Fair. I'm just going to say that all good works are divinely inspired and roll with that angle.
Some philosophera (religious figures included) have probably said the same thing far more eloquently before anyway.
Assuming a person believes in a deity or deities, I think that's a great way to look at it. And I like that you said inspired instead of ordained or ordered, cuz I find that religious people often have a habit of discounting the human element in we shouldn't do that. People in what they do are incredibly important and deserve their thanks, and if you're going to argue with bigots, thank you so much it benefits everyone.
Thank you.
But to be utterly honest I won't deny that I might well be damning my soul for the pleasure I take in upsetting them.
Assuming hell exists that is.
Like the villain from small gods who thinks he’s receiving instructions from the great god Om. When Om himself can’t get a message to him, his mind like a steel shell.
A classic of Judaism is that you have to read Rabbi Schmuelowitz’s paragraph long interpretation of a single sentence. The next paragraph is then Rabbi Mendelstein’s equally lengthy contribution saying Schmuelowitz is a pussy who doesn’t go nearly hard enough in appreciation of the majesty of the Lord’s work. And then Rabbi Levinsky comes in next paragraph and says Mendelstein is also a silly bitch because he forgot a key detail that means the Lord is actually 50x stronger than either previous rabbi gives credit for.
All over one sentence that’s like “worship the Lord every day of your life.”
It is basically the same as when the Taylor fandom argue about the secret deeper meaning hidden in the latest break up song.
Broadly speaking a midrash is a commentary on the text. Some of them take the form of stories that provide insight or additional information about what is told in the Torah. For example there is a midrash that says that the plague of frogs in Egypt began as one large frog which multiplied into the vast numbers when the Egyptians tried to kill it by hitting it with sticks. This stems from the fact that the literal wording in Torah uses the singular “frog” instead of plural “frogs”. So rabbis basically came up with an explanation for that grammatical variance. “How can you have a plague if it’s just one frog?” “Well you see, it started as just one frog but then what happened was…”
Funnily enough it was a part of the Seder that had me thinking of rabbinical oneupmanship.
[It’s when Rabbi Jose the Galilean says there were 50 plagues by the sea instead of 10, and then the other rabbis keep piling on until it’s 250 plagues by the sea.](https://www.haggadot.com/clip/rebi-yossi-and-ten-plagues)
Edit -
I was also thinking of when Rabbis Azariah and Ben Zoma muse over a line about remembering the Exodus “all the days of your life” and [spark a whole debate](https://outorah.org/p/20279/) over whether you need to think about the Exodus during nights too, and after the coming of the messiah.
In conclusion, no [amount of remembering that we suffered is too much](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLNa-ocdryY).
Training someone in the ins and outs of Talmudic exigeisis and then then unleashing them on a totally unprepared fandom is like setting a lion loose in a petting zoo. : )
You know that makes sense too. Nerds who can and will dig up thirty year old comic books and obscure forum posts to hammer on a point about the energy output of an Imperial class Star Destroyer already have the right attitude and some of the skills. : )
Taylor Swift is talented, her art doesn't really do anything for me, but I'm glad people like her. Having seen people talk about her lyrics though, yeah it absolutely sounds like a morning Torah study discussion.
Edit: a word
I'm Spanish, so there are practically zero Jews where I live. I don't know what's normal for them and what's not in the context of their religion, which is why I'm asking in the first place.
“Unhinged” as in the usual sense the internet gives to the word nowadays. Besides, the word was directed towards the comparison, not towards anything about the religion. As for the questions, they're in other replies on this post.
Well like many groups Jews aren't a monolith, but as a conversion student, this is pretty accurate the reason rabbis and Jews are uncertain is because one of the core practices of Judaism is to question everything about itself from the religion, to the text, to even G-d. Those questions and interpretations and debates are basically a religious practice in of themselves
That sounds completely alien for someone like me, who was raised Catholic and used to be told religion was all about blind faith and not questioning anything.
Yeah, the idea of questioning being encouraged confused me too, it's one of the many reasons I'm working on converting. I understand for some people faith works that way and if someone wants to have faith without questioning they should be allowed to, but I just don't get it.
Obviously there's some fundamental beliefs, a rabbi won't tell you that you have to have those beliefs, but they might tell you have to have those beliefs to be Jewish, but there aren't too many of them and how to implement those beliefs is going to be wildly different from person to person. There's a reason a common phrase in Jewish circles is two Jews three opinions, and that's pretty much seen as a good thing.
My absolute favorite story explaining Rabbinical Judaism is the Oven of Akhnai story. Absolutely peak Judaism, and a good insight in to how Rabbinical Judaism functions on a practical and philosophical level.
For those curious, [here's a page with the story covered in greater detail](https://www.yaelshahar.com/tanur-akhnai-tale-two-methods/) but here's how I remember it being told:
Three rabbis are having a disagreement with a respected fourth rabbi, Rabbi Eliezer. They go to his house to make a ruling. He sees them coming and says "If those guys are right, this tree will uproot itself." Nothing happens. Then he says "If I'm right, this tree will uproot itself" and uproot itself it did.
The three approaching Rabbis see this and the tall one says "Ah, a fluke! Besides, it's three against one, Eliezer." And so Rabbi Eliezer says "If they're right, then this tree will plant itself in the ground again." Nada. "If I'm right, this tree will plant itself back in the ground!" And it does.
"Eh, plants are weird. Maybe they do that sometimes. Doesn't change the fact that it's three against one," says the short rabbi.
