I often hear that nonsense from Reform rabbis. I wonder where they studied Judaism. (Yes, I know many did not study at all).
Moses killed an Egyptian merely for beating a Jew. The Hebrews in the Sinai raged on almost every nation they encountered. A specific commandment requires extermination of the Canaanites. Jews happily celebrate Purim, the remembrance of wholesale murder and looting of their enemies. Jews as happily celebrate Hanukkah, a victory of Jewish fundamentalists over the reformers of their day.
Judaism extends tolerance only to neighbors, members of the community who share the same basic values. There is no tolerance of enemies; killing enemies is specifically excepted from the prohibition.
The politically correct rabbis and leftists at the helm dislike real Judaism. Anything else, however, amounts to turning the other cheek, and with terrorism on the march, we will soon run out of cheeks.
I like Zen, a wise teaching. Be courteous, tolerant, and detached from events. That lets you prevail over the enemy, when necessary, with a clear head, without hate and efficiently.
My opinion on this is quite the same, except I see the same in both sides.I do not see why the issue has to be religious. If you take a balanced, or "zen" perspictive, you will quickly see that both sides religious claims to the land are "expired"The Jewish scripture states clearly that they would be cast from the land, and it would be granted back to them by God's will. It seems that if they are having to fight a loosing war by drastic measures, this is not the case.The Muslems, on the other hand, only have scripture giving them right to take over government in those lands they have converted the majority to Islam, and/or already occupy. This is obviously not the case in large portions of Israel either, as their Islamic government had been evicted during WWII.As for the religions even condoning violence, one has to look at what the threshold was that was considered "violence" in that time. Executions and linchings were every day matters until just recently. People weighed them of the lesser of two evils, as imprisionment was dificult if not impossible for many criminals. Those were clearly rules for the time, and do not hold an ounce of water in this modern world.The true reason for the removal of the cannannites was also not listed in scriptures. The cannanites were an active trading partner with Egypt, which they just escaped. It was not tactically wise not to drive them off. Additionally, the cannanite religion called for the prostitution and even raping of forgeners for sacrifices to their gods. In fact, much of the refrences to sexual misconduct in the bible are refering to avoiding this practice, and have lost the meaning of other smaller phrases. (For instance, "as the Sodomites did" could refere to rape, as the sodomites were well known for raping people who did not agree to participate, and the scriptures used by both the Jewish and Christian people recite an incident of such an event.) This clearly conflicted with a culture that outlawed both prostitution and infidelity.This is likewise so with the Muslems, who lived in a land ruled by tyranical rulers, who had to be killed if the Muslems were to continue living by their culture, although I have not had the opertunity to study their culture as much, that much I know for certain.It is almost strange that two people of such simular predicament would not be able to agree when their cultures do not severely conflict in moral code. (To state the degree of this, they even both use very similar diet codes.)This quite clearly states that neither side holds religious ground to their claim.As for non-relgious claim, both are valad. Both have many important cultural sites: some religious, some historical. Both have current occupancy. Considering this case, one should probably set up a secular federalized government, removing ALL religious based laws, and justifying them on universal moral basis. This is one of the few places, where the phillosophies of the artical in question is no doubt correct. Both claims are invalad.Such a government should respect both cultures, and Israel should refer to the corisponding culture, not any one particular region, which is a good compermise, as oposed to banning any use of the word to describe the region as some palistinians would like. As this cultural respect, "Holy sites of Israel" should be listed as a sublist of National tresures, just as "Muslem Holy Sites" given equal listing to both.Religious law should only be allowed on the smallest district of cities, encompassing less than a 500 people's homes and/or workplaces, and not including major routes of transportation. Being banned from entering the region where the crime occured should be the initial punishment, unless such a person wishes to accept the prescribed religious punishment.As for my opinion on solutions to terrorist, I also take the ballanced, Zen approach. In ALL cases terrorism should be addressed premptively by preventing people from joining terrorist. This is done by aiding them in seeing that the average person is not the enemy but the fact that the extremists on both sides are fighting. If they had been doing this in Iraq (like the Army manual says to) the region would probably be almost settled by now.As for one more note on Zen, overlay the sign of the Cross on the Yin-Yang symbol, so that the horizontal line of the Holy Spirit aligns with the barrier between the Yin and the Yang masses. You may be surprised to find that true Christianity actually does acknowlege the cyclic nature of the universe, and how it should be controlled through checking of writen rule with the needs for lax in circumstance, and balancing it with the rationality of one's spirtual judgement. I just wish more Christians would look at such things, I often feel I am the only one. Too many lean too far left or right and neglect the ballance.
Hi,
I just posted this advisory in an answer to a comment from someone citing Samson Blinded as his/her homepage. I don't like going behind people's backs, so I found it only fair to post it here as well.
