By Richard L. Cravatts, AMERICAN THINKER
“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?,” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.”
The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdo?an, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
The Nazification of Israelis — and by extension, Jews — is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.
In reflecting on the current trend, he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism. He defined the process of grafting this opprobrium on Israel as “ideological anti-Semitism,” one which “involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state — and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism — but as a Nazi one.”
Most important for the anti-Israel cause, Cotler contended, once Israel had been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state had been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist — exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought. “These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi’ supply the criminal indictment,” said Cotler. “No further debate is required. The conviction that this triple racism warrants the dismantling of Israel as a moral obligation has been secured. For who would deny that a ‘racist, apartheid, Nazi’ state should not have any right to exist today?”
What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the long-suffering Palestinians. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism.
One of the early academic voices to have assigned the Nazi epithet to Israel was heard in a November 2000 speech by Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois and one of the principal promoters of the global Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In that speech, Boyle made the exact linkage to which Cotler alluded, conflating Israel’s alleged racism with apartheid-like behavior and suggesting, even more ominously, that the ongoing “genocide” against the Palestinians had parallels with the Nazi’s own heinous offenses. “The paradigmatic example of a crime against humanity is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish People,” Boyle said. “This is where the concept of crime against humanity was formulated and came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission is now saying that Israel is doing to the Palestinian People. A crime against humanity.”
That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”
In the morally-defective pantheon of the academic defamers of Israel, perhaps no single individual has emerged as the paradigmatic libeler, the most vitriolic and widely-followed character in an inglorious retinue as Norman Finkelstein, late of DePaul University. Finkelstein has loudly and notoriously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East, not to mention his loathing of what he has called the Holocaust “industry,” something he has called an “outright extortion racket;” in fact, he blames Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, has pure political intentions and passively yearns for truces and safe borders, according to Mr. Finkelstein, while the invidious state of Israel, fearing moderate Arab foes who will force it into peace, is obdurate, conniving, and bellicose. In fact, Finkelstein suggested, Israel is collectively going mad, while everyone else in the rational world yearns for Middle Eastern peace: “I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. . . In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.”
If Finkelstein lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-imbecilic distortions of history and fact, his spiritual mentor, MIT’s professor emeritus of linguistics Noam Chomsky, has inhabited a similar ideological sphere, but has become an even more widely-known, eagerly-followed creature of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.
While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Palestinians, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on their Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace. He draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he was unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters. The rogue state of “Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests, deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh collective punishment,” Chomsky wrote, and yet, even in the face of this hideous, Nazi-like behavior by Israel, “nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or eliciting a violent response.”
In January of 2009, a tenured sociology professor, William I. Robinson, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent an odious email to the 80 students in his “Sociology 130SG: The Sociology of Globalization” course with the explicit message that Israelis are the new Nazis. Under the heading “Parallel images of Nazis and Israelis,” the email displayed a photo-collage of 42 side-by-side, grisly photographs meant to suggest an historical equivalence between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its occupation of Gaza and the Third Reich’s subjugation of the Warsaw Ghetto and its treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Robinson sent the email without supplying any context for it, nor did it seemingly have any specific relevance to or connection with the course’s content.
At Columbia University’s department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Culture (MEALAC), an academic division with a long history of anti-Israel, anti-American bias and politicized scholarship, Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, regularly espouses his loathing of Israel in fringe anti-Semitic publications like Counterpunch and The Electronic Intifada, or in the Arab press, and never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy. In his perfervid imagination, Israelis have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead in January of 2009 when Israel was defending itself against some 6000 rockets attacks from Gaza, “world powers are cheering on . . . and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.” Perversely likening the barbaric aggression of Hamas from within Gaza to the efforts of Warsaw Jews to repel imminent extermination by the Nazis, Massad obscenely suggested that “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”
It is Israel’s actions alone — that and the support of the United States — that are the root cause of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the Jewish state’s behavior is murderous, unethical, and brutal, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Jennifer Loewenstein, Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program. Israel, she wrote, “speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security,” and “Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.”
This summer, while the Gaza incursion was raging, Dr. Julio Pino, associate professor of history at Kent State University, published a vitriolic open letter in which he chastised the “academic friends of Israel” who have “chosen to openly work for and brag about academic collaboration with a regime that is the spiritual heir to Nazism . . . I curse you more than the Israelis,” he told his academic colleagues, “for while The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth . . . Lest you think this is a personal attack I swear it applies equally to all who engage in collaboration with fascism, and we both know the fate of collaborators. In the same manner, only with more zeal, than you have sworn to the Jewish State I pledge to you, and every friend and stooge of Zionism.”