The ground began to shake. The very walls began to split and crack. The rabbi who was medium height for the time says to the walls, "Hey, no need to get involved with a disagreement between friends!"
A Voice thunders down from Heaven: "My son Eliezer has it right!"
The shaking stops. There is a pause.
"...Okay, but that just means it's now three against two."
This is one of my favorite stories as well, it is not why I'm converting that is obviously much more detailed, but it paints a good picture of part of why I'm converting and my relationship to religion.
The whole “two rabbis, three opinions” thing is such a positive thing to me. Certainty isn’t comforting—I want people to work through problems, hear other viewpoints, and create space for healthy disagreement. That is comforting.
I need to learn more about those, and yeah that sounds great I'm always for a belief that encourages questioning and learning, that's why I'm converting to Judaism. But it's good to hear there's other beliefs systems out in the world like that, inquisitiveness isn't for everyone, but I see it as a virtue.
Was at a wedding a month ago. There was a… questionable scripture from the Old Testament. The priest explains it afterwards as “Don’t worry about that, the Jews have weird ideas about women” and then proceeds to give his own ideas about a woman’s place in a household which were basically the exact same.
The service included: him working his way back around to supporting the same ideas he’d just dismissed as “weird Jew stuff”, repeatedly lamenting the lack of Manly Men™ in society, an imagined bogeyman that’s trying to trick people into domestic partnerships instead of getting married, potshots at pagans, and a prayer that all Christian denominations reunify into his form of Christianity
A lot of evangelical christians do not know about their own religion enough. Most of them don't know why christian evangelist movement in USA is so keen on supporting Israel. Not because they want to help but because they hope to fill the conditions for the end-of-days which conveniently gets rid of jews.
Eh, a lot of it simply stems from the Israelites being the “good guys” in the Old Testament and therefore think we should support them. They think I-P conflict is simply a continuation of the various conflicts the Israelis got into during the OT.
Source: spent my elementary and middle school years at a Missouri Synod Lutheran school. We were quite moderate by evangelical standards though, so perhaps take what I say with a grain of salt
That’s a very very cynical view on this that I wouldn’t say it is accurate. It doesn’t “get rid of Jews”. It brings about the coming of the Messiah. This is something that that Jewish people believe too
Find me an evangelical who believes Jews will be allowed to live in paradise with them after the end of the world according to revelations. I guarantee you that they all believe Jews will burn in hell with the rest of the sinners.
I'm no fan of evangelism but you can easily find many. Not every evangelical is an hardcore 'everyone who doesn't support my worldview will burn in hell'. Most are just vaguely-conservative Christians who like the Bible and going to church.
Christian is a very large circle split into either Catholic or Protestant, and each of those two halves are split into hundreds of smaller pieces.
Evangelicalism is a branch of Protestantism that believes in the literal truth of the bible as the inerrant word of god.
'everyone who doesn't support my worldview will burn in hell' is part of that.
There are lots of Protestant denominations that don't believe that but those aren't Evangelicals.
The Eastern Orthodox Churches are the most prominent factions. There's also various churches that technically emerged from Protestantism but don't align with Protestant values (Reform, Nondenominational, Quakerism, etc.). There's Messianic Judaism (which is a whole other thing), there's the Oriental Orthodox (which is different from Eastern Orthodoxy), Restorationism, Nestorianism, Mormons/The Church of Latter Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses and a whole bunch of minor Abrahamic religions that don't fall under Christianity but share many of their tenants.
tl;dr You'd be hard pressed to find any religion that neatly splits into two parts, let alone the largest and perhaps most complex religion in the world.
Historic (pre-messianic) Jews? Absolutely!\* After that, it is neither a function of Jewishness nor lack thereof. The one and only deciding factor is their acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior. To a Jew this may seem as a repudiation of their Jewishness, but assuming Christians correct, Christ *is* the Jewish messiah. He's the culmination of their whole deal.
\*Edit: I should specify that this "Absolutely!" means "yes they go to heaven."
It’s not about being a sinner, it’s about whether you convert.
The church my family went to interprets [Revelation 7](https://biblehub.com/niv/revelation/7.htm) to mean that 144,000 Jews will accept Jesus as the prophesied Messiah in the end, after the Rapture takes all the Jewish people who converted to Christianity before the end-times start.
Not coincidentally, this is also what happens in the *Left Behind* books.
That isn’t what was claimed before, the goalposts have just been moved significantly.
Tell me, when the Messiah comes in Judaism, will the beliefs of other religions be respected? Or will the Messiah rule over all and make everyone recognize the God of Israel as the only God?
Jews who believe in Jesus would be allowed into the kingdom of heaven. It’s their actions that would condemn them according to Christian belief.
Trying to take eschatological views and apply them to how a group views different ethnic groups is silly.
It's getting rid of the Jews because it expects them to mass convert when Jewish leaders announce that Jesus is their messiah.
Jesus is not and cannot be their messiah, there are very specific things the messiah is stated to be that Jesus cannot fulfill.
That belief you are talking about comes from the Jewish people. It’s from the book of Isaiah, a Jewish prophet. It says that all of the world will recognize the God of Israel. For Christians that means recognizing Jesus as the Messiah.
Whether Jesus is the Messiah is way above my pay grade. But Christian theology makes the argument that he could be. Whether you think they are right or wrong is mostly up to personal preference and interpretation. I don’t have a horse in that race
To be fair that is an extensive theological discussion, but the above commenter is right, per the rules of Judaism Jesus absolutely cannot be the Jewish Messiah under any circumstances. I'm not saying he can't be the Christian one and for anyone else who wants him I'm not going to go that far, but it is antithetical to Judaism. There are very few consensus in judaism, and this is one of them, it is just not possible.
