Curing Jewish Ignorance

arauca

Banned
Banned
Whoever does not visit the sick is as if he spilled blood.” – Rabbi Akiva (Nedarim 40a, B. Talmud)

Our fellow Jews are sick. They don’t admit it. They don’t even know it. Yet the malady is grave. “The most destructive, painful, most contagious disease of all,” Rabbi Noah Weinberg, the founder of Aish HaTorah, said, “is ignorance. Ignorance perverts people and leads to wasted, counterproductive lives. Ignorance causes untold suffering – mistreatment of children, marital strife and suffering in a dead-end job.”

Who are these ignorant Jews? The highly educated, socially conscious, comedy-loving, Holocaust-honoring 1.2 million American Jews who identify themselves as Jews of no religion, according to the Pew survey. This group has been steadily growing for four decades and now includes one-third of all adult Jews born after 1980. Four-fifths of this group marry non-Jews. Only 8 percent raise their kids to be Jewish. The majority of them feel little or no attachment to Israel.

I call them ignorant because they’ve turned their back on something they don’t even know. Many have never been exposed to Judaism at all; others have experienced a diluted, dumbed-down version, and understandably found it uninspiring. I don’t blame them for consequently writing off the whole religion, but it’s like writing off sushi after trying a rubbery tuna roll from 7-Eleven.

I know about this because I was one of them. For years, I was proud to be Jewish, but I thought Judaism had nothing to offer me. I had received two messages from my parents:

1) Be Jewish to preserve the Jewish people.

2) Be Jewish because your grandfather died in the Holocaust. My mother is a child survivor of Theresienstadt, with lifelong health problems occasioned by her treatment there. Her father was murdered at Dachau, and most of her extended family was killed at Auschwitz. My father is a Chilean Jew who had to fight his way out of several scrapes with anti-Semites. We never owned a German car. We rejoiced when Israeli commandos rescued the hostages at Entebbe on July 4, 1976.

I sought spirituality everywhere but my own backyard.

And yet, Judaism was understood to be a chore. Temple was boring but obligatory a few times a year. My bar mitzvah was more of a performance than a meaningful experience. As I grew older, I sought spirituality in Eastern philosophy, meditation, endurance sports, jam bands, transcendental poetry and science fiction — everywhere but my own backyard.

Eventually I found my way back, thanks to a confluence of events. My grandmother died. I stumbled into the right shul. I got a taste of deep Judaism, and a constellation of secular myths exploded around me. I found that our ancient tradition spoke to me in innumerable ways, even while I remained scientifically oriented and modern. More to the point, I became a better husband, father, son, brother, friend and citizen when I became a practicing Jew.
http://www.aish.com/jw/s/Curing-Jewish-Ignorance.html
 
Whoever does not visit the sick is as if he spilled blood.” – Rabbi Akiva (Nedarim 40a, B. Talmud)

Our fellow Jews are sick. They don’t admit it. They don’t even know it. Yet the malady is grave. “The most destructive, painful, most contagious disease of all,” Rabbi Noah Weinberg, the founder of Aish HaTorah, said, “is ignorance. Ignorance perverts people and leads to wasted, counterproductive lives. Ignorance causes untold suffering – mistreatment of children, marital strife and suffering in a dead-end job.”

Who are these ignorant Jews? The highly educated, socially conscious, comedy-loving, Holocaust-honoring 1.2 million American Jews who identify themselves as Jews of no religion, according to the Pew survey. This group has been steadily growing for four decades and now includes one-third of all adult Jews born after 1980. Four-fifths of this group marry non-Jews. Only 8 percent raise their kids to be Jewish. The majority of them feel little or no attachment to Israel.

I call them ignorant because they’ve turned their back on something they don’t even know. Many have never been exposed to Judaism at all; others have experienced a diluted, dumbed-down version, and understandably found it uninspiring. I don’t blame them for consequently writing off the whole religion, but it’s like writing off sushi after trying a rubbery tuna roll from 7-Eleven.

I know about this because I was one of them. For years, I was proud to be Jewish, but I thought Judaism had nothing to offer me. I had received two messages from my parents:

1) Be Jewish to preserve the Jewish people.

2) Be Jewish because your grandfather died in the Holocaust. My mother is a child survivor of Theresienstadt, with lifelong health problems occasioned by her treatment there. Her father was murdered at Dachau, and most of her extended family was killed at Auschwitz. My father is a Chilean Jew who had to fight his way out of several scrapes with anti-Semites. We never owned a German car. We rejoiced when Israeli commandos rescued the hostages at Entebbe on July 4, 1976.

I sought spirituality everywhere but my own backyard.

