A little more about religious community and the necessity of Jews working with Christians on Israel/Palestine. I grew up with complete suspicion of “the Christians.” It was very cultural. The Jesus statue outside the Catholic church on the road I walked to to get to my kindergarten gave me the willies, bland and savage. Though my mom, god love her, had a reproduction of the Rouault painting of the Crucifixion because it was great art. Still: they were Christian and they had let the 6 million die. And Christians weren’t as smart as Jews, didn’t have the evolved values of Jews. Just read The Alien Corn by Maugham, and he captures the incredible artistic sensitivity of my people, and the sense of superiority. My family looked with disdain on “WASPy Jews.”
Fast forward. In my adult life, Christians have led me. I married a Christian who is just way out there spiritually; I believe Jimmy Carter’s statements about Israel doing state-sponsored terrorism, and Palestinians doing suicide terrorism, are morally beautiful; and my own mother-in-law smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital on a church group visit to Palestine a few years back. These people have provided greater leadership to me than my own community, by and large, which checkered with neocons and other parochial Zionists, has prevaricated and rationalized, and argued that black is white– and then compelled their children at Ivy League schools to argue to their friends that black is white (c.f. young Joel Pollak modeling Dershowitz’s dancesteps). When the brand new alternative lobby, J Street, says that Jerusalem is the Israeli capital, and not a word about Palestinian Jerusalem, that is prevarication to placate religious extremists in the Jewish midst.
Where am I going? I’ve been thinking of writing a book called Flesh of My Flesh, which is a biblical description of marriage. I’m assimilating. I feel more Jewish than ever, because my wife honors that in me, but I’ve broken law after law of the rabbinical code, mingled my life utterly with Christians. I am not telling other Jews to assimilate. Everyone has their path. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat. And I know many Jewishy Jews who are doing great work here. But I want to claim the goodness in my American anti-halakhic choice (which is the same choice that 62 percent of American Jews under 35 are making, for whatever reason), and also quote Michael Walzer, one of my earliest teachers, at Harvard, years before he began studying Hebrew, who last year said of Jews, that for 2000 years they had sustained a national existence thru thick and thin. “We governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were]
semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves. In the state of
Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is
something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not
done terribly well.” A wise wise statement. And my response is that In the state of America, where I am living my life and not feeling exiled, the Christians I am close to are spiritual heirs to the Christians who were vigorously opposing slavery 150 years ago.
Phil,
Your own identity is your own issue.
Its impossible to be a Jew alone. It only happens in community in some sense, halacha or not.
Being Jewish is only partially about principles (though many ignore that it is about principles, and not only association).
I get that you are attempting to reconcile your marriage to your parents' views and lives, and that there is some tension.
As an adult, you can't really point to your parents' failings as what comprises your tension. You really have to name it as your own tension, resulting from your own choices.
In my life, as part of fairly radical spiritual teachings, I was asked to functionally renounce my Jewishness in favor of a univeralistic approach (there is none in fact that I've ever seen).
Through the same group, I married a Jewish woman, a child of holocaust survivors, but from another continent.
So, as we experienced more pressure to arbitrarily conform and rationalize from the universalistic group, we settled back on being Jewish, but not so heavily.
We don't work at all on Shabbat, keep kosher because the household is vegetarian, offer thanks for each day, and try to live by the primary Jewish teachings that we are aware of.
.
' "In the state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not done terribly well." A wise wise statement.'
Wise indeed. As every political party learns, it's one thing to win an election with hard-hitting slogans; quite another to govern. Zionists learned this with a vengeance. The slogan "a land without people for a people without land" was nonsense to start with; the ethnic cleansing needed to "make it so" continues to this day, as does the resistance of the "nonexistent" original inhabitants.
"The Jesus statue outside the Catholic church on the road I walked to to get to my kindergarten gave me the willies, bland and savage."
The U.S. used to be described as a "Christian nation," but some of the Founders were Deists, which is quite a different breed. They believed in God, but did not necessarily accept the divinity of Jesus. As Wikipedia explains,
"[Thomas] Jefferson arranged selected verses from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in chronological order, mingling excerpts from one next to those of another in order to create a single narrative. The Jefferson Bible begins with an account of Jesus’s birth without references to angels, genealogy, or prophecy. Miracles, references to the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and Jesus' resurrection are also absent from the Jefferson Bible."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible
Modern scholarship — the effort to extract the common source Q (Quelle) from the Gospels — suggests that Jefferson was on the right track. The rabbinical teachings of Jesus are consistent in their sympathy for the poor, the outcast, and the underdog. But the Q sayings don't claim divine origin, virgin birth, and so forth.