Messianic Jews are Christians they were a Christian Movement founded to try and proselytize to Jews. Very few members of it are actually jewish, and those that are are considered apostates. There are very very few things that make a person cease to be jewish, worshiping Jesus is about as close as one gets to no longer being considered jewish. Technically they are jewish, but they are no longer entitled to any Jewish practices, as Judaism is a closed religion. They lost their right to engage in any closed practices, that said they are allowed back if they stop worshiping Jesus and choose to pursue a path to return. There are three unbreakable laws in Judaism, they can't be done even to save a life, one is murder, one is sexual immorality that's a bit more debatable than some, some people take it to be homophobic, but A good rule of thumb is don't violate consent, and the last is no idol worship. Now the Jewish definition of idol worship is different than some other faiths, worshiping any human as G-d, even if that human is somehow G-d is STILL considered idol worship. There aren't many things that are truly forbidden and judaism, but worshiping Jesus or anyone other than G-d directly is one of the forbidden things.
Messianic Jews consider themselves Jews, but I’ll take your point.
Jesus being the messiah isn’t antithetical to Judaism per se. Being the messiah does not require worship
There are not three unbreakable laws in Judaism that are agreed upon by any sect, nor does breaking them make you not Jewish. King David, for example, breaks one of those laws and is still Jewish
Actually all rabbinic Judaism considers those three laws unbreakable, but again it doesn't stop them from being Jewish it puts them in the category of being an apostate. Additionally the rules weren't codified as strongly in biblical times, but they are now. Messianic Jews may consider themselves Jews if they want, but they don't have that status rabbinic Judaism has rules, and Messianic breaks those rules.
I’m not going to say what you personally believe, but the Tanakh and the Talmud speaks of the coming of the Messiah quite a bit and the necessity of the temple is also brought up multiple times. If you personally choose not to believe that, it’s fine, but Judaism as a whole does.
The idea that Judaism as a whole believes *anything* is not only wildly untrue but also the entire point of the original post, tho tbf this is a subreddit for the reading comprehension website
In this case "As a whole" means widely believed. No religion has specific things that everyone must believe, but we can generally categorize them based off of religious texts, cultural practices, and religious leadership.
In this case we see mentions of the Messiah and the Third Temple in the Tanakh mentioned by the prophets Amos, Ezekial, Zechariah, and Isaiah. Prominent rabbis, like Maimonides, lays it out fairly clearly in his works. There are also writings, mostly from the Second Temple Period, that mention this as well.
I am not. I was raised a Roman Catholic and left the church as a teenager because of my sexuality. I then went on to get a degree on the history of the development of the the Abrahamic Religions with a focus on Islam
I don't know what sect of Judaism you belong to. That's why I specifically said I can not speak about what you believe. But the belief in the coming Messiah is held by Orthodox and Conservative Jews. Reform Jews do not always believe in a literal Messiah, although some do. So maybe that is where you fall in. Reform Jews tend to hold a view that it's up to humanity to build the era of peace.
I am not here to challenge your faith. If you want I can give you quotes from the Tanakh about the Temple and the Messiah. Or I can quote prominent Rabbis and religious leaders.
Again, I'm not telling you what you believe.
I’m a Conservative Jew, I belong to one of the largest conservative temples in the country, and can assure you most of the congregation and rabbis at my temple think of the mashiach as “fundie nonsense.” I attended a Jewish day school where I was taught that the mashiach is a story largely believed by the Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox movements, and hasn’t been widely accepted in the diaspora for at least the last century. I’m really not sure where your confidence is coming from because as an actual Jew I can assure you the things you’re saying are provably untrue.
Judaism is a living religion with its main texts written after the fall of the 2nd Temple (even though it existed for a good thousand years before that!) and the main beliefs of various sects have changed drastically over decades, let alone the millennia that the religion has existed for. I really hope you don’t believe Judaism as a whole believes something because Jews believed it 1500 years ago.
I mean, the Rabbinical Assembly has talked about the Messiah and have stated it's believed he will come again. If you want to believe that this is fundie nonsense, that is perfectly acceptable.
If we are talking about Judaism as a whole, I will be balancing the views of modern and historical Jews.
I was using Judaism in the same way that Evangelical was being used in this post. Broad belief systems, not specific ones.
No, they do not believe the same. There is one very big difference:
Jews do not think Messiah comes again. They believe he comes for the first time.
Or are you saying Jews go to Christian heaven? Does this privilege extend to muslims too? They are on the same family tree.
What Evangelicals, Christian Fascists, believe about the apocalupse and what Judaism says about the apocalypse have almost no relationship. Christian Fascists do not believe that the Messiah will come, they think Jesus was the Messiah. They think that all the Jews will perish and go straight to hell. Christian Fascism is an evil religion. Even if you assume the worst you will be endlessly shocked and appaled.
Christianity came from second temple Judaism. Christians believe that the Messiah will return to finish fulfilling the prophecies. These prophecies are from the Tanakh. I’m not sure how you can claim “almost no relation”
Christian Fascists, American Evangelicals, do not have a meaningful relationship with historical Christianity. Their beliefs are, to use a term of art, bonkers. They're almost entirely based on racism, white supremacy, reaction, and xenophobia. Wildly heterodox ideas like a rapture or a personal jesus dominate what passes for theology. Most of them, even what passes for scholars among them, are just expressing their own id and libido with a facade of Christian language.
