these religious Jews complains about democracy – and then proposes current Jewish law, presumably as interpreted by his extremely holy and Pharisaical sect, becomes the law of the land.
Now it is perfectly reasonable that Christian law becomes the law of the land, as happened in Restoration England without any problems, but when you propose that Jewish law become the law of the land, people worry that the secret police will run them in for having dust bunnies that mingle wool lint and linen lint.
When you compare 1680 Christian law, with today’s orthodox Jewish law, it is perfectly obvious that Jewish law is Pharisaical and suffers from runaway holiness.
So you really cannot make that stuff the law of the land. What you can however do is make it the law of the land that only people that purport to believe that stuff get government jobs and professorships in high status universities.
A state needs a religion. Progressivism is a religion. It will kill you. Orthodox Judaism is a religion. It has the substantial advantage that it will not kill you, but it needs to make significant changes to be capable of being a state religion. Some of those changes would be changes back towards the violence and intolerance of Torah judaism, though it would be hazardous to be as extreme as Torah Judaism – indeed Torah Judaism eventually got the Jews into big trouble. Some of these changes would be changes away from Phariseeism.
When
>Your first two links are straight reporting of anti democratic sentiments. That they were reported straight indicates the Cathedral perceived them as non threatening
No, it indicates that the Cathedral has no comeback other than to point and sputter. Come on, it’s the standard “I…I don’t even…” debate tactic.
>and they are no threat to the Cathedral because Orthodox Judaism, unlike recently existent Christianity, is ill suited to be state religion.
Sure-which is why something like half of the Talmud deals with the functioning of state institutions.
>When it reports anti democratic Christians they have horns and tails.
Well, right, and because they are so marginalized, the Cathedral can get away with it. Because the settlers are a central part of Israeli society, that doesn’t fly-too many of us work in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Haifa, have family there, go to school there.
>Your third link is whining that the settlers are deliberately getting in the way of a two state solution, which of course they are.
When is the last time the Christian undemocratic right got in the way of the Cathedral’s foreign/domestic policy in any serious way?
>So a leader of these religious Jews complains about democracy – and then proposes current Jewish law, presumably as interpreted by his extremely holy and Pharisaical sect, becomes the law of the land.
Actually, he’s not presupposing that any particular branch of Orthodox Judaism be the law of the land. We don’t play that game.
>but when you propose that Jewish law become the law of the land, people worry that the secret police will run them in for having dust bunnies that mingle wool lint and linen lint.
Nope. Bayit Yehudi, for instance, has plenty of secular supporters. We don’t do secret police to enforce private observance. Never have, never will, the provision does not exist in the Talmud or in any of the commentaries I am aware of. You are projecting.
>When you compare 1680 Christian law, with today’s orthodox Jewish law, it is perfectly obvious that Jewish law is Pharisaical and suffers from runaway holiness.
To call us Pharisaical is a tautology-the Prushim, or Pharisees in English, were the rabbis, from whom modern Judaism is descended. It’s like calling you a right-winger-well, yes, now what? I do not see runaway holiness-I see lots of tolerance between Torah Jews of varying strains. I see a very small holier-than-thou minority which a) does not seek to impose its standards on the rest of the Torah Jews, b) is not seen by them as something to aspire to.
Anti democratic orthodox Jews are not a central part of Jewish society. Rednecks are a central part of American society, and the Cathedral has no difficulty applying horns and tails to rednecks. If they perceived orthodox Judaism as competing with them for the theocratic rule of Israel, you would all be Nazis and eat Palestinian children in your passover rituals.
Then he is not proposing anything coherent or capable of actually being done by mortals, hence no threat to the Cathedral. A state inevitably winds up having a state religion. If not progressivism, then what? You don’t have a Judaism that is feasible as a state religion, and you just implicitly admitted that.
The old testament has no concept of private observance. Jewish law is simply law. If Judaism is to become a state religion, and is going to use the concept of “private observance” to avoid the intolerably horrible consequences of making modern rabbinical Judaism a state religion, it is going to have to add yet another layer to the Talmud deciding what is private and what is public.
When you say “no particular branch of Orthodox Judaism” – well there a are a lot of branches that find it sinful for Jews to return to Israel without a miraculous Messiah. Them too?
When you say “private observance”, and “no particular branch” you admit what you deny: That exile Judaism has accreted so much Pharisaism as to render it incapable of being the official and enforced state religion, and orthodox Jews don’t really want it to be the official and enforced state religion.
But you are going to need an official and enforced state religion to resist progressivism, so you need to cook one up.
Here is how you do it: You proclaim all parts of the Talmud that would be inconvenient in an official religion as relating to private observance, thereby getting rid of a big pile of unwanted baggage. Then there is a lot of the Talmud that gets activated when you take the Talmud back, and you talmudize that lot into a workable state religion.
You reject my cynicism, but when you say “private observance” your own cynicism shows through. If you really thought Talmudic Jews were Torah Jews, what then would be this “private observance”?
As best as I can figure out, the core of the Christian usage of “Pharisee” as an insult is the argument that Rabbinical Judaism focuses on the letter of the Law to the detriment of the spirit. This is an argument worth addressing.
The Jewish perspective is that you need both the letter and the spirit. The letter is what keeps the spirit in proper boundaries, and the spirit is what keeps the letter alive. Hence, you have things like the death penalty for transgressing the letter of the law on Shabbat, severe financial penalties for transgressing Kashrut, etc. This is also why you have a Torah full of prophetic gestures-prophets marrying a prostitute, digging tunnels, shaving their hair and beard and scattering the hair/burning it/chasing it through the city with a sword, etc. I mean, couldn’t they just have made their point verbally? That is also the exact reason we put on tefillin-why don’t we just say, like the Karaites, that the verses referring to tying these words to your hand and letting them be a frontlet between your eyes are just a metaphor? Why do we bother making the covenant of circumcision in each generation, instead of just going, yeah, we get what it stands for, we should circumcise our heart, and that’s that?
Because we understand that as much as saying something is on a different level than thinking it, doing it is on a different level than saying it. So we have the spirit of the law embodied in the letter. This resonates with the worldview of Judaism as opposed to Christianity-in Judaism, you are supposed to be involved in the world and make it better, with a commandment incumbent upon men to have children, another commandment to marry, and commandments to honor your parents. In Christianity, the ideal is to be a celibate, to leave your parents and follow Jesus.
Now, obviously, people being what they are and the world being what it is, there is almost always a gap between the spirit and the letter, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller. In fact, you can have someone carrying out all the commandments outwardly and completely disregarding their spirit inwardly. This is hardly an insight-the Rabbis knew that and pointed it out, and before them G-d said through his prophet that he doesn’t want fat sacrifices brought by criminals, that their burnt offering stinks to him. But since it is very difficult to accurately gauge at any given moment how close someone is inwardly to the spirit of the Law, this opens a great opportunity to accuse those in authority of being hypocrites, to make the gap seem like a chasm, to make a populist appeal along these lines. This is what every single Leftist revolution does, and it’s what Jesus did. And so, I consider the term Pharisee as used perjoratively by the Christians as no different from the terms Reactionary or Monarchist as used by the Communists.
Of course, once you say that the spirit of the Law is the main thing and the letter is negligible, you can go ahead and dispose with the letter. Then the spirit becomes up to interpretation by the most convincing demagogue, or one whose power comes from the barrel of a gun. Were the Arian Goths more attuned to the spirit of the Law than the Gnostics? Were the Gnostics more in touch with it than Prudentius? Was the Catholic Church more in touch with the spirit before or after it merged with the Roman government? What about Luther and Calvin? What about Jan Hus? There’s no end to it, once you disregard the letter of the Law. And abrogating the letter of the Law (the census shekels, Kashrut, etc.), flouting it, attacking the Pharisees who took it very seriously, pursuing popular opinion as opposed to dictating it-that is your early Christianity.