And yet, Judaism was understood to be a chore. Temple was boring but obligatory a few times a year. My bar mitzvah was more of a performance than a meaningful experience. As I grew older, I sought spirituality in Eastern philosophy, meditation, endurance sports, jam bands, transcendental poetry and science fiction — everywhere but my own backyard.

Eventually I found my way back, thanks to a confluence of events. My grandmother died. I stumbled into the right shul. I got a taste of deep Judaism, and a constellation of secular myths exploded around me. I found that our ancient tradition spoke to me in innumerable ways, even while I remained scientifically oriented and modern. More to the point, I became a better husband, father, son, brother, friend and citizen when I became a practicing Jew.
http://www.aish.com/jw/s/Curing-Jewish-Ignorance.html

Read good story. I applaud you for going back to your roots as a Jew.
 
It's a little hard to take it seriously if you don't even believe in the basic premise. My rejection isn't based on ignorance. In fact I'm sure the more I knew, the less I would appreciate it. Secular Jews should be proud of respecting their heritage and proud of evolving past it's superstitions.
 
The real Jewish malady is racism. Judaism has no basis for defining itself in ethnic/racial/hereditary terms. And by doing so, Jews are violating the Torah. I am working on an article about this for my website, but I will make a few points here.

The usual basis for Jewish racism is:

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Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, because they will turn your sons away from Me to worship other gods. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and He will swiftly destroy you.
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Deuteronomy 7:3-4

But here the reason is clearly given "because they will turn your sons away from Me to worship other gods". In other words, the reason is entirely religious. If intermarrying didn't turn Jews away from God, then there would be no reason not to intermarry, and in fact many Israelites clearly did intermarry starting with Moses.

Let's look at a much harsher prohibition.

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No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the Lord’s assembly; none of their descendants, even to the tenth generation, may ever enter the Lord’s assembly. This is because they did not meet you with food and water on the journey after you came out of Egypt, and because Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram-naharaim was hired to curse you.
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Deuteronomy 23:3-4

The first modern interpretation of this is that the Ammonite and Moabite races are cursed here for their sins. But then how does one explain Ruth? Ruth was a Moabite who became an Israelite, and King David and King Solomon were her descendants. This seems to conflict with the above prohibition. Rabbinic Judaism deals with this by saying that Deuteronomy 23 is only referring to men, not women. But this is obviously nonsense. My explanation is much simpler. The prohibition isn't based on race but rather is against the Ammonite and Moabite nations. When Ruth converted, she simply was no longer a Moabite, so the prohibition no longer applied. The Bible is concerned with "peoples" who are defined by nationality and by religion. There is no racism in the Bible.

Now I want to talk about the Holocaust. The Holocaust was purely a racial conflict. If Judaism hadn't been racist, there would have been no Holocaust. In Mein Kampf, Hitler actually sympathizes with the Jews who were oppressed by Christians because of their religion. Hitler believed in religious tolerance. What made Hitler hate the Jews was the fact that all the Jews that Hitler regularly encountered were liberal Jews, and Hitler hated liberalism (as I do). Hitler saw that these Jews did not practice Judaism, so Hitler said that Judaism is a race pretending to be a religion. And I have to agree with Hitler here. Since Hitler saw the world entirely in racial terms, and since Hitler saw Jews as the race of liberalism, Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews. I personally strongly oppose racism, both Hitler's and Judaism's. If either Hitler or Judaism hadn't been racist, there would have been no Holocaust. Consider the following Torah law:

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Observe the Sabbath, for it is holy to you. Whoever profanes it must be put to death. If anyone does work on it, that person must be cut off from his people.
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Exodus 31:14

If Judaism obeyed this one law, then all liberal Jews would have been cut off from Judaism for not keeping the Sabbath, in which case Hitler would not have associated Judaism with Liberalism and there would have been no Holocaust.

According to Isaiah, Judaism is supposed to be light for other nations. Instead Judaism does its best to hide the Torah from most of humanity based on racism. Judaism retains immoral liberals/modernists who have no respect for the Torah but happen to have Jewish parents, while making it very difficult for other people who want to follow the Torah to join Judaism.

My ideal religion would be strictly based on the Hebrew Bible and would not include racism and other bad ideas that come from the Talmud. This is why I plan to join a Karaite synagogue sometime next year.
 
It's a discussion outside of racism, unless an interest in your ancestral culture is racism. The author is imploring more secular Jews to delve into the religious element of their culture.
 
It's a discussion outside of racism, unless an interest in your ancestral culture is racism. The author is imploring more secular Jews to delve into the religious element of their culture.

My point is that Judaism is not the culture of secular "Jews". The culture of secular "Jews" is Modernism. Therefore Judaism is not their culture.
 
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