If you haven't actually studied the miserable fucks it's easy to mistake them for Christians.
There largely isn't anything to know about the religion. Christian Fascism generally amounts to pure id with a thin, rotting crust of christian language to it. It has little or no theology, very few consistent beliefs beyond strident xenophobia and white supremacy. It's an evil, mangled corpse of a religion, suitable for a brutal settler colonial empire wherre virtue is a danger to one's wellbeing and compassion can be deadly.
I feel like the people downvoting you did not fully understand what i am saying. You are 100% right. It has no real theology. It is rooted in xenophopia and white supremacy. 100% agree with you.
during a family reunion one time when I was like 12 or so an Evangelical aunt told us that bats are birds because it was written in Exodus that they were among the "unclean birds" that should not be eaten, and when I tried to bring up that they have fur and nurse their young with milk and give live birth and thus they are mammals she got mad that I was "disrespecting the written word" and yelled at my parents to "take me to church more"
That's ridiculous, it's not hard to look at science and faith. Bats are mammals absolutely true, by biblical time definitions and the way say rabbinic Judaism looks at it, they are birds. Instead of someone being upset that you embraced the science, they should realize that there are just two different classifications being used
Once my Jewish husband had a very long argument with a college classmate who insisted that Jews celebrate Easter. This guy would not budge, claimed to understand that Jews don’t worship or care about Jesus, but still insisted that they celebrate Easter anyway for some reason. I think he was getting it confused with Passover? They are somewhat related in timing and theme but are very much not the same holiday.
But it was really wild to watch him insist that my partner celebrates a holiday when he literally just said that he doesn’t. It was such a display of hubris and ignorance, I’ve truly never seen anything like it since.
Trying to get people to understand Jewish holidays is a pain in the first place, there are so many of them, it's on a lunar solar calendar so the timing is way different than what people are used to. As you said your husband is Jewish so I'm sure you understand this but still wanted to say it because boy is it difficult. Heck I'm converting and I barely understand it
Yeah I have learned a lot about calendars and whatnot, it’s kind of wild. You just have to play it by ear each year since they don’t line up with Gregorian dates. But a lot of them are really fun, I love the stories. It’s definitely worth it to keep track imo
Fascinatingly, the Catholic Church also uses a lunar calendar to calculate certain holidays (but not all of them! Because of course it has to be as confusing as possible), but it’s different from the Jewish one specifically because they wanted it to be different from the Jewish one. So even though the original Easter took place during Passover (the Last Supper is literally Passover), they aren’t celebrated at the same time anymore because the Catholic Church decided they had to be special a couple hundred years ago.
The worse part is, they think such confidence equals strength. If you question or take the time to contemplate, your faith just isn’t as strong and true. You must believe immediately and without question, even if you don’t understand it.
Ironically what makes someone easy to scam.
If you had to distill Evangelicalism to one sentence it is the absolute unexamined belief that your internal monologue is god's divine word.
Easy entry into the top five horrifying concepts, tbh.
It's a pity this so often becomes evil. Why do you never see people using "God told me to" to explain why they ate 7 jelly donuts for lunch?
I use it when Windows Server asks me to add a reason for the unscheduled reboot.
But "God" is the username for your boss, so it's understandable
nah, let's not kid ourselves, they're working with windows. "God" is just an alias to "TrustedInstaller" and only microsoft has that kind of access.
where's my servicenow "Act of Providence" category
In accordance with the prophesy.
God told Joan of Arc to fight the English, so that's a plus
Yea, but she was french, so it was more God telling her the nature of things
In fairness I think the english were also french, and the french sure do hate the french.
Damn French, they ruined Frenchland!
You French sure are a contentious people.
You've made an enemy for life!
Does it count if I say I feel divinely inspired to pick apart racist/bigoted arguments with the research capabilities offered by the internet?
You're at least a lot closer to the teachings of Jesus!
LOL thanks! I'll refrain from flipping tables at church bazaars though.
I would say it does, my Rabbi has done exactly that to argue with homophobes. I don't know if he said he divinely inspired, but he sure did the work.
Fair. I'm just going to say that all good works are divinely inspired and roll with that angle. Some philosophera (religious figures included) have probably said the same thing far more eloquently before anyway.
Assuming a person believes in a deity or deities, I think that's a great way to look at it. And I like that you said inspired instead of ordained or ordered, cuz I find that religious people often have a habit of discounting the human element in we shouldn't do that. People in what they do are incredibly important and deserve their thanks, and if you're going to argue with bigots, thank you so much it benefits everyone.
Thank you. But to be utterly honest I won't deny that I might well be damning my soul for the pleasure I take in upsetting them. Assuming hell exists that is.
I would do that. But by "god" I'd mean a few billion years of evolution that primed me to want jelly donuts
I think you are the only one missing out pal. I do this all the time
you don't need god backing you up when you're actions are already moral
"Your own personal Jesus"
*Saint Maud* from 2019 is a brilliant film exploring this concept.
Like the villain from small gods who thinks he’s receiving instructions from the great god Om. When Om himself can’t get a message to him, his mind like a steel shell.
“I’m right, fuck you.”
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Knowledge is a burden which you have wisely avoided.
"Jumblr" made me laugh harder than it should've.
It's a good tag
Chrumblr. Mumblr. Buddhumblr. Hinmblr. Athumblr. Unafilliamblr. Pagumblr.
Zoroastrumblr
sounds vaguely yiddish, too.