"I also have to advise the reader that I do not subscribe to the points of view expressed in other posts on SamsonBlinded, which calls itself a "Machiavellian perspective on the Middle East Conflict". Specifically, in one article posted on the blog, the author claims that Judaism is not a religion of peace, citing the holidays of Purim and Chanukah. Unfortunately, to make a point, the author distorts the truth about these holidays by abbreviating the underlying narrative. Chanukah does not celebrate a victory of conservatism over reform but is usually read as a celebration of a miracle accompanying the triumph of religious freedom over Hellenistic oppression. To underline the neutral stance Judaism takes on military victories, we do not commemorate the guerilla warfare victory of the Maccabees but the martyrdom of Chanah and her sons and the miracle of lights. Purim has no militaristic connotation whatsoever, and we do not celebrate the death of Hamman, the Grand Vezire of Persia, but the fact that Queen Esther was able to sway her husband King Ahasverosh (Ataxerxes) and thereby save the Persian Jews from planned and ordained annihilation.
If we believe the Bible, Israel and Judah have known some military success in their day. But the taking of a life was never appreciated in Judaism. Wars have been faught and won or lost, and according to Jewish Law, one is allowed to break almost every rule to save a life. Peace indeed has a high value in Judaism, but it is not to be construed as Peace for the sake of as a value in itself. And Judaism will never be a basis for a Pacifism that turns the practicioner into a victim of outside forces. Self-defense can be seen as a right and an obligation in Judaism (in my opinion, which is just as much or as little significant as that of anybody else in Judaism).
Jewish Law will not tell you to endure suffering at the hand of others. Anybody who ever advocated "turning the other cheek" and "not opposing the Evil-doer" was as clearly out of the bounds of Biblical Law as one can get, even if he claimed he was only fulfilling and not abandoning it, and even if his name was Jesus.
You will be encouraged to fight back, if an attack is unlawful. But Jewish Law will not allow you to take pride or joy in the acts you commit to defend yourself or others, and even ask the soldier to atone for every enemy soldier he kills in battle. And Jewish Law demands that you treat every human being respectfully, even members of enemy peoples, e.g. when it forbids Israelite soldiers to marry women from an enemy country (read correctly, marry in this case means rape, considering that one of the ways to marry in ancient times was simply by having intercourse and further that hardly any woman of an enemy people would consent to such a marriage).
When the post cites Moses killing a man, one has to keep in mind that nobody is perfect, not even Moses was; and Moses was punished by G'd for his shortcomings. He never got to enter the Promised Land. Moses also was raised as an Egyptian prince, and the Thora relates the cited event not only as an act of punishment against the perpetrator but also as an act of compassion towards the Hebrew slave.
Obviously, SamsonBlinded does not claim to be an objective source on Judaism. Considering that our "enemies", be they early Christian Anti-Judaists or any of the other varieties of Antisemites, do not have as thorough an understanding of our religion as we ourselves, I find it ill-chosen to present Judaism in such a potentially harmful, distorted, badly construed and more often than not in this specific post exagerated to a point where it becomes untrue fashion."
Let us accept for a moment that Hanukkah is not about Maccabean victory, but merely about some dubious miracles. You cite the example of Hannah who urged her seven to die horrendous death rather than transgress Jewish laws. Do you, by celebrating Hanukkah, therefore accept that Jewish laws stand above lives?
I note that you have singled out Hanukkah out of all my arguments, while I answered every one of your examples; so obviously, you were not able to counter my arguments on Purim and Moses.
You will also acknowledge that martyrdom is not common in Judaism. While Muslims and Christians have uncountable stories of martyrdom, Jews don't usually make it a point of honor to die for the faith. You will also acknowledge that Hannah did not condemn her sons to death. The verdict was an arbitrary decision of the Seleucid rulers, who thought that refusing to idolate King Antiochus IV Epiphanes was worthy of such punishment.
You will, lastly, acknowledge that Hannukah is commonly referred to as the Festival of Lights, not the Festival of the Maccabean Victory.
That's not obvious, David. I just keep the discussion to manageable size.
Jews do make it a point of honor to die for our (not their) faith: Hannah, Maccabees, Bar Kochba. More importantly, millions of Jews died instead of relinquishing our faith in crusades, slaughters, and pogroms. Usually they had an option to convert instead of martyrdom.
Hannah absolutely urged her sons to accept immediate painful death. They might be in a slight doubt at first, but after the death of the first brother, their fate was clear. As you yourself noted, we do celebrate the heroism of mother sending her sons to death to uphold our faith. That's very illiberal.
Hanukkah is a festival of lights only in shameful politically correct interpretation. Don't forget that you habitually praised Hannah in your comment.
Again, no counter-arguments on Purim or Moses. Works for me.
If you think that Bar Kochba fought against the Romans because of a question of faith, your wrong. Bar Kochba led an uprising against the Roman rulers who upheld some variety of religious freedom in the area. Jews were allowed to go about their (religious) business. But they lived under extraneous rule, which Bar Kochba sought to shed off.
I don't think soldiers like the Maccabees qualify as martyrs.