Now let’s take a step back and look at the Rabbis. What was their power based on, in the big picture? Was it alleged miracles? There were plenty of those, but they never made that claim. Was it popularity with the people? Not at all-there was no getting voted on to the Sanhedrin by the people. Was it being holier-than-thou? Not particularly-the school of Shammai fought the school of Hillel for not being stringent enough, and the school of Hillel won eventually. Was it privileged mystical revelation? Just the opposite-the halakha is that if there is a prophet on the Sanhedrin, and he argues that the law should be whatever he says because he is a prophet, he is condemned to death, and that his vote counts for no more than any other member’s. In fact, there is a story in the Talmud of the Rabbis having an argument, and one of them, in the minority, appealing to supernatural phenomena to prove he was right. The phenomena occurred. The other rabbis told him that it didn’t matter-the Torah is no longer in the heavens, as it says in the Torah itself, and is thus to be interpreted in accordance with learned logic, not supernatural phenomena. Of course, to be an authority, you had to get on the Sanhedrin by defeating one of its members in Torah debate-not just anyone could decide the Law for themselves.
What could be more reactionary-a council of Sages who earn their place by demonstrating their grasp of the Law to the incumbent Sages, their decisions largely immune from popular voting, mysticism and appeals to popular demand to be holier-than. No wonder the Christian revolutionaries hated them with a passion and called the Pharisees with the exact same tone that today’s libs refer to Tea Baggers, Klansmen, racists, cis-het shitlords, etc. It’s hard to twist the spirit of the Law to whatever you want it to be when the letter is taken seriously, so the first step is to project upon your enemies “they take the letter seriously because they are hypocrites and don’t follow the spirit!” Then you throw out the letter, then you make the spirit whatever you feel is convenient, then you head for the Left Singularity.
Wrong:
Rather, Christians, claiming to be sinners, reject moral superiority as the basis of mortal authority. Jesus makes the complaint that formal compliance to the laws is motivated by status, rather than desire for the intent and effect of the laws – the objection is not to formalism as such, but that formalism is a reflection of bad motives.
Of course there are lots of people claiming to be Christians who do claim moral superiority as the basis for their authority, for example Pope Francics, but such people are not Christians in any meaningful sense. If your authority comes from your moral superiority, you don’t need atonement. (And obviously Pope Francis is already a saint) If you don’t need atonement, Christ did not die for your sins, if Christ did not die for your sins …
This makes it a lot easier to be a state religion, since less apt to accrete holier than thou doctrines, and no one is unduly troubled by the fact that the elderly Archbishop has a string of underage mistresses and the Grand Inquisitor is a complete cynic.
Well, yes, which is why Jesus had to be promoted to God as soon as safely dead, to prevent the next guy from doing it. And, for the most part it worked.
The Romans did not cruelly oppress the Jews, at least no more so than they cruelly oppressed everyone else. On the contrary, they bent over backwards to make allowances for the Jews. For example some pharisees got agitated at roman emblems being placed on the temple, so Pontius Pilate piously removed them. They did not force them to worship the official gods, or to acquiesce in the identification of Zeus with the God of the Jews. Trouble was, the Rabbis would not take yes for an answer. They got really obstreperous. Holier than thou, plus the inherently warlike nature of Torah Judaism, put them on collision course with the Romans, which collision the Romans made every concession that they could to avoid.
If Rabbis examined halakhic issues on their own merits, rather than ratcheting for ever greater holiness, there is no way taking babies for a stroll on the Sabbath could ever have become an issue.
The militia made the BLM stand down. Where is your militia?
Thing is, I am offering friendly advice on how to fix your problems, and asking your advice on how to fix our problems, not engaging in a dick size contest as to who has the least dysfunctional society.
We had the stroller discussion at length. Thought that issue was done.
I am pointing out that all the things you are recommending are being done or at least closer to becoming a reality every year, and the people doing them are forming a larger/more influential part of Israeli society.
I told you my advice on fixing your problems-they won’t get fixed as long as the smartest neoreactionaries think of religion as a pack of useful lies to get everyone to work together. The fish rots from the head, and if the guys in charge don’t believe in anything, then pretty soon everything falls apart. Why am I gonna follow someone who doesn’t believe in the principles he wants me to believe in? And that’s without opening the larger can of worms-if religion is just a pretense, then what ultimate difference does it make if my society is thriving or not? I should be striving to maximize my personal utils (Carlyle’s Pig-Philosophy.)
So, then the question is, which religion should we believe in. This is a whole new can of worms. I’m suggesting that it’s not going to get better than a Noahide one for most people.
I asked you for the earliest source of the rabbinical prohibition on babies in strollers, you did not supply it.
You plausibly argued:
And I conceded that argument was not silly. And yet, and yet, you don’t seem to be able to find a decently ancient rabbi prohibiting babies in strollers on the Sabbath.
I argued that if carrying babies or pushing the in strollers had been not ok a hundred years ago you would have seen troubles and disobedience from the women. And, indeed, the current doctrine on strollers is not that women cannot do it, which would surely provoke mutiny, but that it needs a magic spell cast by rabbis to make it OK, which spells have been cast suspiciously recently. If it had been not OK, and there had been no magic spells, then there really would have been trouble.
Many completely non Christian religions have been highly successful at getting people to work together, notably Icelandic and Roman paganism. I get the feeling that Romulus and Servius Tullus were every bit as cynical about religion as I am. In the case of Romulus, probably more so.
So obviously that a religion be true is not really a requirement. And if you examine your own religion carefully, it is not true either – its central claim being that an oral Talmud was given with the Torah, and the oral Talmud said that the Torah does not say what it says nor mean what it means. This is obviously a scam to fix Judaism to accommodate modernity, just as much as promoting Jesus to God was a scam to fix Judaism to accommodate modernity.
Yes, promoting him to God did not entirely work, but you will notice that those, like Pope Francis, who are remaking Christianity into progressivism have to depromote Jesus from God, so it was at least somewhat effective. Meanwhile, you Jews have a religion of exile that needs to become a religion of home. This really is not so hard. You just say that the recovery of the temple activates some much neglected parts of the Talmud, and deactivates most of the rest of the Talmud, and then you talmudize the newly activated parts of the Talmud with a great big pile of re-re-re-interpretation, which Jews are famously, or infamously, good at.
If Christianity is defenseless against its heretical spawn, I would be a lot better off reviving the violent and self confident religion of Romulus rather than converting to Judaism which suffers from guilt and suicidal tendencies. The time has come for a state religion that favors slaughtering your enemies and abducting their women, and the way the wind is blowing, that religion will be Islam, which has some serious disadvantages.
>Many completely non Christian religions have been highly successful at getting people to work together, notably Icelandic and Roman paganism.
And where are they now? It’s hard to argue that the Tyrannosaurus was a great machine which had nothing wrong with it-there is a shortage of Tyrannosauri around us, so there must be some reason. Of course, in its heyday, the Tyrannosaurus was very impressive, but now it’s just fossilized bones.
>So obviously that a religion be true is not really a requirement.
It is, if you want it to stick around in the long run.
>And if you examine your own religion carefully, it is not true either – its central claim being that an oral Talmud was given with the Torah, and the oral Talmud said that the Torah does not say what it says nor mean what it means. This is obviously a scam to fix Judaism to accommodate modernity, just as much as promoting Jesus to God was a scam to fix Judaism to accommodate modernity.
Well, you can see which one still works and which one has degenerated to tattooed lesbian pastors. Obviously, you need mechanisms by which your law can be interpreted appropriately to suit the contingency, and these mechanisms are provided in the Torah verbatim. Moshe himself, in his final address to the Jews, says that the Torah is not in the heavens-it’s been given to the Jews, to keep and implement.
Same place as Torah Judaism.
The reason that the Jews have survived is that their earlier and current religion both prescribe burying poop and washing hands.
>Same place as Torah Judaism.
I’m a Torah Jew, and don’t see any Vikings or Romans around.
>The reason that the Jews have survived is that their earlier and current religion both prescribe burying poop and washing hands.
Well, in an extended metaphysical sense you are righter than you know-separating the holy from the profane is a commandment very conducive to survival. On the other hand, there’s many, many people out there whose religions don’t seem to prescribe much in the way of hygiene and sanitation, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere.
> Jesus makes the complaint that formal compliance to the laws is motivated by status, rather than desire for the intent and effect of the laws – the objection is not to formalism as such, but that formalism is a reflection of bad motives.