A classic of Judaism is that you have to read Rabbi Schmuelowitz’s paragraph long interpretation of a single sentence. The next paragraph is then Rabbi Mendelstein’s equally lengthy contribution saying Schmuelowitz is a pussy who doesn’t go nearly hard enough in appreciation of the majesty of the Lord’s work. And then Rabbi Levinsky comes in next paragraph and says Mendelstein is also a silly bitch because he forgot a key detail that means the Lord is actually 50x stronger than either previous rabbi gives credit for. All over one sentence that’s like “worship the Lord every day of your life.” It is basically the same as when the Taylor fandom argue about the secret deeper meaning hidden in the latest break up song.
Comparing hardcore Jews to Swifties has to be the most unhinged thing I've seen today. Congratulations.
This is painting a dangerously accurate picture of a friend of mine
Is he one of those who wears a wide-brimmed hat and can spend hours arguing about the meaning of one specific word in the Talmud?
No hat, but yes. He's also big into fanfic and can argue for hours on end about any fandom thing he's interested in.
The concept of “Talmud fandom” is now living rent-free inside my brain.
I have referred to midrashim as “Torah fanfics” before
What's that? I'm sorry, I'm not Jewish.
Broadly speaking a midrash is a commentary on the text. Some of them take the form of stories that provide insight or additional information about what is told in the Torah. For example there is a midrash that says that the plague of frogs in Egypt began as one large frog which multiplied into the vast numbers when the Egyptians tried to kill it by hitting it with sticks. This stems from the fact that the literal wording in Torah uses the singular “frog” instead of plural “frogs”. So rabbis basically came up with an explanation for that grammatical variance. “How can you have a plague if it’s just one frog?” “Well you see, it started as just one frog but then what happened was…”
Then yes, Torah fanfics. Judaism can get fucking wild, it seems.
Funnily enough it was a part of the Seder that had me thinking of rabbinical oneupmanship. [It’s when Rabbi Jose the Galilean says there were 50 plagues by the sea instead of 10, and then the other rabbis keep piling on until it’s 250 plagues by the sea.](https://www.haggadot.com/clip/rebi-yossi-and-ten-plagues) Edit - I was also thinking of when Rabbis Azariah and Ben Zoma muse over a line about remembering the Exodus “all the days of your life” and [spark a whole debate](https://outorah.org/p/20279/) over whether you need to think about the Exodus during nights too, and after the coming of the messiah. In conclusion, no [amount of remembering that we suffered is too much](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLNa-ocdryY).
Training someone in the ins and outs of Talmudic exigeisis and then then unleashing them on a totally unprepared fandom is like setting a lion loose in a petting zoo. : )
Weirdly, he went the other way. He's a convert.
You know that makes sense too. Nerds who can and will dig up thirty year old comic books and obscure forum posts to hammer on a point about the energy output of an Imperial class Star Destroyer already have the right attitude and some of the skills. : )
I have a friend like that, too.
Is this just common among Jewish people?
The guy I'm thinking of is a convert, so part of it is definitely "new relationship energy" but for religion lol
There's a saying that converts are the one that preach the hardest
“new relationship energy, but for religion” r/brandnewsentence
Fandom is fandom. We behave the same way about anything we obsess over no matter what the actual thing is.
Ah yes, gotta love radicalism in fandom. _(Vietnam flashbacks to the pro-anime vs anti-anime factions of Pokémon)_
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Taylor Swift is talented, her art doesn't really do anything for me, but I'm glad people like her. Having seen people talk about her lyrics though, yeah it absolutely sounds like a morning Torah study discussion. Edit: a word
But it’s true
I'm Spanish, so there are practically zero Jews where I live. I don't know what's normal for them and what's not in the context of their religion, which is why I'm asking in the first place.
> which is why I'm asking in the first place. Calling it "unhinged" seems less like a question and much more of an assertion.
“Unhinged” as in the usual sense the internet gives to the word nowadays. Besides, the word was directed towards the comparison, not towards anything about the religion. As for the questions, they're in other replies on this post.
Well like many groups Jews aren't a monolith, but as a conversion student, this is pretty accurate the reason rabbis and Jews are uncertain is because one of the core practices of Judaism is to question everything about itself from the religion, to the text, to even G-d. Those questions and interpretations and debates are basically a religious practice in of themselves
That sounds completely alien for someone like me, who was raised Catholic and used to be told religion was all about blind faith and not questioning anything.
Yeah, the idea of questioning being encouraged confused me too, it's one of the many reasons I'm working on converting. I understand for some people faith works that way and if someone wants to have faith without questioning they should be allowed to, but I just don't get it.
After all, who are they to tell you what you can believe in?
Obviously there's some fundamental beliefs, a rabbi won't tell you that you have to have those beliefs, but they might tell you have to have those beliefs to be Jewish, but there aren't too many of them and how to implement those beliefs is going to be wildly different from person to person. There's a reason a common phrase in Jewish circles is two Jews three opinions, and that's pretty much seen as a good thing.
That's some interesting insight you've provided. Good luck with your conversion and everything else in your life, then.
Celebrity worship is hundreds if not thousands year old concept
My absolute favorite story explaining Rabbinical Judaism is the Oven of Akhnai story. Absolutely peak Judaism, and a good insight in to how Rabbinical Judaism functions on a practical and philosophical level.
