Category Archives: Judaism & Jews

Justice And The Question Of Jewish-Christian Continuity

Christianity, Hebrew Testament, Judaism & Jews, Justice, Religion

In response to an exchange in the Comments Section on Christian forgiveness between Rob Murphy and Jess Strong: A growing number of Christians—Replacement Theology proponents, perhaps—pretend Jesus was not Jewish and was not steeped in the Hebrew (“Old”) Testament’s ethics. It’s as though he were an alien from Deep Space. Jesus was certainly a radical, very much in the mold of the classical prophets, some of whom had to sleep in the fields to escape the people’s wrath. Deuteronomy, an early book—the fifth of 39—showcases an advanced concept of Jewish social justice, and is replete with instructions to protect the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widows, the orphans, the aliens, etc.

This ethical monotheism, developed centuries before classical Greek philosophy, is echoed throughout the Hebrew Bible (Exodus), and expounded upon by the classical prophets, who railed against power and cultural corruption so magnificently:

“There is blood on you hands; wash yourself and be clean. Put away the evil of your deeds, away out of my sight. Cease to do evil and learn to do right, pursue justice and champion the oppressed; give the orphan his rights, plead the widow’s cause.”—Isaiah 1:11-17

The claim, made by the dazzling Catholic controversialist Clare Boothe Luce, that “New Testament universalism superseded Old Testament particularism” can be dispatched with a reminder that the Ten Commandments preceded the Epistle of St. John.

Knowledge and wisdom don’t arise in a vacuum; like so many greats, Jesus stood on the shoulders of giants. As for retributive justice in the Hebrew Bible, it would be hard to rival the Book of Revelation–it is pitiless about those “cast into outer darkness.” Jesus, moreover, returns not as a Prince of Peace but as a warrior who “rule[s] the nations with a rod of iron.” If Revelation is not about violent retributive justice I don’t know what is. In fact, some contend that based on the allusions to Armageddon in Blair’s speeches and the apocalyptic themes in Bush’s, both are inspired by Revelation. All in all, history best attests to the propensity of the three major religions to inspire brutality in their followers. The Jews, a dispersed people until very recently, have been most likely to turn the other cheek.

No-fault Forgiveness is Fatal

Christianity, Judaism & Jews, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

…Christian forgiveness is… contingent on the sinner’s repentance, and can be granted only by the one sinned against, and not by the various proxies of popularity. Instant expiation flows more from the values of the 1960s than from any doctrinal Christian values…

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, No-fault Forgiveness is Fatal. Feel free to comment.

The Elusive Jewish Gene

History, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews

I’m getting sick of the determinists who whittle down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages, or something. This article in the New York Magazine puts paid to such reductionism:

“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”

At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really. The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.

Jay Homnick writes insightfully about the topic:

“In fact this analysis is not only demonstrably incorrect, its blind-man-and-the-elephant methodology doomed it from the start. Let’s ask this: is it logical to say that the people who produced the world’s greatest literary work in the 24 books of Scripture, the most powerful (and unprecedented) poetry in history in the Psalms and Song of Songs, and the most ingenious legal compilation, the Talmud, did not have these smarts? That by the merest coincidence their offspring fell into an ironic social anomaly two millennia later and only then achieved a belated smartening?”

He follows up with equal bite in an e-mail exchange:

“As for that rubbish about Jews suddenly getting smart because they had to suddenly figure out that 8 percent of a hundred dollars was 8 dollars, while in the old days they could just farm without having to figure out their overhead and the necessary profit margin to make it profitable, how crass is that?!”

True, “Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world’s population and a mere 3 percent of the United States’, [yet] they account… for 27 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent of the globe’s chess champions.” But if this Jewish menace upsets you, take comfort in the knowledge that there are plenty of stupid Jews to go around.

The Torah And The TLS

Critique, English, Hebrew Testament, Ilana Mercer, Judaism & Jews, Literature

Leave a reply

Here’s a Letter-to-the-Editor of the British Times Literary Supplement. They wanted to publish it; I knew they would; Britons like a pedant. But they want private information about me, which I’m unwilling to disclose. What is it about so many private organizations these days that they act like government? On making a purchase, salesclerks will routinely ask for one’s address. Are they nuts? And most people comply. My husband takes cover whenever a salesperson dares to so pry.

Dear Editor,

In his review of Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses (TLS, June 24, 2005), John Barton praises the author’s translation of the Torah for “brilliantly imitating the Hebrew without sacrificing intelligibility.”
As someone who greatly admires the biblical narrator, I certainly agree that “welter and waste” does justice to “tohu vavohu” (Genesis 1:1), which Barton or the author transliterated to read “tohu wabohu.” Whence does that bowdlerization come? There’s no “wabohu” in Genesis 1:1—there’s no “wabohu” in the Hebrew language!
The first letter in vavohu is a “vav,” which is never a “w,” and here it’s pronounced “va.” The next Barton or Alter-bungled letter is an unpunctuated “Bet” (B), pronounced “v” too. Its enunciation here is “vo.” Hence, “vavohu.” I’m not sure how better to denote an unpunctuated “Bet” in English, but it’s certainly not a “b.”
So many scholarly writers, who profess to know Hebrew, habitually muck up the English transliteration of Hebrew words. Why?