The Shoah has showed us that there is absolutely no point in conversion and/or assimilation. It was the assimilated Jews that were hit first, in Germany.
Hannah may have done whatever you think she did, but there is no question that it was the Seleucids who killed her sons, not Hannah or her urging. Also, there is nothing in the scriptures that tells us that such behavior is actually prefereable to saving oneself. With the experience we have now, we know that if a dictator wants to kill somebody just for being who he is, he will do exactly that and find some reason for it later.
I don't hear the term "politically correct" very often when it relates to something Jews have said or done. It is certainly not a maxime I live by. "Festival of lights" was coined long before the term "politically correct" was ever invented. That notion holds even less value to a Jew than that of Martyrdom, I believe.
I would put it this way: we may commend Hannah AND her sons for not bowing down to a statue of Antiochus VI, but had she decided to break the laws on monolatry and kashrut because she believed that would save her life, under Jewish Law, this would not have been seen as a violation of ritual laws because she was brought to believe that her life was at stake. But since she and her sons of their own chosing did not actively give their lives, but were murdered by the Seleucids, I do not see how you can make this a question of chosing faith over life. It isn't. It is other (aggressive and oppressive) people (the Seleucids or the Inquisition) withholding freedom of religion and persecuting Jews.
I would like to remind you that Macabees, the only religious text with a Jewish background that even referred to something like Martyrdom (the word is Greek and doesn't exist in Hebrew) is not part of the Bible but apocryphal or deuterocanonical. Hanukkah is not a biblical holiday.
I find it specifically interesting that you would cite martyrdom to make the point that a religion was not peaceful. Martyrdom only shows that somebody outside the religion in question was violent and not peaceful. Whatever else your argument may or may not prove, you cannot make Hannah into an advocate of violence, and so citing Hannah is completely beside the point.
Well, you need to learn the immediate reason for Bar Kochba revolt. It was religious restrictions.
Maccabee was a priest, not soldiers.
Hannah directly caused her seven sons to die violent death for our faith. You just wrote that we commemorate Hannah on Hanukkah, and now you condemn her for deviating from the Torah. If the people like Hannah and her sons would have saved themselves then, there would be no Jews by now. She gave her life not for the isolated incident of observing a commandment, but as an example to other Jews. By putting our faith above her life, she saved our faith.
Oh really, Maccabees is the only text on martyrdom? How about the prophets killed and taking great risks to uphold our faith?
And besides Hannah, there were millions of Jews throughout the history who preferred martyrdom to abandoning our faith. Hannah advocated that her sons accept violence. All the more, she would have accepted violence done to the enemies of Judaism. That's exactly what the Maccabees and Bar Kochba did.
Moses was never reprimanded for killing an Egyptian, and the Torah clearly lauds him for bravery and nationalist zeal.
On top of that, remember the conquest of Canaan and extermination of Amalek, and prophetic visions of annihilation of Israel's enemies.
You noted correctly that Jews behaved relatively decently to women of the conquered nations. After exterminating the males.
Wow, this is fun.
Reread my last comment. I said that from a Jewish law point of view Hannah could have done either and acted in accordance with it. Jewish law will forbid you to actively endanger your life to uphold a law, when you alone control the risk. Therefore, Jewish law will forbid you to fast on a holiday that calls for fasting if you are not healthy. It will not forbid you to practice Judaism just because somebody else threatens to kill you if you do. I don't know if you get law at all, but there's a difference between killing yourself and being killed by somebody else, and that difference amounts to the question who pulls the - figurative - trigger. Hannah didn't kill herself or her sons. The Seleucids did.
I find it interesting that what you called reform before, you now call - correctly so - religious restrictions. I don't see the liberalism or reform you claimed before in restricting religion. I don't see how somebody advocating his own freedom of religion, while never even hinting at not allowing other people to follow their religious faiths peacefully, could be the bad guy in such a situation. I expect you do know that Judaism is opposed to missionary work and does not, as a rule, claim to be the only way to salvation.
It is, of course, difficult to separate religion from nationality when it comes to Israel under Roman rule. If the Romans officially restricted the practice of Judaism, they inofficially restricted being Jewish as such, not just its religious practices. Bar Kochba simply led a revolt to free the Jewish people from foreign rule.
Matityahu Hamakabi was a priest. By birth, Yehuda Hamakabi belonged to the same caste. I, btw, am a levi as well. But, what defined Yehuda Hamakabi was not that he was the son of a priest, just as I don't define myself by being a levi. Yehuda Hamakabi entered history books as leading the successful revolt against the Greeks and bringing Israel under Jewish rule once again.
You can look it up. Maccabees is the only text of the time for which the Hebrew phrase for a concept close to Martyrdom is cited. Martyr is a Greek word which in itself is a clue that the concept is more recent than Judaism.
I can't tell whether Hannah would have accepted violence done to the enemies of Judaism. There's nothing in the scriptures that supports this claim. She didn't exactly give an interview to a journalist before she was executed.
