As an observant Jew, how do you feel about the fabrications Joe Smith made to Torah? Regardless of the parsing NAL offers to do on the verses added by Smith, what is the Jewish verdict of such additions to Torah ‘in these latter days?’
As an observant Jew, how do you feel about the fabrications Joe Smith made to Torah? Regardless of the parsing NAL offers to do on the verses added by Smith, what is the Jewish verdict of such additions to Torah ‘in these latter days?’You really can't add anything to the Torah. The Torah is just the first 5 books, what you might call the Pentateuch. As I understand it, all the rest of the Tanakh, what you might call the old testiment, is commentary, of fairly equal rank to other commentaries (Mishna, Talmud etc). (We really don't have a cannon; what we have are texts that are accepted by tradition to varying degrees. For example, the Zoharic sages accept the Davidic Psalms as of almost equal value to Torah.) What happened at Sinai is the seminal event; the testimonies of every other generation since, whether prophets, sages, or rabbis, reduces to meditation, interpretation, and commentary on that event, trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out how to live our lives in light of it etc. So I'm not sure the Jews even have a verdict on Mormonism any more than they would have a verdict of any other gentile faith or tradition. I think the sages and rabbis would simply say that it isn't Jewish and leave it at that.