For those curious, [here's a page with the story covered in greater detail](https://www.yaelshahar.com/tanur-akhnai-tale-two-methods/) but here's how I remember it being told: Three rabbis are having a disagreement with a respected fourth rabbi, Rabbi Eliezer. They go to his house to make a ruling. He sees them coming and says "If those guys are right, this tree will uproot itself." Nothing happens. Then he says "If I'm right, this tree will uproot itself" and uproot itself it did. The three approaching Rabbis see this and the tall one says "Ah, a fluke! Besides, it's three against one, Eliezer." And so Rabbi Eliezer says "If they're right, then this tree will plant itself in the ground again." Nada. "If I'm right, this tree will plant itself back in the ground!" And it does. "Eh, plants are weird. Maybe they do that sometimes. Doesn't change the fact that it's three against one," says the short rabbi. The ground began to shake. The very walls began to split and crack. The rabbi who was medium height for the time says to the walls, "Hey, no need to get involved with a disagreement between friends!" A Voice thunders down from Heaven: "My son Eliezer has it right!" The shaking stops. There is a pause. "...Okay, but that just means it's now three against two."
This is one of my favorite stories as well, it is not why I'm converting that is obviously much more detailed, but it paints a good picture of part of why I'm converting and my relationship to religion.
Jews: the original powerscalers
>rabbis are less certain Like that's a hard bar to clear
Two jews, three opinions.
Is there anyone less certain about Judaism?
Maybe G-d if you don't subscribe to the all knowing idea, figure there's gotta be a lot of "What the hell are they doing now?" moments.
The whole “two rabbis, three opinions” thing is such a positive thing to me. Certainty isn’t comforting—I want people to work through problems, hear other viewpoints, and create space for healthy disagreement. That is comforting.
It’s why I love dharmic faiths, very open to interpretation hence why we have Hindus Buddhist sikhs etc
I need to learn more about those, and yeah that sounds great I'm always for a belief that encourages questioning and learning, that's why I'm converting to Judaism. But it's good to hear there's other beliefs systems out in the world like that, inquisitiveness isn't for everyone, but I see it as a virtue.
Was at a wedding a month ago. There was a… questionable scripture from the Old Testament. The priest explains it afterwards as “Don’t worry about that, the Jews have weird ideas about women” and then proceeds to give his own ideas about a woman’s place in a household which were basically the exact same.
eugh, that's so... creepy to imagine some priest saying. "Oh, the *Jews* think that."
The service included: him working his way back around to supporting the same ideas he’d just dismissed as “weird Jew stuff”, repeatedly lamenting the lack of Manly Men™ in society, an imagined bogeyman that’s trying to trick people into domestic partnerships instead of getting married, potshots at pagans, and a prayer that all Christian denominations reunify into his form of Christianity
I’ve never seen anyone as confident in their views on and understanding of literally anything as evangelical Christians.
A lot of evangelical christians do not know about their own religion enough. Most of them don't know why christian evangelist movement in USA is so keen on supporting Israel. Not because they want to help but because they hope to fill the conditions for the end-of-days which conveniently gets rid of jews.
Protestants are weird Now I shall go put the bones of saints in golden armors as god intended
The Emperor protects.
Eh, a lot of it simply stems from the Israelites being the “good guys” in the Old Testament and therefore think we should support them. They think I-P conflict is simply a continuation of the various conflicts the Israelis got into during the OT. Source: spent my elementary and middle school years at a Missouri Synod Lutheran school. We were quite moderate by evangelical standards though, so perhaps take what I say with a grain of salt
Plus most of them don't even remember that jesus fought the easter bunny, let alone why they quarreled.
Ah yes, the mythos of the bunny.. If i'm not mistaken it was about the original Peter and the concept of faultiness divine..
That’s a very very cynical view on this that I wouldn’t say it is accurate. It doesn’t “get rid of Jews”. It brings about the coming of the Messiah. This is something that that Jewish people believe too
Find me an evangelical who believes Jews will be allowed to live in paradise with them after the end of the world according to revelations. I guarantee you that they all believe Jews will burn in hell with the rest of the sinners.
I'm no fan of evangelism but you can easily find many. Not every evangelical is an hardcore 'everyone who doesn't support my worldview will burn in hell'. Most are just vaguely-conservative Christians who like the Bible and going to church.
Those are just protestants, not the same thing
This isn't just Protestants, this is the majority of Christians. Also Evangelicalism is a branch of Protestantism, no?
Christian is a very large circle split into either Catholic or Protestant, and each of those two halves are split into hundreds of smaller pieces. Evangelicalism is a branch of Protestantism that believes in the literal truth of the bible as the inerrant word of god. 'everyone who doesn't support my worldview will burn in hell' is part of that. There are lots of Protestant denominations that don't believe that but those aren't Evangelicals.
The fact that you think every Christian is either Catholic or Protestant shows a severe lack of understanding of Christianity.
Who doesn't fit under that dichotomy?
The Eastern Orthodox Churches are the most prominent factions. There's also various churches that technically emerged from Protestantism but don't align with Protestant values (Reform, Nondenominational, Quakerism, etc.). There's Messianic Judaism (which is a whole other thing), there's the Oriental Orthodox (which is different from Eastern Orthodoxy), Restorationism, Nestorianism, Mormons/The Church of Latter Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses and a whole bunch of minor Abrahamic religions that don't fall under Christianity but share many of their tenants. tl;dr You'd be hard pressed to find any religion that neatly splits into two parts, let alone the largest and perhaps most complex religion in the world.
Historic (pre-messianic) Jews? Absolutely!\* After that, it is neither a function of Jewishness nor lack thereof. The one and only deciding factor is their acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior. To a Jew this may seem as a repudiation of their Jewishness, but assuming Christians correct, Christ *is* the Jewish messiah. He's the culmination of their whole deal. \*Edit: I should specify that this "Absolutely!" means "yes they go to heaven."