This is prototypical leftism. Since we have no motivoscope, any rabble rouser can ascribe the foulest of motives to those in authority against whom he wishes to rebel.
>Of course there are lots of people claiming to be Christians who do claim moral superiority as the basis for their authority, for example Pope Francics, but such people are not Christians in any meaningful sense.
Obviously. No True Christian…
>If you don’t need atonement, Christ did not die for your sins, if Christ did not die for your sins …
The Torah rejects human sacrifice and the idea that someone else is punished for your sins. Atonement in the Torah is personal, not proxy. See: King David.
>This makes it a lot easier to be a state religion, since less apt to accrete holier than thou doctrines, and no one is unduly troubled by the fact that the elderly Archbishop has a string of underage mistresses and the Grand Inquisitor is a complete cynic.
Until the next Hus or Luther arises. Which they do all the time.
>And, for the most part it worked.
“For the most part it works” is a piss-poor excuse for engineering disaster.
>The Romans did not cruelly oppress the Jews, at least no more so than they cruelly oppressed everyone else.
They stole Temple silver, which was the last straw. Before that, their soldiers exposed themselves in the Temple, and burned a Torah scroll. Before that, they issued an edict that there would be a statue of Caligula put up in the Temple, which edict was not enforced, but it could have been quite easily.
>Holier than thou, plus the inherently warlike nature of Torah Judaism, put them on collision course with the Romans, which collision the Romans made every concession that they could to avoid.
See above. The Romans spent a long time doing everything they could to provoke a revolt.
>Anti democratic orthodox Jews are not a central part of Jewish society.
Sure we are.
>Rednecks are a central part of American society, and the Cathedral has no difficulty applying horns and tails to rednecks.
The parts of American society which are driving the train, the East Coast and West Coast metropoli, are remarkably redneck-free, and the vast majority of their inhabitants have no dealings with rednecks whatsoever. So, not a central part.
>If they perceived orthodox Judaism as competing with them for the theocratic rule of Israel, you would all be Nazis and eat Palestinian children in your passover rituals.
Oh, there’s been a fair amount of that, too, but it faded out over the last 10-20 years.
>Then he is not proposing anything coherent or capable of actually being done by mortals, hence no threat to the Cathedral.
You misunderstand-all the strains of Torah Judaism have more in common than apart. There is no reason that the Sanhedrin would exclude the representatives of any of them.
>The old testament has no concept of private observance. Jewish law is simply law.
As usual, you have no grasp of the subject matter. The Torah sets a clear standard for punishment-there need to be two adult, male witnesses, they need to have warned the transgressor and he still wouldn’t stop transgressing, etc. This is obviously referring to public transgression. Law is law, but the punishment for breaking it, how we know someone broke it, etc., are all part of the law.
>it is going to have to add yet another layer to the Talmud deciding what is private and what is public.
Familiarizing yourself with the Talmud would make your pronouncements on it a bit more authoritative. It already has extensive discussion on what is private, what is public, what is admissible as evidence, what isn’t, etc.
>When you say “no particular branch of Orthodox Judaism” – well there a are a lot of branches that find it sinful for Jews to return to Israel without a miraculous Messiah. Them too?
They would not join a Sanhedrin, by definition, or they would change their thinking.
>When you say “private observance”, and “no particular branch” you admit what you deny:
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. When I make the distinction between private and public, it is because the Torah and Talmud make it. When I make no distinction between branches of Torah Judaism, it is because the Torah and Talmud did not-Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai both sat on the Sanhedrin, so did Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer, so did Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, despite having diametrically opposed perspectives.
>Here is how you do it:…
We do not twist the Torah to our convenience. We build in accordance with the Torah. True, the Torah has 70 faces, and true, the reason we have Rabbis and an Oral Torah is to properly apply it to the contingent circumstances. But we do not act in bad faith, because in these things, acting in bad faith brings bad results in the long term.
>If you really thought Talmudic Jews were Torah Jews, what then would be this “private observance”?
Not all Jews are Torah Jews, and no Torah Jew is perfect. Nobody keeps all the mitzvot all the time. The Torah tells us which mitzvot the Rabbinical courts and the government should enforce, how and when, and which ones are enforced by Heaven (and which ones don’t have any punishment for transgression-for instance, not putting on tefillin.) We are not Saudi Muslims or Communists. What a man does in private is his business, not that of the Rabbis, and we don’t have the concept of a secret police to spy on people in their homes.
And then, because of minute and obscure disagreements on matters of ritual and Jewish law, on which Shammai was holier than thou, leading to serious disagreements on foreign policy on which Shammai was much holier than thou, Shammai invited all the followers of Hillel to a meeting, and treacherously massacred them all, thereby making himself president of the Sanhedrin.
Which then gave him a free hand to carry out his disastrously holy foreign policy, in which he pursued a policy of hostility against each and every one of Israel’s neighbors at the same time as a policy of revolution against the Romans, which policy, carried to ever greater extremes by his successors, eventually led to the exile of the Jews.
If the Sanhedrin of Hillel and Shammai is your model for resolving religious differences between orthodox Jews, you have problems.
And Jews have been getting holier ever since. The Sanhedrin have never been supposed to rule, and when they have ruled, has not worked very well. The holier the Jews get, the more resolving differences is difficult.
Oh come on. You still have not given me the first rabbi to find problems with taking babies outside on the sabbath. The word “Talmudic” when used as a pejorative, means to corruptly evade through complexification, hair splitting, and uglification.
The Torah speaks for itself. It is lot less holy, and a lot more bloodthirsty and intolerant, than the Talmud. And we have the historical record of Torah Jews. Hard to say how holy they were, but definitely a lot more bloodthirsty and intolerant than Talmudic Jews.
You need a state religion that is a lot more bloodthirsty and intolerant than the Talmud, but a lot less bloodthirsty, warlike and intolerant than the Torah, and a lot less holy than the Talmud, and have demonstrated ample ability to twist the Torah to suit.
If Orthodox Jews were acting in good faith, in the sense of genuinely believing themselves to be Torah Jews, would already be making sacrifices on the rock. Most don’t want to touch the temple with a ten foot pole because that would reactivate a pile of Torah law that scares the piss out of them.
And which should scare the piss out them. You really do have to figure out what you are going to do to be a state religion again. After two thousand years of exile, not ready to be a state religion right now. In contrast, 1930s anglicanism was a perfectly fine official state religion, its only problem being that it had in reality been out of power for a hundred years.
Kerry says Israel has to implement the two state solution or “Israel Could Become ‘An Apartheid State’” – in other words, do to Israel what was done to South Africa – demand a one state majority rule solution.
If white South Africans committed suicide, Jews will commit suicide. You need your own state religion to replace progressivism. Judaism changed when it went into exile, and it has to change again to come home.
>Shammai invited all the followers of Hillel to a meeting, and treacherously massacred them all, thereby making himself president of the Sanhedrin.
You are misreading Wikipedia. They did not massacre the followers of Hillel, but either killed six of them or didn’t kill anyone, depending on which version you read. Further, all their rulings were reversed shortly thereafter, and the entire episode has become become an exemplar of how NOT to act in Judaism, described in the Talmud as one of the worst days in our history.
Which then gave him a free hand to carry out his disastrously holy foreign policy, in which he pursued a policy of hostility against each and every one of Israel’s neighbors at the same time as a policy of revolution against the Romans
Source?
>The Sanhedrin have never been supposed to rule, and when they have ruled, has not worked very well.
Actually, the Sanhedrin’s function, as presented by the Torah, is be the legislative and judicial branch in one. So, they were supposed to rule. Given that we still live in accordance with their rulings, 1500+ years later, they must have ruled fairly well, as opposed to, say, the Hashmonaite rulers of whose rulings and institutions only Hanukkah remains.
>You still have not given me the first rabbi to find problems with taking babies outside on the sabbath.
There is no problem with taking babies outside during Shabbat. There is a problem carrying objects which do not carry themselves between domains on Shabbat. This problem is well documented from the Talmud onwards.