Christianity has been described as "Judaism for gentiles." If one omits the claims of Jesus's divinity (as Unitarians do, for instance), the distance between the two religions is not that great. Jesus can be viewed as a later prophet who introduced some needed modernizations of outmoded Jewish practices, as well as a more loving image of God.
From the Buddhist concept of the ever-turning wheel, I infer that there are prophets among us in every generation. So it is a mistake to canonize the Torah, or the New Testament, or the Koran — since revelation is an ongoing process, not a single person or point in time. OOOOMMMMMM.
Jim, how does the Talmud fit in with what you say here?
Phil,
Your own identity is your own issue.
Its impossible to be a human being alone. It only happens in community in some sense, however remote. Even if there's no human being around, like Tom Hanks in that movie, you make one up out of a sport ball.
Being Ja human being is only partially about principles (though many ignore that it is about principles, and not only association).
When any human being marries outside the religion, culture or tribe they happen to be born and early raised into, he or she obviously has to attemptto reconcile the marriage to their parents' views and lives, and that there is some tension.
As an adult, one can't really point to his or her parents' failings as what comprises one's individual tension. One really has to name it as one's own tension, resulting from one's own choices.
Today it's less of an individual leap to jump from one form of Christianity to another (though in the past, this was literally deadly), or to jump from one form of Judiasm to another, and dittto respecting the various forms of practicing Muslim. In general all religious practice options run the gamut from very strict to most universal. For example, an American-born Jew may marry a Jewish woman, but she is a a child of holocaust survivors from another continent.
From a universal humanity POV, this is a stretch but not nearly as much as say, another Jewish American who marries a WASP.
Or perhaps this is not so? If one Jew is brought up in the spirit of humanism, and the other in the spirit of kosher Zionism, who has made the greater leap?
It might be a Mexican stand-off, so to speak. Sort of like the car grease monkey who was born into utter poverty in Appalachia who works himself up to being part of the lower middle class as juxtiposed to the person born in Scarsdale who enlists in the US Army for true patriotic reasons. Perhaps that analogy is too flawed, but what do you have to say?
Witty doesn't work at all on Shabbat, keeps kosher because the household is vegetarian, offers thanks for each day, and try to live by the primary Jewish teachings that he is aware of–he doesn't say gentiles like Jefferson have influenced him at all; rather he chooses only Jewish philosophy and history as a primal guide by his own admission.
Phil does the opposite in the sense that his deed show his creed and it is not the same as Witty's.
How would Kant look at their respective deeds and acknowledged motivations for same?
Posted by:Richard Witty
Oops, Sorry I didn't mean to imply this was posted by Richard; it was posted by me.
Also, in general, regarding the thought that Israel has not been too good in taking responsibility for non-Jews, I'm reminded of Truman, the guy who took minutes to rubber-stamp recognition of Israel into the community of nations to the utter surprise of the USA's reps at the UN & the USA's state dept, who said not long before his seminal gentile act, in essence, that the Jews, when in power or influence, are no different than any one else.
Perhaps that's a lesson still to be learned, no thanks to Truman?
The light onto the nations is what, a bad sulpher match?
Walzer: "In the state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not done terribly well."
Ah, the arch understatement. The Afrikaaners, in a similar situation, also did not not do 'terribly well'.
I believe it is true that SOME of the founders were deists — Christian deists who had been raised as Christians — but most were dedicated Christians. And part of their mostly Protestant Christianity entailed calculating the potential for corruption of any institution (the kind of corruption that both Jesus and Luther railed against) hence they recognized the wisdom of not institutionalizing Christianity within the State.
But this is also a of “weakness” of Christianity, in that it is willing to give pretty much everyone of any religion, and even atheists, the benefit the doubt (live and let live), which provides them an opportunity to institutionalize their own (dysfunctional) belief-systems. And because they don't subscribe to the Christian ethos, they are willing to jam it down everyone else's throat.
An example is when there is another religious group hostile to Christianity and willing to engage in treachery and subversion, through the corrupt political class, the courts, the culture and the economy, to destroy Christianity and replace it with its own malign (ie Talmudic) values. (The Christian scholar Rev Ted Pike at TruthTellers.org has done an excellent job of deconstructing the ongoing war that Talmudic-inspired organized Judaism has engaged in against the Christian underpinnings of this country for decades.)
It is doubly disastrous when Talmudic organized Jewry is joined by atheistic Communists, left-liberals, and politically correct ideologues seeking to utilize “multi-culturalism” and “diversity” in order to water down Christianity to the extent that it can be safely drowned, wherein (they fantasize) they will rule out. (It’s ironic that none of these would have ever gotten a foothold in the West but for Western (Christian) civilization’s innate, Christian-inspired tolerance. The hostility and selfishness demonstrated by “liberals” towards Christianity is comparable to US Talmudic Jewry’s out of each’s sheer infantile ingratitude toward the hand that feeds. They both seem to be suffering from a kind of stunted narcissism.)
