iambiguous wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2022 4:45 pmThen the part where Jesus Christ was a Jew. And Jews don't even believe in Jesus Christ!!!
This is a devilishly complex and muddled area. It is also a dangerous one for a group of reasons.
I have recently been reading Sholem Asch's
One Destiny: An Epistle to a Christian. While it is true that historical Judaism rejected the entire idea of god incarnating as a man as non-possible, Judaism in later stages (in the early 20th century) began to *sort of* extend to Jesus the possibility that he was god's messiah to the Gentiles. The book is quite interesting -- he is a good writer -- but I would regard it as a Jewish attempt to take hold of the Christian narrative; and to re-explain Christianity as Judaism. It is a very
very smooth rhetorical work.
When one reads people like this -- and Sholem Asch is deeply invested in those Hebrew definitions of being a 'chosen people' and having a unique and distinct destiny (from which one cannot resign) -- I cannot at this point
unsee what I have been expressing to Immanuel (and which he is incapable of entertaining for obvious reasons). The Hebrew 'construct' is a manifestation of Hebrew idea-imperialism. Does this idea require a great deal of added explanation to grasp? However, Yahweh began, and strictly so, as a tribal daemon. Only later, a good deal later, was he redescribed and re-envisioned as being the god who 'created the world'. This assertion, that a visualization, a god-form, and the specific and solitary highly grumpy entity called Yahweh created and owns the world is the fundamental error that must be punctured.
Surely those who do not believe
any aspect of religious mythology necessarily have jettisoned this idea. They say, and with genuine logic and quite fairly: "This is all made up". Indeed, it really was all made up. By a priest-class who used ideas to subject a people, the Jewish people, to a form of theological servitude. As a Jew, and as a *committed Jew*, there are severe penalties for negating the role assigned to one by a priest-class. And by the god-image of that terrifying personage known as Yahweh. If you disobey that god, let me tell you, that god will empower and inspire surrounding nations (the goyim) to become the *rod* by which Yahweh maims, tortures and murders you.
If you assent to *believing in* the core tenets of the belief-system -- if you really do see yourself as having been solely chosen by the Supreme Being to conquer and rule the world (this is the
core tenet of Judaism) then right there you are trapped.
So my view, which will be intensely opposed by any 'believing Jew' and also by Immanuel who, as I determined, desires to become a Jew and who identifies with Jewish destiny and wishes to become a part of that destiny, is that you have to go right to the very core of that 'belief' which is, to borrow again a useful word you've coined, a
contraption.
When you read people like Sholem Asch or for example Ludwig Lewisohn's
This People, what you will find is that it is within the *beliving community* that leaving that community of those who accept these tenets is made impossible. To announce 'leaving Judaism' is described as becoming a 'self-hating Jew'. To be critical of Judaism, which is to say to take any sort of stand against the construct of superiority and the god-provided
right and indeed mission to dominate others at the most profound level one can imagine, this is fought against tooth and claw.
The purpose of Judaism, and the extended purpose of Christianity, has historically been based in the idea-imperialism of asserting that their god, their conception of life, their values, and indeed their sense of destiny! is contrary to the design of the god that they concoct. In whom they put words calling for death, dismemberment and destruction to become their *proper and deserved fate*. Note that Immanuel, in essence, repeats this idea-formula. You are free to believe what you believe but you will be 1) scraped out of the Book of Life and 2) sent to suffer extreme horror, for eternity, in a hell realm.
All that is needed is to see and understand the core operative element.
So as I say the *dismantling* and the *deconstruction* of these idea-sets -- in which our deal Immanuel Can has invested the totality of himself! -- must be thought through. It is in fact the
moral choice. But it is highly and even intensely controversial.