Occasionally, when an academic makes public his loathing of the Jewish state, and continues to demonize and libel Israel beyond the bounds of what would be considered acceptable scholarly discourse, there are consequences — though rarely. This summer, for instance, Steven Salaita, author of Israel’s Dead Soul and perennial critic of Zionism, had an employment offer from the University of Illinois withdrawn once the school’s president was made aware of some of Salaita’s virulent Twitter posts about Israel. During the widely-criticized Gaza incursion, Salaita tweeted that “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?” He also blamed anti-Semitism on Jews themselves, as many anti-Semites do, by asserting that Israel’s behavior causes the hatred of Jews, that “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.”
As grotesque and distorted as these calumnies against Israel are, as perverse and inaccurate the comparisons drawn between Nazism and Zionism and between Nazis and Israelis are, and as wildly hateful these libels are to the point of being, as defined by the State Department’s own working definition, anti-Semitic in nature — the branding of Israel as the Nazi of nations by these academics serves to reinforce, and give credibility to, similar hatreds and biases expressed outside the university walls.
This is a lethal narrative because when it is believed the world naturally asks itself, as Cotler warned: if Israel is a Nazi-like, apartheid regime, standing in opposition to everything for which the civilized community of nations stands, who cannot hold Israel accountable and judge it harshly for its transgressions? That against all historical evidence and the force of reason the calumny against Israel that it is a murderous, sadistic, and genocidal regime has been successfully promoted and continues to gain traction indicates that Israel’s academic defamers have been successful in inverting history as part of the modern-day incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., is the president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews.
“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?,” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.”
The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdo?an, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
The Nazification of Israelis — and by extension, Jews — is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.
In reflecting on the current trend, he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism. He defined the process of grafting this opprobrium on Israel as “ideological anti-Semitism,” one which “involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state — and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism — but as a Nazi one.”
Most important for the anti-Israel cause, Cotler contended, once Israel had been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state had been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist — exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought. “These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi’ supply the criminal indictment,” said Cotler. “No further debate is required. The conviction that this triple racism warrants the dismantling of Israel as a moral obligation has been secured. For who would deny that a ‘racist, apartheid, Nazi’ state should not have any right to exist today?”
What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the long-suffering Palestinians. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism.
One of the early academic voices to have assigned the Nazi epithet to Israel was heard in a November 2000 speech by Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois and one of the principal promoters of the global Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In that speech, Boyle made the exact linkage to which Cotler alluded, conflating Israel’s alleged racism with apartheid-like behavior and suggesting, even more ominously, that the ongoing “genocide” against the Palestinians had parallels with the Nazi’s own heinous offenses. “The paradigmatic example of a crime against humanity is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish People,” Boyle said. “This is where the concept of crime against humanity was formulated and came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission is now saying that Israel is doing to the Palestinian People. A crime against humanity.”
That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”
In the morally-defective pantheon of the academic defamers of Israel, perhaps no single individual has emerged as the paradigmatic libeler, the most vitriolic and widely-followed character in an inglorious retinue as Norman Finkelstein, late of DePaul University. Finkelstein has loudly and notoriously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East, not to mention his loathing of what he has called the Holocaust “industry,” something he has called an “outright extortion racket;” in fact, he blames Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, has pure political intentions and passively yearns for truces and safe borders, according to Mr. Finkelstein, while the invidious state of Israel, fearing moderate Arab foes who will force it into peace, is obdurate, conniving, and bellicose. In fact, Finkelstein suggested, Israel is collectively going mad, while everyone else in the rational world yearns for Middle Eastern peace: “I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. . . In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.”
If Finkelstein lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-imbecilic distortions of history and fact, his spiritual mentor, MIT’s professor emeritus of linguistics Noam Chomsky, has inhabited a similar ideological sphere, but has become an even more widely-known, eagerly-followed creature of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.
While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Palestinians, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on their Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace. He draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he was unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters. The rogue state of “Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests, deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh collective punishment,” Chomsky wrote, and yet, even in the face of this hideous, Nazi-like behavior by Israel, “nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or eliciting a violent response.”
In January of 2009, a tenured sociology professor, William I. Robinson, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent an odious email to the 80 students in his “Sociology 130SG: The Sociology of Globalization” course with the explicit message that Israelis are the new Nazis. Under the heading “Parallel images of Nazis and Israelis,” the email displayed a photo-collage of 42 side-by-side, grisly photographs meant to suggest an historical equivalence between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its occupation of Gaza and the Third Reich’s subjugation of the Warsaw Ghetto and its treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Robinson sent the email without supplying any context for it, nor did it seemingly have any specific relevance to or connection with the course’s content.