I think defending yourself against wrongdoers is perfectly normal. Legitimate self-defence is a hallmark of every legal system in the world.
The only person with any "say" on the matter that was against self-defence was the guy who wrote the Sermon on the Mount. I personally find the idea of abandoning justice horrifying.
Moses was not reprimanded because he fled to the desert. The Torah lauds him for his compassion for a Hebrew slave at a time when he could have chosen to go on to be an Egyptian prince. Technically, an incident where a human being is being attacked by another and likely to be beaten to death and only saved by the intervention of a third person who kills the perpetrator and thereby stops the attack would be considered legitimate defence of another under German Law. If Egyptian Law didn't recognize that at the time, it was because it allowed slavery and didn't consider slaves human beings, a logic which is totally unacceptable to, I can only hope, everybody nowadays.
The Amalekites had throughout biblical times attacked the Hebrew tribes several times. They targeted the weak among the Exodus first. War was not outlawed in International Law until well into the 20th century. I don't see why King David should have acted any differently than the supposedly enlightened rulers of, say, the British empire, 3000 years later. Imagine how progressive Biblical Law was at the time just by outlawing rape. And keep in mind that Jewish Law is constantly evolving. A Rabbi is not allowed to cite the Torah as a source of law even more, but has to refer to much more recent sources. We are talking about a law that allows abortion and stem-cell research, a progressive stance not adopted by a lot of faith or traditional values based laws and constantly debated in US constitutional law.
I think, we both have very different concepts of peace. To you, peace is simply the absence of violence. You would sacrifice everything, including your freedom of thought, just to barely survive. You are right in saying that Judaism does not advocate that kind of peace. The first commandment holds that we have been delivered from slavery. We are free men and women, and nobody should be allowed to take this freedom away from us.
To me, therefore, peace can be achieved not through bowing down to but only after the eradication of restrictions on my rights as a human being.
Hannah did not even fight back. What she did is not different from what Mahatma Ghandi did. She simply did not bow down to injustice. She performed an act of civil disobediance. You can try to make her into a monster all you want. I don't think she would be bothered by it. I find it sad, though, that you have nothing more productive to do than this. I like to believe I do. Take care and maybe visit my completely secular blog about living in Tel Aviv (davidgoestelavivi.wordpress.com) sometime. Yours, David
Oops. I can't edit my comment, but I just saw that I said "Imagine how progressive Biblical Law was at the time just by outlawing rape." in the second to last paragraph.
Outlawing rape is normal and to be expected, and the Bible of course did it. I wanted to write "outlawing the rape of enemy women", which is a measure relating to the behavior of soldiers in war, something that was regulated by the Geneva conventions only, about 3000 years later.
David, there's no practical difference between killing yourself and acting in such a way that someone else will surely kill you.
The example of Hannah - as well as of millions other Jews throughout the history demonstrates that faith is above life.
Moses act was illegal under any law. You can't go on killing any attackers. That's exceeding the necessary defense. Moses act is only comprehensible in light of the idea that by killing the Egyptian he reinstated the divine justice. He simply gave us an example that those who seek any damage to the God's people merit death so that God's will triumphs on earth.
Amalekites didn't kill Jews at the time Jews exterminated them. Amalekites were specifically exterminated for the guilt of their ancestors.
I'm not going back to this discussion. Everything I've said, I've said. As I see it there's a huge difference between suicide and death at the hand of another; for you there isn't. OK, I get it. You shouldn't test your theory in a court of law or on the bar exam, though. Boy, you'd flunk. Bad.
The point I feel I do have to make, though, is one of law; of German law, to be precise. You can take it from me (I'm a German jurist) or look it up yourself:
§32 StGB (the German Criminal Code) allows anybody to stop an attacker from attacking the life, physical integrity, well-being, freedom of movement, property or other protected individual interests of another person. Although §32 demands that defense be necessary, proportionality in German law is a threefold test of which only the first two stages apply to §32. The first stage (adequacy) is chosing the means most likely to achieve a legitimate aim (such as stopping the attack). The second stage (necessity) is chosing the mildest means among all those that are of equally adequate effect. Until this stage, killing an attacker, which is singularly most likely to efficiently and finally put an end to his attack, is necessary. The regular third stage of the proportionality test (proportionality stricto sensu, which would entail weighing the endangered protected interest and the means of defense) does not apply to legitimate defense under German law, because it is considered too restrictive in the situation of an attack perpetrated by a conscious human being.
The third stage test is therefore replaced by a "gross disproportionality" test under §32 par. 2 StGB, which is far less restrictive. That's the test that tells you that Grandpas shouldn't shoot kids with rifles just because they're picking cherries off of a tree in his garden. That's the example, we usually quote from Reichsgericht jurisprudence to showcase just how outrageous a means of defense must be in relation to the offense to warrant a verdict of gross disproportionality.