It is triply disastrous when all of these are joined by atheistic, Right-wing money-worshippers whose religion is comprised of markets and mammon and who thus are also hostile to Christian morals because they interfere with money making. Many of these are also willing to make common cause with both Talmudic Jews and even liberals because of their shared materialistic (as opposed to spiritual) values. Hence Neoconservatism’s predomination in the neo-GOP, (given sustenance by useful idiot “Christian” Zionists who spend their time praying for Israel and winning lottery tickets).
What a hodge-podge of psychotic children ruling the country, which is where we’re at today.
The trick will be regaining our Christian bearings and veneration for our Christian foundations in the tradition of the founders, and seeing to it that these various hostile forces are subordinated to their secondary positions and kept there, because we all can see where they lead when given the opportunity.
Alternatively, it will be collapse and resurrection in a renewed Christian incarnation, as has happened in the case of the Soviet Union and the re-arisen Russia so despised by the liberal media and the Bushcons.
Ed, do you think the long influence of the Talmud will ever come to light?
Witty, here's a telling book about how the historical Jewish ghetto worked both ways–& how Jews in the long run benefitted from changing times more than the average gentile, right down to now: link to amazon.com
Phil,
You are irony incarnate, a fitting representation of contradiction. How many Gentiles who have Jewish friends can deny the fact that they like them – in many cases for their Jewishness? For the some of the very characteristics they were excluded for in past generations? They are bright, generally (although some seem to let cultural myopia bleed into their own intellect), they are empathetic.
At the same time it is impossible to deny that most Jews have such an entitlement to hate and judge that they are impossible to accept as a whole. Why would Gentiles not look at them as suspect?
There was a really telling comment a few days ago that the deafening silence on the Jewish and Neocon role in our problems in the Middle East calls into question all sorts of accepted historical truths. J Street's bullshit is more of the same cover story.
I grant that Gentiles can be quite thick and I am sure that I am among the more intelligent – that judgement is purely based on circumstance and career. But I wonder how many of the not so bright are starting to put together the pieces and question the underpinnings of the current cultural blank check that Jews possess.
I can tell you that almost twenty years ago, before I enlisted in the Army, I told my father that I did not want to fight for Israel. I was not very well informed at that point and I was also not an anti-semite.
As I have become better informed, my emotions swing wildly when I try disentagle the legitimate contributions of Jewish culture to our civilization from the propaganda at which the same culture is so expert. Have your people ever accepted responsibility for anything? Ever given credit to the Gentiles where credit is due?
"How would Kant look at their respective deeds and acknowledged motivations for same?"
As a Protestant he would probably be more on Richard's side. Duty is the main thing. Duty for him beats sympathy/compassion. Your task is more important than the misery on your way, it shall not distract you. The Kant "I read" would object to Phil's actions. But judge for yourself. Unfortunately we can't confront him with the horrifyingly dutiful Germans between 1933-45.
Kant's Duty Ethics
This of course could stand for Human rights today:
"CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE: Act only on those maxims (or rules of action)that you could at the same time will to be a universal law.
As a post-war German I have a problem with the "will" in this context.
I remember passages were he wrote that following your duties was beyond helping the person in despair. (But we should grant him, he had no chance to update his study post 1945)
Critque of Pure Reason
"(The Christian scholar Rev Ted Pike at TruthTellers.org has done an excellent job of deconstructing the ongoing war that Talmudic-inspired organized Judaism has engaged in against the Christian underpinnings of this country for decades.)"
…Howl! Jesus Christ! Jesus and Maria, actually more Jessus
un Maria in a slightly slangy Czech/German, was the favorite exclamation of a friend from Prague, who once was pleased to welcome Alan Ginsberg elected King of May by the Prague students. But Alan wasn't too much liked by authorities, here or there or in Cuba.
not a single line further …
I am at a loss, how one can help you out of that dark cage, Ed.
LeaNder, you did get that I was suggesting Kant's catagorical imperative. What I don't get is why you think Phil has not internalized it. Or have I misread you?
LeaNder, you did get that I was suggesting Kant's catagorical imperative. What I don't get is why you think Phil has not internalized it. Or have I misread you?
LeaNder:(But we should grant him, he had no chance to update his study post 1945) – That hair shirt you wear sure gives you moral authority…get over it. You'd had better crawl out of your cage first, Ed will take care of himself.
Thanks.
Lots of (mainline protestant) Christian groups, such as the Presbyterian Church USA are doing terrific work — at great cost — to help bring about peace with justice in this arena.