At Columbia University’s department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Culture (MEALAC), an academic division with a long history of anti-Israel, anti-American bias and politicized scholarship, Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, regularly espouses his loathing of Israel in fringe anti-Semitic publications like Counterpunch and The Electronic Intifada, or in the Arab press, and never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy. In his perfervid imagination, Israelis have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead in January of 2009 when Israel was defending itself against some 6000 rockets attacks from Gaza, “world powers are cheering on . . . and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.” Perversely likening the barbaric aggression of Hamas from within Gaza to the efforts of Warsaw Jews to repel imminent extermination by the Nazis, Massad obscenely suggested that “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”
It is Israel’s actions alone — that and the support of the United States — that are the root cause of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the Jewish state’s behavior is murderous, unethical, and brutal, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Jennifer Loewenstein, Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program. Israel, she wrote, “speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security,” and “Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.”
This summer, while the Gaza incursion was raging, Dr. Julio Pino, associate professor of history at Kent State University, published a vitriolic open letter in which he chastised the “academic friends of Israel” who have “chosen to openly work for and brag about academic collaboration with a regime that is the spiritual heir to Nazism . . . I curse you more than the Israelis,” he told his academic colleagues, “for while The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth . . . Lest you think this is a personal attack I swear it applies equally to all who engage in collaboration with fascism, and we both know the fate of collaborators. In the same manner, only with more zeal, than you have sworn to the Jewish State I pledge to you, and every friend and stooge of Zionism.”
Occasionally, when an academic makes public his loathing of the Jewish state, and continues to demonize and libel Israel beyond the bounds of what would be considered acceptable scholarly discourse, there are consequences — though rarely. This summer, for instance, Steven Salaita, author of Israel’s Dead Soul and perennial critic of Zionism, had an employment offer from the University of Illinois withdrawn once the school’s president was made aware of some of Salaita’s virulent Twitter posts about Israel. During the widely-criticized Gaza incursion, Salaita tweeted that “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?” He also blamed anti-Semitism on Jews themselves, as many anti-Semites do, by asserting that Israel’s behavior causes the hatred of Jews, that “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.”
As grotesque and distorted as these calumnies against Israel are, as perverse and inaccurate the comparisons drawn between Nazism and Zionism and between Nazis and Israelis are, and as wildly hateful these libels are to the point of being, as defined by the State Department’s own working definition, anti-Semitic in nature — the branding of Israel as the Nazi of nations by these academics serves to reinforce, and give credibility to, similar hatreds and biases expressed outside the university walls.
This is a lethal narrative because when it is believed the world naturally asks itself, as Cotler warned: if Israel is a Nazi-like, apartheid regime, standing in opposition to everything for which the civilized community of nations stands, who cannot hold Israel accountable and judge it harshly for its transgressions? That against all historical evidence and the force of reason the calumny against Israel that it is a murderous, sadistic, and genocidal regime has been successfully promoted and continues to gain traction indicates that Israel’s academic defamers have been successful in inverting history as part of the modern-day incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., is the president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews.
@ yamit82:
How would YOU know what I do or don’t know? Your presumption is ASTOUNDING.
Nu, so now you read minds, bli ayin hara?
Why can’t I?
There is no contradiction. Man’s will WAS free until his initial disobedience. At that point his freedom of will was lost; he became compulsive. till he gets his will back he WON’T be free to love God. And till he sees his NEED to get his will back, he won’t seek a remedy.
Right. What about it?
He knows everything else. Why wouldn’t He know that?
You’re suggesting He did NOT know that the world would be filled w/ wickedness?
— and that He did NOT know, upon creating it, that He would destroy it? — by way of a Flood?
The text ALSO says, ‘God is not a man, that He should lie; nor the son of man, that He should repent.’ [Num 23:19]
— Repentance is His gift to Man. Adonoi himself does not need to repent. He doesn’t make mistakes.
No. No. And No.
Six of one, half-dozen of the other. Allegorical, Metaphorical — in the context of which we are speaking, no significant difference. Bottom line is that you’re saying it is symbolic. I say it is both symbolic AND literal.
No, I don’t think so. Not that I’m ‘incapable’ of sloppiness; happens all the time actually, much to my chagrin. But in this instance I had noticed that BR cited it from the essay in your link. However, if you linked to it, then you agree with it — as you’ve said (on more than one occasion) in the past.
Already showed you one (showed it to you a couple times in this thread already) in B’midbar 23:19 But it really isn’t even necesssary to go so far as to hunt it down in scripture.
The most telling evidence of Adonoi’s omniscience is that He knows something nobody else could possibly know: He knows my sins.
— Moreover, He knows just how to properly punish them.
My Hebrew used to be fair-to-middlin’ — but without constant immersion, you lose stuff. And if I’m out of my league, it’s not for lack of Hebrew facility. STUDY may make a man a scholar
— but it will never bring him to the Author of the Book he studies. Not if he lives to be as old as God himself.