This being said, a German court would probably acquit a man who killed an attacker to protect his victim from being severely beaten and/or killed. Even if the court found that the means of defense used were grossly disproportional (which in cases of grave or dangerous battery or attempted homicide is highly unlikely), §33 StGB would still apply in case of sthenic affect (where the defender used excessive means out of fear for the life of the defended) and protect the defender from being punished.
As a comparative lawyer, I can only advise you not to make assumptions about just "any law" the way you just did. They're usually wrong.
But we're going round and round. This discussion isn't going anywhere. You're arguing points of history that, if they happened like this at all, happened about 2200 to 3500 years ago, you're generalizing a whole lot, and you hardly ever explain how you reach certain catchphrases. I still haven't understood at what point forcing people to idolate a statue of King Antiochus IV or forbidding them to keep kosher became progressive liberal reform. And frankly, this discussion started to bore me at least one post ago. So, thank you for bothering, but don't any more.
Defenders of Masada committed suicide, didn't they? Yet, only one or three of them actually committed suicide while others died from the hand of their friends.
Perhaps Graeco-Romans in the Hannah account conducted assisted suicide of good Jews?
But our discussion actually revolves around the question whether Judaism sets faith above life. The answer - as any decent rabbi would attest - is unquestionable yes. Please note that Hannah died for the faith rather than to uphold individual instance of observance.
I can't say about German jurisprudence but Israeli courts routinely sentence Jews for killing Arab attackers. The army is prohibited from shooting at stone-throwers if the soldiers can drive to safety. And I frankly doubt that a German court would acquit someone who *deliberately* killed a person beating another. Moses didn't try lesser means of stopping the battery, such as shouting and fighting the attacker. Definitely, two of them could ward off the Egyptian without killing him, and surely the prince (Moses) could stop the battery verbally. In Israeli, Russian, and American legal systems, such a death would be qualify from manslaughter in Russia to at least second-degree murder in the United States.
Maccabean war is commonly understood as civil war between Jewish fundamentalists and Hellenizers. The Books of Maccabees explicitly state that many Jews supported Antiochus reforms. Liberal Judaism today abrogates kashrut and observance in general just like Antiochus did. Antiochus demanded practically nothing as to what modern liberal Judaism won't concede.
Why am I even bothering?
Antiochus prohibited the practice of Judaism. He was not going to liberalise religious practices, but to restrict them. Today, you have a choice. No one forces you to be a Liberal Jew. You can observe kashrut or not. I have a rabbi student friend, she's a Liberal Jew and she keeps perfectly kosher. I come from an orthodox background and I don't keep kosher, and I don't consider myself a Liberal Jew (that's a whole other bag o bones, so forgive me for not elaborating). But Antiochus killed people for observing kashrut. Ask a Liberal Jew if he would kill somebody for not eating pork. I don't think so.
Again, I don't know why you make assumptions about German courts when I just told you what a German court would and has decided. German courts are extremely lax when it comes to legitimate defense.
Of course, if somebody throws stones at a car that can safely drive off and is shot and killed, that defence is simply not the mildest adequate one (second stage). Driving off would be just as fine. Shouting is hardly as efficient as killing, the risk that the attacker would not be swayed by it subsists, so it would be considered inadequate (first stage). You can of course try (if you want to wait until the Egyptian foreman kills the Hebrew slave without consideration or scruples and wonders why an Egyptian prince would even bother about a slave). But German law will not ask you to commit an act of legitimate defense in stages of intensity unless you provoked the attack yourself or even caused it by some kind of risk augmenting behavior.
Threatening to use a gun would probably be considered adequate and necessary, but then again, Moses didn't have a gun now, did he?
As to the *deliberate* killing part. If you don't do it deliberately, conscious of the attack and with intent to defend, it wouldn't even be qualified as legitimate defense in Germany. There are different opinions on the subject of non-conscious defense: some people would not grant the "defender" any alleviation of guilt at all, since he wasn't willfully defending someone but had other motives for the crime, others would say that the existence of objective circumstances warranting legitimate defense would erase the unlawfulness of his actions and their consequences, leaving only his criminal intent, a basis for a verdict of attempted homicide or murder, depending on his motive and the circumstances of the killing.
Of course, American legal systems will not allow just anybody to kill people claiming legitimate defense. You'd at least have to claim that you thought the person you shot was a burglar or tresspasser and your or someone else's life was threatened. I'm thinking teenage daughters coming home past curfew. I'm thinking Texas. But in a country so gung-ho on guns, I completely understand if they take a more restrictive stance on legitimate defence. In Germany, guns are extremely hard to get by and the courts are more liberal.
I don't know what makes a "decent rabbi", but the ones I asked told me that life is above ritual. When you're starving to death on an island and all you can find to eat is a ham sandwich, enjoy. Life takes precedence.
