The Paradox Of Antisemitism And Hope

Rabbis since the Middle Ages onwards have sought to prove the validity of the Torah and our belief in G-d from the story of G-d’s revelation to the whole Jewish people at Mount Sinai. As explained by Rabbi Judah Halevi in the Kuzari, the logic goes like this: If G-d had not actually appeared to all the Jewish people, then it would have been impossible for someone to write a book that would be adopted as truth by those people.

Because Jews of previous generations accepted the Torah as truth and passed it down to subsequent generations, and ultimately to us, it must have actually happened. Hence G-d and the Torah are proven by the very fact that the Revelation at Sinai appears in the Torah itself. While many contemporary Jews may struggle with this proof, on the basis that they have accepted the Torah without necessarily believing its complete historical accuracy, they therefore assume that previous generations were equally negligent in their due diligence. But we can derive something even greater from this argument.

No other religion in the world claims that a whole people saw G-d and survived. Christianity and Islam make far less grandiose claims: that their leaders (and maybe one or two hangers-on) saw G-d and that was it.

Rabbi Y. Y. Jacobson explains that the founders of Islam and Christianity were aware of the relatively weak basis of their claims to Godliness, and so they incorporated the Torah into their religions to make the greater claim: G-d appeared to the whole Jewish people, the ultimate proof of His existence and interest in mankind, but He changed His mind and reselected our people (Christian / Muslim) in their place.

This so-called “Replacement Theology” has mammoth implications for the Jewish people. Some Jews are skeptical or don’t believe altogether that our ancestors actually encountered G-d, but there are close to four billion Christians and Muslims on this planet who do believe it! They believe that the Jewish people are G-d’s witnesses, making them “the new Jews.” A side effect of their claim, however, is that as the only people to have actually witnessed G-d, in their eyes we are still His ambassadors on Earth, providing a moral model to the world.

As a result of this, other faiths have two options for how to interact with Jews. They can choose to build their morality through emulating us, which close to a billion Christians in the West have chosen to do, and live lives that are impacted by the Torah, incorporating weekends, family structures, and societal values such as justice, freedom and equality. Alternatively, they can choose to live immoral lives, murdering others without guilt and annihilating the Jews, as Hamas, Stalin and Hitler have all tried to do, in order to destroy the evidence of morality in the world.

So, the seeds of Jew hatred lie in the belief of our enemies, from Sefer Shemot, that we witnessed G-d as a people. But the story of Sefer Shemot also provides us with hope.

The Israelite people fell to the lowest level of impurity. We were slaves in Egypt for eighty years and on the brink of total assimilation into Egyptian culture. And then, just before we descended into the abyss, G-d took us out with many miracles. Seven weeks later, we encountered G-d at Mount Sinai and collected the original signed copy of His book! From this story we see a tremendous message of hope. Whenever the Jewish people are oppressed, they emerge stronger, more united, and heading toward redemption.

The very word “Sinai” (which translates to “hatred”) that is the historic basis of Jew-hatred is the same Sinai that promises us that we are moving closer to G-d’s final goal. From Sefer Shemot comes the paradox, the hope, and the joy of being a Jew.

“Do y’all not believe Jesus Christ is God?”
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Being Jewish, I don’t believe that any man could possibly be God, and that to assume so and act upon it is the very definition of blasphemy.

I further don’t believe that the historical Jesus - who was doubtless VERY different from the guy invented by Paul, the early Church fathers and Constantine - was, is or ever will be the Messiah. He simply failed at the major tests: he didn’t build the Third Temple (the 2nd still stood for about 40 years after he died), he didn’t ingather all of the exiled Jews (in fact, not long after he died, there was a massive forced Diaspora), he didn’t bring about world peace (the century in which he lived was one of the most brutal and war-filled ones in history, and there hasn’t been a single year of peace since he was born and died), and he didn’t bring about the universal recognition if the God of Jacob as THE one and only God (no one has, or could, not until the actual Messiah shows up). Don’t even get me started on his genealogy, which the Christian scriptures can’t even agree upon - and in both cases he’s disqualified anyhow. Oh, and a 2nd coming (really the third - first when he lived, 2nd when he supposedly was resurrected, and third that so many people are still waiting for) is just a do-over. By that standard, ANYONE dead could be the future Messiah. Besides, nowhere in Jewish scripture is there even a hint of the Messiah being a former carcass.

And if he did, then he committed blasphemy; NO man can be divine, that is ONLY for God. That’s the main difference between your beliefs and mine - I don’t subscribe to the “cleaned-up” pagan belief in demi-gods or of a human woman being impregnated by God. Whomever the historical person was who was used as the model for Jesus, he was a mortal and fallible man, born of the union of two mortal and fallible human beings, and he is dead.

You'll have to excuse ebb. He's just mad that the one and only claim of Divine Revelation in all of human history that is self-validating is the Revelation at Sinai, and not anything to do with J*sus. As the article says, that's why chrstianity had to incorporate the Hebrew Bible into its own canon.

Chrstianity (and other religions) are based on faith. For Sinai, no faith is necessary. It is an absolute undeniable fact. It could not possibly have not happened. And it's the only such claim of revelation in history!

Ironically, ebb doesn't seem to understand that to a Fundamentalist Protestant (the tradition I grew up saturated in), he doesn't believe in J*sus either because he believes in secondary instrumentalities (sacraments, rituals, ceremonies, etc.). To a FP, to call J*sus one's "savior" one must reject all such things and be "saved" completely passively, with an absolute minimum, or sometimes with no, participation. To FPs, ebb is a "Judaizer!" He preaches Protestantism to the Jews and Judaism to the Protestants!