Sorry to tell you, but you’re wasting your time. (Do you have an infinite store of it?) Much learning is a weariness of the flesh. . . .
How absurd; you don’t KNOW “everything” that I believe — let alone how I came to believe it. In any case, the scripture was never meant for study. If you were a meditator INSTEAD of a ‘studier,’ you’d know that.
And I’ve told YOU countless times that I don’t.
— You just don’t listen.
dweller Said:
You know nothing of the kind and you do not read it as allegory or metaphor you can’t.
dweller Said:
When I speak of rabbis I am speaking only of Chazal.
Most rabbis are not that bright but a few are giants, they count.
Of course not only his obedient servants. I thought you didn’t believe in free will but of original sin???
When the Torah speaks of loving G-d it is not in the romantic poetic form but is understood in original Hebrew to be like: clinging to.
How do you know he knew??
It is just as reasonable to believe G-d regretted as to believe he couldn’t the text and the pshat says he regretted I didn’t. Did G-d regret making or causing the creation of dinosaurs? Was it a 250 million year mistake? Maybe they existed outside of any ontological input and were just a victim of natural processes and chance?
Wrong I said that Genesis is allegorical and Chazal understood it as such. No biblical text can be ignored and is studied for what it can teach us that is relevant to us today…The Talmudic discussions sought to understand that teaching and quoted the actual Text. I didn’t It was BR who quoted from an essay I sent him. Getting sloppy dweller?
What I believe is irrelevant it was you who jumped head first with big foot in mouth into a discussion I was having with BR.
To play devils advocate, I challenge you to find in Jewish texts support for G-d being omniscient.
I can supply a wealth of textual evidence that G-d is not.
Doesn’t change much for Jews but what does it do for you christians???
Do me a favor go learn Hebrew from a real Jewish Hebrew speaking scholar, you are really out of your league. I’m no scholar but I do study every day and every day I learn something that makes everything you believe not only wrong but most Gibberish….Mathew Henry, is an Ignoramus as are the rest of his ilk including that fool Dr. Strong.
I told you many times that relying on christian translations and interpretations renders everything you claim to believe
Theological junk food.
@ yamit82:
That doesn’t mean it cannot also — at the same time — be read literally. It is not “either-or.” It is BOTH.
Not “all”; SOME. And I daresay you’d have rough time establishing that the “some” even constituted a majority of rabbis.
He didn’t create man to be His automaton. He made man FREE to love Him or not; free to obey or disobey. ‘Interference’ would presume a withdrawal of that freedom.
Of course He knew. What of it?
I thought you said it was written for “people with very primitive knowledge” — so, what’s the problem? You can’t see that the word ‘regret’ as applied to God is itself a reflection of that primitive knowledge???
You insist that Genesis is purely metaphorical; yet in the next breath you proclaim that his ‘regret’ and ‘repentance’ are strictly literal! ROFLMAO.
If the Almighty’s ‘regret’ is strictly literal, then it follows that your idea of ‘God’ is apparently, at best, some kind of cosmic phuqup — and at worst, a perverse jokester Unless, of course, He isn’t omniscient. (Is that what you mean to suggest?)
honeybee Said:
Bueno yo quiero pero no aquí mi amor. 😛
yamit82 Said:
Muestre me !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@ honeybee:
Very funny MLT
honeybee Said:
Not true I react and you know it!
@ yamit82:
allow me to organize my thoughts !!!
honeybee Said:
Why what?
yamit82 Said:
Their is our difference. You organize, I react.
yamit82 Said:
yamit82 Said:
I still just wish to know, why??????????
@ bernard ross:
@ bernard ross:
Of course you realize that the subject is much too vast and complex to be properly understood in our brief exchanges.
I am no biblical scholar and must rely only upon what I understand and those of any sources I use.
The Torah is very concise and short on explanations. The oral law attempts to fill in the blanks and understanding of the written texts. Since Hebrew of the Torah and biblical era had only consonant and no vowels and since each letter and vocalization can be crucial in understanding of the texts we must today do the best we can with what we have and know. The oral law was never supposed to be written down or fixed in time as the written torah.
Like the American constitution it was to be dynamic and interpreting the written text along with the social and cultural advancement of the Jewish people. Core principles in the Torah text were fixed and immutable but all else subject to interpretation and in Judaism the last responsa overrides all before it. That is the principle but we also allow only those who are considered true scholars and sages to interpret and rule on Halacha. While anyone is free to interpret Text only consensus and time reduces what posek is followed ultimately… Whatever is most accepted and stands the test of time is what stands.
Talmud codified
Schroeder makes a good even interesting case yet I have read criticisms and it seems to be still full of holes…..