The people in Massadah were dead. Their bodies just hadn't caught up to it yet. If they hadn't died at the hands of their friends, the Romans would have killed them - probably only after torturing them. There was this little thing called crucifixion. Maybe you've heard of it. In German law, the "Gefahrerhöhungstheorie" (theorie of augmentation of risk) tells you that there is no crime where the consequence of the crime can already be deemed as achieved. The soldiers in Massadah were really only lessening the pain accompanying their inevitable deaths.
Assisted suicide would be conditional on Hannah coming up with the intent of killing herself by herself. Clearly, she didn't go to the market that day thinking "What a nice day to die." If she wanted to uphold the faith, suicide is a rather dodgy way to do it. It's considered the ultimate crime in Judaism. How did you put it? Go, ask "any decent rabbi".
I by the way don't get the difference between dying for the faith and upholding an individual instance of observance. How would you go about upholding the faith other than by upholding an individual instance of observance? And how exactly can you separate an individual instance of observance from the faith in its entirety? Do you think Hannah grandstanded but secretly had shrimps at home the night before and routinely held classes in idol pottery for bored housewivew? She was an observant Jew, no more and no less. Scripture made her into something else maybe, but that scripture (2 Maccabees) isn't even part of the Bible.
Faith is communal phenomenon, as opposed to individual incident of observance. If Hannah and many Jews like her would abandon Judaism to save their lives, there will be no Judaism by now. Think of Marranos.
Life might take precedence over individual act of observance, but not over the faith of the nation. Moses killed the Egyptian not really to defend the Jew but as a symbolic act of vengeance on the Egyptian oppressors of Jews.
Upholding the freedom of religion to allow the slaughter of animals in accordance with certain Muslim beliefs not shared by the entirety of Islam, the German Federal Constitutional Court held that religion is not a mass phenomenon based on a formally institutionalized code but an individual phenomenon or at most a group phenomenon of informally - non-coordinated - shared beliefs (in the sense of Art. 4 of the German Basic Law). As you see, there is really no uniform definition of religion.
The Marranos may have openly converted to Christianity according to Roman-Catholic ritual. But according to the Halachah, that doesn't make them any less Jewish. And their offspring often continued Jewish practices such as lighting Shabat candles even at a time when they had long forgotten they were Jewish.
The thing is that there is no abandoning Judaism to save your life. Judaism sticks to you. You're born with it. Hundred thousands of German Jews were assimilated before the Holocaust, and the ones without the money or means to flee the country were killed although they had fully integrated themselves into German society. They were even less likely to survive if integrated, because many of them could not believe that their own people, the Germans, would turn on them, while the ones who were not integrated were a lot more mobile and quicker to recognize the early signs of impending persecution.
Your logic is deficient when you say that Judaism was contingent on Jews not leaving the faith. Lots of people have abandoned Judaism for a variety of reasons, and the faith has not died. But not abandoning Judaism isn't automatically a death sentence for the practicioner either. If your logic were correct, Judaism could not survive either way, because those who'd die for the faith would be dead and those who'd abandon the faith to survive would be lost to the faith.
You say that Moses killed out of vengeance and not really to defend or protect. Do you have any proof to back that up? Or is that one of your assumptive conclusions again like the one where a Seleucid king prohibiting kashrut becomes a liberalist reformer?
Frankly, I couldn't care less about what German courts think about Judaism. I don't believe that underlying opinions substantially changed in the past 70 years.
From Jewish point of view, religion is definitely communal. Recall many commandments with the threat of caret (expulsion from the community is the most liberal interpretation). All morals are communal, in fact. You would resist have someone eating excrements in a public place. Likewise, I do object to seeing homosexuals in the Land of Israel. Or take the relevant example of the Temple Mount. It's not an individual issue: either Muslims have a temple there, or the Jews; can't be both.
Marranos ceased to be Jewish in a few generations. Judaism, like any religion, revolves around external rites and observances.
I cannot agree with you that "Judaism sticks." It doesn't. The fact that Germans exterminated even Christianized Jews relates to Germans' hatreds. Assimilated Jews have nothing to do with Judaism after 2-3 generations. They interbreed with Gentiles and dissolve.
You say, "Lots of people have abandoned Judaism for a variety of reasons, and the faith has not died." That's the other way around: Lots of Jews clung to our faith, often risking their lives or sacrificing their lives in the process, and therefore our faith survived. Judaism survived and flourished despite some assimilated Jews.
Why do soldiers undertake suicide missions? To save the larger entity, from their company to their nation. The same way many Jews died throughout the ages refusing to abandon their faith. They posed a two-fold example: of steadfast faith to other Jews, and of the Jewish courage - to our enemies. Antiochus could kill Hannah and her seven sons, but not every Jew. It is because people like Hannah absolutely rejected Antiochus' demands and denounced his liberal collaborators among Jews, did our faith survive.
