HEY JEWS

i like the idea of "what is the story with hell" being something a kid ad-libs at a seder to freak out gramma

it was a funny conversation. my daughter has a penchant for doing this, asking me to explain some big conceptual thing towards the end of dinner. I guess she's come across enough references to the devil (classmates, books, comics, cartoons etc.) to start wondering where the character comes from and how it relates to conceptions of the afterlife. and it is all pretty fascinating but I made it clear I thought it was also all 100% Christian nonsense, not to be taken literally/seriously.

mishnaic literature does talk about gehenna as a place where ur sins are purified before you can enter olam haba, but ur right it's barely touched upon in the tanakh - the famous allusion to the afterlife in the tanakh is Genesis 25:8 by yitzchak who the verse says was "gathered unto his people," which seems euphemistic but also particularly suggests to me some kind of ancestral afterlife. the reason i always heard for the lack of afterlife talk in the bible is bc judaism's focus is on repairing this world and turning it into a home for god - whereas christianity + islam are focused on the world to come. i do think this is a major theological break + the sorta subtext for original sin in christianity which can never be solved, so the best you can do is believe + enjoy god in the afterlife. by contrast the major focus in judaism is the age of the messiah when all the earth has been repaired + made divine.

is it really cool to raise your kid with that kind of mocking contempt for other religions?

xp

like tellingly in the 13 principles of faith maimonidies mentions, "the belief in divine reward and retribution," which could refer to heaven/hell or could just refer to this world, and then "The belief in the arrival of the Messiah and the messianic era," followed by "The belief in the resurrection of the dead," the last two of which are completely concerned w/ this world. none of the principles say anything about having to believe in heaven or hell.

when I'm answering questions from a 7yo about whether the devil is literally, physically real, then it's not so much mocking contempt as being honest. the devil is not a literal person that is going to punish her and take her to hell for being a bad person (no matter what Antonin Scalia says). I consider it my responsibility to educate her in the traditions of her culture (Judaism) and to give her my honest views. The devil is definitely a Christian construct, and as such I felt it was my job to point out to her that it's not an idea I or our family or Jews give any credence to. I did discuss some of the more interesting stories that center around the devil (Faust, Dante's Inferno, to a lesser extent the Book of Job, etc.) She gets a lot of second-hand Catholic stuff from kids at school so I do my best to provide some context to what she hears, deferring to my (primarily lapsed) Catholic in-laws on the finer points.

xp

good point about Maimonides Mordy. Yeah I haven't gotten into any non-Tanakh stuff with her - she's only 7 and just in her first year of sunday school so this has been her first exposure to a lot of non-holiday-specific biblical stories and theological ideas

outis, so cool that conversations with your daughter are intellectually fascinating/ challenging for the both of you, you're lucky to have each other as interlocutors

mordy, sorry for referring to tanakh as old testament, that was faux pas (more dumb of me than offensive i guess?)

tanakh = acronym for torah, neviim (prophets) and ksuvim (writings)
OT generally refers I think only to Torah portion but OT isn't a Jewish idiom (obv bc you can only have an OT if u have a NT) so idk it could maybe include all of tanakh

huh wiki on the OT is p interesting - actually the OT includes a bunch of stuff (to varying degrees depending on the denomination) *not* in the Tanakh

is it really cool to raise your kid with that kind of mocking contempt for other religions?

xp

― circa1916, Friday, April 17, 2015 8:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he said he made clear his thoughts on the matter, not that he made it a matter of doctrine or stated it as fact to his child. plus, well, he's not wrong.