My developing idea is that G-d is Mind!!!! (An intelligence far beyond our comprehension) So I don’t seek to comprehend.
I believe that all physical creation consists solely of the laws of nature at work and we can understand many but far from all or even most of those laws, beyond that we know nothing.
I’ll get back to you with more explicit discussion to your questions all very good, rational. I need to organize my responses first.
yamit82 Said:
then are you saying the rabbi’s were wrong? Your Schreder link showed how the Torah and science were not contradictory. Pre Einstein rabbi’s would have found schroeders analysis to be absurd and therefore morphed Torah truth into a form that they could understand. Men’s interpretations and reasoning is subject to their relative knowledge base at the time of their interpretation.
yamit82 Said:
Do they, and did they, understand that their “interpretations” are limited to their current knowledge base which would naturally affect the content of their interpretations and perhaps render them inaccurate?
You have often stated that Jews do not need an intermediary to G_D but you never state how that is true. E.G. It appears that the commonly accepted intermediaries are the “sages” and rabbi’s.
yamit82 Said:
yamit82 Said:
Yamit Said:
should these examples of regret also be taken as allegory and not literally? this would make more sense and your link attests to when it advises to conclude along these lines:
At first glance it appears to me that using the word repent to describe actions of an omnipotent, all seeing G_D does not make sense and is contradictory. If taken literally it would describe an imperfect god who appears to be surprised at the outcomes of his creation. However, if the use of the word repent is allegorical then it would also appear to have a less than literal meaning in your quote of G_D regretting four things. To describe G_D as regretting and all knowing and omnipotent appears to be contradictory.
Who is narrating the story? Is it a man to whom G_D related the story or is it G_D speaking in the 3rd person? My perspective is that wherever men come into the picture there is the beginning of confusion and corruption. My tendency is to assume that where man speaks of a less than perfect G_D perhaps man erred.
yamit82 Said:
I find this very interesting and it has been an interesting subject for me to ponder: that the Torah is written for people with primitive knowledge to understand. Your Schroeder link on creation described how genesis could be literally true once mans understanding caught up. It appears to me with the advent of DNA knowledge whereby there appears to be a written program of life throughout the generations, and whereby our scientific knowledge of the contained information is limited, that primitive language MAY in fact describe predestined programs written as DNA. E.G. the relationship thread of Esau, Ishmael and Jacob may be a primitive description of a pre-written DNA program and that DNA may prove to contain a great deal more than we envision at this time. At this time we speak pf preponderances to behaviors and diseases but perhaps at a later date we will discover that those preponderances are actual destinies. It might be that “Esau incites Ishmael to murder Jacob” is a primitive description of a much more complicated DNA code….even a code that is able to discern the extent of the genetic relationship of a descendant of Esau when determining when a preponderance becomes an actuality.
I have a question that arose for me: when was it decided to convert the oral Torah to writing? It seems to me that an omnipotent G_D who gave 2 distinct vehicles for transmitting His Law would also know what the future differences would be between the two. That transmitted orally would likely be subject to change over the generations. However, since G_D knew that difference it would appear to me to assume that he intentionally separated the 2 types or he would have transmitted all as written. Knowing that oral law would change would likely have been part of His plan. If he had wanted oral law to be frozen then why did he not transmit it as written with the written law? it is man who appears to have decided that what G_D intentionally and knowingly gave as oral should be converted to written, thus deviating from G_D’s original intention. I must assume that what G_D does he does intentionally and with knowledge.
mar55 Said:
I have always said the if there is a G-d, sometime in the future, I should like to look into His Bright and Shinning Contanece and ask Him one question: Why????????????????
bernard ross:
“The Torah is about actions. It teaches us what to do. The commandments are literally true, and the rest is merely an illustration. Think of the Talmud as similar to a modern legal commentary: the laws are real, but the examples are often made up.”
No christian understands biblical Hebrew because if they did they would leave skid marks to their pagan beliefs.
The whole of the book of genesis should be read as allegory.
The rabbis have all read it as such. christians don’t, they can’t it would destroy their whole basis for belief. Their theology would crumble.
The whole Garden of Eden myth using their theological literal beliefs didn’t G-d know the outcome before the events yet he didn’t interfere> Why??
Did not G-d know beforehand what man would become before he decided to destroy the living world by flood except for Noah whom he deemed singularly righteous?
The Torah has many examples of G-d expressing regret.
Here are but a few:
Genesis 6:6
And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
“Rabbis have postulated that all historical accounts in the Torah (presumably including Genesis) were given only for the purpose of interpretation. Midrash Rabba also says, “To reveal the power of the act of creation to flesh and blood is impossible… Therefore, the Torah text, ‘In the beginning God created’ is worded vaguely.” What did you expect to read in Genesis, an article on DNA? Obviously, the description was worded for people with very primitive knowledge. The phrase “and G-d rested” is not taken literally; why is the phrase “and G-d created” any different?