How can you be sure that Moses didn't merely defended the Jew but exacted vengeance? Read Exodus 2:11 and listen to the emphasis: "Moses went to HIS BRETHREN, and saw THEIR BURDENS, and saw an Egyptian a Hebrew, ONE of his BRETHREN." The next day Moses saw a Jew smiting another Jew (the same verb as for the Egyptian, so presumably same intensity of beating). Moses merely asks the Jew, why is he beating his fellow. Moses was quite a nationalist.
Moses had already killed one man, and hoping nobody had witnessed it, tried to cover it up. He had the scruples and bad conscience everybody should have after killing a man even in defense of another. It was the Jew who "smit" the other who told Moses that he had killed an Egyptian and was not morally superior to him.
Also, though the use of the same word may be construed as an indicator of equality of intensity, one has to take into consideration that the punishment an Egyptian faced for injuring a slave would be light compared to that of a slave injuring a slave. Even though at the moment of the act, the intensity of injury was the same, the Egyptian might have continued the beating creating a lethal risk, while the same is less likely concerning two Hebrew slaves.
From a Jewish point of view, history and salvation may be collective, but observance/faith is individual. Look it up in the writings of Martin Buber. How could religion be communal when you can't get the rabbis to reach a consensus on anything, much less all of us.
You started talking about other legal systems, making wholesale statements. If I pointed to German Law it was only to prove you wrong on 2 points. Which I have. 1: "No legal system would classify killing somebody to save someone else from being "smitten" as legitimate defense." 2: "Religion is definitely and without exception a communal or mass phenomenon." I used German jurisprudence because it's what I know best.
I'm Jewish, I live in Tel Aviv, and I couldn't care less about gays in Israel. Nothing in Jewish Law can be construed to forbid sexual orientation.
As for the Temple Mount. It's huge. There's Al-Aqsa and Omar and still there's lots of free space. I don't see how one is exclusive of the other when the entire old city of Jerusalem consists of churches, mosques and synagogues with much less space between them. I don't see how one would go about rebuilding a temple without the Messiah coming first. I also don't see how one would do it without knowing where the Holiest of Holies originally was. We'd never be able to use such a Temple.
Assimilation is not the equivalent of Christianization. Lots of Jews in Germany effectively became members of the "secular" bourgeoisie wearing secular clothes, fighting - like my Great Grandfather - in the German (Prussian) Army, without starting to interbreed. When I spoke of Assimilation, I thought we were talking about gearing down observance, not about conversion.
Ritual usually dies last, not first. The Marranos have kept some rituals like lighting candles even though they have no clue anymore why they do it. Look at the Christians. They're still praying to their pagan gods using the same rituals (eggs on Easter), but hardly anyone knows that any more.
So: I'm just a regular Jewish guy, mostly observant, but I like to listen to other women singing than just my mother (just an example). I see somebody murdered because he refuses to convert to X. I see another one surviving by converting to X. Tell me: where exactly is the incentive of staying Jewish. Because I honestly can't see it. If Hannah really thought she would actually make people want to follow her example (and die), either people are a lot less like me than I think they are or Hannah was reaaaaaaally stupid.
Judaism survived not because of it's martyrs but because of people coping with the circumstances and hardships of persecution as best as they could.
Antiochus could have and would have had every observant Jew killed. People have perpetrated unspeakable acts against us just because we are who we are. But you're the first one I've ever "met" that blames it on our faith and on our will to keep it.
People didn't die because they wanted to die to set an example. These people loved life. They were not suicidal, they were murdered. You're so good at finding notions that are exclusive of each other. Somebody who is murdered cannot have committed suicide. Somebody who is murdered because he refuses to convert to another faith has not chosen to die. The person trying to force him to convert and that ends up killing him makes that choice.
How could anybody possibly uphold the faith by committing suicide? Suicide is the ultimate crime in Judaism. He would not uphold his faith but completely relinquish it.
But you have made it perfectly clear to me that you will not accept my reasoning. Let me make it perfectly clear to you that I will not accept yours. I am disgusted by it. This discussion is over.
Martin Buber is the least authority on Judaism I can imagine. I gave you major examples proving that Judaism is a communal faith: caret, Temple observance, all the way unto the High Priest' atoning for the nation's sins. The fact that various sects of Judaism disagree on particular details of observance means nothing. Each sect is a huge community. Attorneys and prosecutors disagree on every criminal case; does that mean that common law is not a communal affair?
"Nothing in Jewish Law can be construed to forbid sexual orientation." Ah? Er? Try reading the Torah.
The Second Temple was rebuilt without a messiah, so why would we need messiah for the Third Temple? For an unobservant, gay-neutral Jew like you, an appeal to messiah is odd. You allude to messiah only to argue against rebuilding the Temple. Rambam is clear that any person who starts rebuilding the Temple deserves the title of messiah.
It is a major commandments to extinguish non-Jewish worship in the Land of Israel. It is therefore unimaginable to tolerate Al Aqsa alongside the Third Temple.
"Gearing down observance" removes Jewish isolation from Gentiles and allows interbreeding and assimilation. That process is unmistakable in America. Secular Jews actively interbreed even with Germans.