Christianity should be mocked and ridiculed more IMHO but then again it just plays into the martyr complex that some of that sect already has so...

might be more balanced to clarify that nothing in any jewish holy book is actually physically true either

We werent discussing any jewish texts. If she had asked me if moses was a real person i'd be inclinex to say yes. If she'd asked me if jacob really wrestled an angel i would've explained it as a metaphor.

i was about to joke that while i'm sure shakey won't mislead his kid re the veracity of the torah, i intend to, and to dismiss the teachings of christianity so yell at me. but then i started thinking about 'truth' as it pertains to holy scripture + divinity and how 'this is what i believe' differs from 'this is what our ppl believe,' the latter inaugurating a person into a larger community that contains various nuances for what meaning is, what truth is, etc, but that uses particular texts as the foundation for these discourses. like is there a huge difference between 'the revelation at mount sinai definitely happened and it was the event that formally established the ppl of israel' and 'for the last 2 thousand years jews have lived + died as part of a people who trace their constitution to the revelation at mount sinai'? i suppose the former matters more if you're a certain kind of historian or an atheist but the latter is really what 'belief' means in a faith community: 'this is what we're about.' and re christianity, it isn't just as absurd as judaism bc it has been the largest antagonistic body to judaism, a theology that claimed to supersede the beliefs of judaism, that contradicted the fundamental tenants of idol worship w/ its innovation re the son of god, and who has been responsible for the deaths of many jews over the last 2k years. it's 'more false,' not bc it's less historically accurate, but bc it is (or for the most part was) a direct threat to 'what our ppl believe.' nb this gets into a certain kind of tribalism that is probably even more problematic for modern secularism/liberalism than believing patently absurd stories, but i think it does explain why story absurdity doesn't really bother most religious ppl. it's less important what i believe and more what i believe the people around me believe (or more what i believe my parents believe).

^that's why i felt referring to tanakh as old testament was faux pas on my part: not just re accuracy of denotation, but referring to sacred jewish text(s) with terminology of Christianity, i.e. as inscribed within Christian framework which presumed both to appropriate & supersede those texts

(faux pas for me especially because i’m not a Christian)

btw drash, i meant to mention to you that the chapter in heschel's prophets "prophecy and psychosis" is exceptionally good and even worth jumping ahead too (esp if you find the early prophet-specific chapters slow going)

Yes the "this is what our people believe" is the framework i'm trying to provide. It's def tribal but that's the way the world is.

Xp

even for a non-believer like me it is easy to tell how fucked with the original prophecies were by butthurt Johannine folk who couldn't rectify that the "Messiah" had been killed. But it's still fascinating, from a historical perspective, to read about the evolution of Christianity over time, particularly Bart Ehrman's books. I just ordered "When Jesus Became God", but I find that "Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium" was my favorite.

but, if I ever *have* kids (looking lesser and lesser likely by the day) it's not like I'd disown them for being religious. But if any one of my damn Black Sabbath albums went missing on account of that they'd be sent to Siberia.

(thanks for chapter rec; might read it in advance of getting there; but enjoying early chapters v much so far)

x-post--Ha ha. "Dad, you are a heathen and I had to smash your Black Sabbath albums"

i was about to joke that while i'm sure shakey won't mislead his kid re the veracity of the torah, i intend to, and to dismiss the teachings of christianity so yell at me. but then i started thinking about 'truth' as it pertains to holy scripture + divinity and how 'this is what i believe' differs from 'this is what our ppl believe,' the latter inaugurating a person into a larger community that contains various nuances for what meaning is, what truth is, etc, but that uses particular texts as the foundation for these discourses. like is there a huge difference between 'the revelation at mount sinai definitely happened and it was the event that formally established the ppl of israel' and 'for the last 2 thousand years jews have lived + died as part of a people who trace their constitution to the revelation at mount sinai'? i suppose the former matters more if you're a certain kind of historian or an atheist but the latter is really what 'belief' means in a faith community: 'this is what we're about.' and re christianity, it isn't just as absurd as judaism bc it has been the largest antagonistic body to judaism, a theology that claimed to supersede the beliefs of judaism, that contradicted the fundamental tenants of idol worship w/ its innovation re the son of god, and who has been responsible for the deaths of many jews over the last 2k years. it's 'more false,' not bc it's less historically accurate, but bc it is (or for the most part was) a direct threat to 'what our ppl believe.' nb this gets into a certain kind of tribalism that is probably even more problematic for modern secularism/liberalism than believing patently absurd stories, but i think it does explain why story absurdity doesn't really bother most religious ppl. it's less important what i believe and more what i believe the people around me believe (or more what i believe my parents believe).