>The word “Talmudic” when used as a pejorative, means to corruptly evade through complexification, hair splitting, and uglification.
We are not responsible for your pejoratives. The word “Anglo,” when used as a pejorative, means…the word “Yankee”, when used as a pejorative, means…the word “Male”, when used as pejorative, means…
>The Torah speaks for itself.
You read Hebrew? Or are you relying on a translation? How did your translator know what the Torah says?
Our Rabbis taught: A certain gentile once came before Shammai and asked him: “How many Torot do you have?”
“Two,” he replied: “the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.”
“I believe you with respect to the Written, but not with respect to the Oral Torah. Make me a proselyte on condition that you teach me the Written Torah [only].
Shammai scolded and rejected him in anger. When he went before Hillel, Hillel accepted him as a proselyte. On the first day, Hillel taught him, “Alef, bet, gimmel, dalet.” The following day Hillel reversed the letters.
“But yesterday you did not teach them to me like this,” he protested.
“Must you then not rely upon me? Then rely upon me with respect to the Oral Torah as well.”
Meaning, if you trust the Jews as to what the Written Torah says, you might as well trust them as to what its contextual meaning is.
>It is lot less holy, and a lot more bloodthirsty and intolerant, than the Talmud.
Either “less holy” or “more intolerant.”
>And we have the historical record of Torah Jews. Hard to say how holy they were, but definitely a lot more bloodthirsty and intolerant than Talmudic Jews.
Again-your historical record comes from us. If you trust our historical record on the one, might as well trust on the other. I do not see more bloodthirstiness in the time of Joshua and David-I see different context.
>You need a state religion that is a lot more bloodthirsty and intolerant than the Talmud, but a lot less bloodthirsty, warlike and intolerant than the Torah, and a lot less holy than the Talmud, and have demonstrated ample ability to twist the Torah to suit.
Or maybe we can decide what we need? The Talmud has in it provisions for warfare, which allow for war as brutal as necessary, and the Torah has in it provisions for tolerance of non-Jews, alliances with them, etc.
>If Orthodox Jews were acting in good faith, in the sense of genuinely believing themselves to be Torah Jews, would already be making sacrifices on the rock.
There are contingent circumstances. We learned the hard way, over and over again, through the Bar Kochba rebellion for instance, not to overplay our hand too early. Since time is moving on our side, it is better to wait a bit, until 70% of combat officers are religious, until the majority of Yehuda and Shomron are Jewish, etc., then to jump the gun and have a bloody failure.
>Most don’t want to touch the temple with a ten foot pole because that would reactivate a pile of Torah law that scares the piss out of them.
No-they don’t want to touch it because they see what YASSAM does to settlers it is disposessing.
>After two thousand years of exile, not ready to be a state religion right now.
We have to test and find out.
>In contrast, 1930s anglicanism was a perfectly fine official state religion, its only problem being that it had in reality been out of power for a hundred years.
Except that it failed completely due to no external reason (we had the Romans), it was totally fine. Hmmm…
>Kerry says Israel has to implement the two state solution or “Israel Could Become ‘An Apartheid State’” – in other words, do to Israel what was done to South Africa – demand a one state majority rule solution.
And how did that work out for Kerry? And how well did the talks, which were supposed to present the dilemma of giving up half of Israel or becoming a Jewish minority state (I am not sure how-the numbers don’t work out)-how well did they go?
>If white South Africans committed suicide, Jews will commit suicide.
We are not them, and are not about to commit suicide.
>Judaism changed when it went into exile, and it has to change again to come home.
This is true…in a way. The phenotype of Judaism changed. The genotype, meaning, the Oral and Written Torah, did not. All the necessary DNA is there, it just needs to be expressed. 40% religious Zionist officers in combat units vs. ghetto Jews/assimilated European Jews in 70 years is a big genotypic change, and it’s just started.
Reversed when? The policy of ever more provocative behavior towards Romans and neighboring peoples was not reversed, but grew worse and worse. Does not seem to have been reversed until the zealot faction suicided.
https://thinkhebrew.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/shammai-and-the-zealots/
Not so. Exodus 24 and Numbers 11 ascribe no powers to the seventy elders. Exodus 18 says that Moses shall legislate and shall judge great matters, and the elders shall judge small matters.
Josephus in the Wars of the Jews and the Antiquities of the Jews does not seem to notice the Sanhedrin, which appears to have been unimportant or entirely absent during the most of the history he relates.
The Sanhedrin expired horribly in the destruction of the temple. What you refer to is the Palestinian Patriarchate, which was subordinate to Roman authority, therefore lacked the opportunity to rule well or badly, since it had no real enforcement capability. You have not had a Jewish theocratic government since the exile began.
The Sanhedrin theocratic government is alleged to have ancient roots, but there is no historical record of these ancient roots. Its existence that is known to history was short and disastrous.
Babies are not objects, nor are they products. It is not at all obvious that babies are covered, and if they were covered, then the women would have mutinied, and the Rabbis would need to cast magic spells to allow women to carry their babies – but these magic spells are rather recent, and the motivation, that they be cast to allow women to carry their babies, much more recent.
And if babies were objects or products, they would be a special kind of object that caused a whole lot of Sabbath problems, so would get specifically mentioned.
And what do they mean? My experience is that stereotypes are usually pretty accurate. In the years preceding the civil war, a Yankee was someone from the puritan descended parts of America, greedy, hypocritical, and pharisaical – it was a term that Americans used for that minority of Americans that was preparing to conquer the rest.
The translator read it.
Written records are less prone to convenient adjustment than oral records. Plus your “contextual meaning” is text torture. It is simply obvious that the talmud takes the position that the old testament does not say what it says nor mean what it means – that the talmud is as much a rewrite as the New Testament.
Talmudic Jews are a lot more recent than Christians, so our historical record does not come from Talmudic Jews. Comes from Christians, Romans, and Josephus.
Jews were bloodthirsty crazies all the way through to Josephus, after which they became much more pacific – and now they are suicidally pacific. Your supposedly right wing religious party favors greater autonomy for Palestinians. How do you reconcile that with what is written in the Old Testament?
A mighty arab army occupying the rock? I don’t think so. You are rationalizing. It is orthodox Jews that are holding back from the rock. No one is holding them back.
So, you have refused the two state solution, while piously pretending to be moving towards it, very slowly. Now comes the pressure for the one state solution.
Jews are way guiltier than white South Africans were. Guilt works better on Jews than just about anyone else.
There is no evidence that the oral Torah ever existed, and if it ever existed, could not have survived more than a few generations without suffering frequent and total change. The Talmud is a creation of exile, and is poisoned by exile.
Pay attention to the difference between the proposal (v. 22) and its implementation (v. 26). Jethro proposes a distinction between great and lesser matters; Moses implements a distinction between difficult- and easy-to-adjudicate cases.
You are, in stereotypical Jewish style, talmudically torturing the text.
Verse 26 “And they judged the people at all seasons: the hard causes they brought unto Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves.”
Not a legislative body in Exodus, not a legislative body in Numbers, and in Josephus’ history of the Jews, not a legislative body. The recorded history of the Sanhedrin as a legislative body theocratically sovereign over the children of Israel, is brief and disastrous.
What does have a respectably long recorded history is the Jewish Patriarchate, which was an institution of exile, powerlessness, and weakness. Christians predate Talmudic Jews, and Christian history predates Talmudic history.
The New Testament was based on the old testament, but the Talmud copies massively from Christian practices and tradition, for example the wedding ring is a Christian tradition. The Christian Patriarchate predates the Jewish Patriarchate.
The true origin of the Jewish patriarchate is not the seventy elders, nor the Sanhedrin, but the Christian patriarchate.
>The policy of ever more provocative behavior towards Romans and neighboring peoples was not reversed, but grew worse and worse.
I explained to you what the deal was with the Romans. It could not have ended other than how it did-to accept Romans exposing themselves in the Temple and stealing its silver was to invite further outrages.