Believe it or not, I'm actually a big fan of most of ebb's posts. He knows what's going on in the Catholic Church, opposes the Catholic liberals, and is anti-Jewish only to the extent demanded by his religious dogma. I have never seen him invoke the "Protocols" or call abortion "Zionism" or anything like so many right wing Catholics do. I hope for his conversion, but I do honestly respect him.

I’ve been wondering if the rise of the ancient Greek civilization, with its “wisdom”, could have been driven largely by the influence of Israel, and particularly the revelations given by G-d to the Jewish people. True knowledge about Him provides a foundation of true knowledge about His Creation while also protecting against the acceptance of falsehoods. Those revelations about G-d and His Creation can seem obvious and “natural” once they’re widely accepted because their truth becomes more apparent, but they are anything but. G-d’s ways and thinking are so above ours and so holy and perfect that mankind couldn’t arrive at them on our own.

That said, I won’t speak of Islam, but as for the Christian faith, what’s said about it in this article is mistaken, for the most part, I believe. The truth about Christianity is in our New Testament, though, and in recent years, G-d has given me more understanding of how the New Testament appears to Jews in general. That was especially so after watching videos online from Rabbi Tovia Singer for awhile.

I started to think much more, then, about how a Jewish person would likely respond to different passages that I could now see would be offensive and troubling to someone Jewish. I’d never given that much thought before, thinking instead mostly of my own response, and that of other Christians, for their viewpoints, and that of unbelieving Gentiles, for better understanding how they might be reached with the Gospel. It did even make me question my faith in Christ, and examine it all anew. I absolutely remained a Christian, but with new questions for G-d. I just want to be truly led by Him. To be willing to oppose Him in any way is the most foolish thing anyone could ever do, and in a class by itself. Over the years, He’s made me better at waiting on Him for answers.

At this point, I believe that some of our Christian interpretations of our faith and of the New Testament have room for reconsideration, and that there’s a need for it, under the guidance of the Lord. There’s always a need for that in general because interpretations and teachings aren’t infallible, but often get mindlessly passed on as such at some point for a variety of less than acceptable reasons.

On the idea of Christians seeing ourselves as the “new Jews,” it should be noted that we don’t see each other as one people as Jews do, I believe. We aren’t ethnic family, and any professing Christian might not be a genuine one. The New Testament warns of that. Jesus said the church would include both wheat and tares. We even have to question and test our own sincerity.

So the concepts of group favor and group guilt have been quite foreign to us. Instead, Christianity is much more about the individual, similar to how secular law is. I’ve come to the point now of seeing America as having entered Hell collectively, while there is yet a remnant of faithful here, and the collective part was a new way of thinking to me.

And what, in essence, is Christianity about? It is about rejecting our rebellious ways and being reconciled to G-d, on His terms.

It’s somewhat like hardened criminals who have been bent on doing evil, and justifying it, then having a change of heart that transforms them, putting love and faithfulness and righteousness in their hearts instead. That is the spiritual situation of human beings with respect to G-d. Once reconciled to G-d, people become fit for Heaven.

And the Christian focus on faith essentially comes down to if anyone can live perfectly, or if we all —no matter how righteous in some respects — also need God’s forgiveness and mercy. Could any of us dispense with His mercy and forgiveness altogether?

As I said above, I have started to see how the New Testament and how it’s been interpreted could be offensive and troubling to Jews. I actually read the Gospels daily for over a decade without ever really noticing the Jewish aspects, including the Messianic conflicts, etc. And I’m very gifted intellectually, very knowledgeable, and went to college for English, and so practiced and excelled at “close reading” of texts — that is, honing in on what a text actually says. So how, despite all that, did I basically miss that the Gospels involved anything Jewish — even the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders went right over my head — until I read the whole Bible? I believe that I was coming from such a pagan secular worldview, including intellectual fare, entertainment, and politics, that I only saw the personal spiritual issues in the Gospels, and trying to adopt them was all I could handle then, such as the teachings in the well-known Sermon on the Mount. And that left me, therefore, to see, for example, the Pharisees not as Jewish religious leaders, but as nothing more than present-day Republican politicians, as I was a Democrat then. I projected what I knew on to the text.

When I eventually decided to read our whole Bible about 20 years ago, I’d only read the Gospels, Revelation, and Genesis, part of Exodus and Psalms and Proverbs up to that point. Upon reading the whole Bible, my understanding was truly transformed.

Specifically on Israel, I saw, for instance, that I’d been misguided to celebrate the Israel-Palestinian peace process during the Clinton administration.

And personally, as I said, I was transformed. I’d been very much into psychology up until that point, but I recognized then its tremendous errors and limitations. And I saw G-d’s Word, in contrast, as being so packed with insight that it was able to make us capable of learning to truly live in and enjoy perfect divine love with G-d and each other — our sin and imperfections forever overcome, with our free will still intact. While this way is still mixed with this sin-cursed world for now, the foretaste we have now is nevertheless far superior to every other way I’ve known. It healed and restored me in a way that psychology (or literature, or philosophy, or art, etc.) never could. It also illuminated truths I’d sensed in some way but maybe never could have identified on my own. Once I was shown them, though, my reaction was, “Of course! How could I have been so blind? That shows our fallen human nature. And the truth is just so amazing and wonderful!”

One example would be, from Proverbs, for us to trust in the Lord and not lean on our own understanding. All in all, it makes perfect sense, given our extremely limited and fallible knowledge and understanding, and it’s far superior counsel to anything psychology would tell you.

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