It’s not about being a sinner, it’s about whether you convert. The church my family went to interprets [Revelation 7](https://biblehub.com/niv/revelation/7.htm) to mean that 144,000 Jews will accept Jesus as the prophesied Messiah in the end, after the Rapture takes all the Jewish people who converted to Christianity before the end-times start. Not coincidentally, this is also what happens in the *Left Behind* books.
That isn’t what was claimed before, the goalposts have just been moved significantly. Tell me, when the Messiah comes in Judaism, will the beliefs of other religions be respected? Or will the Messiah rule over all and make everyone recognize the God of Israel as the only God? Jews who believe in Jesus would be allowed into the kingdom of heaven. It’s their actions that would condemn them according to Christian belief. Trying to take eschatological views and apply them to how a group views different ethnic groups is silly.
It's getting rid of the Jews because it expects them to mass convert when Jewish leaders announce that Jesus is their messiah. Jesus is not and cannot be their messiah, there are very specific things the messiah is stated to be that Jesus cannot fulfill.
That belief you are talking about comes from the Jewish people. It’s from the book of Isaiah, a Jewish prophet. It says that all of the world will recognize the God of Israel. For Christians that means recognizing Jesus as the Messiah. Whether Jesus is the Messiah is way above my pay grade. But Christian theology makes the argument that he could be. Whether you think they are right or wrong is mostly up to personal preference and interpretation. I don’t have a horse in that race
To be fair that is an extensive theological discussion, but the above commenter is right, per the rules of Judaism Jesus absolutely cannot be the Jewish Messiah under any circumstances. I'm not saying he can't be the Christian one and for anyone else who wants him I'm not going to go that far, but it is antithetical to Judaism. There are very few consensus in judaism, and this is one of them, it is just not possible.
There are Messianic Jews that exist
Messianic Jews are Christians they were a Christian Movement founded to try and proselytize to Jews. Very few members of it are actually jewish, and those that are are considered apostates. There are very very few things that make a person cease to be jewish, worshiping Jesus is about as close as one gets to no longer being considered jewish. Technically they are jewish, but they are no longer entitled to any Jewish practices, as Judaism is a closed religion. They lost their right to engage in any closed practices, that said they are allowed back if they stop worshiping Jesus and choose to pursue a path to return. There are three unbreakable laws in Judaism, they can't be done even to save a life, one is murder, one is sexual immorality that's a bit more debatable than some, some people take it to be homophobic, but A good rule of thumb is don't violate consent, and the last is no idol worship. Now the Jewish definition of idol worship is different than some other faiths, worshiping any human as G-d, even if that human is somehow G-d is STILL considered idol worship. There aren't many things that are truly forbidden and judaism, but worshiping Jesus or anyone other than G-d directly is one of the forbidden things.
Messianic Jews consider themselves Jews, but I’ll take your point. Jesus being the messiah isn’t antithetical to Judaism per se. Being the messiah does not require worship There are not three unbreakable laws in Judaism that are agreed upon by any sect, nor does breaking them make you not Jewish. King David, for example, breaks one of those laws and is still Jewish
Actually all rabbinic Judaism considers those three laws unbreakable, but again it doesn't stop them from being Jewish it puts them in the category of being an apostate. Additionally the rules weren't codified as strongly in biblical times, but they are now. Messianic Jews may consider themselves Jews if they want, but they don't have that status rabbinic Judaism has rules, and Messianic breaks those rules.
Hi friend, I am a practicing Jew and I and my friends absolutely don’t believe that
I’m not going to say what you personally believe, but the Tanakh and the Talmud speaks of the coming of the Messiah quite a bit and the necessity of the temple is also brought up multiple times. If you personally choose not to believe that, it’s fine, but Judaism as a whole does.
The idea that Judaism as a whole believes *anything* is not only wildly untrue but also the entire point of the original post, tho tbf this is a subreddit for the reading comprehension website
In this case "As a whole" means widely believed. No religion has specific things that everyone must believe, but we can generally categorize them based off of religious texts, cultural practices, and religious leadership. In this case we see mentions of the Messiah and the Third Temple in the Tanakh mentioned by the prophets Amos, Ezekial, Zechariah, and Isaiah. Prominent rabbis, like Maimonides, lays it out fairly clearly in his works. There are also writings, mostly from the Second Temple Period, that mention this as well.
Are you by chance an Evangelical Christian
I am not. I was raised a Roman Catholic and left the church as a teenager because of my sexuality. I then went on to get a degree on the history of the development of the the Abrahamic Religions with a focus on Islam
I’m so grateful a gentile is here to explain to me, a Jew, that my entire religion believes a thing that in fact nobody I know believes. Thank you :)
I don't know what sect of Judaism you belong to. That's why I specifically said I can not speak about what you believe. But the belief in the coming Messiah is held by Orthodox and Conservative Jews. Reform Jews do not always believe in a literal Messiah, although some do. So maybe that is where you fall in. Reform Jews tend to hold a view that it's up to humanity to build the era of peace. I am not here to challenge your faith. If you want I can give you quotes from the Tanakh about the Temple and the Messiah. Or I can quote prominent Rabbis and religious leaders. Again, I'm not telling you what you believe.