>https://thinkhebrew.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/shammai-and-the-zealots/
That is hardly a serious source. Lots of conjecture. If the guy knew his ass from a hole in the ground, for instance, he would have known that warfare on Shabbat was always allowed, and that the Maccabbees reaffirmed this after a group of rebels against the Greeks died due to not fighting on Shabbat. And of course every single rabbi considered the Shabbat to be the lynchpin of the week, not just Shammai.
>Not so. Exodus 24 and Numbers 11 ascribe no powers to the seventy elders. Exodus 18 says that Moses shall legislate and shall judge great matters, and the elders shall judge small matters.
These are not the source for the Sanhedrin. If you look at the source, Exodus 18, you can see that Yithro proposes and Moshe accepts a system of courts of tens, twenties, fifties and thousands, dealing with judiciary matters. Cases were handled at the lowest possible level, moving up all the way to Moshe if courts were unable to settle the matter. Deuteronomy 17 makes it obvious that this system would continue to exist after Moshe’s death, and that the head court would be at the Temple, and that matters too difficult to settle in the local courts would be dealt with by the Sanhedrin. Disobedience of its sentence would be punished by death.
>Josephus in the Wars of the Jews and the Antiquities of the Jews does not seem to notice the Sanhedrin, which appears to have been unimportant or entirely absent during the most of the history he relates.
Josephus mentions the Gerousia/Synedrion in several places. There are also numerous sources attesting to its existence prior to Josephus’ era. Towards the end of Hashmonaen rule and throughout the Roman occupation, things got pretty crazy, with locally appointed rulers killing each other and widespread corruption.
>The Sanhedrin expired horribly in the destruction of the temple.
No-they rebuilt it at Yavne shortly after the destruction.
>What you refer to is the Palestinian Patriarchate, which was subordinate to Roman authority, therefore lacked the opportunity to rule well or badly, since it had no real enforcement capability.
Actually, the Sanhedrin removed itself from the Hall of Hewn Stone well before the destruction of the Temple, due to the rise of false testimony which led it to execute too many innocent people. Since its power to execute was contingent on meeting in the Hall of Hewn Stones, they left it to avoid the whole mess.
>You have not had a Jewish theocratic government since the exile began.
Well, yes, by definition. That’s what exile means. Although we did have limited communal sovereignty in Persia and a few other places at times.
>The Sanhedrin theocratic government is alleged to have ancient roots, but there is no historical record of these ancient roots. Its existence that is known to history was short and disastrous.
When you speak of “history”, it is like when the NYT speaks of “science.” In fact, all the time that the Jews lived in Israel, there was a Sanhedrin/Gerousia/Council of Elders.
>Babies are not objects, nor are they products.
According to Halacha, everything that can’t carry itself is covered by the prohibition. There is a recorded debate on whether you can carry a sick man on his bed outside in the Talmud. For this purpose, babies are like objects.
>if they were covered, then the women would have mutinied,
Your women, whose religion serves them and is bound to their convenience, would have mutinied. We are different.
>and the Rabbis would need to cast magic spells to allow women to carry their babies – but these magic spells are rather recent,
You are confused as to the difference between a magic spell and a legal device. The eruv, a legal device, is so ancient that an entire tractate of the Talmud is named after it.
>and the motivation, that they be cast to allow women to carry their babies, much more recent.
?
>And if babies were objects or products, they would be a special kind of object that caused a whole lot of Sabbath problems, so would get specifically mentioned.
No, they’re covered under the whole idea that a living thing carries itself, even when someone carries it, because it COULD have carried itself. So, when it can’t carry itself, the corollary is that you can’t carry it between domains.
>My experience is that stereotypes are usually pretty accurate.
Sure. From the perspective of Christians, who happily throw out 95% of the Torah and interpret the remainder as it suits them, a close reading of it with the presumption that every word is in there for a reason and that the people who came before them knew what they were about seems crazy. Hence, Talmudic as a pejorative.
>The translator read it.
The translator is making difficult choices and necessarily every translation is a lie. Many words have multiple meanings and lots of context.
>Written records are less prone to convenient adjustment than oral records.
Look up the story of the writing of the Septuagint translation sometime.
>Plus your “contextual meaning” is text torture.
Of course not. If anyone could come along and read the Torah and understand it from zero, Ptolemy would not have needed the 70 sages to write the Septuagint. But if a translation fully captured the meaning, the Jews would not consider the writing of the Septuagint a tragedy.
>Talmudic Jews are a lot more recent than Christians,
You keep repeating this, and I keep asking you for a source, and you keep coming up with nothing.
>so our historical record does not come from Talmudic Jews. Comes from Christians, Romans, and Josephus.
Here is Josephus talking about the Oral Law, which is to say, the Talmud:
“[T]he Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their
fathers, which are not written in the Laws of Moses; and it is for that reason that the Sadducees reject
them and say that we are only to consider those in the written word as binding, but not to observe
those derived from the tradition of our forefathers. And these are the matters over which have arisen
great disputes and differences among them, while the Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, and do not have popular support, but the Pharisees have the multitude on their side.”
Josephus also mentions things like the etrog, which is only known from the Oral Torah-the Written Torah only mentions “the fruit of a beautiful tree.”
We also see that the Written Torah tells us we will not lose the Talmud, in Isaiah: “And as for Me, this is My covenant with them,”
said G-d, “My spirit, which is upon you and My
words that I have placed in your mouth, shall
never depart from your mouth nor the mouths
of your descendants.”
>Jews were bloodthirsty crazies all the way through to Josephus
Is this how the guy who comes along and tells David that Saul is dead is an Amalekite? You know, a member of the nation we were supposed to exterminate, according to the Written Torah? Is this how David himself is the descendant of a Moabite woman, and we are not supposed to marry with Moabite converts, and only through a Talmudic parsing of the commandment the elders decided that this only applied to male converts only? I mean, if they were so bloodthirsty, why didn’t they just kill Ruth?
>after which they became much more pacific –
Yes. Like in the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Kitos War, the revolt against Gallius and the one against Heraclius-these were just, like, peaceful flower happenings, maaan.
>and now they are suicidally pacific.
Amazingly, this pacifism involves a military which is the best in the region, and the suicidalism involves permits to build 14,000 homes in the settlements issued this year.
>Your supposedly right wing religious party favors greater autonomy for Palestinians.
Which right wing? The Likud is the Outer Party. The settlers’ are an actual right wing, and favor no such thing. Bennett and his guys are representatives of the actual right. Time will tell if they get absorbed into the Likud, but the progress of the last negotiations seems to show that the Outer Party is actually bending before the proper right, making token concessions to the Cathedral while building settlements and sabotaging the “negotiations.”
>A mighty arab army occupying the rock?
You can, instead of making sarcastic comments, look up some videos of YASSAM breaking up demonstrations by religious Jews, tearing nostrils open, etc. The Arabs are not our problem, and have not been for a long time.
>So, you have refused the two state solution, while piously pretending to be moving towards it, very slowly. Now comes the pressure for the one state solution.
I doubt that’s going anywhere. We have extensive trade partnerships with China, India and Russia, as well as the rest of the world, and we have our own oil/gas now. What’s the US gonna do, take a year off from fucking up in Syria and the Ukraine and come after us? It’s not the 1980s anymore.
>Jews are way guiltier than white South Africans were. Guilt works better on Jews than just about anyone else.
On exile Jews, perhaps. Not on us.
>There is no evidence that the oral Torah ever existed,
I just quoted you Josephus and Isaiah saying it did. What else do you want, a personal divine revelation?
>and if it ever existed, could not have survived more than a few generations without suffering frequent and total change.
Well, if Americans had it-sure. But we’re not Americans-we take Torah seriously.
The reason for the Oral Torah was so that the Sages could adjust the application of principles of the Written Torah according to contingent circumstances. So there is some change, that’s the point. But total change? No.
>The Talmud is a creation of exile, and is poisoned by exile.
The Talmud as a whole is the Oral Torah.
If you mean the Talmud as it was written, the Jerusalem Talmud, which came first, was not a product of exile, being written down in Israel.
The Babylonian Talmud, compiled in present-day Fallujah, IS a product of exile, and speaks of itself as such-it says “the Torah of Bavel is darkness,” and “there is no Torah like the Torah of the Land of Israel.” But the overall perspective is that there is an entity-the Oral Law-it has principles, and the expression of its principles varies depending on time, place and contingent circumstances. Now we’re home, living in a sovereign state, so the expression will naturally change.
