HEY JEWS

well I'm not really gonna argue that Jewish theology/cosmology is somehow superior or more accurate or more believable than others - I just find it helpful in framing my own ideas. there's stuff in there that makes sense to me, it's a point of view I'm comfortable with.

I guess to some extent a fair amount of it comes down to simple tribalism - I can find value in and have been fascinated by stuff in Buddhism, sufiism, the tarot/magick whatever, but I wasn't raised in those traditions, they don't feel like they're *mine* in the sense that I grew up learning about them and thinking about them with my family and peers.

i'll argue that Jewish theology/cosmology is much more appealing to me aesthetically, emotively and intellectually than other theological practices i've investigated. particularly kabbalistic/gnostic/chassidic theologies are incredibly dense + satisfying to study + meditate upon. i could probably talk about this for hours and hours tbh to get into why i find it so satisfying. i think it's just very well developed philosophically, as a kinda of parallel intellectual practice to trad continental or medieval phil or whatever.

i don't think it's so controversial to say that parts of jewish intellectual tradition are probably the most cerebrally developed theologies in world? not that it makes them better or anything, but it might make them more compelling for certain kinds of ppl...

def the case for me

I remember getting into an debate with a christian kid in elementary school where I was basically arguing, in less sophisticated terms, that Judaism didn't assert a truth claim in the same sense that Christianity did, that it wasn't presenting its answers as *the* answers, and also that Jewish traditions were just What We Do as opposed to the "right" way of doing things. I think I benefitted a lot from being raise with that frame of mind, as opposed to one in which a religion is exclusive of all others (we're right, they're wrong).

think that goes back to s1ocki's point about Judaism's "history of dissent, debate, intellectual engagement" - that's a real thing, and it isn't necessarily present in other traditions where you are just supposed to shut up and accept things on faith or because an authority figure told you so.

re jewish theological texts, this is one of my favorites of all time:
http://www.chabad.org/library/tanya/tanya_cdo/aid/6237/jewish/Lessons-in-Tanya.htm

it is generally considered to be one of the more accessible + broad treatments of chassidic philosophy. some parts are still incredibly complex systemic treatments of divinity, creation, revelation, progression of worlds, development of human consciousness, etc, that require a lot of time and background to fully tease out. and it's supposed to be a text written for lay people! once you get into more complex + esoteric works you could spend your entire life trying to understand them (and some scholars, like wolfson at nyu, moshe idel at hebrew u, boyarin sometimes do just that)

esoteric judaism - the math rock of theologies

i don't think it's so controversial to say that parts of jewish intellectual tradition are probably the most cerebrally developed theologies in world? not that it makes them better or anything, but it might make them more compelling for certain kinds of ppl...

― Mordy, Friday, June 22, 2012 12:15 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this true though? more than the catholic church's centuries of scholarship and theology? more than hinduism?

there's definitely a skeptical, questioning element to jewish theology that i appreciate—although i don't know if that, in practice, leads to any greater freedom of thought than any other religion.

I dunno if freedom of the thought is the end-goal. intellectual rigor is its own reward.

i would say that depends on what you apply it towards

like honestly i think the world be better served if great minds had been focused for centuries on stuff like how people get sick than transubstantiation and biblical property laws

re: the catholic church - frankly a lot of their theological/intellectual tradition reads like bending-over-backwards to invent arguments to justify dogma (not all, by any means, but a fair amount). Like, a lot of it strikes me as really tortured logic in the service of justifying something demonstrably ridiculous like a literal virgin birth or resurrection.

xp

like honestly i think the world be better served if great minds had been focused for centuries on stuff like how people get sick than transubstantiation and biblical property laws

you mean like keeping kosher to avoid trichinosis lol

re: the catholic church - frankly a lot of their theological/intellectual tradition reads like bending-over-backwards to invent arguments to justify dogma (not all, by any means, but a fair amount). Like, a lot of it strikes me as really tortured logic in the service of justifying something demonstrably ridiculous like a literal virgin birth or resurrection.

xp

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, June 22, 2012 12:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree—but there were plenty of great catholic thinkers.

is this true though? more than the catholic church's centuries of scholarship and theology? more than hinduism?

yeah, i think this is true. afaik there is not a comparable collection of scholarship, liturgy + theology in any other religion, tho i'd be interested to hear about other possibilities.

i could be wrong about this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_theology

seems like these dudes thought about this stuff a lot

yeah not sure where you're goin with this Mordy

I mean Hinduism's been around longer, all those vedas...

it's kinda silly comparing different textual canons. i was really just trying to demonstrate that there is a huge disciplinary history that can be fulfilling to study regardless of questions of veracity. i feel like one of the major critiques of religion in the contemporary secular community is that it is intellectually vapid, and certainly tons of religious practice is vapid. but esp in judaism there is a large intellectual component undergirding it. just the legal + talmudic corpuses alone span thousands and thousands of volumes without even getting into theology or esoteric works.