The Genesis account relates the idea that idols have no place in the world and deserve no worship; everything else is an illustration, with hints at deeper meaning.
The Torah doesn’t speak of the world’s age. The rabbinical calendar is based on highly ambiguous calculations of the life spans of early humans, starting from Adam. Gentile theologians derived different calculations from the same texts. The major presumptions behind such methods are that Adam was created during the creation, and each day of creation is a normal day. Both suggestions are problematic. There is no reason for G-d to divide his work into human or earthly days. The Adam account, taken literally, refers to the saving of mankind from a drought rather than to creation. The Torah speaks truths only, and it is impossible to read into it that the world’s age is only several thousand years.
Even if we consider the rabbinical age of the world, it doesn’t refer to planetary events. Tellingly, Genesis lacks anything on the creation of sun and stars, the obvious objects of pagan creation tales. The first verse specifies carefully that *this* heaven and *this* earth were created. The waters were not created at that time, but were already there, and G-d only divided them. The whole thing was there, formless and void. “G-d created” is a gross mistranslation; the word “bara” means “formed.” We may surmise that God brought the earth back into the order after a major upheaval.”
@ bernard ross:
It ISN’T possible. The notion is more than absurd; it’s presumptuous (to say nothing of boneheaded). Quite evidently written by men who — despairing of ever ‘reaching’ GOD’s level — spitefully resort, instead, to dragging HIM down to THEIRS.
Quite right. It IS senseless and anything BUT ‘sagacious.’
I’ve pointed this out to Yamit loads of times, but it apparently goes in one ear & right out the other, because he keeps pulling up that same lame quote about the ‘four things the Almighty regrets creating.’
This one from last month [below] is the only the most recent go-’round:
MORE DISCUSSION IN THE FINAL 4 POSTS (pg 2, #23-26) ON THAT THREAD (“Liberal Islamophiles”)
@ dweller:
No. Not unless what ‘catches’ you speeding is your own conscience.
The state and its enforcement arms are there to take up the slack for those who’ll not be disciplined by conscience. “If men will not be governed by God, they will be ruled by tyrants.” Wm Penn.
That’s for them to decide. They have to live with who they are and whose children they are.
The measuring is GOD’s work, not man’s. He implants in man, however, His emissary on earth — a conscience [< con scientia: “with knowing”] — and IT has its own way of ‘measuring’ such things.
Whether a man will (or won’t) LISTEN to it, however, is another matter altogether.
An inwardly generated sorrow [the noun form of “sorry”] for perceived wrongdoing
— leads quite naturally to such a change of attitude — and with it, of behavior.
Don’t hold your breath, however, in rapt expectation of such t’shuvah where dickhead ‘philosophers’ like Vladimir Jankélévitch are concerned.
@ bernard ross:
Bernard, there are many things I do not understand. The above mentioned is one of them.
Your very logical and it is brilliantly exposed. In sprite of everything I have a strong faith.
yamit82 Said:
If the Galut was a punishment and G_D has used confusion before as a form of punishment(Babel) why should we assume that anything born in the Galut is not punishment and confusion?
from your citation:
Punishment and confusion explained in advance
How is it possible for a G_D from which everything proceeds and who controls all events and can tell the Jews far in advance of the punishment they will receive for the crimes they will commit……….
How is it possible for such an omnipotent and perfect G_D to REGRET????????? To regret means to have erred, to have been imperfect, to have not foreseen the outcome of His actions. To me this makes no sense and contradicts what we know regarding all things proceeding from G_D and that He already knows the outcome which He later regrets???? This does not sound sagacious to me and I wonder if the sages who rendered this arose in the galut? Would the “sages” of the Galut have also been in the punishment of the Galut and been in a state of confusion? Did G_D know beforehand that he would later regret His own actions, the actions of a perfect G_D?
yamit82 Said:
many in Israel do the same
yamit82 Said:
Isn’t this mainly because you chose to make aliya? I know that you have chosen to believe on a religious basis that it is an imperative for jews to make aliya as much as some religious Jews say the opposite. apparently religious Jews can find a way to make opposites the “real” Judaism.
yamit82 Said:
it’s a good thing for Israel that through the years American Jews, like you once were, did not feel as you do.