― Mordy, Saturday, April 18, 2015 9:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i think all this is repulsive, guess that's my tribe

fwiw i don't think christians or atheists are repulsive. i just don't think that their beliefs are my beliefs. if we're really going to talk tribalism, i guess we need to talk about being pro intertribal relations and being pro abolishing the tribes.

bc i'm not embarrassed to say that i prefer the former to the latter

no i do too, just physical empirical verifiable truth is not something i can compromise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCR-yOoWJjI

l,r een, mordy

lol

no i do too, just physical empirical verifiable truth is not something i can compromise

― een, Saturday, April 18, 2015 12:15 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Who is asking you to compromise physical empirical verifiable truth? The 'repulsive' thing is to ignore history. How can you be for physical empirical verifiable truth and also be for throwing out evidence?

thread needs more tanuki

you would totally feel Gizmo after midnight, wouldn't you

ew

omg *feed* not feel. *smh*

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/16/406967291/1-000-songs-from-holocaust-survivors-archived

http://blog.sefaria.org/2015/05/18/how-much-of-tanach-is-in-the-talmud/

neat. wonder if one could (or i assume one might) derive some hermeneutic significance from variation in percentage...?

absolutely. leviticus is the most cited + also the part of tanach most concerned w/ ritual + legal practice. esther is really high (56.89% cited) but i bet most of that is in tractate megillah - the one that deals w/ all the laws of purim (and all the associated stories). probably lots of connections to make, esp if you could better map which parts are cited in which tractates.

my local federation paper just laid off its entire editorial staff :(
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20150604_Philadelphia_s_Jewish_Exponent_lays_off_its_local_editorial_team.html

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-talmud-became-a-best-seller-in-south-korea?intcid=mod-yml

like tellingly in the 13 principles of faith maimonidies mentions, "the belief in divine reward and retribution,"

I've been teaching my kids that in Judaism we do good things because they're good and we're commanded to do them, not because we'll be rewarded for doing them or punished for not doing them. But maybe I'm just wrong about this? I feel like I'm constantly revealing the spottiness of my Jewish education in this thread.

nah that's a valid angle

belief in divine reward and retribution does not necessarily imply that there's a clear-cut commodity-exchange type of relationship between God and people. God is ultimately unfathomable, after all

different groups emphasize different things. When I went to a Litvish yeshiva they definitely emphasized the idea of schar v'onesh (punishment + reward) and that's a well-known trope in non-chassidic ultra orthodoxy. my family's particular chassidic sect downplays it in favor of tikkun olam type ideas (dirah b'tachtonim - making the world here a fit dwelling place for g-d) so it doesn't have a huge amount of currency in my community but it's obv still one of the articles of faith so you can't dismiss it entirely.

Yeah I like that idea, do good things not anticipating a reward, but because they are good in themselves.

Kant ennit

wow I totally missed this whole "shellfish in the NY water supply" controversy

wonder what the rabbinical reasoning was in allowing it

http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/310997/global-jewish-population-nears-pre-holocaust-level/

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-talmud-became-a-best-seller-in-south-korea?intcid=mod-yml

― Mordy, Tuesday, June 23, 2015 7:40 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's kind of sad, but my heart gets lighter every time i read a news story about jews in a foreign country and it's /not/ about anti-semitism

although....

Other Jews I spoke to were concerned that Tokayer’s Talmud was helping popularize Jewish stereotypes in South Korea. Even positive stereotypes, some said, can be dangerous. As Dan Sneider, the associate director for research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford, and a former congregant of Tokayer’s synagogue in Japan, put it, “The line between ‘Jews, aren’t they incredible’ and ‘Jews, aren’t they somehow dangerous and sinister’ can be pretty thin,” particularly in countries like South Korea and Japan, where the dearth of Jews means they are essentially “an abstraction.”

i had no idea julia wertz was in the new yorker!