The way I heard it, Pontius Pilate diverted some of the temple taxes to build an aqueduct, thereby providing water that did not transmit disease, making the frequent handwashing mandated by the pharisees of the time actually useful, bringing religious cleanliness into line with actual cleanliness, The aqueduct thing seems like an entirely appropriate use of temple taxes, given that the pharisees were making a big deal about cleanliness.
The aqueduct incident was referenced in “The life of Brian”, in the rant on the evils of Roman imperialism, which rant was pretty much accurate.
And the Romans wanted to place Roman symbols on the temple so that Romans could pretend that the Jews were worshiping Zeus, without actually forcing the Jews to pretend they worshiping Zeus. But the Jews would not let them place the symbols.
Despite the fact that today’s Arabs are powerless, and would exterminate you if they had the power, and the Romans had the power to exterminate the Jews but were reluctant to apply it, you let today’s Arabs dig in the ruins of the temple looking for the arc, you allow them to exclude you from the rock, yet Torah/Sanhedrin Jews would not let the Romans decorate the temple with symbols that could potentially be interpreted by a Roman (but not by a Jew) as indicating conformity with Roman official religion.
It is surely obvious that Torah/Sanhedrin Jews were too intolerant, and Talmudic Jews are far too tolerant, dangerously so, as the South Africans were dangerously so.
Not what it says. What it says is that lesser judges shall settle straightforward cases, and Moses hard cases. Thus Moses makes precedent, and the judges do not make precedent. No grant of legislative power to the elders.
Not so.
Deuteronomy 17 addresses rule by judges and rule by kings, judge in this context being a single judge supreme over the Israeli legal system, as for example Samuel. Israel generally had zero or one such judge at a time. Judges, one at a time, not some body of judges, had executive and legislative power, but differed from Kings in that they could not tax and conscript. See the book of Judges, and Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews.
Somehow, by no clear mechanism, a judge appeared who judged Israel. Not elected by the Sanhedrin. If selected by anyone, selected by the hereditary priesthood.
Deuteronomy seventeen tells us:
“the judge”, not “the judges”, consistent with the Book of Judges, the Book of Joshua, the Book of Ruth, the book of Samuel, and “antiquities of the Jews” which depict zero or one judge ruling at any given time. Deuteronomy seventeen verse nine suggests that the levites, the hereditary priesthood, got to choose the Judge, or had substantial influence over who got chosen, but no Sanhedrin, no special subset of the levites mentioned.
The Gerousia is simply “the elders”. Most societies have elders, and the Torah mentions them from time to time. He reports the Synedrion (Sanhedrin) as an institution recently created by the Romans. As I said “its rule in recorded history brief and disastrous”
Such as?
History is what gets written down by people who were in a position to know what happened. If your evidence for the ancient existence of the Sanhedrin is Deuteronomy 17, you have no evidence. If it existed, would have left evidence.
If there was, it would be mentioned in the Torah and by Josephus. It is not. The Sanhedrin he refers to is a Roman created legislative body. The elders he refers to are not a council, not a collective entity that makes decisions.
If it is unclear whether a sick man is an object in the relevant sense, it is unclear whether a baby is an object in the relevant sense. Given that it is extremely difficult to stop women from carrying babies, whereas sick men very seldom need to be carried, and if they do it is normally an emergency which overrides normal rules, if babies were included, would be mentioned.
Since you are profoundly reluctant to give the the earliest mention of babies, I conclude that the debate over babies is very recent – in which case the prohibition against carrying babies on the Sabbath is very recent.
Your women would be mutinying right now, hence the issue of magic spells to allow them to carry babies.
What is not ancient but very recent is that the major motivation for this legal device is to allow women to carry babies outside on the sabbath.
The Jews at the time of Josephus did not consider the writing of the Septuagint a tragedy. Philo and Josephus considered it as authoritative as the original, and we see no indications of anyone of the time having any contrary opinon.
And the interesting thing about the septuagint is that where the talmud ascribes to the written Torah a meaning wildly different from the plain and clear meaning of the Torah, as it so often does, the Septuagint reflects the Torah, not the “oral torah” – which implies that the “Oral Torah” did not exist at the time of Josephus, or that its contents were different beyond recognition.
You, not I, need to provide a source for the ancientness of talmudic Judaism.
Which, however, provides no evidence that those making up an oral law then made up an oral law that had much resemblance to those making up an oral law three hundred years later. Among other things, consider the disagreement on the septuagint, and the disagreement on the supposed ancientness of the Sanhedrin.
Surely, the oral torah knows the etrog from Josephus, not the other way around.
And according to the written Torah, did a pretty good job. That is like arguing that Hitler did not exterminate the Jews, because there are still plenty of Jews.
All of these long precede Talmudic Judaism. They also display horrifying Torah style savagery, while today’s Talmudic Jews err in the opposite extreme. If you insist on a strictly accurate statement, Jews were bloodthirsty crazies all the way to Josephus and for a couple of generations after.
And he proposes to annex area C, containing three percent of Palestinians, while granting greater autonomy to areas A and B, a plan that has all the same defects, in marginally lesser degree, as the various almost equally suicidal plans he so rightly ridicules.
Bennett proposes to give 48000 Arab Muslims Jewish citizenship “so that the world cannot say we are an apartheid state”. But obviously, Bennetts plan is apartheid. What he needs to say is “Unlike those foolishly tolerant South Africans who are now getting genocided, we are going to stick with apartheid forever.”
If he cannot say that, Israel will not survive.
Further, Bennett does not say “arab Muslim” He says “Palestinian”. No member of the Israeli state apparatus should be allowed to say “Palestinian” except in scare quotes. If Palestinians exist, the Jewish state should absolutely deny that they exist. Bennet should have said “Jewish ruled Arab Muslims” He uses words that are likely to kill him and every Jew everywhere.
You know what the Torah Jews of the first and second centuries would have done. That was excessive, but excessive is better than suicidal.
You will cut your own throats with a rusty knife, exactly as the white South Africans did, because Jews are more vulnerable to that sort of pressure than other kinds of white people.
Watch Bennett’s right wing video on annexation. He sounds so sane, and correctly points out that everyone else is so crazy, until he give us his own plan, which is only minutely less crazy, suddenly revealing that the entire Jewish political spectrum including Bennett’s Home party lives inside the Cathedral, and the logic of the Cathedral is that Israel must be destroyed.
Josephus’ Oral Torah seems to have had some striking differences from yours, among them that the Sanhedrin was created by the Romans.
Demographics, I presume? Are there other reasons?
You know, I’ve been meaning to mention something to you. Two things. If you go into a boxing match and do everything right, then come out paralyzed and brain damaged, obviously you did SOMETHING wrong. Second, I think that having a discussion about what the Jews should do with a guy whose pseudonym is hitlerdidnothingwrong is about like having a discussion on the best options for American whites with Tim Wise-I mean, what could I possibly gain from that?
I never heard of that until you just now told me. What I complained about was that among the many perversions that the Noahide laws give a pass to is sex with girls who have not yet developed secondary sexual characteristics. And that was far from being my major complaint about those laws. I don’t really think that sex with pre pubertal girls is all that serious. There are far worse things wrong with Noahide laws. I asked you what gentiles should do, you proposed the Noahide laws. I looked up the Noahide laws, found them to be Jewish decadence in a box, and good evidence for Jews favoring decadence for their host civilizations.
The Noahide Laws are extreme shorthand, just like the 613 Commandments. Establishing a system of righteous courts is one of those commandments. It is difficult to imagine any system of righteous courts which would condone pedophilia.
The Pauline commandments are considerably shorter than the long version of the Noahide laws, and yet they manage to cover a whole lot of stuff that the long versions of the Noahide commandments curiously omit. They command patriarchy, which the Noahide laws completely ignore. They command a bunch of practical pragmatic measures to artificially raise male status and lower female status without mistreating women or causing unpleasantness. They forbid trannies and similar decadent behavior. They limit charity to avoid encouraging feckless behavior among the recipients and to avoid charity substituting for family.