yamit82 Said:
You and I have very different views regarding who bears the most responsibility for the libels of the diaspora and the foreigners. Aside from the obviously anti semitic I have concluded as a result of the last 10 years of reading Israeli news directly that the absolutely prime reason for the confusion in the diaspora is the confusion among Israelis and israeli Jews. the confusion in the diaspora reflects the same confusion in Israel, it is almost a replica. There is no confusion abroad that is not strongly reflected, even to absurdity, in Israel. there is no possibility for united diaspora support until there is unity in Israel as to what the real facts are. As I stated prior, Haaretz is the most widely quoted news and opinion source by foreign media and wire services; this is what causes the confusion. But, even going to the sources as I have makes this confusion even more apparent. the greatest factor in facilitating that confusion is the enormous lack of GOI support for the legal and historical rights of Jews. Prior to my becoming directly acquainted with the facts in Israel I never imagined that there was such a lack of unity among Jews and I especially was unfamiliar with what I consider to be a betrayal of the jewish people by those who present themselves as the religious leadership of the Jewish people. personally I consider it highly inaccurate at best to blame the Jewish diaspora for the libels cast at Israel when it is successive GOI’s, Israeli leftists, and the religious sector who give wings to the libels. Now that I am aware of the facts I see how futile it is to expect anything different from foreigners and jewish diaspora as long as Israelis operate as they do. There is no foul statement made in the diaspora that is not first made in Israel by israeli Jews. In fact, your post today of the i24 lavie interview drove that home to me. It was so obvious that the insane woman was a liar and fraud. However, when foreign Jews listen to Israelis they are not going to demand more nationalism than the Israeli government or people. It is Israel which has left the diaspora in ignorance by not disputing the libels.
@ honeybee:
Sorry MLT I answered to quickly.
You are correct as usual. 🙁
@ bernard ross:
There is Judaism and then there is the Galut version not the same thing.
That I believe is why the Shoah happened.. Can you imagine what would have happeded if many or most of those Jews had gotten to Israel? We needed then young motivated fighters and builders neither the assimilated Jews nor the shettl Jews would have been an asset at that time and the converse is a given.
Read this carefully I agree with it mostly.
THE SHOAH AND LOVE OF THE EXILE
@ bernard ross:
Understand something I am against Jews fighting to stay in the Galut. Today there is a viable alternative open to all Jews even to non Halachic Jews so there is no excuse except that most love and cling to the exile and so they are doomed to pay a high price even the ultimate price. This is what I believe. That said PR? Is a waste of time money and energy. Jews too few and they won’t ever come up with sufficient organization and financing to compete with the forces arrayed against them on a level playing field.
Law fare if pursued vigorously can impact but each case is a torturous road sometimes taking years before final resolution and few or any of the complainants ever see a dime. Who knows about the victories? Still it can keep some countries and Institutions a bit more honest. Won’t effect Jewish attitudes I think.
American Jewry is finished… They have comitted genocide on themselves and are not worth the effort or attention. We should support and reinforce those still with us and the rest can go to hell.
@ bernard ross:
I think yes in part but Betar is not religious. Related to Jabotinsky although in France a majority might be observant Jews but not the black hat white socks variety most are Sephardi.
yamit82 Said:
are they(Betar) considered from the religious sector?
yamit82 Said:
this yael Lavie looks like a paid defamer to me. I was astounded to hear that Btsalem employs 11 researchers and the one cited here denied the holocaust. What is most despicable is Lavies attempts to censor this astounding fact from the conversation and even to say that the need for peace should overide this astounding fact.
This is where the evil spirit begins: in Israel. Israel needs a Pinochet, one cannot negotiate with cancer!
yamit82 Said:
Do you still believe that PR, educating Jews and Lawfare are a waste of time?
yamit82 Said:
I cannot help but suspect that if the euro/christians were removed from the equation the Jews would have resolvedd the situation with the arabs.
yamit82 Said:
are your referring just to the political leadership or also to the religious leadership? In looking at the whole picture I find the religious leadership, other than religious zionists, to be absent from the picture. Many advised Jews not to emigrate from Europe to Israel. Weren’t the secular zionists more responsible for the creation of the Jewish state than the religious sector. I do not have a side but I am unimpressed with the religious sector. those who can muster 750,000 to attend a rabbi’s funeral have been noticeable absent from supporting, as opposed to obstructing, the state of Israel and its religious responsibilities. they do not protest to support Jewish settlement in YS, the Jewish homeland, and they do no protest to keep the muslims from polluting the Mount. they have raised their voice to bar Jews from the Mount based on their religious interpretations that unclean Jews would pollute the Mount but they say nothing of the muslims holding barbecues on the MOunt or playing soccer there. Now that Israel controls the MOunt it is responsible for its care and respect. the Mount can be shut down to all but certainly it should not be polluted by muslims while in the care of the Jewish state.