yeah that's true, but I'm not sure the same can't be said for Hinduism and (especially) Islam

esp w/Islam's intellectual traditions being so wrapped up in legal & scientific issues

could be true. tbh, i'm not an expert in islamic scholarship. it's hard for me to imagine similarly large collections just bc i know how huge the jewish library is. like your average lay person could have a home library of collected talmud, mishna, tanach w/ commentaries, shulchon aruch, various other legal editions, tons of commentaries on all the aforementioned, mussar or chassidic/esoteric works, etc. it's normal in the orthodox community for even uneducated to have home libraries of hundreds of jewish books. then you walk thru like JTS or YU libraries and they're just overwhelming.

there are i suppose two complexities superimposed here, the one being a sort of highly intricate 'rigorous' logical procedure derived from certain immutable (godly) precepts and other the a sort of complexity that might come from ambiguity, overdetermination, the contemplation of the unknowable &c

also, the words are really small in the talmud, and there's a lot of text on every page. u kno, if we decided it actually mattered which religion's text could beat up which other religion's text

https://people.cnm.edu/personal/jersherm/DrSherman/Talmud.jpg

i suppose the difference is that catholic theology (tending to the former) does not have secondary literatures, it has the word of god and various (sometimes maddeningly complicated) refinements that define what the will of god will already have been even though god in his more voluble phases neglected to describe this exactly

i don't really know what it is in the mass of jewish (or any other religious) texts that is going to help you with--what? coming to terms with your own death or something?

to me, if you can really believe in an afterlife, i suppose that eases some of the pain of existence. otherwise, it's like they said in ecclesiastes: all is vanity.

I figure when I die I go back to where I was before I was born

problem solved

which is to say that basically any religious text is like any other, full of a lot of bullshit and occasional practical advice. rooting for the home team as being more 'intellectual' or whatever is just chauvinism coming out sideways.

xpost

i mean i'd like to think i treasure the traditions yadda yadda yadda but whenever i do manage to get myself invited to a seder or something it's about fifteen minutes before i start fidgeting and looking at the door.

i like some of the stories about animals in the torah.

which is to say that basically any religious text is like any other, full of a lot of bullshit and occasional practical advice

I don't think this is really true fwiw. there are vastly different approaches, to say nothing of actual content, between, say, the Rig Veda and Maimonides

whenever i do manage to get myself invited to a seder or something it's about fifteen minutes before i start fidgeting and looking at the door

can't wait to greet Elijah eh

we usually pass one another as i'm leaving and he's just showing up.

amateurist, with all due respect, it doesn't sound like you maybe have a lot of experience with the texts you're discussing? like, "full of a lot of bullshit and occasional practical advice" doesn't describe the Talmud at all which is pretty skimpy on practical advice but rich with deliberations into the nature of obscure tort laws punctuated by surreal and strange stories.

yeah i know, i'm being contrarian. i just get irked by secular jews who make claims for the supposed intellectual superiority of their religious texts which they aren't even that invested in.

also most of what i have learnt in my life has made me more discomforted by morality, more anxious about my place and role in life, not relieved and certainly not anesthesticized, which is how i imagine u imagine the intended effect

fair enough, tho i take these texts very seriously and am pretty invested

p sure Buddhism has a place at the table of Spiritual Traditions That Think Baout Thangs

super interesting interview w/ a guy becoming a kabbalist (a for "real" kabbalist, not a kabbalah center one):
http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/an-aspiring-mekubal-an-interview-part-i/

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/106729/responding-to-readers

tbh i think that just writing an article that mentions breaking bad + the holocaust is trivializing and offensive from the get go. what a paucity of feeling to think that an amc drama is relevant at all.

here's the original article: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/105853/breaking-bad-karma

Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror—visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you’re not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit.”

I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race—conniving, indestructible, taking and taking. My grandparents were not excluded from this suspicion. The same year, during a family dinner conversation about Terri Schiavo, my father made the serious request that should he fall into a vegetative state, he would like for us to keep him on life support indefinitely. Today he and I are estranged for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason.

tbh, might belong on the anti-semitism thread instead.

yikes. that piece is so...weirdly glib? about all of it. I expect something longer, some kind of conclusion but it really just kind of '"holocaust survivors and Walter White...hand-wave, et cetera...and fin."

yeah I don't know what to make of the tone of that

the article is almost so offensive to all basic human sentiments as to be inoffensive because it's clearly the rantings of an unsettled mind. like maybe the only offense is that Tablet thought that a clearly unwell human being was just a courageous idiosyncratic writer.

dunno why the Holocaust is mentioned at all tbh

xp

Right! Like...the line she thinks she's drawing between Breaking Bad and the holocaust is really unclear, to the point of not even being existent.

And the things she's saying about the Holocaust in general, I just... I don't know why you'd try to express that without being a good enough writer to explain yourself afterwards.

And the Tablet explanation of it is like..."okay so that happened. Anyway.."

she does not seem to understand the difference between doing things to survive (ie, Holocaust survivors) and doing things that are wrong because you know you're going to die (breaking bad). these are not the same thing.