It was secular Jews that founded Israel, and religious Jews are sinking it. You have no counter narrative to the Cathedral, and you need one. It is not the Cathedral that stops you from taking back the temple mount, and it is not religious Jews calling for a one state solution.
The Cathedral is in big trouble in Israel but not because of religious Jews. Rather, religious Jews are doing well because the Cathedral is in big trouble. The Cathedral is in big trouble because it lacks a convincing narrative of how Israel can continue to exist as a Cathedral state. But religious Jews don’t have a convincing narrative of how Israel can exist as a Jewish state, short of a Messiah saving the day with overt miracles.
The Pauline commandments led to today’s disaster, slowly but inexorably. They might forbid trannies and limit charity, but they led to a civilization which worships trannies and robs people to give their money as charity to the undeserving. Meanwhile, we have no maximum limit to charity (other than how much of your inheritance you can give away,) and yet don’t have too much of a problem with it. We assume patriarchy instead of commanding it, but for some reason have a society where men are men and women are women.
The secular Jews who founded Israel did so so that Jews could become more like the Jews of the Torah than the Jews of Poland. In this way, they were more religious than many of the religious.
>But religious Jews don’t have a convincing narrative of how Israel can exist as a Jewish state, short of a Messiah saving the day with overt miracles.
What do you mean? The narrative is simple-keep building and fighting as necessary, set up a Sanhedrin, build a Temple. Which of these necessitates miracles?
The Pauline commandments mostly worked pretty well from the early days of Christianity to around 1820. In England they worked exactly as designed from the restoration to around 1820 thanks to firm and clear state backing. The people who produced the present disaster turned unitarian, starting with William Wilberforce. They were holier than Jesus, and therefore holier than Paul. That William Wilberforce was holier than Jesus shows that promoting Jesus to God worked, stabilizing the religion after Jesus destabilized it. William Wilberforce and his successors had to demote Jesus before he could undo what Paul did.
The Palestinians are not trying to defeat you by military victory. Your right wing religious party proposes more independence for the Palestinians, not less, to which the Palestinians make the devastating reply that they want a one state solution, since the expansion of the settlements has made the two state solution impractical.
If Israel keeps doing what it is doing, what it is doing is pretending to be proceeding to a two state solution, while actually not. The hypocrisy becomes transparent and cannot continue.
>The Pauline commandments mostly worked pretty well from the early days of Christianity to around 1820.
Collapsing the Roman Empire and the whole Reformation thing were just brief glitches.
>In England they worked exactly as designed from the restoration to around 1820 thanks to firm and clear state backing.
Why did there have to be a Restoration if they were working so well?
>The people who produced the present disaster turned unitarian, starting with William Wilberforce. They were holier than Jesus, and therefore holier than Paul.
In the exact same way that Jesus was holier than the Kohanim and the Rabbis, and Paul was holier than Jesus, and Martin Luther was holier than Paul.
>That William Wilberforce was holier than Jesus shows that promoting Jesus to God worked, stabilizing the religion after Jesus destabilized it.
William Wilberforce was a natural product of the Puritans and Quakers, who were natural products of Calvin and Luther, who were natural products of Christianity, which was a Jewish heresy.
>The Palestinians are not trying to defeat you by military victory.
They are not trying to defeat us at all-most of the settlements were built by Arab labor. To the extent that they have a national leadership, it is focused on maintaining its little hustle.
>Your right wing religious party proposes more independence for the Palestinians, not less, to which the Palestinians make the devastating reply that they want a one state solution, since the expansion of the settlements has made the two state solution impractical.
Again-there are no “the Palestinians.” There are various tribes and mafias, and various proxies for the Cathedral. Our right wing religious party is Bait Yehudi, which is pushing what is necessary for the next step of the plan.
>The hypocrisy becomes transparent and cannot continue.
You really need to pick one thing. Either a state religion in which nobody who matters really believes is alright and fine in the long term, or hypocrisy is unsustainable.
Viewed from two millenia, brief.
Paul told us he was a sinner, and anyone making excessive claims of holiness was up to no good.
And that has been the way it worked out. Holier than thou factions of Christianity inevitably abandon the doctrine of atonement, and then quietly turn unitarian.
Christianity and Talmudic Judaism are both heresies of Torah Judaism. Torah Judaism needed an update. You are still industriously updating Talmudic Judaism, while Phil Robertson sticks to quoting Paul. Christians have more stability than Talmudic Jews.
Further, Phil Robertson has more influence than the microscopic band of Orthodox Jews who want the temple mount back. Most Orthodox Jews don’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
You would be fine with a state religion which no one really believes. Trouble is, you have a state religion, progressivism, which people really do believe.
>Viewed from two millenia, brief.
The Reformation has never stopped.
>Paul told us he was a sinner, and anyone making excessive claims of holiness was up to no good.
Yeah, but he said it in that fake-humble way Christians love. Then he told everyone to go be a eunuch if they could.
>Holier than thou factions of Christianity inevitably abandon the doctrine of atonement, and then quietly turn unitarian.
And non-holier than thou factions end up with their Pope kissing refugee feet on Lampedusa and their Patriarch rocking $40K gold watches and working for the FSB. I don’t understand your desire to find a gold filling in this mess.
>Christianity and Talmudic Judaism are both heresies of Torah Judaism.
Since all we know of Torah Judaism as it was actually practiced either comes from Talmudic sources directly or is inferred from them, I’m not sure how you can say that. Where is the source, by the way, for your assertion that the early Christians were surprised at Talmudic Jews?
>Christians have more stability than Talmudic Jews.
We have a system designed to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining the core stack. Christians have a system designed to either slide off into ineffectuality or mutate into something deeply malignant.
>Further, Phil Robertson has more influence than the microscopic band of Orthodox Jews who want the temple mount back.
I think that Robertson has been completely sidelined, that you can’t find anyone who makes decisions in the US who takes him as an authority. Meanwhile, I see Jews who want the Temple Mount back all around me, I see them in the Knesset, and scaring the shit out of the dominant elite here. We are a minority-but a significant and growing one, and we have the silent support of half the population. The Russian Narodovoltsy in the 1880s were doing much worse, yet in 40 years they had gotten what they wanted.
>You would be fine with a state religion which no one really believes.
No, we wouldn’t. What we would be fine with is in the Shema we read twice a day.
>Trouble is, you have a state religion, progressivism, which people really do believe.
Some people, and there are less and less of them.
As far as trannies are concerned, “Things pertaining to a man shall not be worn by a woman. And a man shall not wear a woman’s garment.” Deuteronomy 22:5.
Yes, but that is not in the Noahide laws – the problem being that Jews favor decadence for non Jews.
It is in the extended version, the SOP.
Lint is a concern in the dryer, not the washer. One lie, all lies!
Yuk yuk yuk!
Does this mean that Matt Forney is finally dead? Both he, and we, go to a better world…
for some reason, it’s giving me a 404 error when I try to post longer comments.
>You do not have record of the practices of Babylonian Jews until Christians got the upper hand.
We have the Mishna, and the Babylonian Talmud was written when the Christians of Babylon were a small minority.
>you have ditched most of the rest of the commandments for pretty much the same reasons as the Christians did.
Which ones have we ditched? When I go to poor religious Jewish neighborhoods, I can’t help but notice that there is no crime, so it can’t be the commandment prohibiting theft. I don’t see religious Jews eating frogs and shrimp, so it can’t be that one. I’m not seeing religious Jews desecrating Shabbat…which commandments have we ditched?
>Old Testament law does not directly support patriarchy, but rather takes patriarchy for granted. When Jews found themselves exiles in an empire that was abandoning patriarchy, would have been ideologically helpless.
We have a commandment that says “you will not walk in their ways.” This includes, obviously, imperial ideology. Along with what you think of as “Old Testament Law,” we have the Oral Law, i.e., the Talmud, and custom. You have a very Protestant view of the Bible, where what is written is what there is, everything else is up for grabs. Our view is that what is written only makes sense in the context of tradition. Just like you can’t learn to program or fix cars from reading manuals.