When I see the behavior of those who should be in the forefront of religious Jewish leadership I must wonder of what value it is to declare a Jewish state when a large number of the religious sector are against the Mount and against Jewish settlement in YS. who would carry the banner of leadership in the declared “Jewish state”. Would it be the same ones who have more interest in their perks and avoiding the army than in the Jewish state? Call me a cynic but I cant help but wonder if R. Yosefs recent declaration, which basically supports BB, will lead to a rapprochement with the “coalition”? I find that the religious sector is a source of division rather than unity being more interested in declaring who is not a Jew.
yamit82 Said:
the greatest encouragement is the division of the Jews, the lack of Jewish unity.
@ yamit82:
I said Fire Ants. a whole different breed then puny red ants.
honeybee Said:
A few years ago my house was infested with red ants…They are hard to kill como mi amor por ti. 😉
Eric R. Said:
Eric, Darlin, again with blowing up the world.
@ yamit82:
Was that a Fire Ant, they can sill bite even when they’re dead.
@ keelie:
Might be coming attractions to Jews in North America?????
Most French Jews are from North Africa.
They could use instructors like yourself.
@ yamit82:
Re: France’s Fighting Jews
Great imagery Yamit! One punch to the face of the leading big-mouth will stop further action pretty quickly… unless the leading big-mouth is a brave warrior – which is highly unlikely.
@ Eric R.:
Such a situation – covert assassination operations – has the effect of sending a clear message. One French general (in days of old) called the point of this type of message, “pour encourager les autres” (to encourage the others).
Eric R. Said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1l9wYMH6jA
dweller Said:
Being sorry???? 😛
Being sorry ? Like getting caught speeding and having to pay a large fine? Are Europeans alive today responsible for what previous generations of Europeans did to each other and to their Jews?
Anyway how can anyone measure “Being Sorry”?
Don’t want or need “Sorry” Change in attitudes leading to
change in behavior will do.
“What they got” from WHOM?
Who ever said Europeans were supposed to feel ‘sorry’ for the Jews?
Europeans were supposed to be sorry for what they DID.
If the barbarians are never made to pay any serious price for their barbarism, then what possible reason will they ever have to abandon barbarism?
@ bernard ross:
France’s Fighting Jews
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uFW1lnA0Lc#t=141
Interview Heats up between Tuvia Tenenbom and Yael Lavie of i24 News
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jia43vZ0wMo#t=335
Welcome to the global intifada
Op-ed: Evil spirit is winning, and it has an army of supporters in West. Not just radical Islamists, but also intellectuals, professors, ‘rights activists’ and rest of members of anti-Israel campaign.
MOST haven’t a clue that our thousands yr old JEWISH homeland is NOT recognized as the nation-state of the Jewish people by its own bastard leadership, since the inception of Israel’s re-birth in 1948! Now, you tell me: hasn’t that been a signal to our enemies to continue to attack the Jewish essence of Israel???
@ bernard ross:
Thinking about a relevant postulate.
No matter what we Jews do, we will still be hated so we might as well be hated for what they all want to believe about us anyway.
Take our most immediate existential threats against the Jewish State. Who’s arming the Palestinian Arabs? Who’s helping Iran build its Jewkiller nukes? Sure, it would be comforting to believe the Christians now love us, but seriously, scratch the surface and you’ll find the past isn’t so distant. Why do Russian spies skate and Pollard rots?
The West provides the means and oil money is the grease. It’s a symbiotic relationship of Esau and Ishmael. Esau (Edom/the West) is using Ishmael( Muslim Arabs)
It isn’t either or. The Christians represent a threat to Jews, the Muslims represent a more imminent threat.
Eric R. Said:
Perhaps you did not read the article. I was referring to those referred to in the article for a start and then otherr academic libelers. My view is that those who lie against Israel are guilty of attmpted genocide as those libels always preceded pogroms and holocaust. hence they should be liquidated just like any existential enemy. certainly it is quite feasible to assasinate a few a day at minimum, especially with the help and input of diaspora Jews.
bernard ross Said:
Israel cannot do this by assassination. Give that there are 400 million Euronazis and 1+ billion Islamonazis who fit this description, it can only be done with nuclear weapons.
I like b. ross’ idea too.
@ bernard ross:
Me too… Like the folks who took care of the Munich terrorists. The people who are sitting their homes and offices comfortably dreaming about how to rid the world of Jews, are simply far too comfortable. That has to change.
excellent observation.
I have dreams of teams of covert Jewish assassination squads roaming the globe and doling out “accidents” to these filthy perverts.
Hope springs eternal.
Illogical and irrational. As soon as the conditional is used one can tell that the person using it is living in his or her own fantasy world. That fact that people – in particular so-called intelligent students – swallow this guff unflinchingly is a reflection not on the source of the guff, but on the now common inability to discriminate between the illogical and irrational, and what could be called “the truth” which is based on their diametric opposites, and which is the firm basis of natural life on this earth.