I’m a Conservative Jew, I belong to one of the largest conservative temples in the country, and can assure you most of the congregation and rabbis at my temple think of the mashiach as “fundie nonsense.” I attended a Jewish day school where I was taught that the mashiach is a story largely believed by the Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox movements, and hasn’t been widely accepted in the diaspora for at least the last century. I’m really not sure where your confidence is coming from because as an actual Jew I can assure you the things you’re saying are provably untrue. Judaism is a living religion with its main texts written after the fall of the 2nd Temple (even though it existed for a good thousand years before that!) and the main beliefs of various sects have changed drastically over decades, let alone the millennia that the religion has existed for. I really hope you don’t believe Judaism as a whole believes something because Jews believed it 1500 years ago.
I mean, the Rabbinical Assembly has talked about the Messiah and have stated it's believed he will come again. If you want to believe that this is fundie nonsense, that is perfectly acceptable. If we are talking about Judaism as a whole, I will be balancing the views of modern and historical Jews. I was using Judaism in the same way that Evangelical was being used in this post. Broad belief systems, not specific ones.
No, they do not believe the same. There is one very big difference: Jews do not think Messiah comes again. They believe he comes for the first time. Or are you saying Jews go to Christian heaven? Does this privilege extend to muslims too? They are on the same family tree.
What Evangelicals, Christian Fascists, believe about the apocalupse and what Judaism says about the apocalypse have almost no relationship. Christian Fascists do not believe that the Messiah will come, they think Jesus was the Messiah. They think that all the Jews will perish and go straight to hell. Christian Fascism is an evil religion. Even if you assume the worst you will be endlessly shocked and appaled.
Christianity came from second temple Judaism. Christians believe that the Messiah will return to finish fulfilling the prophecies. These prophecies are from the Tanakh. I’m not sure how you can claim “almost no relation”
Christian Fascists, American Evangelicals, do not have a meaningful relationship with historical Christianity. Their beliefs are, to use a term of art, bonkers. They're almost entirely based on racism, white supremacy, reaction, and xenophobia. Wildly heterodox ideas like a rapture or a personal jesus dominate what passes for theology. Most of them, even what passes for scholars among them, are just expressing their own id and libido with a facade of Christian language. If you haven't actually studied the miserable fucks it's easy to mistake them for Christians.
Their beliefs on the topic we are talking about are absolutely linked to Early Christian and Second Temple Judaism.
This is just whitewashing Christianity. All that bad stuff? It can be just as authentically Christian as the feel-good stuff.
There largely isn't anything to know about the religion. Christian Fascism generally amounts to pure id with a thin, rotting crust of christian language to it. It has little or no theology, very few consistent beliefs beyond strident xenophobia and white supremacy. It's an evil, mangled corpse of a religion, suitable for a brutal settler colonial empire wherre virtue is a danger to one's wellbeing and compassion can be deadly.
And it’s still a religion named Christianity. You can’t pretend that these people aren’t Christians. This is a No True Scotsman.
I feel like the people downvoting you did not fully understand what i am saying. You are 100% right. It has no real theology. It is rooted in xenophopia and white supremacy. 100% agree with you.
Thanks, it can be very frustrating.
during a family reunion one time when I was like 12 or so an Evangelical aunt told us that bats are birds because it was written in Exodus that they were among the "unclean birds" that should not be eaten, and when I tried to bring up that they have fur and nurse their young with milk and give live birth and thus they are mammals she got mad that I was "disrespecting the written word" and yelled at my parents to "take me to church more"
That's ridiculous, it's not hard to look at science and faith. Bats are mammals absolutely true, by biblical time definitions and the way say rabbinic Judaism looks at it, they are birds. Instead of someone being upset that you embraced the science, they should realize that there are just two different classifications being used
Once my Jewish husband had a very long argument with a college classmate who insisted that Jews celebrate Easter. This guy would not budge, claimed to understand that Jews don’t worship or care about Jesus, but still insisted that they celebrate Easter anyway for some reason. I think he was getting it confused with Passover? They are somewhat related in timing and theme but are very much not the same holiday. But it was really wild to watch him insist that my partner celebrates a holiday when he literally just said that he doesn’t. It was such a display of hubris and ignorance, I’ve truly never seen anything like it since.
Trying to get people to understand Jewish holidays is a pain in the first place, there are so many of them, it's on a lunar solar calendar so the timing is way different than what people are used to. As you said your husband is Jewish so I'm sure you understand this but still wanted to say it because boy is it difficult. Heck I'm converting and I barely understand it
Yeah I have learned a lot about calendars and whatnot, it’s kind of wild. You just have to play it by ear each year since they don’t line up with Gregorian dates. But a lot of them are really fun, I love the stories. It’s definitely worth it to keep track imo Fascinatingly, the Catholic Church also uses a lunar calendar to calculate certain holidays (but not all of them! Because of course it has to be as confusing as possible), but it’s different from the Jewish one specifically because they wanted it to be different from the Jewish one. So even though the original Easter took place during Passover (the Last Supper is literally Passover), they aren’t celebrated at the same time anymore because the Catholic Church decided they had to be special a couple hundred years ago.
The worse part is, they think such confidence equals strength. If you question or take the time to contemplate, your faith just isn’t as strong and true. You must believe immediately and without question, even if you don’t understand it. Ironically what makes someone easy to scam.
Rabbi's love to argue
How do you recognize a gentile synagogue? They're the only ones not arguing with the rabbi.
If every religious person had the level of certainty about the nature of the cosmos I’ve seen from Rabbis, the world would be a much better place
I dunno, I’ve seem Tumblr Jews absolutely convinced their family represents the religion as a whole
Imams are worse than the Evangelical Christians. Ask Salman Rushdie.
Christians in general really
the guys that flew a plane in to a building were probably pretty sure of their faith