“When I go to poor religious Jewish neighborhoods, I can’t help but notice that there is no crime,”
LOL. I suspect crime rates among poor religious Jews are not lower, but higher than those of their secular counterparts. Of course, since they refuse to appeal to the police for intervention, and shun all judgment by secular courts, these crimes go unreported and uninvestigated, so the illusion of poor Jews who never rape 10 year olds in the Mikveh or abuse their sisters can be maintained.
“which commandments have we ditched?”
I think the commandments Jim refers to are the commandment to cleanse Israel of idol worship (goodbye, Christian tourists), of foreigners (goodbye, 23% of the population), to establish Sanhedrin that would obviously undermine the Knesset’s authority (goodbye, democracy), and to rebuild the Temple for sacrifices, blood-sprinkling, and purification rites with red heifer (goodbye, horrified leftists). Of course, you didn’t “ditch” these commandments; just postpone their implementation… for centuries. The excuse that you don’t have the Messiah is especially ridiculous, considering there’s a potential Messiah in every generation, and Rabbi Kahane / Lubavitcher Rebbe could easily assume that title.
Your suspicions are unfounded. Street crime in Mea Shearim (robbery, theft, assault, rape) is unheard of. I can’t speak about rape in the mikveh or people raping their sisters-never seen it, so it’s in the same category to me as ritual satanic abuse in American kindergardens. In any case it’s not what I’m talking about here.
The commandments you are talking about are a) public, not private, meaning, binding on the Jewish people as a whole, not upon individuals, b) require pre-requisites for their implementation. Meaning, if I show up on the Temple Mount tomorrow with some portland cement and a trowel, I’m not going to get very far. You are correct that these things are our national mission and every day that they are not done is a bad day. You are also correct that in every generation, the possibility to do them exists, and that individuals exist who could lead the Jewish people in doing them. However, you are not correct to say that the Jewish people have abrogated those commandments. We are moving, year by year, closer to the point where we can fulfill them, where the prerequisites exist, where the Jewish people are ready.
Street crime, along with other crimes in generally unheard of because no one wants to report these crimes. The Ultra-Orthodox would rather solve their issues by themselves without involving secular authorities. Which is fine, but that doesn’t mean no issues exist. Sex crimes especially are prevalent because no family would expose these to the public, so abuse can go on for years. Rape in the Mikveh in an anecdote, but a recurring anecdote you can hear from ex-religious Jews nonetheless.
Some of these commandments are public, yes, but also involve many private commandments, such as individual sacrifices that are dependent on there being a (public) Temple where to sacrifice. I don’t claim the Jews abrogated these commandments, just found rather flimsy pretexts not to follow them. For instance, you don’t have to even fully rebuild the Temple: if you have priests and an altar, that is enough to conduct sacrifices, the same way modern Samaritans do on Passover, but in Jerusalem.
If enough Jews wanted to, they could have post-humously made Ben Gurion to be a Messiah, declare that the years from 1939 to 1949 were Gog & Magog (a war of all Gentiles against the Jews, with a Jewish triumph), and all that’s left to do is making a descendant of David (after all these generations, probably most Jews are) a king and removing those damn Mosques. None of this is impossible, you just don’t want to. Which is okay, but then you’re not much better than Christians who arbitrarily choose which commandments of the Torah to follow.
>If enough Jews wanted to, they could have post-humously made Ben Gurion to be a Messiah,
He doesn’t fit the criteria, plus, he’s dead, and we have a problem with that kind of thing.
>declare that the years from 1939 to 1949 were Gog & Magog (a war of all Gentiles against the Jews, with a Jewish triumph)
But they weren’t.
>and all that’s left to do is making a descendant of David (after all these generations, probably most Jews are) a king
It has to be a patrilineal descendant, though of course we can also have a Messiah who is not a descendant of David-eventually, the kingdom will pass from the hands of his descendants.
>and removing those damn Mosques.
Now you’re talking.
Why not?
They were not because WW2 was a war between two sets of non-Jews, one of which absolutely hated Jews and the other just didn’t like them. There was no Jewish triumph-the war was a disaster for the Jewish people, with massive communities being destroyed. It’s taken 50 years to rebuild demographically. The only upside was the creation of the State of Israel.
It’s not hard to have better crime statistics than a lot of places today. Try beating London in 1800.
If religious Jews as a whole decided to send some of their priests to sacrifice upon the rock that is symbolically or literally the rock that Abraham sacrificed a sheep upon, no one would very seriously try to stop them. The Cathedral does not care about the temple. It cares more about settlements. The forces that hold you back from the temple are internal, not external. And as long as you are held back from the temple, still in exile.
working on it.
Two more things-in your other thread, you suggest that Israel’s religious zionists minimize academic education. This is simply untrue. Israel’s newest university, Ariel, is in the Shomron and full of Religious Zionists. The population of Machon Lev Technical College, which produces very serious engineers, programmers and physicists (my neighbor, who engineers lasers, says that the only guys he’s seen coming out of college in this field who don’t require extensive retraining come from ML), is 100% religious Zionist kids. If you go to the Technion, Tel Aviv University or Hebrew University, about 10-20% of the student body is religious Jews.
And also, I could see Rabbi Kahane fulfilling the Messianic requirements (leading the Jewish people to victory over our enemies, forcing them to keep the commandments, bringing back the exiles, rebuilding the Temple,) had we been ready as a nation. But I do not see the Lubavitcher Rebbe as being the man for this mission during his lifetime. Rav Kook could have done it, but again, we weren’t ready, neither the religious nor the secular.
I made a distinction at the beginning between the Ultra-Orthodox and nationalist Zionists. I’m well aware that these two groups are not same: the former have higher fertility rates due to religious conviction, the latter are still very fertile due to nationalism.
Yeah, the Lubavitcher Rebbe is not the best candidate for the Messianic role, though according to Jewish tradition there will be two Messiahs: spiritual, ben Yosef; and military, ben David, and both the Lubavitcher and Kahane could fulfill these roles, respectively.
Kahane was not Ben David, as evidenced by his last name. But anyway, they’ve both left us and we should focus on the next candidates.
Slight correction: Machon Lev has a significant population of Chassidic students as well. Don’t know the numbers, but 100% RZ it isn’t.
Eh, they’re mostly neo-Chassidic, or Chardal, or something along those lines. You know, to get in you have to know math and English pretty well, so that presupposes that you are either D.L. or went to one of the three Charedi high schools in the country which teach secular subjects, or somehow managed to jam six years’ worth of math etc. into a year-long prep course, which very few Charedi kids successfully do.
Obviously, those commandments were ditched with good reason.
But, having furtively gotten into the commandment ditching business, one can then consider how Judaism should be so as to not be subversive.
And yet he was talking about what he experienced you jewish cunt.
(you’re not a dummy, but stop the piling on bullshit please… real easy to pile on to that someone… insert X there)
Your traditions do not go back all that far. You swiped religious backing for patriarchy from the Christians. When Talmudic Jews first appeared, Christians were inclined to doubt that they were Jews.
source?
You have a very Protestant view of the Bible
If “B” was writing in French he would have said something to the effect of “You have a very Roman Catholic view of religion, in that you place too much emphasis on artwork and church buildings and not enough on what’s written in the Bible”
Slippery, but not enough.
A.J.P.
Your traditions only go back to around four hundred AD. Your kind of Judaism has never exercised theocratic power. Versions of Christianity that existed within living memory have exercised theocratic power.
To prevent progressivism doing a South Africa on you, you need a variant of Judaism that can exercise theocratic power, and need to install that variant in place of progressivism.
>Your traditions only go back to around four hundred AD.
Josephus says different.
>Your kind of Judaism has never exercised theocratic power.
Funny thing about theocracy-Josephus made up the word as a neologism while talking about the Jewish system of government.
>Versions of Christianity that existed within living memory have exercised theocratic power.
And what happened then? Did Martians land and zap them with death rays? Did ZOG come along? What?
Does he? That is not how I read him. Reads to me that he had never heard of, nor could he have imagined, Talmudic Jews. He is reporting on Torah Jews, who had conspicuously different behavior and traditions.
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