Female singing has nothing to do with Judaism. R.Caro banned it as an ethical matter, and observing it is not a religious issue.
You ask, "where exactly is the incentive of staying Jewish?" It's a matter of axioms, David. Of values. Unless you believe in Judaism, staying Jews - and dying to save our faith and the nation - makes no sense whatsoever.
"People didn’t die because they wanted to die to set an example." Wrong. Recall another example from the Maccabees, the old man who refused his friends' offer of eating kosher meat pretending its pork. He refuses the offer and dies horrendous death specifically to avoid giving a wrong example to others, lest they think he transgressed Jewish law.
Just think for a moment: how did Russian soldiers uphold their ideological believes when tens of thousands of them undertook suicide missions during the WWII? The people who closed machine gun windows in German underground forts with their bodies? They died to save the larger entity, their nation. How did Jewish teenage fighters ascended the gallows refusing to ask the British occupiers for clemency? How did Jeanne d'Arc refused to retract? Life is not everything, and almost nothing compared to ideological values.
Sorry. I tried using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page, but I'm still getting emails about new comments on this discussion. Can you unsubscribe me, please? Clearly, we're not on the same page about the Torah or "authorities" on Judaism or the distinction between suicide and murder:
- if the greatest religious philosopher of the 20th century is not an authority to you;
- if you believe that the concept of Homosexuality as a sexual orientation even existed in the Torah, which it clearly doesn't; the term and concept was only created in the mid-19th century, by a German; it or anything like it couldn't possibly be included in the (written) Torah; of course, I won't make any assumption about your take of contemporary Jewish Law;
- also there's the basic misunderstanding between us about people "wanting" to die: I think - and judging from your arguments, you don't - that people who make a choice for themselves to observe a law and are murdered for it by another person, have no real say in the matter, because the murderer alone controls whether he will go through with his murder, not the victim; assisted suicide would be a drugist selling tons of sleeping pills to someone who clearly already intends to kill himself to begin with; these are no arguments to you, I understand that, and yours are no arguments to me; even if you cite instance upon instance to back your claim that won't help my understanding your point because I do not subscribe to your basic reasoning, which turns antijudaist murder into assisted suicide;
- this could also attest to a different basic conception of Jewish history; maybe, you would like to believe that Jews always are in full control of their own destiny (which would make every martyr into someone who committed suicide, which in turn I hold to be the ultimate crime in Judaism, but apparently you think suicide is fine) whereas I see Jewish history as one of persecution and diaspora and of coping with its circumstances (which essentially allows the martyr to be a victim not of his faith but of murder).
So there's really no use in this discussion. It's not your fault or mine. I think it is the axioms and values we have learnt to accept as children (or maybe at a later time). I, like many others, was taught that life supercedes everything and that justice and the law are only there to uphold our values, first and foremost that of life. You may have been taught or may have found that Judaism, for you and probably many others, is about ritual observance for its own sake and can conflict with other values, like life. Also your understanding of criminal responsibility is completely different from mine. These are basic, usually unuttered differences that make a discussion on this specific topic quite senseless. I see that now. I couldn't see that basic misunderstanding in the original post, which was admittedly brief and distorting (when it turned Seleucids into liberalists). The beauty of Judaism (for me, and probably you'd have to say something about htat as well) is that we all should be able to accept each other's differences (I'm talking only about Jews now).
So again, without further ado, please unsubscribe me, because I couldn't manage to do it myself, although I copied the link into my browser and loaded it. I have no idea why it didn't work, but it obviously didn't. You can go on commenting all you want; I really don't mind if you get in the last word. It's your page. I just don't want to read any more of your comments, because I just don't find them very enlightening.
How come Martin Buber is a religious philosopher? He's an atheist. No more religious than Kant. His "Judaism" is a bunch of Hasidic tales (twisted or edited at that).
Homosexuality is a case of "man lying with man is with woman." I guess, given your Orthodox background, you can find this verse in the Torah.
I don't know how to make it more clear than Hannah - and millions of Jews beside her - accepted imminent death not because of the single instance of observance, but as her "five cents" (that's an inappropriate term here but I use it for clarity's sake) into the struggle of national survival.
Suicide is not a crime, but in obligation in cases like Hannah's. Suicide is a prescribed alternative for murder, incest, and idolatry.
Scores of biblical examples attest to the faith's priority over life: take Nadab and Abihud, for example.
You keep saying that the post calls Seleucids liberals. No. There were plenty of liberal Jews who supported Seleucids - re-read the Maccabees, if you care.
Where, just where does Judaism says we should accept each other's differences? After Buber, you invented a moral theory for yourself and call it Judaism, but tell me, where does the Torah asks us to live happily with deviants ignoring the differences? We were commanded to smash foreign altars and kill deviant Jewish priests at Shiloh. Where's the tolerance?
where do judaism people live???